The Morning Horsehide Herald — the Fourth of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

Is it spring training yet? No — the pennants are being decided, and spring must wait its turn.

The Game of the Day

THE LOUDEST ROOM IN FLORIDA GOES QUIET ONE BATTER AT A TIME — RASMUSSEN CARRIES A NO-HITTER INTO THE EIGHTH, THE LONE NEW YORK HIT DIES AT THIRD BASE ON A PERFECT RELAY, AND ARANDA'S SOLITARY THUNDERCLAP IS THE WHOLE OF THE SCORING: RAYS 1, YANKEES 0

Ten strikeouts, three-and-twenty swinging strikes, and three-and-twenty of six-and-twenty men retired — the right-hander becomes but the seventh pitcher of the Modern Era to carry a no-hit bid through seven and two-thirds October innings, the first since Aníbal Sánchez in 2019, while the Yankees' single safety is the fewest of their four hundred and forty-seven postseason games; Cole gives five creditable innings and is beaten by a changeup, Wells breaks up the history with two out in the eighth and is thrown out stretching for his trouble, and the Sunshine State's first playoff victory since 2021 arrives before a sold-out and thunderous dome — with Game Two Monday at eight o'clock and the captain Judge, by the roster's verdict, nowhere on the rolls

The loudest room in Florida went quiet one batter at a time. Drew Rasmussen, whom his own pitching instructor Snyder calls "the industry standard," took the ball for Game One of the Division Series before a sold-out Tropicana Field — 40,542 souls, the towels already whirling — and for seven innings and two-thirds he permitted the famous New York order nothing at all: no hit of any denomination, two passes his only lapses, fifteen men retired in one unbroken procession. Ten strikeouts he collected, and three-and-twenty swinging strikes, the most any Tampa Bay man has drawn in a postseason game; of six-and-twenty batters faced he retired three-and-twenty. The scribes certify him the seventh pitcher of the Modern Era to carry a no-hit bid through seven and two-thirds innings of an October game, and the first since Aníbal Sánchez turned the trick for Washington in the 2019 Championship Series. "My heart rate was at a thousand beats per minute," the right-hander confessed afterward. "I was just trying to execute one pitch at a time."

The history was broken, and then punished. Austin Wells, with two out in the eighth, lined a double down the right-field line — whereupon, seeing the stop sign too late, he charged for third and was thrown out by a relay of textbook beauty, Mesa to Walls to Caminero, the lone New York baserunner of consequence erased in the act of overreaching. "Just obviously not a good decision there," ruled the manager Boone. One hit was the evening's entire New York produce — the fewest in the four hundred and forty-seven postseason games the franchise has played, a ledger that reaches back to the days of Ruth — and when Baker struck out two in a clean ninth, the Rays had their first playoff victory since the opening game of the 2021 Division Series, by the severe and ancient score of 1-0.

The run itself was a single stroke of thunder: Jonathan Aranda, in the third, turned on a Gerrit Cole changeup and deposited it in the right-center seats. Cole was otherwise creditable — five innings, five hits, one run, five strikeouts, in his first postseason start since the 2024 World Series — and his bullpen gave nothing behind him. "You've got to tip your cap," was the sentiment of the visiting clubhouse, though Cole himself framed it as a fighter would: "They're going to land some blows. You've got to take blows in the postseason, and you've got to dish them out, too." The hosts, for their part, have now won each of Rasmussen's last thirteen starts, and the man's career ledger against New York — five victories against two at a 1.81 figure — reads like a standing indictment. His manager Cash, who lately compared the fellow's preparation to Roy Halladay's, declined to retract: "I've said a lot of dumb things in my life. That one was not."

So the top seed leads, one game to none, and the arithmetic the Herald entered yesterday now works for Tampa Bay: clubs that take the opener of a best-of-five have advanced 116 times in 160 tryings, and the home winners of Game One under the present format 42 of 56. Game Two goes Monday at eight o'clock beneath the same dome, the young right-hander Schlittler taking the ball for New York — and the Yankees, who must in all likelihood solve Rasmussen once more before this series is through, will attempt it without their captain, the roster's verdict on Judge being rendered at last and reported in the columns below. "It's a tall order," allowed the first baseman Rice. "I think we're built for it."

The Postseason Card

SEVEN-AND-TWENTY INNINGS OF OCTOBER AND NOT ONE OF THEM PLAYED FROM BEHIND — MURAKAMI'S FOUR-HUNDRED-AND-FORTY-FOOT THUNDERCLAP AND A FOUR-INNING SAVE OF THE ANTIQUE SCHOOL SHUT OUT THE FOREST CITY NINE: WHITE STOCKINGS 3, CLEVELANDS 0

Five Chicago arms braid a three-hitter at Progressive Field, the rookie Smith walks the bases full and is rescued twice by routine fly balls, and young Grant Taylor — two days removed from a four-and-fifty-pitch career high — claims the final twelve outs with six strikeouts, closing the ninth by fanning three men on eleven pitches; the visitors have not trailed in this postseason's seven-and-twenty innings, Messick wears a loss his six strikeouts scarcely deserved, and Game Two goes Monday at five o'clock with the strikeout king Williams standing between Cleveland and a two-games hole

The question on the South Side is no longer whether the White Stockings will win October games; it is whether they will ever consent to trail in one. Saturday's 3-0 verdict at Progressive Field — a three-hit shutout administered to the division champions in their own yard — ran Chicago's postseason account to seven-and-twenty innings without once standing behind, and the counting-men certify the deeper figure: the lead held at the end of four-and-twenty of those innings, the most in the first three games of any postseason in the franchise's annals, and matched in the last twenty years only by the 2019 Yankees and the 2017 Dodgers.

The decisive blow belonged, as it so often has this remarkable season, to Munetaka Murakami. The Japanese first baseman, whose arrival re-energized the whole enterprise, met a Parker Messick offering in the fourth — Vargas aboard by a single — and sent it a Statcast-certified four hundred and forty feet for the game's first two runs. Colson Montgomery's double cashed Teel in the seventh for the third, and that was the whole of the scoring, for the Chicago relay required no more. The rookie Hagen Smith walked the bases full with two out in the third and was rescued by Hudson's routine fly ball; a fourth-inning crisis died the same polite death against Kay; and then came the antique theater. Grant Taylor, two days removed from a career-high four-and-fifty pitches in Houston, took the ball for the final four innings and never gave it back — six strikeouts, the last three of them administered to Martínez, Lowe, and Bazzana on eleven pitches in the ninth, a four-inning save of the old school. "That's what playoff baseball is about," said the manager Venable. "Your big dogs going out there and making big plays."

Cleveland, which had not played in a week, mustered three hits and twelve strikeouts against the procession, and Messick — six strikeouts in four and a third, undone by the one swing — wore a loss his line scarcely deserved. The fourteenth meeting of the summer's closest neighbors thus goes to the guests, who took seven of thirteen from these same Clevelands in the regular campaign and now stand two victories from a first Championship Series since 2005. Game Two goes Monday at five o'clock on Lake Erie's shore, and the hosts hand the ball to Gavin Williams, whose 248 strikeouts led the American League — with Burke expected to answer in some capacity for Chicago, and the series guaranteed in any event to call at Rate Field come Wednesday.

THE CHEERS HE ORDERED ARRIVE ON SCHEDULE, AND IN HUNDRED-DEGREE HEAT — SKUBAL CARVES SIX INNINGS IN HIS FIRST HOME OCTOBER START WHILE ATLANTA'S BULLPEN-DOOR ROULETTE COMES UP EMPTY: BOYS IN BLUE 5, BRAVES 3

The left-hander twice crowned the American League's finest surrenders a leadoff single and then retires fifteen straight, Teoscar Hernández, Tucker, and Muncy supply three home runs off the fourth and fifth Atlanta arms, and Albies' two-run answer in the ninth arrives two innings too late; Dodd's three scoreless innings as opener are squandered by a bullpen stripped of its high-leverage men, Weiss declares himself unworried with Sale still undecided for Game Two this very evening at eight o'clock against Snell, and the champions' arithmetic now reads one game to none with their two best arms yet unused

The cheers Tarik Skubal requested in these columns yesterday were delivered on schedule, 50,194 strong, in heat that touched one hundred degrees at the first pitch. The left-hander — twice crowned the American League's finest arm in his Detroit years, and making at last the first home postseason start of his life — surrendered a leadoff single to Baldwin and then retired fifteen Atlantas in unbroken succession, finishing with six innings of two-hit, one-run, seven-strikeout work, Murphy's sixth-inning solo blast the only blemish on the afternoon. The tailored reasoning that gave him the ball over Yamamoto, which this paper entered Saturday, wanted no further argument by evening.

Atlanta's half of the ledger was the mirror and the misfortune. Dylan Dodd, the opener, gave three scoreless innings that deserved coronation — whereupon the roulette of the bullpen door, spun of necessity with Fuentes and Suarez both spent from the Wild Card round, came up empty twice. Mederos, summoned for the fourth, was met by Teoscar Hernández's two-run thunder; Smith-Shawver, asked for the middle innings, surrendered Tucker's two-run blast and Muncy's solo in the sixth; and 5-1 was the account when Albies — now four for twelve this October with two home runs and a triple — answered with two aboard in the ninth off Scott, two innings too late for the difference. Phillips recorded the final out with the tying men in the on-deck circle's imagination only. "I don't have any worries about having enough pitching," declared the manager Weiss afterward. "We've got plenty of pitching." The Herald, which has chronicled the invalid rolls that swallowed Schwellenbach, Waldrep, Strider, López, Elder, and Pérez, admires the confidence and withholds the endorsement.

The second chapter comes this very evening at eight o'clock at Dodger Stadium, and the stakes are the series' whole shape: clubs that seize the first two games of a best-of-five have advanced nine-and-eighty times in a hundred. The hosts send Blake Snell, whose strikeout rate stood sixth among all starters this summer despite a season of but nine starts; Atlanta had not, by press time, decided whether Sale — five-and-ninety pitches Tuesday and one-and-twenty more Thursday — takes the ball or waits for Georgia, with Holmes and the rookie Ritchie the alternatives, and Lane Thomas restored to the October rolls for his first start since the seventh of September. The champions, meanwhile, hold Yamamoto in the holster for Game Three — an abundance their president Friedman says improves his quality of life, and his counterpart Anthopoulos can only envy.

THE ROOF ITSELF ENLISTS WITH THE HOME NINE — FRANCE'S WOULD-BE THUNDERCLAP STRIKES A CABLE IN THE NINTH AND FALLS INTO CHOURIO'S GLOVE, AND THE MILWAUKEES SURVIVE THE OPENER BY THE WIDTH OF A TRUSS: MILWAUKEES 3, SAN DIEGOS 2

Misiorowski opens with the fastest pitch October has ever recorded at 104.8 miles the hour and is nonetheless wrung dry in four innings by thirty foul balls, Chourio's game-tying blast makes him at two-and-twenty the franchise's October home-run king, and Contreras — benched for loafing a week ago — trots a go-ahead homer home in the seventh; then, with one on and one out in the ninth, France launches a drive the Padres swear was leaving the yard until a roof cable swats it down for the strangest out of the autumn, the challenge is denied, and Game Two goes this afternoon at four o'clock, King against Henderson

The Herald has entered many verdicts in its columns; rarely one co-signed by the building. With Milwaukee ahead 3-2 in the ninth Saturday night, one San Diego man aboard and one out, Ty France launched a towering drive toward the left-field corner — a blow the batsman himself pronounced gone, and which two Milwaukee coaches, consulting their private camera angles, privately agreed was staying fair — whereupon it struck a cable on the roof of American Family Field, changed its mind in midair, and settled into Jackson Chourio's glove for the second out. The ground rules, recited by the umpire Mahrley at the lineup exchange that very afternoon to general laughter, were unambiguous: struck in fair territory and caught, the ball is an out. San Diego's challenge, pleading foul-territory contact, was denied upon review. "I came in here and said, 'Incredible home-field advantage,'" testified the Milwaukee coach Erickson. "That's the advantage you get when you win 103 games." The manager Murphy assigned the intervention higher authority still: "'Ueck' reached up there and knocked that ball down." The counting-men note the drive left the bat at nine-and-forty degrees of launch, an angle that has cleared a fence but ten times in the whole tracking era — and note besides that this is the second San Diego homer confiscated by architecture this season, Bogaerts having lost one to the Tropicana catwalks in August.

The lawful baseball preceding the miracle was itself worth the admission. Misiorowski, the young ace who led all the game in earned runs this summer, opened the evening at 104.8 miles the hour to Tatis — the fastest pitch October has recorded since the tracking began, wresting the mark from San Diego's own Mason Miller — and was nonetheless wrung dry inside four innings, the Padres fouling off thirty pitches in that span, the most ever counted in a postseason game's first four frames, and cashing two second-inning runs on a parade of one-out singles and a fielder's choice misplayed at first. "His velo dropped five miles per hour almost in the second inning," allowed the manager Murphy of the early hook. The order answered for him: Chourio's two-run blast in the third — which made him, at two-and-twenty years, the franchise's leader with five October home runs — squared the account, and in the seventh William Contreras, benched a week ago for declining to run out a grounder, turned on Morejon's offering and was granted the rare luxury of a trot. Five relievers carried the rest, Hall escaping a bases-full seventh and Megill striking out Tatis with the tying run at third before presiding over the ninth's architecture.

So the club that hit the fewest home runs in the National League won on two of them, and the hottest team in baseball fell by the width of a truss. Game Two goes this very afternoon at four o'clock beneath the same roof: Michael King, whose career October figure stands at 2.05 and who carried a no-hitter into the seventh against Chicago in the Wild Card round, against the composed young right-hander Logan Henderson, eleven victories against three at a 2.47 figure, who has never in three-and-twenty career starts allowed more than three runs. The San Diegos could scarcely ask a better man for a must-have game; neither, the Milwaukees would answer, could they.

News Around the League

THE CAPTAIN'S CASE, THE VERDICT: JUDGE IS LEFT OFF THE DIVISION SERIES ROLLS — SEVENTEEN DAYS OF ARGUING WITH THE ARITHMETIC END WITH THE CALF UNPERSUADED, AND NEW YORK OPENS OCTOBER'S SECOND ROUND WITHOUT ITS THREE-TIME MOST VALUABLE

The case this paper has followed since the calf first gave way on the sixteenth of September is closed, and the verdict went against the plaintiff: Aaron Judge's name does not appear on the Yankees' roster for the Division Series against Tampa Bay, the wire's correspondents reporting the decision Saturday before the opener. The docket of his rehabilitation was thorough to the last — the platelet injection, the rounds of live batting practice in the Bronx and at Somerset, Friday's early workout across the bay, the shirt reading "No time like October" — but the one exercise the captain never completed was the running of the bases, and the moderate strain of the soleus, which ordinarily asks three weeks, declined in the end to be hurried into seventeen days.

The consequence was visible at once in Saturday's batting order, which carried no Judge and mustered one hit, and the fuller measure of it is entered in the game account above. The Herald, which has reported each hearing of this case in its turn, enters the verdict without garnish: the finest batsman of his generation will watch the Division Series from the rail, and New York's October now rests upon the rotation it spent all summer touting and an order that must discover its thunder elsewhere.

THE ROSTER DESK: A DEBUTANT OF THREE WEEKS' STANDING CRACKS THE CHAMPIONS' OCTOBER ROLLS, MUSGROVE KEEPS HIS SEAT IN SAN DIEGO, AND BUEHLER REPAIRS TO THE PATERNITY LIST AS THE FIRST STORK OF THE POSTSEASON CALLS

The Division Series rosters published Saturday carried their small surprises. In Los Angeles, the champions found room for Josue De Paula, the young outfielder whose major-league debut came but three weeks ago — a bold entry on an October roll, and a mark of the esteem the club's counting-men hold for the bat. In San Diego, the Friars stood entirely pat from their Wild Card sweep, Joe Musgrove keeping his seat among the arms — though Walker Buehler begins the series on the paternity list, the autumn's first visit from the stork, with his return to the rolls expected when the series removes to California. Milwaukee, for its part, restored the bat of Andrew Vaughn from the invalid rolls Friday, and he promptly delivered a pinch single in the opener.

THE DISCIPLINE DESK: TWO FIFTY-SIX-GAME SENTENCES HANDED DOWN UNDER THE MINOR-LEAGUE DRUG STATUTES — THE WASHINGTON CATCHER RIVERO AND THE FREE AGENT PÉREZ TAKEN UP FOR THE PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING ARTICLE

While eight clubs quarreled over the pennants, the league's constabulary was at its quieter work: Francisco Rivero, a catcher of the Washington organization, and Raudi Pérez, a pitcher presently of no club at all, were each suspended six-and-fifty games following positive tests for a performance-enhancing substance under the minor leagues' drug programs. The Herald reports the sentences as the wire gives them, without editorial — observing only that the game's October stage and its October woodshed operate, as ever, on the same calendar.

The Sunday tables, then — four contests entered, the four Division Series each one game old, and the form chart's first verdict is unanimous in one particular: the opener went to the home nine in three yards of four, Chicago's road burglary at Cleveland the lone exception, and every Game One winner now enjoys the arithmetic this paper printed yesterday in prospect — 116 of 160 best-of-five leaders have gone through. The second chapters divide between today and tomorrow: San Diego at Milwaukee at four o'clock and Atlanta at Los Angeles at eight this afternoon and evening, then Monday the American League's turn, Chicago at Cleveland at five and New York at Tampa Bay at eight — the latter to be contested, by Saturday's roster verdict, without the captain Judge. The Herald's columns will carry each in its fullest measure. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Sunday, October 4, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Cy Young Award Winners — Baseball-Reference
Adam Berry, Rasmussen -- the 'definition of ace' -- takes no-no into 8th as Rays 1-hit Yankees — MLB.com
Bryan Hoch, Outpitched in G1, Yanks remain confident they can turn tables — MLB.com
Jorge Castillo, Aaron Judge not on Yankees' roster for ALDS vs. Rays — ESPN
Scott Merkin, Yet to trail this postseason, White Sox march into Cleveland and claim ALDS Game 1 — MLB.com
Mark Bowman, Game 1 exposes Braves' thin starter depth -- and it's officially all hands on deck — MLB.com
Sonja Chen and Mark Bowman, Braves-Dodgers NLDS Game 2 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, FS1/FOX One) — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Contreras comes up clutch as Crew captures Game 1 win in NLDS — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell and Adam McCalvy, France's towering fly ball hits cable, ground rules lead to wild flyout in 9th inning — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy and Mark Sheldon, Miz comes out firing with 104.8 mph first pitch to set new record — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, AJ Cassavell and Mark Sheldon, Padres-Brewers NLDS Game 2 FAQ (4 p.m. ET, FS1/FOX One) — MLB.com
Alden Gonzalez, Dodgers include OF prospect Josue De Paula on NLDS roster — ESPN
Joe Musgrove sticks on Padres' roster; Buehler on paternity list — ESPN
Francisco Rivero, Raudi Perez suspended for positive drug tests — ESPN