The Morning Horsehide Herald

THE LAST BALL OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE'S YEAR COMES DOWN IN CHOURIO'S GLOVE — DOWN FOUR RUNS BEFORE THE SECOND INNING HAD COOLED, THE BREWERS CLIMB OUT A SIXTH TIME THIS OCTOBER, SWEEP THE TWICE-CROWNED CHAMPIONS FROM THEIR OWN YARD, AND CARRY MILWAUKEE TO ITS FIRST WORLD'S SERIES SINCE 1982: BREWERS 6, DODGERS 4

2026-10-16T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THE LAST BALL OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE'S YEAR COMES DOWN IN CHOURIO'S GLOVE — DOWN FOUR RUNS BEFORE THE SECOND INNING HAD COOLED, THE BREWERS CLIMB OUT A SIXTH TIME THIS OCTOBER, SWEEP THE TWICE-CROWNED CHAMPIONS FROM THEIR OWN YARD, AND CARRY MILWAUKEE TO ITS FIRST WORLD'S SERIES SINCE 1982: BREWERS 6, DODGERS 4

Shohei Ohtani's three-run homer — his first in two months, ending the longest drought of his career — stakes Los Angeles to a 4-0 lead in the second inning, and Milwaukee answers the way it has answered all month: back-to-back doubles from William Contreras and Jake Bauers, a bases-loaded walk, Garrett Mitchell's go-ahead drive in the sixth and David Hamilton's parting shot in the ninth, while Aaron Ashby records the final nine outs; no club had ever erased a four-run deficit to finish a postseason sweep, and no club had ever been swept by an opponent one October and swept that same opponent the next

The National League's season ended in the glove of Jackson Chourio, on a fly ball that died just short of the left-center warning track at Dodger Stadium on Thursday night, and the noise that followed belonged to the visitors' dugout and to the several thousand Wisconsinites among the 49,104 who declined to go home. They stayed to watch the Warren C. Giles Trophy presented on enemy ground, and they were entitled: Milwaukee has waited 44 years for this, since the 1982 club of Harvey's Wallbangers carried the American League's flag and lost a seven-game World's Series to St. Louis. This pennant is the franchise's first in the National League — and the cry of that earlier October, "Milwaukee, you have a World Series!", belonged by the record not to Bob Uecker but to his partner Dwayne Mosley, Uecker having slipped down to the clubhouse to ready the celebration broadcast. The city may now compose a new one.⁴³

The evening began as the champions' best of the month. Shane Drohan opened for Milwaukee and walked two; Dustin May inherited the second inning and absorbed four runs of it — Andy Pages' single for the first, and then Shohei Ohtani, restored to the leadoff post he had not occupied since September 27, turning a 1-1 cutter into a three-run drive to right-center. It was Ohtani's first home run since August 18, the end of a 115-plate-appearance drought, the longest of his career, whose every barren week this paper has chronicled.³⁸ From 4-0 the ledger turned by installments. Contreras and Bauers struck back-to-back doubles in the fourth, Bauers' a ground-rule bounce worth two runs; in the fifth David Hamilton singled home Sal Frelick and Bauers drew a bases-loaded walk for the tie; in the sixth Garrett Mitchell led off against the left-hander Tanner Scott and hit the go-ahead homer to center; and in the ninth Hamilton — the nine-hole man, two hits, two runs driven in and a stolen base on his evening — added a parting shot off Edwin Díaz's hanging slider.³

The final nine outs belonged to Aaron Ashby, on 39 pitches, and they were not uneventful: he stranded the tying run in scoring position in both the seventh and the eighth, striking out Ohtani swinging with that run at third base. The save ran three full innings in a pennant-clincher, company he shares with only Lance McCullers Jr., Madison Bumgarner, Steve Howe and Vida Blue since the save became an official statistic in 1969; his October account now shows 12 1/3 innings and no runs across six errands.⁸⁷ The relief corps as a body allowed five runs in 21 2/3 innings of the round, a 2.08 figure, and Joel Romero's victory Thursday meant a reliever won all four games of the series — a thing no best-of-seven sweep had ever shown — and seven of Milwaukee's eight games this postseason, which no club had done either.⁷⁵

Mitchell's blow deserves its biography. Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at nine years old, he slid to the 20th selection of his draft on the doubts that diagnosis bred, wears an insulin pod wired to his telephone, and has played more games this season than in his first four years combined. On Wednesday he and Bauers struck back-to-back homers off a left-hander — lefty upon lefty, a sequence only Ruth and Gehrig in 1928 and Schwarber and Harper earlier this very month had written before them — and on Thursday he supplied the pennant's deciding run. "It was time to make the big shift," said his father Antony, who reports that his son has always run on doubt as other men run on praise.⁶

The ledger of the series reads like a page from the game's far shelf. The four-run recovery is the largest ever to finish a postseason sweep, and ties the largest in any pennant-clinching game since the rounds began in 1969, matching the Yankees of 2000 and 2003; Milwaukee trailed in all four games of a series it swept, which no club had done; its six comeback victories in its first eight October games stand alone in the records.⁵ The Brewers are the fifth club to sweep a reigning champion from a best-of-seven — after the 1990 Reds, 1966 Orioles, 1963 Dodgers and 1914 Braves, every one of whom went on to the World's Series — and the first ever, in this sport, to be swept by an opponent one postseason and sweep that same opponent whole the next, the wound of last year's four-game dismissal at these same hands repaid to the penny. This was the 11th best-of-seven ever played between two 100-win clubs and the first to end in a sweep, and Los Angeles even lost its first October game of the year with Tyler Glasnow pitching, a distinction the man had carried through seven appearances.⁵³ The valedictories were brief. "We got outplayed in all facets," said Dave Roberts. "You remember it," said Pat Murphy of the beatings his club once took in this yard. "You have to have that faith," said the captain Christian Yelich, "and you have to have, like, the belief that you know this group can get it done."³⁴ The World's Series opens Friday next, October 23, at American Family Field, against the winner of the American round — whose state of play the Postseason Card takes up below.¹⁴²

The Postseason Card

THE EIGHTH MAN IN THE ORDER SENDS HIS BAT SKYWARD AND THE BALL TO THE BLEACHERS — HALPIN'S TWO-RUN WALLOP OVERTURNS AN AFTERNOON SIMPSON'S TRIPLE HAD BRIEFLY STOLEN, WILLIAMS FANS NINE MORE IN FIVE, AND THE CLEVELAND NINE STAND TWO WINS FROM THE WORLD'S SERIES: GUARDIANS 3, RAYS 2

October baseball by daylight, at the one-o'clock hour the rain dictated, and 30,101 fill the lakefront yard anyway; Gavin Williams strikes out nine of the eighteen men he faces and departs early by design, Chandler Simpson's two-strike triple gives Tampa Bay a short-lived lead, and Petey Halpin — a reserve outfielder a fortnight ago — answers with a two-run homer off Griffin Jax and a bat flip his own bullpen scored a ten, before Cade Smith's four-out save sends Cleveland ahead two games to one

The afternoon appointment this paper commended yesterday to readers of flexible luncheon arrangements proved worth the leave-taking. Under a sunny 62 degrees at Progressive Field — the one-o'clock start having been dictated by the evening's forecast — 30,101 turned out on a weekday midday and were repaid in two hours and twenty-eight minutes. Cleveland struck first in the second, Nathaniel Lowe lining a double to right to cash Jo Adell; Tampa Bay answered in the fourth when Chandler Simpson, down to his last strike, lashed a two-run triple past Chase DeLauter to score Yandy Díaz and Victor Mesa Jr. — the speedster's third run driven in of the round, and very nearly the whole of the visitors' offense.¹⁰

The reply came from the eighth place in the order. Patrick Bailey singled with one out in the fifth, and Petey Halpin — until a fortnight ago a late-innings defensive reserve, pressed into the lineup in the Chicago round and never since removed — turned Griffin Jax's 96-mile sinker into the right-field bleachers, 105 off the bat, for the lead. The bat went skyward in a high, turning arc. "I just kind of blacked out," Halpin pleaded afterward — October's fashionable alibi, Jake Bauers having entered the same one at the dome on Monday. "It was majestic," certified Steven Kwan; Daniel Espino, warming in the bullpen, scored the flip a ten while confessing he feared the lumber might strike its owner on the way down.¹¹

Gavin Williams made the two runs stand. Five innings, two hits, nine strikeouts — both runs rode Simpson's triple — and a departure at 70 pitches that his manager called precaution rather than necessity. The figures behind the figures: 33 strikeouts in 16 2/3 innings this October, a 45.9 percent strikeout rate that is the highest any pitcher has carried through a postseason of ten innings or more, past Corey Knebel's 44.6; no Cleveland pitcher before him had struck out nine or better in three straight postseason starts; and his 45 October strikeouts for the franchise passed Andrew Miller for fourth on the all-time roll, behind Charles Nagy's 55, Orel Hershiser's 54 and Corey Kluber's 47.¹⁰¹² Behind him Espino, Erik Sabrowski and Hunter Gaddis carried the ball to Cade Smith, whose four-out save ran his month to a 1.00 earned-run average with 13 strikeouts in nine innings. Tampa Bay's consolations were small but genuine: Liam Hicks threw out two Cleveland runners, the first Rays catcher ever to cut down two in a postseason game.¹²

The visitors' grief is the bats. Three hits and 13 strikeouts on the afternoon; Junior Caminero 0-for-4 with four of them, his first postseason homer still unstruck; the top third of the order — Díaz, Jonathan Aranda, Caminero — a combined 1-for-12. "We have to make adjustments and play our baseball," Caminero said through the club's interpreter, and his manager Kevin Cash asked plainly for bigger at-bats.¹⁰ So Cleveland leads two games to one and stands two victories from its first World's Series since 2016 — the fourth time the franchise has held such a lead in a pennant round, having cashed the one in 1997 and let go those of 1998 and 2007 — while Tampa Bay trails at this station for the first time in its history; the scholars note the winner of a third game from a 1-1 tie has taken the series in roughly seven cases of ten.¹⁰¹² The fourth game is appointed for eight o'clock tonight by the lake, weather permitting, and the Weather Desk sets out the particulars — and the contingencies — elsewhere in this number.²

News Around the League

THE LAUREL DESK: THE MOST VALUABLE MAN OF THE NATIONAL ROUND NEARLY QUIT THE GAME TWO WINTERS PAST — BAUERS, SIX RUNS DRIVEN IN AND A HIT IN EVERY GAME, IS THE FIRST BREWER EVER TO CARRY OFF THE HONOR, AND EITHER AMERICAN FINALIST IS A FORMER EMPLOYER

The hardware followed the story. Jake Bauers, whose twelve-pitch walk turned the second game and whose eleven-pitch homer turned the third — both sieges set out at length in these columns — was named the most valuable player of the National League's round on the field Thursday night, the first man in Milwaukee's history to take the series laurel. The affidavit: a hit in all four games, a team-leading six runs driven in — tied for the most in any postseason series the franchise has played — and in the clincher a two-run double and the bases-loaded walk that drew the game level.⁹

The man receives the honor at 31, in his seventh season, two winters removed from nearly leaving the game altogether before his wife talked him back onto the field. The regular season that followed ran to 26 home runs and 86 runs batted in, and October has compounded it. "I just let it all come to me," Bauers said. "I didn't chase it." His teammates were less restrained — "No one deserves it more," said Sal Frelick — and his manager chose the house style: "Jake played with a broken toe, he's had shin splints all year, and he's soft," offered Pat Murphy, entirely in jest.⁹ The footnote the deadball desks will savor: Bauers broke into the league with Tampa Bay in 2018 and spent two seasons in Cleveland's employ, so whichever club emerges from the American round, the World's Series will send the series' most valuable man against a former employer.⁹

THE WEATHER DESK: THE AMERICAN ROUND'S FOURTH GAME GOES TONIGHT AT EIGHT BY THE LAKE, IF THE SKY ALLOWS — MARTINEZ, WHO BLANKED CLEVELAND TWICE THIS SUMMER ACROSS THIRTEEN INNINGS, MEETS A HOME STAFF ASSEMBLED BY COMMITTEE, AND A WASHOUT WOULD REDRAW THE WEEK

The American League's fourth sitting is appointed for eight o'clock Eastern tonight at Progressive Field, Cleveland leading two games to one — but the sky holds a vote. Rain is in the Friday forecast, the same forecast that moved yesterday's game up to one o'clock in the afternoon, and both commands spent Thursday drawing contingencies. Should the evening prove unplayable, the clubs could pass Friday idle and play the fourth and fifth games Saturday and Sunday by the lake, spending the scheduled travel day, with a sixth game to follow at the Gulf without pause.¹³²

If the game is played tonight, Tampa Bay sends Nick Martinez, a right-hander of career-high employment this season — 31 starts, a 15-6 record and a 3.10 earned-run average — who holds a peculiar mastery of the home side: two starts against Cleveland this summer, thirteen innings, not one run, including seven blank frames in a 1-0 verdict in this very yard in April. Drew Rasmussen stands slated for the fifth game and Freddy Peralta for the sixth.¹³¹² Cleveland's answer is a committee: a bullpen evening in which Joey Cantillo is expected to carry a large share, Tanner Bibee and Slade Cecconi the bulk innings, and Shawn Armstrong — unscored upon in four October appearances — or Daniel Espino may be first out of the gate. A postponement would change the committee's complexion entirely, handing Foster Griffin the ball Saturday on regular rest. "Our guys stay ready," said Stephen Vogt, declining to be alarmed on either count.¹³¹²

THE ALMANAC DESK: THE WORLD'S SERIES OPENS FRIDAY NEXT AT MILWAUKEE — HOME GROUND EARNED BY A HUNDRED AND THREE VICTORIES, THE FIRST TWO GAMES AND ANY SIXTH AND SEVENTH BY THE LAKESIDE BREWERY, AND THE AMERICAN CHAMPION TO BE KNOWN BY THEN

The almanac may now be printed in ink. The 122nd World's Series opens Friday, October 23, at American Family Field in Milwaukee, with the second game there Saturday the 24th; the third, fourth and fifth games go Monday the 26th through Wednesday the 28th at the American champion's grounds; and a sixth and seventh, should the argument require them, return to Milwaukee on Friday the 30th and Saturday the 31st.¹⁴²

The home ground is held on merit, not on league custom: the Brewers' 103-59 was the best record in the majors, a franchise mark, and it outranks whatever the American round produces — Tampa Bay having won 98 and Cleveland fewer still. Every game goes out over the FOX wire. Start times await the league's pleasure, and the opponent awaits tonight's weather; both will be entered in this ledger the morning after they are known.¹⁴

THE FAREWELL DESK: ROJAS, AGED SEVEN-AND-THIRTY, TELLS HIS TEAMMATES 'THIS IS IT' — THIRTEEN SEASONS, TWO TITLES, A NO-HITTER PRESERVED WITH THE BACKHAND AND A SEVENTH-GAME HOMER IN THE NINTH, AND NOW A DESK IN THE DODGERS' SCHOOLHOUSE

The last game of the National League's season was also the last of a distinguished career. Miguel Rojas, 37 years old, told his Los Angeles teammates after Thursday's defeat that he had played his final game as an active man: "This is it, guys. This is it." The ledger he closes runs thirteen major-league seasons and 21 years in professional baseball — a 2014 debut with these same Dodgers, remembered for the backhand stop at third base that helped preserve Clayton Kershaw's June no-hitter; eight seasons as Miami's everyday shortstop and captain; and a return to Los Angeles in 2023 for four seasons, 446 games and a .260 average.¹⁵

The crowning entries came late, as they sometimes do for the glove men: World's Series titles in 2024 and 2025, and in the seventh game of last autumn's Series against Toronto, a game-tying home run in the ninth inning — a swing that will outlive every fielding chart ever drawn of him. He does not go far: Rojas moves into a player-development post with the organization, the exact title still being lettered. "He built a legacy that we'll be talking about for a long time," said Freddie Freeman; Mookie Betts called him simply "our leader." The Herald tips its cap to a workman of the old school and wishes him a long second career teaching the backhand.¹⁵

With this number the Herald's ledger turns one hundred — a hundred mornings of scores set down and deeds sung since this desk first took up its pen, and the chronicle is pleased to mark the occasion with a pennant in it. The forward ledger now reads: the American round's fourth game tonight at eight by the lake, weather permitting, a fifth Saturday at the same address, and a sixth Monday at the Gulf should the argument run on; the National League's business is concluded until Friday next, the 23rd, when the World's Series opens at Milwaukee.²¹³ One league's season ended last night in a glove in left-center; the other's hangs tonight on a rain cloud over Lake Erie. The game, as ever, keeps its own calendar and lets the rest of us guess. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Friday, October 16, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
AJ Cassavell, Brewers end Dodgers' three-peat bid with an NLCS sweep of their own — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Milwaukee, you have a World Series! 44 years later, this one's for the believers — MLB.com
Sarah Langs, Fascinating facts and stats from Brewers' comeback sweep — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Mitchell keeps proving doubters wrong -- all the way to the World Series — MLB.com
Christina De Nicola, Ashby's 9-out save the cherry on top of dominant NLCS for Crew's 'pen — MLB.com
Courtney Hollmon, Ohtani's 1st HR in nearly 2 months not enough for LA in NLCS loss — MLB.com
Christina De Nicola, Bauers takes home NLCS MVP after series filled with signature moments — MLB.com
Keegan Matheson, Go-ahead HR from unlikely source flips ALCS back in Guardians' favor — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Which landed 1st? Halpin's epic HR or the 'majestic' bat flip that followed? — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Adam Berry and Keegan Matheson, Rays-Guardians ALCS Game 4 lineups, FAQ — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Tim Stebbins, With rain in forecast Friday, how might ALCS Game 4 pitching plans shape up? — MLB.com
What you need to know about the 2026 World Series — MLB.com
Courtney Hollmon, After 13 seasons, 2-time World Series champ Rojas calls it a career — MLB.com

THE FIRST PITCH OF THE EVENING LEAVES THE YARD AND THE ELEVENTH OF A SINGLE SIEGE DECIDES IT — CHOURIO AMBUSHES SNELL BEFORE THE FIFTY THOUSAND HAVE SETTLED, BAUERS OUTLASTS HIM FOR A GO-AHEAD CLOUT, MITCHELL FOLLOWS HIM OVER THE BARRIER, AND MILWAUKEE STANDS ONE VICTORY FROM ITS FIRST WORLD'S SERIES IN FOUR-AND-FORTY YEARS: BREWERS 6, DODGERS 2

2026-10-15T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THE FIRST PITCH OF THE EVENING LEAVES THE YARD AND THE ELEVENTH OF A SINGLE SIEGE DECIDES IT — CHOURIO AMBUSHES SNELL BEFORE THE FIFTY THOUSAND HAVE SETTLED, BAUERS OUTLASTS HIM FOR A GO-AHEAD CLOUT, MITCHELL FOLLOWS HIM OVER THE BARRIER, AND MILWAUKEE STANDS ONE VICTORY FROM ITS FIRST WORLD'S SERIES IN FOUR-AND-FORTY YEARS: BREWERS 6, DODGERS 2

Jackson Chourio strikes Blake Snell's very first offering into the right-center seats — one year to the day after he opened a postseason game the same way — and after Will Smith's bases-loaded double briefly restores the champions and their crowd, Jake Bauers fouls off everything Snell has left and turns the eleventh pitch of the battle into a two-run homer, Garrett Mitchell makes it back-to-back, and the Dodgers stand three games down in a hole only one club in history has ever climbed out of

Dodger Stadium got its voice back in the sixth inning Wednesday night, and kept it for less than an inning. Will Smith, mired all month, had just lined a bases-loaded double off the top of the left-center wall for the lead, and the 50,708 were making the old championship noise — two titles running will teach a crowd the words. Then Jake Bauers stepped in against Blake Snell in the seventh and declined, pitch after pitch after pitch, to be put away, and when the eleventh offering caught too much of the plate he deposited it in the right-field pavilion, 412 feet off, for two runs and the lead.³⁴ The yard went so quiet that the visitors' dugout could be heard celebrating in the upper deck. Garrett Mitchell struck the next homer himself, back-to-back, and Milwaukee had turned a 2-1 deficit into a 6-2 verdict and a three-games-to-none grip on the National League's pennant round.³

The evening had announced its character on its very first pitch. Jackson Chourio, 22 years old, met Snell's opening fastball — 97.6 miles the hour, center-cut — and drove it the opposite way into the right-center seats before some of the principals had found their places; the Milwaukee owner was still scrambling to his seat, and Bauers was still pulling on his batting gloves.⁶ The records went scrambling with him: only six men have opened a postseason game with a first-pitch home run since such things were first counted in 1988, and Chourio has now done it twice — one year to the day since he did it in this same round against this same club — a distinction he shares with George Springer alone. The blow was his sixth postseason homer, the most any Brewer has ever accumulated, and Snell became the only pitcher twice victimized by the leadoff ambush.⁶ The young man played the rest of his evening in company: a praying mantis took up residence on his shoulder in the third, just as he settled under a Freddie Freeman fly ball half-lost in the low sun, and could not be persuaded off him. The catch was made, insect and all.⁷

Between the first blow and the last ran a proper pitchers' evening. Snell, who had not allowed a home run in ten starts this year, gathered himself after Chourio's clout and at one stretch retired fourteen men in succession, nine strikeouts among his evening's work.⁵⁴ Robert Gasser — the man this paper introduced yesterday as the season's quietest success — answered with five scoreless innings of his own, three hits, on 72 pitches. The sixth undid the visitors' arithmetic for a moment: Abner Uribe arrived from the bullpen without his compass, walked three Dodgers, and Smith's double cashed two of them — the heaviest damage Milwaukee's relief corps has absorbed all month, with a blown save entered against Uribe's account. DL Hall walked in, stranded Shohei Ohtani ninety feet from home, and the damage stopped at two.³⁵

Then came the seventh, and the at-bat that may yet stand as the series' epitaph. Andrew Vaughn's seven-pitch walk ended Snell's run of fourteen straight; Christian Yelich went in to run for him; and Bauers — who turned the second game Monday with a twelve-pitch walk against Yoshinobu Yamamoto — began fouling off everything with a star on it. A called strike, two balls, a foul tip; two-strike fouls off the slider and the curve; ball three; then fouls off the four-seamer, the changeup, the slider again. The eleventh pitch was a fastball meant for the edge that arrived at the middle, and Bauers did not miss it. He is the second man in postseason history with plate appearances of eleven pitches or more in consecutive games — the Cubs' Aramis Ramirez, in 2003, is the other — and his homer was just the sixth ever struck on the eleventh pitch or later of a postseason at-bat.⁴ The beaten pitcher, once his teammate in the Tampa Bay chain, paid him the evening's handsomest tribute: "I've seen all the ups and downs he's been through, and it's been a lot of downs. For him to go through this right now, he's earned it. Hat's off to him. What an at-bat. I threw everything I had."⁴ This is, after all, a man Milwaukee itself released two Novembers ago, a journeyman of five organizations who once mused about quitting the game for Costa Rica. "I was looking for a fastball, and I didn't want to miss it," Bauers said. "I said I'll adjust to anything else, but if you get a heater, don't miss it."⁴

Mitchell's four-bagger made the pair the third set of back-to-back postseason homers in Milwaukee's annals and chased Snell; a wild pitch cashed Brice Turang in the eighth and Joey Ortiz singled home Cooper Pratt in the ninth, and the accounting was complete. The visitors have now answered, immediately and in kind, every one of the four innings in which Los Angeles has scored in this series — their fifth comeback victory in seven October games, a figure matched this early only by the 1996 Yankees and 1980 Phillies, both of whom finished their autumns with parades.³ The arithmetic ahead is the kind this paper prints with a steady hand: of the 42 clubs ever down three games to none in a best-of-seven, 32 were swept, two forced a seventh game, and exactly one — the 2004 Red Sox, on whose roster stood a reserve outfielder named Dave Roberts — recovered the series. "It's certainly possible," says the same Roberts, now managing the club that must do it. "I've lived it."⁵ His batsmen, 3-for-32 with runners in scoring position this postseason outside Smith's double, are rather further from the precedent than he is. Kyle Tucker states the assignment plainly: "This team's won four games before. That's what we're going to have to do."³ The fourth game goes this very evening at eight o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium, and the Elimination Desk takes up its particulars elsewhere in this number.¹⁰

News Around the League

THE ELIMINATION DESK: TONIGHT AT EIGHT THE CHAMPIONS BAT FOR THEIR LIVES BEHIND GLASNOW, UNDEFEATED COMPANY IN THIS OCTOBER'S SEVEN ERRANDS — MILWAUKEE, ASKED FOR ITS STARTER, PROMISES ONLY THAT 'THERE WILL BE PITCHING'

The National League's fourth sitting goes tonight at eight o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium — moved up an hour from nine by the league's Wednesday decree — with the sweep standing one game off and the champions' three-peat standing on its last legal appeal.⁸¹⁰

Los Angeles sends its best remaining argument. Los Angeles has yet to lose a postseason game in which Tyler Glasnow has pitched this month — seven appearances, a 1.73 earned-run average across 26 innings — and the man carries a 3.60 figure in three career elimination games, all served in Tampa Bay's employ. His last outing wobbled, five walks against Atlanta in the Division round, but surrendered a single run in 4 2/3 innings.¹⁰ Behind him the bullpen reports in nearly full strength, though the first two games' starters do not: Tarik Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are held back for a fifth and sixth game that will exist only if tonight is won.⁵¹⁰

Milwaukee, meanwhile, conducted the week's briefest press conference. "Pitching tomorrow?" a reporter asked Pat Murphy, hoping for a name. "Yeah," the manager replied, "there will be pitching."¹⁰ The candidates for what amounts to a bullpen evening are plentiful and rested: the left-handers Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan and the right-hander Chad Patrick have yet to throw a pitch in seven postseason games, and Dustin May — a former Dodger with a 2020 ring from this very ballpark — threw an inning in the second game. The staff they would front carries a 1.74 earned-run average this postseason, the lowest of the twelve clubs that entered.¹⁰ The champions have twice lately climbed from the brink — down two games to one against San Diego in 2024, down three games to two in last year's World's Series — but they have never needed four victories in a row with winter at the door. "We've never been in this big of a hole," says Kiké Hernández, "but we've had our backs against the wall plenty of times before, and we've come out of it."⁵

THE LAKEFRONT DESK: RAIN MOVES THE AMERICAN QUESTION TO ONE O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON — WILLIAMS, NOW OFFICIAL, TAKES THE BALL FOR THE FOREST CITY NINE AGAINST JAX, WHO MAKES THE FIRST OCTOBER START OF HIS LIFE IN A YARD HE KNOWS BY HEART

The American League's pennant round resumes today at Progressive Field at one o'clock in the afternoon, Eastern — the league having moved the game up five full hours from its evening appointment on account of rain forecast over Cleveland tonight. October baseball by daylight, by the lake, with the round tied at a game apiece: the deadball desks could ask no better page.⁸⁹

The pitching is now official on both sides. Gavin Williams, whom this paper reckoned yesterday the likely man, was formally named Wednesday afternoon — on regular rest at last, after a Division round in which he made two starts and an emergency relief errand, recorded the final three outs of the fourth game, and came back on one day's rest to strike out twelve in the fifth, tying the franchise's postseason record. His October ledger stands at a 1.54 earned-run average with 24 strikeouts in 11 2/3 innings, and today's assignment lines him up, should the series run its full length, to start a seventh game Tuesday on regular rest.⁹ Opposite him, Griffin Jax makes the first postseason start of his career — a starter most of this season, lately a reliever by October necessity, with a 0.90 earned-run average over his last five appearances; since a rough return from elbow discomfort in early September, he has permitted two runs in 20 innings with 19 strikeouts across his last four regular-season starts and a Division-round relief errand. The venue holds no mysteries for him: most of his career was spent in Minnesota's employ, and his 13 relief appearances in this very yard produced a 2.19 earned-run average. The man is presumably also acquainted with the weather.⁹

The crowd that sang Cleveland back from two defeats down against Chicago now gets three straight home dates with the round level — and the statisticians' note from yesterday's number still stands: the winner of a third game in a series tied at one has gone on to take the series in roughly seven cases of ten. Patrick Bailey, swinging a hot October bat, catches his customary partner; Tampa Bay's lone question is whether Jonny DeLuca or Cedric Mullins patrols center.⁹

THE MANAGERIAL DESK: THE COURTSHIP THIS PAPER REPORTED YESTERDAY LOSES ITS CHAPERONE — HOUSTON LETS ESPADA'S PAPERS LAPSE A DAY AFTER LENDING HIM TO SEATTLE'S PARLOR, AND PHILADELPHIA, TWICE REFUSED BY CORA, GIVES MATTINGLY, AGED FIVE-AND-SIXTY, TWO YEARS ON MERIT

The managerial market produced two settlements Wednesday, and the first reads as a sequel to yesterday's number. Joe Espada, whose permission to interview for Seattle's vacancy this paper reported only yesterday, will not be back in Houston at all: the Astros announced they will not renew his contract when it expires at the month's end. The owner Jim Crane supplied the customary warm send-off — "We are thankful for Joe's hard work, his passion for the game, and for his commitment to the Houston Astros" — and the club parted besides with five of its coaches, leaving it in search of a manager and a general manager at once, Dana Brown having been dismissed in August.¹² The record Espada carries to market: 256 wins against 229 across three seasons, division flags in 2024 and 2026 — the latter at 81-81, the first club in the game's history to reach the postseason without a winning record — and a two-game sweep at the White Sox's hands for an exit. The courtship across the division may now proceed without asking anyone's leave.¹²

In Philadelphia, meantime, the interim tag came off. Don Mattingly, 65 years old, signed a two-year engagement as the Phillies' manager, the position he has held in fact since Rob Thomson's dismissal 28 games into the season. His case argued itself: 79 wins against 55 thereafter, a Wild Card berth clinched with a victory in the season's final game, and an exit in the deciding third game of the Wild Card round against Atlanta. The appointment carries its footnotes — the man is the father of the club's general manager Preston Mattingly, and the executive Dave Dombrowski was twice rebuffed in his pursuit of Alex Cora before settling, both times, on the man already in the chair.¹³ The Herald observes that 23 consecutive seasons of managing and coaching, laid atop a playing career of the first order, make "settling" a curious word for it.

THE AWARDS DESK: RAWLINGS NAMES THREE MEN TO EVERY POST FOR THE GOLDEN GLOVES, VERDICTS SEALED UNTIL THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER — AND TWO OF THE NOMINATED WILL BE AT WORK THIS VERY AFTERNOON BY THE LAKE

The leather trade published its short lists Wednesday: the Gold Glove finalists for 2026, three men to a position in each league, the utility post included, with the winners to be announced on the first of November. The electorate, for the record, is the league's 30 managers and up to six coaches per club, barred from voting for their own men and counting for three-quarters of the verdict, the remaining quarter supplied by the Society for American Baseball Research's defensive index.¹¹ The Blue Jays and Cubs lead the nominations with five men apiece; the Braves, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Royals count four each.¹¹

Two of the nominated have more immediate engagements. Tanner Bibee, a finalist among American League pitchers, and Taylor Walls, a finalist at shortstop, are presently employed on opposite sides of the pennant round that resumes at one o'clock today at Progressive Field — Bibee for Cleveland, Walls for Tampa Bay — and may be excused for leaving the campaigning to their rivals.¹¹ The Herald reports nominations as nominations, per its standing rule: the hardware changes hands when the ballots are counted, and not an edition sooner.

Today the calendar grants both arguments at once, and at civilized intervals: the American question at one o'clock in the afternoon by the lake, where the rain rewrote the timetable, and the National at eight in Los Angeles, where Milwaukee may finish what it started and the champions must win tonight and then three more times besides. Friday holds the American round's fourth game at Cleveland, and a fifth National sitting — should tonight's defendants earn it.² An afternoon playoff game is the oldest luxury the sport affords: it was how all of October sounded before the lights went up, and a reader with a flexible luncheon arrangement is advised to take full advantage. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Thursday, October 15, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
AJ Cassavell, Brewers keep October magic rolling, on cusp of 1st World Series in 44 years — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Bauers refuses to give up – not on his career, not against a pair of Dodgers aces — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, LA facing long odds after rough 7th flips script on Snell's Game 3 start — MLB.com
Christina De Nicola, Chourio's history-making 1st-pitch HR comes 1 year to the day after he did the same thing! — MLB.com
Scott Chiusano, The one thing that bugs Brewers star is a praying mantis on his shoulder — MLB.com
Updated Thursday start times: 1 ET (ALCS Game 3), 8 ET (NLCS Game 4) — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Keegan Matheson and Adam Berry, Rays-Guardians ALCS Game 3 FAQ (1 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Adam McCalvy and AJ Cassavell, Brewers-Dodgers NLCS Game 4 FAQ (8 ET, FS1/FOX One) — MLB.com
2026 Gold Glove Award finalists revealed — MLB.com
Astros will not renew contract of manager Joe Espada — ESPN
Phillies hire Don Mattingly to 2-year deal as manager — ESPN

THE SECRET IS ANNOUNCED OVER THE LOUD-SPEAKER AND KEPT ANYWAY — ONE-AND-SEVENTY FASTBALLS FROM 'FASTBALL FREDDY,' THE SWIFTEST OF HIS NINE-YEAR LIFE; A GROUND BALL FINDS THE ONE CRACK IN THE LEAGUE'S SUREST THIRD BASEMAN; AND THE THROWBACK-CLAD RAYS SQUARE THE PENNANT ROUND: RAYS 3, GUARDIANS 1

2026-10-14T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THE SECRET IS ANNOUNCED OVER THE LOUD-SPEAKER AND KEPT ANYWAY — ONE-AND-SEVENTY FASTBALLS FROM 'FASTBALL FREDDY,' THE SWIFTEST OF HIS NINE-YEAR LIFE; A GROUND BALL FINDS THE ONE CRACK IN THE LEAGUE'S SUREST THIRD BASEMAN; AND THE THROWBACK-CLAD RAYS SQUARE THE PENNANT ROUND: RAYS 3, GUARDIANS 1

Kevin Cash grumbles that even the public-address man was advertising 'Fastball Freddy' before the first pitch — then Peralta throws 71 four-seamers among his 99 pitches regardless, 29 of them at 97 miles the hour or better and one at 99.4, the hardest of his career, across six scoreless innings in the longest postseason outing of his life; Tampa Bay's three runs, every one unearned, are manufactured from a walk, two infield choppers, an alert dash to an unguarded base and a ball that skips through José Ramírez's legs; and Parker Messick's boyhood-ballpark homecoming ends in a tough-luck defeat as the series packs for Cleveland tied at a game apiece

The evening's one secret was given away before the first pitch, and it kept perfectly well anyway. "The announcers before the game and even our PA were calling him 'Fastball Freddy,'" Kevin Cash grumbled afterward, half in jest. "That told everybody what was coming."⁴ What came, Tuesday night at Tropicana Field, was 71 four-seam fastballs among Freddy Peralta's 99 pitches — a reliance he had not permitted himself in any start since June of 2019 — and the forewarned Guardians went 3-for-17 against the pitch and never once scratched him.⁴ The figures read like an affidavit: 29 offerings at 97 miles the hour or better from a man whose season average was 94.3; a 99.4 to Jo Adell in the fifth, the hardest pitch of his nine-year career; 51 of the 71 heaters spotted at the top third of the strike zone or above it.⁴³ "It's already an elite fastball, but he was placing it at the top for strikes," said Steven Kwan. "And then it felt like when he wanted to, he just put it a ball above. When he's doing that, it's pretty hard to lay off."⁴ Six scoreless innings — the longest postseason errand of Peralta's life — on four singles, two walks and a hit batsman, closed with a nine-pitch siege of Petey Halpin that ended in a changeup, a strikeout, a scream off the mound and the dome chanting "Freddy! Freddy!" at the Trade Deadline acquisition. His last eight starts, summer and October together, have now each allowed five hits or fewer and no more than one run, with a Tampa Bay victory to show for every one — the longest such run by any traditional starter since 1900.⁴

The three runs behind him were all unearned and all of a piece — "a very Rays inning," their own manager certified.⁶ Junior Caminero opened the fourth with a walk; Victor Mesa Jr.'s double-play bouncer was undone on review, the relay having pulled Nathaniel Lowe's foot from the bag; and after a strikeout, Chandler Simpson — making his first start since the second game of the Division round — chopped a ball five feet in front of the plate and outran the clean play. Mesa, observing that third base stood unguarded where Ramírez had drifted toward short, simply never stopped running.⁶ Then Ben Williamson beat a 2-1 changeup into the ground toward the surest glove in the league, and the ball struck the lip where the dirt meets the artificial turf, hopped off the top of Ramírez's mitt and passed between his legs into left field as Mesa trotted home.⁶⁵ Liam Hicks, dropped to eighth in the order against the left hand, lined the next man's first pitch — a slider left up — to right-center for two more. One ball out of the infield in the whole rally, and the game decided by it. "They've done that all year," said Stephen Vogt. "When they smell blood, they take it and run."³

Cleveland's grief wants a careful accounting, for the club otherwise played a clean, hard game. Ramírez makes the play in question as near to always as the language allows; this once the bounce defeated him. "Nobody's perfect, but I still feel bad," the third baseman said through the club's interpreter. "The ball bounced right on the edge between the dirt and the turf. That's what made it more difficult for me."⁵ Kwan, who was himself victimized by the surface in the opener, offered the visiting fielder's lament: "It's kind of inconsistent whether it's going to hop or skip. When you don't play on it every day, you're just not calibrated to it."⁵ The offense supplied its own share, going 1-for-6 with runners in scoring position and leaving nine men aboard; the lone reply was Chase DeLauter's double to right in the seventh, cashing Patrick Bailey's walk.⁵ And Messick — whose homecoming to the ballpark of his boyhood this paper set out at length yesterday morning — deserved a kinder ledger than the one he signed: five innings, six hits, two walks, three runs and not one of them earned, a tough-luck defeat in the house he once watched from the cheap seats.⁵

The victors, it should be recorded, played the evening in fancy dress. Down a game, the Rays swapped into their Devil Rays throwbacks around ten o'clock that morning on a suggestion from the club's chief executive Ken Babby — a costume in which they had gone 12-3 during the regular season — and the swagger arrived with the wardrobe.⁷ Caminero leapt to spear Kwan's fifth-inning liner and administered a finger wag after the fashion of Dikembe Mutombo; by the seventh the two were conferring amiably at third base about it. "He told me, 'Hey, if I hit it a little bit harder, the ball's past you,'" Caminero reported. "And I said, 'Yeah, try to hit it harder and I won't catch it.'"⁷ So the 32,125 went home in two hours and forty-two minutes, and the round removes to the lakefront tied at one — no small adjustment of the odds, the home-field club having historically taken such a series 55 times in 102, and 24 of 40 in the pennant rounds. The third game goes Thursday evening at six o'clock Eastern at Progressive Field, and the Herald surveys that sitting elsewhere in this number.³²

News Around the League

THE LINEUP DESK: THE QUESTION OF RESTING OHTANI IS ANSWERED BY THE MAN HIMSELF — 'ADAMANT' HE CAN HELP, THE GAME'S GREATEST INSTRUMENT TAKES HIS PLACE IN TONIGHT'S ORDER, MECHANICS, SYMPTOMS AND ALL

The conversation this paper reported yesterday has been held, and the player won it. Shohei Ohtani will bat for Los Angeles in tonight's third game, Dave Roberts announced Tuesday at Dodger Stadium, the club having weighed resting him and found the man immovable. "He was very convicted that he is onto something mechanically," the manager said. "He was adamant that he can help us. He's well enough to help us win a baseball game. So that's all I needed to hear."⁸ Roberts likened the sitting-down he did not order to the one he once gave Freddie Freeman, whose sprained ankle cost him three games of the 2024 postseason before five World Series appearances that entered legend.⁸

The figures that prompted the question have not improved for being aired. Ohtani stands at .197 with a .629 on-base-plus-slugging over his last 35 games, has not homered since August 18 — a drought of 110 plate appearances, the longest of his career — and is 3-for-20 this October without an extra-base hit, dropped from second in the order to cleanup. Speaking to the press for the first time since the eve of the Division round, he declined the alibi of the right biceps and left knee that have troubled him since June: "The symptoms shouldn't be the reason why I can't hit," he said through his interpreter.⁸ The remedies have been uncharacteristic — on-field batting practice four days running, from a man who takes it in public a handful of times a year, and even a show of bunt against a left-handed reliever on Monday.⁸ The opposition declines to read the ledger literally. "We remember vividly at this time last year that he maybe had the best baseball game ever played the day he pitched against us," said Milwaukee's Pat Murphy. "You can't forget that, his capabilities, whatever."⁸ On that much, every scorer in the press box agrees.

THE PRECIPICE DESK: TONIGHT AT EIGHT THE TWICE-CROWNED CHAMPIONS MAKE THEIR STAND AT HOME, TWO GAMES IN ARREARS — SNELL, WHO FACED THE MINIMUM THROUGH EIGHT AGAINST THESE SAME BREWERS A YEAR AGO, DRAWS THE ASSIGNMENT AGAINST GASSER, A MAN WHO BEGAN THIS SEASON IN NASHVILLE

The National League's argument resumes tonight at eight o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium, and the arithmetic of the precipice is plainly printed: clubs down two games to none in a best-of-seven have recovered the series 16 times in 95 trials, and of the 42 that ever fell behind three games to none, 32 were swept and exactly one — Roberts' own 2004 Red Sox, as the manager hardly needs reminding — climbed all the way out.⁹ "You want to get that first one," Roberts allows.⁹

His chosen instrument is the left hand with the best claim on Milwaukee's respect. Blake Snell, limited to nine starts this season by shoulder trouble and surgery on the elbow, was "too fine" by his manager's reckoning in his lone October outing, walking five men in an abbreviated Division-round start; but his five starts at Dodger Stadium this year show a 2.19 earned-run average, and his last acquaintance with these Brewers — in this very round, a year ago — ran eight scoreless innings in which he struck out ten and faced the minimum.⁹¹⁰ "0-2, 2-0, it wouldn't matter," Snell said. "I know what I need to do to win and dominate." His teammate Teoscar Hernández counts the remaining cards without blinking: "We've got Snell, we've got Glasnow, and then we've got Tarik again... I think we're going to be OK."¹⁰

Milwaukee's answer is the season's quietest success story: Robert Gasser, who opened the year at Triple-A Nashville and enters a pennant-round start on a run of 2-0 with a 1.73 earned-run average over his last seven appearances — a rise that began in late August when a comebacker felled Dustin May on the game's first pitch and Gasser walked out of the bullpen into a rotation he has not left since.⁹ With Milwaukee's fourth-game starter yet unnamed, every inning the sweeper-artist supplies tonight is worth two. The home crowd, the probabilities and the champions' pride all report for duty at the same hour; the Herald will believe the obituaries when it sees the body.⁹

THE LAKEFRONT DESK: THE AMERICAN ROUND, NOW A BEST-OF-FIVE WITH THREE GAMES BY THE LAKE, RECONVENES THURSDAY AT SIX — JAX IS NAMED FOR TAMPA BAY, WILLIAMS STANDS LIKELY FOR CLEVELAND, AND THE LOUDEST YARD OF THE AUTUMN AWAITS THEM BOTH

The American League's pennant round rests today and reconvenes Thursday at six o'clock Eastern at Progressive Field, reduced by the split at the dome to a best-of-five in which Cleveland holds the next three home dates.¹¹² The statisticians commend the appointment: in best-of-seven series knotted at one, the third game's winner has gone on to take the series 71 times in 102.⁵

Tampa Bay has named its man — Griffin Jax, a starter for most of the season, who carries a 0.90 earned-run average over his last five appearances and spent only 32 pitches in his lone Division-round errand, two tidy innings against the Yankees.¹¹ Cleveland has named nobody, Vogt preferring to see how his staff emerges from the first two games, but the ball figures to belong to Gavin Williams on regular rest — the same Williams whose Division round ran to a 1.54 earned-run average with 24 strikeouts in 11 2/3 innings, closing one elimination game and starting the next.¹¹

The venue is reckoned a combatant in its own right. The lakefront crowd that sang its club back from two games dead against Chicago now receives a series tied, and even the enemy tips his cap in advance. "That's as good an atmosphere as you're going to see," said Kevin Cash. "They've got a great fan base that's going to be behind their team."¹¹ The marquee names, meanwhile, owe the round a signature: Ramírez's series so far holds one solid game and one costly error, and Caminero still awaits the first postseason home run of his career. One of the two clubs will put the sport's longest waits another game behind it Thursday — Cleveland's drought of 77 seasons against a Tampa Bay franchise that has never once, in 28 years, carried the flag home.¹¹

THE MANAGERIAL DESK: SEATTLE ASKS LEAVE TO COURT THE MAN WHO KEPT HOUSTON'S MACHINE RUNNING — ESPADA, HIS CONTRACT EXPIRING WITH THE MONTH, WILL HEAR THE MARINERS OUT

Word from the executive corridors: Joe Espada, these past three seasons the manager of the Astros and for six before that their bench coach, will interview for Seattle's vacant managership, the Mariners having sought and received Houston's permission by the account of the wire's sources. Neither club confirms the courtship; the man's contract expires at the month's end, which rather confirms it for them.¹²

The résumé travels well. Espada's nine Houston years took in the 2022 championship, two further pennants and seven division titles, and his own three seasons at the helm ran 256-229 with the West's flag in 2024 and again this summer — though this summer's edition won it at 81-81 and was swept from the Wild Card round by the White Sox, a decline that had already cost the general manager Dana Brown his post in August.¹² Espada, for his part, has said plainly he would like to continue in Houston.

Seattle's specification reads like a reply to its own history: the president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto — whose two previous selections, Scott Servais and the departed Dan Wilson, had never managed a game at any level — now declares prior big-league experience "preferred" and the need to be for "fresh thought."¹² A man with three division titles in three years, suddenly at liberty across the division, answers the advertisement almost suspiciously well. The Herald files the courtship under October's quieter competitions and will report the banns if they are published.¹²

A single game stands on tonight's card, and it may be the month's heaviest: the National League's third sitting, at eight o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium, where the champions of the last two World's Series stand twice beaten, with Snell on the hill and Ohtani batting on his own insistence. Thursday the calendar doubles again — Tampa Bay at Cleveland at six o'clock, Milwaukee at Los Angeles at nine.² The week's two evenings at the dome have supplied a matched pair of lessons: Monday the form sheet burned, and Tuesday it was lovingly restored, the best fastball of a man's life and a single error punished to the last unearned run. The game gives and takes away with the same hand, and October keeps every receipt. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Wednesday, October 14, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Keegan Matheson, 'When they smell blood, they take it and run': Rays create havoc to even up ALCS — MLB.com
Brian Murphy, Spoiler alert: 'Fastball Freddy' went fastball-heavy -- and Guards still couldn't hit it — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Guards head home with series tied after costly error on Rays' turf — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Rays pounce after Guards' mistakes, rally in the most Rays way imaginable — MLB.com
Jake Rill, With retro swag and a finger wag, 'Devil' Rays throw it back — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Ohtani 'adamant' he is good to go, will be in NLCS Game 3 lineup — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Adam McCalvy and AJ Cassavell, Brewers-Dodgers NLCS Game 3 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, FS1/FOX One) — MLB.com
Christina De Nicola, Dodgers need Snell to step up on big stage, just as he's done in the past — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Keegan Matheson and Adam Berry, Rays-Guardians ALCS Game 3 FAQ (Thurs., 6 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Mark Feinsand, Daniel Kramer and Brian McTaggart, Mariners considering Espada for manager vacancy (source) — MLB.com

THE ONE-AND-NINETIETH PITCH IS THE ACE'S LAST, AND IT COMES DOWN FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX FEET AWAY — DeLAUTER AND BAILEY UNDO RASMUSSEN BY INSTALLMENTS, LOWE UNTIES THE KNOT, AND THE LAKE ERIE MEN, FOUR TIMES VICTORIOUS RUNNING, CARRY THE OPENER OUT OF THE ENEMY'S DOME: GUARDIANS 7, RAYS 3

2026-10-13T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THE ONE-AND-NINETIETH PITCH IS THE ACE'S LAST, AND IT COMES DOWN FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX FEET AWAY — DeLAUTER AND BAILEY UNDO RASMUSSEN BY INSTALLMENTS, LOWE UNTIES THE KNOT, AND THE LAKE ERIE MEN, FOUR TIMES VICTORIOUS RUNNING, CARRY THE OPENER OUT OF THE ENEMY'S DOME: GUARDIANS 7, RAYS 3

Down 2-0 by the first inning to a Tampa Bay club that had not lost a game since the regular season's final Sunday, Cleveland waits out Drew Rasmussen — whose previous 13 starts had every one of them ended in a Rays victory — and then dismantles the evening piece by piece: Chase DeLauter's opposite-field homer in the sixth, Patrick Bailey's 436-foot reply on the ace's 91st and final pitch to open the seventh, Nathaniel Lowe's two-run single in the eighth, and a three-run ninth manufactured largely by José Ramírez's legs, while Foster Griffin and five relievers hold the American League's top seed to one run across the final eight innings

For five innings beneath the dome at St. Petersburg on Monday night, the pennant round's American opener obeyed the form sheet to the letter. The Rays, 98 games victorious this summer and unbeaten since the 27th of September, scored twice before Cleveland had recorded three outs — Junior Caminero and Jonny DeLuca singling home the runs in the first — and Drew Rasmussen, rested to the point of luxury, carried the 2-0 advantage through six innings on 90 pitches, pitching as a man whose previous 13 starts had every one concluded in a Tampa Bay win.³⁴ The house brand was all in evidence: the airtight glovework, the opportune single, the strangling of the opposing offense. The visitors from the lake, fresh from three straight elimination wins in the Chicago round, were being quietly shown the arithmetic by a club that had been resting on its sweep of the Yankees.⁴

Then Chase DeLauter leaned on a pitch and drove it the opposite way, over the left-field barrier, and the form sheet began to smolder. That was the sixth inning and made it 2-1; in the seventh, Tampa Bay elected to send Rasmussen out once more, and Patrick Bailey met the ace's 91st pitch — his first of the inning, and his last of the night — and deposited it 436 feet to right-center, the longest blow of the catcher's major-league life, for the tie.³ "We got punched early," said the Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt. "Our pitching staff, credit to them for stopping it and keeping us in the game as long as they did. The offense came alive... Hitting a couple balls out of the yard made it a new game."³

The new game belonged to the visitors. In the eighth, José Ramírez and DeLauter singled their way aboard against the reliever Wells, and Nathaniel Lowe lined a two-run single to center off Ian Seymour — both runs entered against Wells's account, and the defeat with them — to put Cleveland ahead 4-2 to a roar from the traveling contingent.⁴ Cedric Mullins answered with a solo shot off Erik Sabrowski in the bottom half, and then the ninth dissolved into the particular chaos that follows José Ramírez around October. A tag play, overturned on Cleveland's challenge, let Angel Martínez score on Ramírez's single; moments later Ramírez widened his lead off second until the pitcher Kevin Kelly could look at nothing else, broke with the delivery, and drew Caminero sprinting to third to cover — whereupon Jo Adell grounded a double through the ground the third baseman had just vacated, and two more runs crossed.⁴ "He's 'Hosey,'" said Vogt. "He just has a knack for finding his way on base. When he does, he makes things happen."⁴

The final accounting: 14 Cleveland hits, tied for the fourth-most the franchise has ever recorded in a nine-inning postseason game, and seven runs in the last four innings against a pitching apparatus that surrenders nothing by reputation.⁴ Behind Foster Griffin's four innings of two-run work came Daniel Espino, Joey Cantillo, Hunter Gaddis — the win credited to his name — Sabrowski and Cade Smith, an inning apiece.³ The victory is Cleveland's fourth without interruption, tied for the second-longest October streak in the franchise's annals behind the six that opened the 2016 tournament, and the club has scored 30 runs in the five games since it stood two defeats from winter.⁴ "There were some situations where this group definitely could have folded," said Lowe, reaching back to the Chicago series for his evidence, "but we didn't."³

So the round's first lead belongs to the lower seed, with the third, fourth and fifth games all waiting at Cleveland — no small matter between two clubs hauling the game's heaviest waits, the Guardians without a title since 1948 and the Rays without one in their 28 years of existence.⁵ Tampa Bay, for its part, declines the fainting couch. "We know exactly who we are," said Caminero. "We won 98 games for a reason. We won the division for a reason."³ The second game goes this very evening at eight o'clock Eastern at the dome, Parker Messick against Freddy Peralta, and the Herald takes up that pairing — a homecoming on one side, a resurrection on the other — elsewhere in this number.²

The Postseason Card

THRICE THE ANGELENOS NOSE AHEAD, AND THRICE THE ANSWER ARRIVES BEFORE THE INNING CAN CLOSE — WILD BILL STRIKES THREE BLOWS OF RECORD, BAUERS STANDS A TWELVE-PITCH SIEGE OF SEVEN MINUTES, AND THE CREAM CITY NINE GO TWO GAMES UP: BREWERS 7, DODGERS 4

Yamamoto, the reigning World Series Most Valuable Player, is run off after eight outs — the shortest postseason start of his life — by a third inning he cannot escape; William Contreras ties the game twice and wins it once, the fourth man in postseason history with three tying or go-ahead hits in a single game and the first since 1997; and four Milwaukee relievers retire all 15 men they face, the most wholly perfect bullpen innings any October game has ever recorded, as the series packs for Los Angeles with the titleholders in arrears

The second game of the National League round, before 42,516 at American Family Field on Monday, resolved into a call-and-answer the visitors could not win. Three times in the first six innings Los Angeles took a lead — Mookie Betts scoring on Teoscar Hernández's sacrifice fly in the first, Tommy Edman crossing on a thrown-away pickoff in the third, Kyle Tucker and Edman scoring in the fifth on a bunt heaved wide and Freddie Freeman's sacrifice fly — and three times Milwaukee drew level or better before the same inning closed.⁶ The visitors' four runs required only three hits, the home side's starter Logan Henderson having donated two throwing errors to the cause; the rest of their evening required rather more, and they did not have it. "They're playing really well over there," allowed Max Muncy afterward. "They're a very good team."⁶

The hinge of the night ran twelve pitches and seven minutes. With two aboard and two out in the third, Jake Bauers settled into a siege of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, fouling off six two-strike offerings from five different pitch types before the 12th pitch, a curveball, bounced for ball four — the longest plate appearance of Bauers' career, the longest anyone has forced upon Yamamoto in his American employ, and only the 12th postseason walk of a dozen pitches or more since such things were first counted in 1988.⁸ "It just got to a certain point where it was straight compete mode," said Bauers. "A little bit like a blackout." Two pitches later Christian Yelich lined Yamamoto's 75th and last offering into center for two runs, and the reigning World Series Most Valuable Player, who threw a complete game at this club in this round a year ago, was gone after eight outs, the briefest postseason start of his life. "He just didn't have it tonight," said Dave Roberts. "Which is very rare." His Milwaukee counterpart Pat Murphy called the walk "a turning point, I really do."⁸⁶

And still the game required winning, which is where William Contreras conducted his clinic. The catcher dug a tying single out of his shoetops in the first; he tied it again in the fifth with a drive measured at 436 feet to straightaway center off Kris Bubic; and when the Dodgers put Brice Turang aboard on purpose in the sixth to face him, he lashed the go-ahead single to left and flung his bat with what witnesses described as equal parts elation and disdain.⁷⁶ Three tying or go-ahead hits in one postseason game: only Sandy Alomar Jr. in 1997, Steve Garvey in 1984 and George Brett in 1978 had done it before him. "That's Wild Bill," said the rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt. "Big knock after big knock. He's a dog."⁷ The insurance arrived in the eighth from Turang and Bauers, singles both, giving Milwaukee its first margin greater than two runs — in either direction — of the entire postseason.⁶

What followed the starter was, again, flawless: May, Romero, Uribe and Ashby retired every one of the 15 men they faced, five perfect innings, the most wholly perfect bullpen work any postseason game has recorded, and the relief corps' account for the month now shows a single earned run across six games.⁶⁷ So Milwaukee, swept from this round by this opponent a year ago, carries a 2-0 lead west — a position from which clubs have claimed the series 79 times in 95 tries — having spent the enemy's two aces, Skubal and Yamamoto, for no return at all.⁶ The captain declines the laurel: "We haven't accomplished anything yet," said Yelich. "It was a good start. But still a long way to go." The third game goes Wednesday at eight o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium, where Los Angeles must decide, among other matters, whether their greatest batsman plays in it — a question the Lineup Desk takes up above.²

News Around the League

THE LINEUP DESK: THE GREATEST INSTRUMENT IN THE GAME MAY BE SET DOWN — LOS ANGELES WILL WEIGH RESTING OHTANI FOR THE THIRD GAME, THE WIRE REPORTS, AFTER TWO MONTHS OF HURTS HAVE DIMMED THE LAMP

The titleholders return home trailing and carrying a question no club has ever wished to ask. According to a report from Katie Woo and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the Dodgers will discuss whether Shohei Ohtani should sit for Wednesday's third game — a sentence that would have read as satire in July and reads as arithmetic in October.⁹

The figures make the case the eyes have been making for weeks. Ohtani has managed lingering injuries to the right biceps and left knee since at least June, hurts that sent him to the injured list in September; across his last 35 games, regular season and postseason together, he has batted .197 with a .629 on-base-plus-slugging. He has not homered since August 18 — a drought of 110 plate appearances, the longest of his career — and this postseason stands 3-for-20 with seven strikeouts, dropped already from second in the order to the cleanup spot.⁹ "He doesn't feel great," the manager Dave Roberts told the reporting parties. "It's having a conversation with him tomorrow, kind of try to figure out what's best for him, what's best for us. He certainly has earned that conversation and deserves it."⁹

Should the conversation end in rest, the beneficiary would likely be Josue De Paula, ranked the game's fourth-finest prospect by MLB Pipeline's reckoning, who reached base in half of his 42 plate appearances after a September summons and has been confined this October to three pinch-hitting errands. His outfield glove being the acknowledged weakness, the young man's bat can enter the lineup only through the designated hitter's door — which is to say, only at Ohtani's expense.⁹ The Herald observes merely that October is the month in which even the grandest accounts come due, and that the titleholders' ledger now shows two debts and dwindling collateral.

THE CASUALTY DESK: TWO RAYS MEET AT SPEED BENEATH A FOUL FLY AND BOTH RISE TO TELL OF IT — CAMINERO TAKES THE BLOW IN THE CHEST AND KEEPS HIS POST, DeLUCA TAKES IT IN THE SHOULDER, AND TAMPA BAY EXHALES

The fright of the American opener outlasted its score. In the ninth inning Monday, Brayan Rocchio lifted a foul fly toward the Cleveland bullpen down the left-field line; Jonny DeLuca pursued it from his post in left, Junior Caminero ran back from third, and in the noise of 35,361 neither man heard the other coming. The ball fell untouched. The players did not — left shoulders absorbing most of a collision that sent DeLuca rolling into the bullpen bench and left Caminero seated against the low wall in evident pain.¹⁰

The reckoning, mercifully, was small. Caminero — struck mostly in the chest, he said, the headache "just kind of the normal aftereffect" — remained in the game and trotted back to third base while the dome's loudspeakers offered the theme from "Rocky." "I feel good. Feel good overall," he reported afterward. His manager Kevin Cash concurred: "I think he just got the wind knocked out of him, and he seems to be totally fine now." DeLuca owned to a banged-up shoulder and hand and expected no lasting trouble from either. "Just two guys going hard at it, and obviously it's pretty noisy," the outfielder shrugged. "I think Cami's good. I'm pretty good."¹⁰ The Rays, a run down in a series growing heavier by the evening, will take the diagnosis as the day's one unqualified victory.

THE HOMECOMING DESK: TONIGHT AT EIGHT, THE BOY FROM PLANT CITY TAKES THE HILL HE ONCE WATCHED FROM THE CHEAP SEATS — MESSICK, AGED SEVEN AT THE 2008 WORLD'S SERIES, FACES PERALTA, A MAN REMADE ON THE GULF SINCE AUGUST

The second game of the American League round, this evening at eight o'clock Eastern at Tropicana Field, prints two biographies on one card. Parker Messick was seven years old on October 23, 2008, when he watched from these very stands as the Rays took a World Series game from Philadelphia; tonight the left-hander from Plant City — a town he commends for its people, its food and its Strawberry Festival — starts a pennant-round game on that same floor, with family and friends in the seats and his hometown throwing a watch party besides. "I have so many good memories here," said the Guardians' young ace, who went 12-9 with a 2.56 earned-run average this season and has thrown 193 innings against a previous professional high of 138 1/3. "To be able to do it on this stage now is just an incredible opportunity."¹¹ His last outing, an abbreviated 65-pitch start in the Division round, he waves off — "missed some pitches by tiny margins that ended up in walks" — and his fastball in it ran above his season's average velocity, which he offers as evidence the arm remains sound in October.¹¹

Opposite him stands the resurrection. Freddy Peralta came to Tampa Bay from the Mets on August 2 carrying a 4.99 earned-run average from his 22 New York starts; on the Gulf he has been another pitcher entirely — a 3.25 figure in his Rays service, by the ledger, including a September of 0.96 across five starts — and in his Division-round outing he threw 65 percent fastballs at nearly 97 miles the hour, well above his season custom.¹³¹² "What clicked is him coming over here and just flushing whatever had gone on," said Cash, "approaching it like a fresh start."¹² The deadball desks will relish the footnote: Peralta spent his first eight seasons and nine postseason errands in the employ of Milwaukee — the very club now two games to the good in the other league's round — and tonight pitches to keep his own round from slipping to 2-0 before it leaves for Cleveland.¹²

THE QUARTERMASTER DESK: EACH SIDE SHUFFLES ONE CARD FOR THE PENNANT ROUND — CLEVELAND ADDS A THIRTEENTH ARM IN CECCONI, AND TAMPA BAY SUMMONS YOUNG HOPKINS, LATELY OF THE DEVELOPMENT LIST, WITH HIS HUNDRED-MILE BOLT

Both American League quartermasters amended their manifests before Monday's opener, and both amendments bought pitching. Cleveland added the right-hander Slade Cecconi and set down the utility man Daniel Schneemann, electing to carry 13 pitchers after a Division round that wrung the staff like wash — three games in four days, seven pitchers used in one and eight in another. "Having that 13th pitcher was really important to us," said Vogt, who prizes Cecconi — 21 starts this season before a late move to the bullpen — as a man who "can throw up to 40, 50 pitches" in a single errand. The cost is bench flexibility: the rookie Angel Genao now stands as the lone spare part across the middle infield.¹⁴

Tampa Bay's exchange was a reliever for a reliever and a story besides: the left-hander Garrett Cleavinger out, and in his place Brody Hopkins, a hard-throwing young right-hander who in early August sat on the development list at Triple-A Durham, learning the bullpen trade, and who now finds himself dressing for a Championship Series. His manager's commissioning speech was brief. "He just said, 'You ready to pitch?'" Hopkins recounted. "And I'm ready to pitch." The young man brings a fastball of triple-digit reputation and breaking stuff his employers describe in terms usually reserved for weather. "Going from the dev list to the ALCS in two months, it's pretty crazy to think about," he allowed. "I'm juiced and ready to go."¹⁵

THE DESERT DESK: THE FALL CIRCUIT HANDS OUT ITS FIRST LAURELS — FIVE HITS IN A DEBUT FOR CLEVELAND'S FRANCISCA, WHO BATTED .556 FOR THE WEEK, AND A FASTBALL OF A HUNDRED AND THREE FROM WASHINGTON'S SUSANA

From Arizona, where the game's apprentices play out October in the sunshine, the Fall League has named its first weekly honorees. Welbyn Francisca, a 20-year-old infielder in the Cleveland chain, announced himself with five hits in his very first game for the Surprise club and closed the week leading the circuit at .556 with a .944 slugging figure and seven runs driven in across four games — the continuation of a season in which he climbed three levels and struck 19 home runs in 79 games, finishing at Double-A Akron among the Eastern League's youngest men.¹⁶

The pitching laurel went to Jarlin Susana of the Washington chain, who struck out eight and allowed one earned run over 5 2/3 innings spanning two starts for Salt River — and who supplied the week's most emphatic single datum, a fastball registered at 103.8 miles the hour, paired with a slider spinning near 3,000 revolutions.¹⁶ Cleveland's October is otherwise occupied, as the rest of this number attests, and Washington's ended with the summer — but both nurseries, evidently, are in bloom.

Tonight the American League holds the floor alone — the second game at the dome at eight o'clock — while the National League travels; its third game goes Wednesday at eight at Dodger Stadium, and Thursday both rounds sit at once, Tampa Bay at Cleveland at six and Milwaukee at Los Angeles at nine.² A reader keeping this month's ledger will have noticed its governing law: the clubs pronounced dead keep batting. Cleveland stood two defeats from winter a week ago Sunday and has not lost since; Milwaukee was swept from its round a year ago and now holds that same round by the lapels; and the titleholders' two aces have been spent without a win to show. The game honors no form sheet for long — that is its oldest kindness, and this paper's favorite. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Tuesday, October 13, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Keegan Matheson, Guards come up big late to rally past Rays in ALCS opener — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, 'Hosey' does it: Ramírez's havoc on basepaths key to Guards' 4th straight win — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Tim Stebbins and Keegan Matheson, Guardians-Rays ALCS Game 2 FAQ (8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Crew overcomes 3 deficits in seesaw Game 2, tightens grip on NLCS — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, 'Wild Bill' takes charge for Brewers with 3 hits, 3 RBIs -- and 0 worries about next contract — MLB.com
Zach Sweet, An ace's undoing: Bauers' 12-pitch walk vs. Yamamoto 'changes the game' for Crew — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Dodgers to discuss sitting Ohtani for NLCS Game 3 (report) — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Caminero, DeLuca dodge serious injury after scary collision — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Messick, once a fan at The Trop, will take the hill there as Guardians' ALCS Game 2 starter — MLB.com
Jake Rill, Peralta again looks to harness Trop energy, even ALCS with Game 2 start — MLB.com
Freddy Peralta Stats — Baseball-Reference
Tim Stebbins, Guardians swap in Cecconi for Schneemann, bolstering staff for ALCS — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Hopkins in, Cleavinger out on Rays' ALCS roster — MLB.com
Michael Avallone, Guardians' Francisca, Nats' Susana pick up Week 1 Arizona Fall League honors — MLB.com

THE MIDNIGHT LESSON COMES DUE, AND THE BILL IS PRESENTED TO THE FINEST LEFT HAND IN THE LAND — TURANG, SCHOOLED IN AN EMPTY CAGE TWO NIGHTS PRIOR, CLOUTS SKUBAL THE OPPOSITE WAY; THE BOY LARA SINGLES HOME THE DIFFERENCE, AND FOUR RELIEVERS BAR THE DOOR ON THE CHAMPIONS: BREWERS 2, DODGERS 1 IN THE PENNANT OPENER

2026-10-12T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THE MIDNIGHT LESSON COMES DUE, AND THE BILL IS PRESENTED TO THE FINEST LEFT HAND IN THE LAND — TURANG, SCHOOLED IN AN EMPTY CAGE TWO NIGHTS PRIOR, CLOUTS SKUBAL THE OPPOSITE WAY; THE BOY LARA SINGLES HOME THE DIFFERENCE, AND FOUR RELIEVERS BAR THE DOOR ON THE CHAMPIONS: BREWERS 2, DODGERS 1 IN THE PENNANT OPENER

The duel the statisticians ranked among the three finest ever printed on an October card resolves into something homelier and better: Misiorowski, missing his best stuff, opens with 11 straight fastballs and grinds 13 outs from 94 pitches; Skubal retires nine of his first ten with six strikeouts and then cannot miss a bat again; Brice Turang — 2-for-16 in the Division round until a late-night tutorial with the hitting coach straightened his path — golfs a 2-0 sinker 384 feet into the home bullpen, Luis Lara pokes the go-ahead single at 21 years of age, and Milwaukee's bullpen, 19 2/3 October innings without an earned run and counting, hands the defending champions a 2-1 verdict in Game 1 of a Championship Series they swept a year ago

The decisive blow of the National League's pennant opener was struck two nights before the game began, in an empty batting cage under American Family Field. Brice Turang had carried a 2-for-16 Division Series home from the San Diego round, and a 1-for-15 from last October's Championship Series before that, so he stayed late at the park with the hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach to sand his swing back down to its essentials — hands tight, path straight, the ball driven back up the middle. "That's what he was working on, exactly," Pat Murphy would say afterward. "Instead of his hands dropping and cutting across, to just get straight to the baseball."⁶ On Sunday evening, before 42,617 at American Family Field, the homework was graded in public: Brewers 2, Dodgers 1, and the club that was swept out of this very round by this very opponent a year ago leads it, one game to none.

The advertised duel arrived imperfect and was the better theater for it. Jacob Misiorowski, the young ace who led all baseball in earned-run average this summer, confessed afterward he "didn't think I had my best stuff," and the evidence agreed — the Dodgers fouled off 21 of the 42 swings they took at him and made him labor 35 pitches through the second inning alone, where a walk to Shohei Ohtani and Andy Pages' single to right produced the visitors' lone run.⁴³ But the young man opened the night with 11 consecutive fastballs, the first at 102.3 miles the hour to Mookie Betts and the warmest at 104.0 to Freddie Freeman, and when the second inning stood bases loaded with one out he coaxed from Kiké Hernández the double play that ended it — Cooper Pratt with the clean pick at short, Turang with the pivot.⁴³ A disputed balk stretched his fourth; he answered by striking out Kyle Tucker. His final accounting — one run on five hits across four and a third innings, 94 pitches — was less a masterpiece than a load-bearing wall, raised by a pitcher who has thrown nearly 190 innings this year, "way over," his manager marvels, anything he had done before.⁴

Tarik Skubal, meanwhile, was for three innings everything his billing promised, retiring nine of the first ten Milwaukee men with six strikeouts. Then the lineup saw him a second time, and the spell broke with an audible snap: the Brewers swung and missed at better than half his offerings through three innings, and at precisely one pitch thereafter.⁵ In the fourth, Turang — who had just fouled a pitch off his own kneecap — got a 2-0 sinker in on the hands and did exactly what the midnight tutorial prescribed, staying inside the ball and driving it the opposite way, 384 feet to left-center into the home bullpen for the tie.⁶³ "I wasn't trying to hit a homer," the second baseman said. "I was trying to hit a nice line drive back up the middle." The pitcher tipped his cap — "in the zone, but it's in," Skubal allowed, "a good swing" — and then undid himself in the fifth by the oldest sin in the book, a leadoff walk to Garrett Mitchell. "The leadoff walk just can't happen," Skubal said plainly. Pratt bunted the runner along, and Luis Lara, the 21-year-old in right field, lined the first-pitch changeup he saw into center for the lead.⁵³ Skubal's five innings and 81 pitches made the shortest of his eight postseason starts.⁵

What remained was the machinery Milwaukee trusts most. DL Hall faced exactly one batter and got two outs for his trouble, inducing the double play that erased Betts in the fifth; Abner Uribe took the sixth, Aaron Ashby the seventh and eighth, and Trevor Megill the ninth, where he complicated matters with two walks before Betts drove a ball to the deepest part of center that Mitchell ran down at the warning track to end it.³⁴ The relief corps' October ledger now reads 19 2/3 innings without an earned run among Hall, Uribe, Ashby and Megill, a bullpen earned-run average of 0.38 through five games — tied for the third-lowest any club has carried through its first five postseason contests since 1969 — and opposing batsmen at a .163 figure.⁴ "We saw their four leverage guys tonight," Dave Roberts said, "and we just couldn't muster anything." His offense has two hits in 27 plate appearances with runners in scoring position this October, both of them Pages'.⁵ "At some point," said Betts, "we've got to get ours."³

The ledger notes what the evening portends. Every one of Milwaukee's five October games has been settled by one or two runs, and the two runs it scored Sunday are more than it managed in any single game of last autumn's Championship Series sweep.³⁷ History leans gently toward the winner: clubs taking Game 1 of a best-of-seven have claimed the series 127 times in 197 tries.³ But the champions' answer arrives with scarcely a pause — the second sitting is this very evening at five o'clock Eastern, Yoshinobu Yamamoto against the rookie Logan Henderson, and the account of that matchup is taken up elsewhere in this number.²

News Around the League

THE WAKING DESK: VOGT PROMISED AN ANSWER UPON RISING, AND THE ANSWER IS GRIFFIN — THE WELL-TRAVELED LEFT HAND, THREE YEARS IN JAPAN AND AN ALL-STAR AT LAST, OPENS THE PENNANT ROUND AGAINST RASMUSSEN AND THE RESTED RAYS AT EIGHT O'CLOCK TONIGHT

When Stephen Vogt was asked Saturday night, amid the champagne, who would pitch the Championship Series opener, he laughed that he would let the world know when he woke up. He woke, and the ball belongs to Foster Griffin. "It was a no-brainer to give the ball to Foster in Game 1," the manager said Sunday, and the pitcher called the assignment "a huge honor" before declining all sentiment: "I feel like there's still a job to be done."⁹

The choice is a story the deadball desks would have relished. Griffin returned to these shores only this season after three years' employment in Japan, made his first All-Star team, posted a 3.06 earned-run average across 22 starts for Washington, and crossed to Cleveland at the August trade deadline, where a single eight-run calamity against Baltimore inflated an otherwise respectable ledger — a 3.73 figure over his other eight starts, and seven strikeouts in 2 2/3 innings of Division Series relief since.⁹ The arithmetic behind the romance is colder: Parker Messick and Gavin Williams, the co-aces who spent everything in the five-game escape from Chicago, are not on regular rest until the second and third games, and the Rays batted a league-handsome .752 by on-base-plus-slugging against right-handed pitching this season but a .679 against left — 25th in the game. Cleveland sends the left hand.⁹

Opposite him at eight o'clock Eastern at Tropicana Field stands Drew Rasmussen, rested to the point of luxury, who carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning of his last start and who threw seven scoreless at this same Cleveland club in July, allowing one hit.⁸ The season series went 5-1 to Tampa Bay; the two clubs between them carry the sport's longest waits, Cleveland without a championship since 1948 and the Rays without one in their 28 years of existence — the matter this paper took up at length yesterday, and which begins settling itself tonight.⁸

THE REJOINDER DESK: NO REST FOR THE BEATEN — YAMAMOTO, WHO THREW NINE FULL INNINGS AT MILWAUKEE IN LAST YEAR'S ROUND, TAKES THE BALL AT FIVE O'CLOCK AGAINST A ROOKIE WHO HAS NEVER ONCE BEEN BATTERED

The champions' opportunity for redress arrives before the sting fades: Game 2 goes this evening at five o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, and Los Angeles sends the surest thing October has lately known. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the reigning World Series Most Valuable Player, carries a 2.14 postseason earned-run average and has won all but one of his 11 postseason starts; in this very fixture a year ago — Game 2 of the Championship Series, in this very ballpark — he threw the first complete game of his American career, and in the Division round just concluded he allowed Atlanta one run across seven innings.⁷

Milwaukee's answer is Logan Henderson, 24 years old, who has made 24 starts in the major leagues and never in any of them allowed more than three runs — and who, the Milwaukee faithful will note with relish, outdueled Tarik Skubal at Dodger Stadium in August over a career-high seven innings.⁷ The undercard of anxieties favors the home nine as well: Will Smith stands 1-for-19 this October with seven strikeouts, Ohtani bats lower in the order than the world is accustomed to seeing him, and the champions' timeliest hitting remains the property of Andy Pages alone.⁷

The statisticians append the grandest framing: this is only the 17th postseason meeting of two 100-win clubs, the sixth in a Championship round, and the National League has seen exactly one such series before — Philadelphia and Cincinnati, in 1976.⁷ The argument removes to Los Angeles for Wednesday's third game.²

THE INFIRMARY DESK: THE RAYS SHEATHE McCLANAHAN FOR THE WINTER — NOT HURT, SAYS CASH, MERELY SPENT, AND THE CLUB DECLINES TO SPEND HIM FURTHER

One subtraction from the American League card before it begins: Shane McClanahan will not pitch again this year. The left-hander has not worked since the 3rd of September, when forearm tightness ended a start against Texas, and Kevin Cash announced Sunday that the club has shut him down for the balance of the postseason — with the emphatic clarification that this is prudence, not calamity. "Shane is done for the season," the manager said. "He's a healthy pitcher."¹⁰

The caution is easily understood by anyone who has read the man's medical file: a second reconstruction of the elbow, then a nerve injury in the triceps that cost him 2025 under the knife, two and a half seasons surrendered to the arm before this year's return — 10 wins against 7, a 3.36 earned-run average, 106 strikeouts in 118 innings across 24 starts. His manager nominates him for the game's comeback laurels, an advocacy this paper records as advocacy, the ballots being months from counted.¹⁰ McClanahan remains with the club through October in the capacity Cash describes as "being the best teammate"; the Rays will prosecute the pennant round with the rotation that needed no asterisk — Rasmussen tonight, with Freddy Peralta, Nick Martinez, and one of Griffin Jax or Ian Seymour behind him.¹⁰

THE MARKET DESK: JAZZ CHISHOLM TAKES HIS ONE-AND-FORTY STOLEN BASES TO THE AUCTION HOUSE — THE WIRE SURVEYS THE BIDDERS, AND THE GULF BETWEEN ASKING AND APPRAISAL WOULD SWALLOW A FRANCHISE

The winter market stirs even as October plays on. The wire this weekend surveyed the free agency of Jazz Chisholm Jr., the Yankees' second baseman, who arrives at the auction a 29-year-old by next Opening Day, with a season of .231, 19 home runs, and a career-high 41 stolen bases, third-most in the American League, worth some three and a half wins above replacement by the modern accounting.¹¹ The survey names the Tigers, Blue Jays, Angels, Padres and Reds as plausible suitors, a return to the Bronx not excluded, and notes the strikeouts — 157 of them, a whiff rate in the game's bottom tier — that keep the appraisers' enthusiasm in check.¹¹

The arithmetic of the bargaining table is where the entertainment lies. An executive consulted by the wire projects three or four years at about $20 million per annum; the player's camp, by an earlier report the wire recalls, has floated eight to ten years at $35 million. The Herald, whose sympathies in matters of the purse are a matter of standing record, begrudges no workingman a bold opening price — the owners' side of these tables has never once undersold itself — and merely observes that between those two figures lies a winter's worth of negotiating, which this paper will follow with its customary interest.¹¹

October presents its first two-sitting evening of the pennant rounds: the National League's second game at five o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, the American League's first at eight at Tampa Bay's dome — a reader with a wireless set and no other obligations may take in both, and this paper recommends the indulgence. Tuesday the American League argument continues at the dome at eight; Wednesday the National League's removes to Los Angeles.² Yesterday this desk counseled its readers to be seated early for Skubal against Misiorowski, and the counsel stands vindicated in an unexpected key — the finest pairing the card could print was decided not by either famous arm but by a second baseman's midnight homework and a bullpen that has yet to surrender an earned run all month. The game keeps its own counsel; that is why we keep buying tickets. Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Monday, October 12, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
AJ Cassavell, Brewers take Game 1 in NLCS rematch against defending champs — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Without best stuff, Miz grinds into the 5th, then Crew's lockdown 'pen takes over — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, With minimal support, Skubal loses steam 2nd time through in NLCS loss to Brewers — MLB.com
Zach Sweet, Late-night work pays off for 'baseball rat' Turang in Game 1 star turn — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Sonja Chen and Adam McCalvy, Dodgers-Brewers NLCS Game 2 FAQ (Mon., 5 ET, FOX/FS1) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Tim Stebbins, Guardians-Rays ALCS Game 1 FAQ (Mon., 8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Guardians tab well-traveled Griffin to open ALCS: 'It was a no-brainer' — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Notes: McClanahan (left forearm tightness) shut down for season — MLB.com
Mark Feinsand, Where could Jazz Chisholm Jr. land in free agency? — MLB.com

ONE-AND-TWENTY STRIKEOUTS IN THE DRIZZLE AND A HOMER GOLFED FROM THE GRASSTOPS — WILLIAMS FANS TWELVE ON TWO DAYS' REST, RAMÍREZ SUPPLIES THE ONLY RUNS FROM BENEATH HIS OWN KNEES, AND CLEVELAND, TWO GAMES DEAD ON MONDAY, PACKS FOR THE PENNANT ROUND: GUARDIANS 2, WHITE SOX 0

2026-10-11T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

ONE-AND-TWENTY STRIKEOUTS IN THE DRIZZLE AND A HOMER GOLFED FROM THE GRASSTOPS — WILLIAMS FANS TWELVE ON TWO DAYS' REST, RAMÍREZ SUPPLIES THE ONLY RUNS FROM BENEATH HIS OWN KNEES, AND CLEVELAND, TWO GAMES DEAD ON MONDAY, PACKS FOR THE PENNANT ROUND: GUARDIANS 2, WHITE SOX 0

The decider by the lake is settled by the two oldest instruments in Cleveland's kit — pitching, and José Ramírez: Gavin Williams, 48 hours removed from the first relief errand of his life, carries a no-hitter into the sixth and strikes out 12 to tie Charles Nagy's franchise postseason mark, the staff entire fans 21 Chicago batsmen, the most ever recorded in a nine-inning game of any month in the game's history, and Ramírez reaches down for a knuckle curve nine inches off the ground — the lowest pitch ever hit for a postseason homer in the tracking era — and barely clears the right-field wall with the two runs that make Cleveland the 11th club ever to climb from two games down in a best-of-five, the first since 2017, with the Rays waiting at their dome Monday night

The rain never quite stopped at Progressive Field on Saturday night, and neither did the strikeouts. Before 36,889 umbrella-minded believers, in a steady 65-degree drizzle, the fifth and deciding game of the American League Division Series resolved itself into the two commodities Cleveland has trusted since the deadball days — unhittable pitching and José Ramírez — and two hours and thirty-six minutes after the first pitch the scoreboard read Guardians 2, White Sox 0, the series 3 games to 2, and the season, for one of the Central's two quarrelsome neighbors, over.

Gavin Williams had called for this baseball. As this paper set down yesterday morning, the big right-hander closed Thursday's Game 4 with the first relief appearance of his professional life, then stopped by his manager's office to claim the Game 5 start he was always scheduled to make; the club hoped the 18-pitch cameo would read, in the final accounting, as a high-intensity side session. It read as prophecy. Williams faced one man over the minimum through three innings, struck out the side in the fourth, and did not permit a hit until Kyle Teel's two-out single in the sixth — a lone single, two walks and a hit batsman the whole of Chicago's account against him, with 12 strikeouts beside, his four-seamer averaging 99.1 miles the hour against a regular-season mean of 97.6.⁴ The dozen ties Charles Nagy's 1996 mark for the most in a postseason game in the franchise's books, and stands one shy of the winner-take-all record Tarik Skubal set only last October.⁴ When a walk to Miguel Vargas loaded the bases with two out in the sixth, Williams left to a standing ovation — "He ran out of pitches," said Stephen Vogt. "That's the only reason he came out of that game" — and Erik Sabrowski fanned Munetaka Murakami on five pitches to end the threat.⁴ The researchers of the Elias Bureau append the filigree: Williams is only the third pitcher in postseason history to record the final out of one game and start the next with elimination hanging over both, after Mordecai Brown in 1910 and Hank Borowy in 1945 — and the only one of the three whose club won the second game.⁵

The runs, both of them, belonged to the captain. At 9:03 by the Eastern clock the "Jo-sé! Jo-sé!" chant rolled around the grandstand; at 9:04, with Steven Kwan aboard and two strikes on him in the fourth, Ramírez reached down for Sean Burke's 78-mile-an-hour knuckle curve — a pitch measured at 0.74 feet above the earth, the lowest any man has hit for a postseason home run since the tracking instruments arrived in 2008, and the lowest of Ramírez's own career besides — and golfed it 348 feet to right, where it cleared the wall by a courtesy.⁶⁵ The building shook, the lights flickered, and the crowd sang him out of the dugout for a curtain call. The man himself dismissed the pitch-classification sciences entirely: "Come on! You know! It was a home run pitch!"⁶ He is the first Cleveland batsman ever to homer in consecutive postseason games with elimination at stake in both, and his ledger since the series turned — 5-for-12, four extra-base hits, seven runs driven in across Games 3, 4 and 5, after an 0-for-6 beginning — is the whole story of the comeback in one line.⁶³ "If there's one person on the planet I would not doubt, it's José Ramírez," said the club president Chris Antonetti; the reliever Sabrowski proposed, more economically, "Build the statue."³

And then there is the number that wants its own paragraph: 21. Williams, Sabrowski, Hunter Gaddis and the closer Cade Smith — the last two perfect across the final three innings, Smith collecting five outs for the save — struck out one-and-twenty Chicago batsmen, the most in any nine-inning game, regular season or postseason, in the recorded history of the major leagues. The previous postseason mark was 19, set in Game 3 of this very series, by this very staff.⁵ Cleveland's 75 strikeouts for the series are the most ever administered in a best-of-five, eleven clear of any other club's.⁵ Chicago's manager Will Venable declined every alibi: "I thought it was less about chase and more about being attacked in the zone... the story is just being able to put the ball in play."⁷ Burke, the losing pitcher, deserved kinder arithmetic — five innings, four hits, the two Ramírez runs his only blemish — and his manager called the fatal delivery "a good pitch, and obviously a better swing."⁶

So the Guardians stand as the 11th club in history to lose the first two games of a best-of-five and win it anyway, the first since the 2017 Yankees — who performed the trick, the records dryly note, in Cleveland — and just the fourth to do it after dropping the opening pair at home.⁵ A franchise that entered the evening 2-9 in win-or-go-home contests has now taken three straight elimination games, the same way it erased a five-and-a-half-game divisional deficit in September. "Backs against the wall!" Vogt hollered at the center of the clubhouse scrum, before the champagne interrupted him. "You boys showed up. You showed out... We've got eight more wins to go!"³ The first four are to be sought at Tampa Bay's dome, where the Championship Series opens Monday night at eight o'clock Eastern — the lakefront nine against the best record in the American League, 1948 against 1998, the two longest-suffering droughts left standing, and the account of it taken up elsewhere in this number.²

News Around the League

THE CURTAIN DESK: TONIGHT IN MILWAUKEE, A PAIRING SEEN THIRTEEN TIMES IN FIFTEEN HUNDRED OCTOBER GAMES — SKUBAL AND MISIOROWSKI, THE FIRST AND FOURTH ARMS IN ALL THE LAND, OPEN THE PENNANT ROUND AT EIGHT O'CLOCK

The National League's curtain rises this evening at eight o'clock Eastern at American Family Field, and the statisticians have done the arithmetic on what the ticket buys: a duel in the top one percent of all postseason pitching matchups of the last 55 years. By Baseball Savant's rolling measure of current form, Tarik Skubal is today the No. 1 pitcher in baseball and Jacob Misiorowski the No. 4 — and of the nearly 1,500 postseason starts since 1971, exactly 13 have paired two top-four arms against one another. Ranked by the average standing of the two starters, tonight ties for third-best ever, behind only Dwight Gooden against Mike Scott in the 1986 Championship Series — a 1-0 masterpiece in which Scott fanned 14 — and Roger Clemens against Dave Stewart in 1990.⁸

The particulars want little embroidery beyond what this paper has carried all week. Misiorowski, 16-5, led the entire major leagues in earned-run average (1.80), strikeouts (252), walks-and-hits per inning (0.80) and opponents' batting mark (.157), and against these same Dodgers owns a 1.59 figure across three career meetings; Skubal, the twice-laureled Cy Young man acquired from Detroit at the Deadline, carries a 1.97 earned-run average over seven career postseason starts into the assignment.⁹⁸ It is 103 wins against 100, the league's two best outfits, a rematch of last autumn's Championship Series — swept by Los Angeles — and the third such meeting since 2018. "When we play our brand of baseball... we're a really hard team to beat," says Christian Yelich; the Milwaukee faithful will add, sotto voce, that their club declined to be the highest bidder for Skubal in July, and that the risk of exactly this evening was the price of the prudence.⁹⁸

The margins of the card: Los Angeles frets over cold bats — Shohei Ohtani at .154 this October and Will Smith at .063 — while William Contreras, who led the majors in runs driven home in September, arrives slashing .375 for the Division round; the Dodgers' infirmary lists Blake Treinen as unlikely for the postseason, while Milwaukee reports itself whole.⁹ And the schedule holds one more enticement: both aces stand lined up to meet again in a potential fifth game at Los Angeles.⁸ The second sitting is Monday at five o'clock Eastern, before the series removes west for Wednesday's third.²

THE DOME DESK: MONDAY AT THE TROP, THE TWO LONGEST WAITS IN THE LEAGUE SIT DOWN TOGETHER — RASMUSSEN LIKELY FOR THE RESTED RAYS, WHILE VOGT PROMISES HIS OWN STARTER UPON WAKING

The American League's pennant round convenes Monday night at eight o'clock Eastern at Tropicana Field, and it is a meeting of the sport's two most patient congregations: Cleveland has not won the World Series since 1948, Tampa Bay never in the 28 years since the franchise first took the artificial turf — and one of the two is now guaranteed a seat at the Fall Classic table should it win four games.¹⁰²

The pitching ledgers could scarcely be less alike. The Rays, idle since Wednesday's sweep of New York, have their ace Drew Rasmussen lined up for the opener on extended rest — his last outing carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning — and a bullpen so little used in the Division round that the closer Bryan Baker worked every game with a day's rest besides.¹⁰ Cleveland, by contrast, spent everything by the lake on Saturday: Gavin Williams is unlikely before Thursday's third game, Parker Messick before Tuesday's second, and when Stephen Vogt was asked who takes the ball Monday, the manager laughed and said, "I'll let you know when I wake up tomorrow" — the plausible candidates being Tanner Bibee, the opener Daniel Espino, Joey Cantillo and Foster Griffin.¹⁰

The bloodlines cross in every direction, as they will among the league's thrifty houses: Junior Caminero, Yandy Díaz and Kevin Kelly all began as Cleveland chattel; Kevin Cash coached Cleveland's bullpen before his long tenancy in the Tampa Bay dugout; Vogt's own playing career opened 0-for-27 in a Rays uniform. The season series went 5-1 to Tampa Bay, 20 runs to 8, with half the meetings settled by a single run — these clubs pitch, catch the ball, and beat nobody but each other's patience.¹⁰ The ceremonial first ball Monday is entrusted to Carl Crawford, of the 2008 pennant winners.¹⁰

THE VALEDICTORY DESK: THE SOUTH SIDE FOLDS ITS TENTS WITH WET EYES AND A FULL SCRAPBOOK — FROM A HUNDRED LOSSES THRICE RUNNING TO A GAME 5, AND A CLUBHOUSE VOWING ITS RETURN

The visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field held the usual October inventory — tears, embraces, and the chairman at the door. Jerry Reinsdorf stood and thanked his White Sox man by man as they came off the field, the proprietor's acknowledgment of a season nobody ordered: a club that lost 100 games in each of the three preceding summers seized the league's final Wild Card, swept Houston from the bracket, led the mighty by two games in this series, and died at last by the strikeout, 21 of them on the final night, 75 across the five games.⁷

The elegies were defiant. "It was fun, but we didn't want to end it here," managed the second baseman Chase Meidroth, through some difficulty. "They pitched their asses off. They deserve to go to the next round. It sucks, but we'll be back." Munetaka Murakami, four times a strikeout victim on the night, called the club "still a very young team" and the loss a lesson for carrying forward; the right-hander Mike Vasil put the house position plainest: "This team will be back. There's no denying that. But we made a lot of people believe... White Sox baseball is back and we are here to stay."⁷

The ledger supports the optimism better than the obituary suggests. Chicago led the American League in runs (776) and walks (589) this season and stood third in home runs (211); it never lost more than four games running all year; and the core of the enterprise is young enough that the autumn reads as a down payment rather than a squandering. The franchise's winner-take-all record now stands 0-2 across its long history — and the Herald, which watched this club make the summer far more interesting than anyone contracted for, suspects that particular ledger will get further entries soon enough.⁷

THE FRONT-OFFICE DESK: THE ATHLETICS' PRESIDENCY GOES BEGGING — FULD OF THE PHILADELPHIAS DECLINES THE CROWN, AND A BOSTON MAN STANDS NEXT IN THE ANTEROOM

Word from the executive corridors, where October is hiring season for everyone eliminated from it: Sam Fuld, the general manager of the Phillies, has declined an offer to become the Athletics' president of baseball operations, by the account of ESPN's sources. The suitors move down their list — Taylor Smith, an assistant general manager with the Red Sox, remains a leading candidate for the post.¹¹

The Herald reads the refusal without astonishment. The Athletics, lately of Sacramento and bound eventually for Las Vegas, are offering a grand title attached to a franchise between addresses; Mr. Fuld, by contrast, already holds a chair in a contending organization. That the club's search now turns toward Boston's front office is noted here for the winter record — the game's executive carousel rarely stops turning once the first chair is declined.

The paper begrudges nobody a breath, but October grants none: tonight at eight by the Eastern clock the National League's argument opens in Milwaukee, Skubal against Misiorowski, a pairing the statisticians rank among the three finest ever printed on a postseason card; Monday the American League's opens at Tampa Bay's dome at eight, with the senior circuit's second sitting at five o'clock the same evening.² Yesterday this paper observed that one of the game's two long waits — Cleveland's or Chicago's — would grow a day shorter by nightfall. It was Cleveland's, by the margin of a pitch nine inches off the ground. The Herald will be at its post for all of it. 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 11, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Tim Stebbins, Guardians erase 0-2 hole, complete ALDS comeback to punch ALCS ticket — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, What fatigue? Williams fans 12, flirts with no-no 2 days after closing Game 4 — MLB.com
Sarah Langs, 6 incredible stats from the Guardians' 21-K, Ramírez-fueled clincher — MLB.com
Martín Gallegos, 'The heartbeat of Cleveland,' Ramírez sends stadium into frenzy with go-ahead HR — MLB.com
Scott Merkin, White Sox magical season ends in Game 5 of ALDS: 'This team will be back' — MLB.com
Mike Petriello, Skubal-Miz matchup not just rare -- it's nearly unprecedented — MLB.com
Sonja Chen and Adam McCalvy, Dodgers-Brewers NLCS Game 1 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX One) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Tim Stebbins, Guardians-Rays ALCS Game 1 FAQ (Mon., 8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Sources: Phillies' Fuld declines offer to become A's president — ESPN

Postseason Off-Day Edition — the Tenth of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

2026-10-10T11:00:00Z

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

0 days until the fifth and deciding game of the Division Series — the White Sox at the Guardians, eight o'clock this very evening by the lake (Saturday, the 10th of October, 2026).

News Around the League

THE DECIDER DESK: ONE QUARREL LEFT OF FOUR, AND IT ENDS TONIGHT BY THE LAKE — WILLIAMS KEEPS THE BALL HE NEVER SURRENDERED, BURKE TAKES IT WITH NO OPENER AHEAD OF HIM, AND THE WINNER PACKS FOR TAMPA BAY

The bracket has spent its riches down to a single argument. Of October's four Division Series, three are settled and their winners gone to their rest; only the Central's remains, and it concludes this very evening — the White Sox at the Guardians, eight o'clock Eastern at Progressive Field, the survivor to present itself at Tampa Bay's dome on Monday.²⁶ Two games apiece, and the series' peculiar signature holds to the last: every victory in it has been taken in the other man's yard, Chicago seizing the first pair by the lake, Cleveland the next two on the South Side.

Stephen Vogt has answered the question his own Game 4 adventures raised: Gavin Williams — who closed Thursday's 9-5 verdict with the first relief errand of his professional life — keeps the start he was always scheduled to make, on his regular rest. "Gavin wants the ball," said the manager. "We want him to have the ball, and it's his game." The pitcher himself declines the taxonomy altogether: "It doesn't matter the role at this point," he offers, and reports the body sound. The Forest City nine hope Thursday's three-out cameo reads, in the final accounting, as a high-intensity side session rather than a withdrawal from tonight's funds.³

Chicago counters with Sean Burke, 11-7 with a 3.34 mark on the year, and this time no opener precedes him — the assignment is his from the first pitch. His Game 2 turn in bulk relief, one run on one hit across five and a third innings with six strikeouts and thirteen men retired in order at one stretch, remains the finest pitching the visitors have shown Cleveland all series, and Will Venable pronounces him "built for these types of moments."⁴ The bullpen ledgers counsel economy on both sides of the field: Erick Fedde's 61 pitches of Thursday likely rule him out of tonight's account, Hagen Smith has now worked three times in the series and on consecutive days, and Grant Taylor — charged with four runs of Thursday's sixth without recording an out — professes himself ready for anything at all. "We just want to win this series however possible," says Venable, "and wherever that is, we'll take it."⁴ The stakes have stood in this paper's columns all week and want no embroidery this morning: the Pale Hose chase a first pennant round since 2005, the Guardians the lifting of the game's longest-standing championship drought, and one of those long waits grows one day shorter tonight.

THE ROTATION DESK: YESTERDAY'S SURMISE BECOMES TODAY'S OFFICIAL RECORD — SKUBAL SUNDAY AND YAMAMOTO MONDAY FOR LOS ANGELES, WHILE MILWAUKEE KEEPS ITS OWN COUNSEL

What this paper carried yesterday as the wire's well-reasoned surmise is now the official record: Dave Roberts on Friday named Tarik Skubal for Sunday's opening game in Milwaukee and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for Monday's second, precisely the order the reasoning foretold — Yamamoto proceeding on his accustomed five days of rest, with a sixth game held open for his return should the quarrel stretch so far.⁵ Milwaukee, for its part, has signed nothing: Jacob Misiorowski appears set to answer Skubal in the opener, but the Brewers have made no announcement, and the Herald reports the probability as a probability and not a fixture.⁵

The ledger behind the Los Angeles order is briefly told. In the Division round the four starters — Skubal, Blake Snell, Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow — allowed 4 earned runs in 21 1/3 innings among them, a 1.69 figure; Skubal's National League debut ran six innings of one-run work against Atlanta, and Yamamoto's Game 3 ran seven with 10 strikeouts.⁵ Behind the confirmed pair the projections place Snell third, on extended rest and still nursing the groin tightness that has trailed him since the middle of September — it showed in a ragged five-walk outing that lasted under four innings in Game 2 — and Glasnow fourth, in whose seven postseason starts the Boys in Blue have yet to taste defeat.⁵

The curtain rises Sunday at eight o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, the second sitting follows Monday at five, and the argument removes to Los Angeles for Wednesday's third.²

THE REPOSE DESK: ELEVEN IDLE DAYS AGAINST THREE OF WORK — THE GULF COAST CLUB SCRIMMAGES AGAINST ITSELF THIS AFTERNOON WHILE OCTOBER CHOOSES ITS NEXT OPPONENT

The Rays, their sweep of New York concluded Wednesday, have made an art of the interval. Home Thursday and the rest of the day off; a full dress workout Friday at their dome; an intrasquad scrimmage this very afternoon, the club's hitters and pitchers obliged to make do with one another; a standard drill Sunday — and then Monday night, the first game of the pennant round, against whichever club survives tonight by the lake.⁶ Between the regular-season finale of September 27 and that first pitch the club will have counted eleven idle days against three of work. Kevin Cash accounts the rest a "privilege," and his charge to the room wants no translation: "We've got two more bites — two more bites on the bone!"⁶

The pitching plan waits politely upon tonight's result — "some pretty good ideas," the manager allows, with nothing final until the opponent is known — though Drew Rasmussen stands in line for the opener, as he stood for the Division round's, and Cash means to lean on the same five starters throughout.⁶ The repose has been kindest to the relief corps: Bryan Baker, the locksmith of the ninth of whom this paper wrote only yesterday, was used but sparingly in the sweep, as were Cam Booser and Kevin Kelly, and the Championship Series calendar — off days after the second and fifth games only — will ask considerably more of them than the Division round ever did.⁶

THE BALLOT DESK: TEN NAMES TO A LEAGUE AND TWO DAYS LEFT AT THE BOX — THE AARON HONOR NAMES ITS FINALISTS, FIVE OF THEM STILL AT THEIR DAY'S WORK THIS OCTOBER

The season's first ballot-box stands open. The Hank Aaron Award, the annual laurel for each league's most accomplished batsman, has its finalists for 2026: ten names to a league, selected by a committee of MLB.com's own journalists, with the winners to be chosen by a panel of the game's legends and past honorees — the fandom casting its own votes besides, at the league's site, until 11:59 Monday morning by the Eastern clock.⁷ The winners are to be announced November 11 at Las Vegas on the MLB Network's awards evening. The Herald, by its standing rule, reports a ballot as a ballot: nothing has yet been won, and the trophy keeps to its case until the panel speaks.

The rolls reward a reading. The American League's ten include Bobby Witt Jr., Riley Greene, Pete Alonso and Yordan Alvarez; the National's, Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Fernando Tatis Jr.⁷ And five of the twenty are still in uniform this October: Junior Caminero and Yandy Díaz of Tampa Bay's waiting company, Miguel Vargas of the White Sox — at liberty to add to his argument this very evening — and Ohtani and Milwaukee's Jake Bauers, whose clubs open the pennant round against one another Sunday.⁷

THE PACIFIC DESK: NINE-AND-THIRTY CIRCUIT CLOUTS AND THE THREE JEWELS OF THE CENTRAL LEAGUE — SATO OF THE HANSHIN TIGERS WEARS JAPAN'S TRIPLE CROWN, AND THE POSTING WINDOW BECKONS

From the far shore of the Pacific comes word of a coronation. Teruaki Sato of the Hanshin Tigers has won the Japanese Central League's Triple Crown, batting .306 with 39 home runs and 106 runs driven across — a .991 on-base-plus-slugging besides — making him the ninth man in Nippon Professional Baseball's long history to lead his league in all three columns at once, and the first since Munetaka Murakami turned the trick for Yakult four years ago.⁸⁹ The 27-year-old left-handed slugger, principally a third baseman, follows a 2025 campaign of 40 home runs and 102 runs batted in with the finest season of his life.⁹

What follows is the portion that concerns the thirty clubs of this hemisphere: the wire expects Sato posted for their inspection as soon as early November, and the insider Jon Heyman already names the Mets, the Yankees, the Phillies and the Dodgers among the likely bidders.⁸ The precedent travels well and sits near at hand — Murakami, the last man to wear this crown, crossed the ocean and now draws his pay from the White Sox, whose season comes to its winner-take-all hearing this very evening. The scouting reports will make their winter rounds; the Herald merely notes that the market for Japanese royalty has lately been a seller's.

The Friday ledger is a blank page — not a pitch thrown from one coast to the other — and the paper begrudges the quiet nothing, for the calendar now owes us riches on consecutive evenings: tonight at eight by the lake, the only fifth game October's first round produced; Sunday at eight, the National League's curtain in Milwaukee; Monday, the American League's at Tampa Bay's dome, with the senior circuit's second sitting at five o'clock the same day.² Somewhere tonight a season ends in Cleveland — one or the other must — and a pennant argument gains its final party before the morning. The Herald will have the whole account in its next number. Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Saturday, October 10, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Tim Stebbins, Williams gets start for Guards in Game 5 -- two days after closing out Game 4 — MLB.com
Rhett Bollinger, Burke gets ball first for White Sox in Game 5, with rest of plan in flux — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Dodgers tab Skubal for Game 1 of NLCS, then Yamamoto in Game 2 — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Notes: Rays staying hungry ahead of ALCS, plotting pitching, roster plans — MLB.com
VOTE NOW: MLB announces finalists for Hank Aaron Award — MLB.com
Aiden Stepansky, Will NPB's 1st Triple Crown winner since Murakami jump to MLB? — MLB.com
Teruaki Sato Japanese & WBC Leagues Statistics — Baseball-Reference

TEN MEN TO THE PLATE AND THE SIXTH INNING TAKES THE SOUTH SIDE'S VOICE AWAY — BAILEY RISES FROM THE BENCH TO STRIKE TWICE, RAMÍREZ CARRIES THE FLAME, AND CLEVELAND, TWICE LEFT FOR DEAD IN THIS SERIES, HAULS THE QUARREL HOME FOR A FIFTH AND FINAL SITTING: GUARDIANS 9, WHITE SOX 5

2026-10-09T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

TEN MEN TO THE PLATE AND THE SIXTH INNING TAKES THE SOUTH SIDE'S VOICE AWAY — BAILEY RISES FROM THE BENCH TO STRIKE TWICE, RAMÍREZ CARRIES THE FLAME, AND CLEVELAND, TWICE LEFT FOR DEAD IN THIS SERIES, HAULS THE QUARREL HOME FOR A FIFTH AND FINAL SITTING: GUARDIANS 9, WHITE SOX 5

The question Stephen Vogt put to his men before the Chicago leg — whether it is sweeter to madden 40,000 or to hush them — receives its answer in a six-run sixth: held to one hit and trailing 2-0 through four, the Cleveland nine draw level on Patrick Bailey's homer from the bench and José Ramírez's two-run drive, surrender the lead within the half-inning, then send ten batters against the Chicago relay — Bazzana's double past a diving Montgomery, two walks, four singles, and Grant Taylor, the four-inning savior of Game 1, retired not a single man — while Gavin Williams, the putative Game 5 starter, takes the last three outs of a 9-5 verdict that squares the only Division Series to reach a deciding game, Saturday at eight o'clock by the lake, the winner to call upon Tampa Bay on Monday

Stephen Vogt spent the week posing his club a riddle of acoustics. “What do you like better?” the Cleveland manager asked his men before the series removed to the South Side. “Do you like to make 50,000 people go crazy, or do you like to shut 50,000 people up? They're both very different feelings, but they're equally as fun.”³ On Thursday evening at Rate Field, before 39,920 believers dressed in black, the Guardians chose the second feeling, and the sixth inning administered it.

For four innings the evening leaned Chicago's way. The hosts manufactured two runs in the third by the humblest means October knows — Munetaka Murakami's bases-loaded walk and Sam Antonacci's sacrifice fly — while Cleveland managed a single hit and Parker Messick, the rookie left-hander entrusted with the season, walked four men and was gone after two and a third innings. The advertised duel of southpaws dissolved on both ends: Hagen Smith, Chicago's announced starter, lasted two outs and three walks himself, and the game passed into the hands of the two bullpens, where Erick Fedde held Cleveland quietly for three and two-thirds in bulk relief.

The fifth inning turned the ledger over. Patrick Bailey, who had begun the evening on the bench, lined a homer into the right-field seats; two batters on, José Ramírez — whose October revival this paper has chronicled daily — turned on a fly ball to right-center for a two-run clout and a 3-2 lead. Chicago answered in kind and at once, an Antonacci hit-by-pitch forcing in one run and Brenton Doyle's sacrifice fly another, and at 4-3 the home crowd permitted itself to believe. Then came the sixth. Angel Martínez was struck by a pitch, stole second, and scored when Travis Bazzana's double dropped just beyond the dive of right fielder Braden Montgomery — the groan from the grandstand was audible on the wireless — and the next six Cleveland batters all reached against Grant Taylor, the same Taylor whose four-inning save had stolen Game 1. Bailey singled, Rocchio and Kwan walked, and Ramírez, DeLauter and Adell singled in succession: ten men to the plate, six runs across, 9-4, and Taylor charged with four of them without recording an out. The researchers note the six-run frame ties the third-largest inning in Cleveland's postseason history, and that the franchise has now scored nine runs in consecutive October contests for only the second time, the first being Games 3 and 4 of the 1997 World Series.³

Miguel Vargas supplied the South Side's coda, a parting shot to left in the ninth, and it fell to Gavin Williams — the presumptive Game 5 starter, making the first relief appearance of his professional life — to take the final three outs on 18 pitches.⁴ That economy now hangs over Saturday: Cleveland's pitching plans for the decider are frankly unsettled, Messick's abbreviated start having forced seven relievers into service. “I'm good to go,” Williams offered afterward. “If I've got to start, I'll start. If I come out of the 'pen, I'll come out of the 'pen. I'll do anything.” Chicago, by contrast, arrives with its best bulk man, Sean Burke, rested and ready.⁴

So a series that has refused every tidy script gets the ending it deserves: two games apiece, each club having won twice in the other's yard, Game 5 Saturday at eight o'clock Eastern at Progressive Field — the only Division Series of the four to go the distance.²⁴ The arithmetic of history calls it a coin flip: of the eighteen prior clubs to drop the first two games of a best-of-five and win the next two, ten went on to take the fifth, and home teams in winner-take-all games stand 70-68 all-time.³ Cleveland, chasing the longest active championship drought in the game — no title since 1948 — could become only the fourth club to climb from two games down in a Division Series after losing the first pair at home. Chicago, which as this paper noted yesterday has still never shown its home crowd an October victory this fall, must now win its fifth straight road scrap of the autumn to reach a first pennant round since 2005. “We kind of let the home crowd down those first two games,” said Steven Kwan. “So hopefully it's another chance at redemption.”⁴ The winner's reward: the rested Rays, Monday, at their dome.

News Around the League

THE BARGAINING DESK: THE OWNERS SLIDE A PAPER ACROSS THE TABLE — A SEASON SHORN TO 154 GAMES, A MONDAY OF REST, A LONGER OCTOBER, AND THE TOP SEEDS TO CHOOSE THEIR OWN PREY

While the Division round supplied the week's noise, the quieter table got a new document. Major League Baseball's latest proposal to the players' union, delivered Thursday, would return the game to a 154-game schedule beginning in 2029 — a figure the sport kept almost without interruption from 1904 to 1960 — with a scheduled off-day every Monday, four split doubleheaders per club, and a season ending a week earlier. The Division Series would stretch from best-of-five to best-of-seven, and, most novel of all, the highest seeds would choose their opponents: the third seed selecting its Wild Card quarry immediately after the regular season, the first seed naming its Division Series foe once the Wild Card round concludes. The league stipulates that no downward adjustment would be made to salaries for the shorter season, with bonus and option thresholds scaled proportionally.⁵

The league's case, in the words of its spokesman Glen Caplin, rests on player health and spectacle alike: a weekly off-day “good for player health,” a new national broadcast window, “fewer weekday afternoon games, a longer Division Series and more opportunities to see the game's best pitchers on the biggest stage.” The proposal's own prose, it must be said, confesses the box office as candidly as the training room — the added October off-days are commended for “increasing ratings and enhancing the value of the sport's media rights,” and the 2029 commencement happens to coincide, to the year, with the start of the league's next national media agreements.⁵

The Herald's sympathies on matters of the purse are a matter of public record, and it weighs the paper accordingly. A weekly day of rest and a schedule shortened at full pay are concessions the workingman's side of this game has sought since the deadball days, and the paper credits them as genuine. The choosing-of-opponents is theater — bulletin-board material by design, as the league's own wire cheerfully admits — and theater sells at the gate and on the air, where the owners keep the till. No formal answer from the union had reached the wires consulted by this desk when the edition went to press; the Herald will read it, when it comes, with its customary interest.

THE OVERTURE DESK: SUNDAY'S CURTAIN IN MILWAUKEE PROMISES A DUEL FOR THE AGES — THE YOUNG FIREBALLER OF THE CREAM CITY AGAINST THE TWICE-LAURELED LEFT HAND OF LOS ANGELES

The National League's pennant quarrel opens Sunday evening at eight o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, the second sitting follows Monday at five, and the argument removes to Los Angeles on Wednesday — a rematch of last autumn's Championship Series and a meeting of the league's first and second seeds.² Neither club has formally named its Game 1 pitcher, but the wire finds every sign pointing to the matchup of dreams: Jacob Misiorowski against Tarik Skubal.⁶

The credentials require little embroidery. Misiorowski, the 24-year-old to whom Milwaukee entrusts its loudest evenings, finished the regular season atop the entire major leagues in earned-run average (1.80), strikeouts (252), walks-and-hits per inning (0.80) and opponents' batting average (.157), and in the Division round his fastball touched 104.8 miles the hour while averaging 101.2.⁶ Skubal, the two-time reigning Cy Young man of the American League,⁹ crossed leagues at midsummer in the blockbuster that made him a Dodger¹⁰ and scarcely broke stride — a 2.61 earned-run average in the Los Angeles colors despite surrendering 44 days of his summer to elbow surgery, and six innings of one-run work in his National League postseason debut against Atlanta. The wire's reasoning for the pairing is sound: Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the other candidate, worked Tuesday and would be on short rest Sunday; Monday suits him naturally.⁶

The scribes call it perhaps the finest Game 1 matchup the bracket could have drawn. The Herald, having watched both men terrorize the summer from opposite leagues, declines to argue, and counsels its readers only to be seated early.

THE PADLOCK DESK: THREE-AND-THIRTY SAVES WITHOUT A STUMBLE — BAKER, THE SELF-MADE LOCKSMITH OF THE NINTH, CARRIES THE GAME'S SUREST THING INTO THE PENNANT ROUND

While Tampa Bay rests and waits upon Saturday's survivor, the wire pauses over the man who shut each door of the Division round behind him. Bryan Baker, the 31-year-old All-Star in his first season as the Rays' closer, saved all three victories of the sweep of New York — ten batters faced, four strikeouts, one lone walk the only man to reach — and became just the fourth pitcher since the save entered the official ledger in 1969 to nail down each of his club's first three postseason games, joining Manny Corpas, Mark Wohlers and Dennis Eckersley. He is the only one of the four to do it without allowing a hit.⁷

The season behind the October is of a piece: 41 saves to share the major-league lead, a 1.44 earned-run average, a .161 opponents' mark, and — the figure that says the most — 33 consecutive save chances converted since the 17th of May, the longest such run in the franchise's books. All of it managed on two pitches, fastball and changeup, by a former Oriole the Rays did not even plan to employ as a traditional closer when spring camp broke. “He's a rock, man. He's a maniac,” testifies the veteran Nick Martinez; manager Kevin Cash puts it as a question — “Is there a team that should feel better than us?”⁷

The Herald notes one filigree the wire supplies: the man with whom Baker shares the save crown, at 41 apiece, is Cleveland's Cade Smith — who worked an inning in Thursday's Game 4, and who may yet bring the argument into the Championship Series in person, should Saturday by the lake fall the Guardians' way.⁷

THE NURSERY DESK: THE PASTIME RECRUITS FROM THE CRADLE — MR. FALLON TEACHES THE SMALLEST FANS THEIR FIRST WORDS, AND THE WORDS ARE 'DODGERS' AND 'YANKEES'

The game's longest campaign — the one for the next generation — opened a new front this week. Jimmy Fallon, the late-night host and best-selling author, has partnered with the league on two board books for the very youngest prospects: Your Baby's First Word Will Be Dodgers and Your Baby's First Word Will Be Yankees, illustrated with amiable farm animals by Miguel Ordóñez, to be published by Macmillan's Feiwel and Friends imprint on February 2, 2027, and available now for the pre-ordering.⁸

“Parents spend months trying to get their baby's first word to be 'Mama' or 'Dada,'” Mr. Fallon explains. “This book is for parents with bigger dreams.”⁸ The Herald observes without malice that of the two titles, one arrives rather better timed than the other — the Dodger infant may yet babble his first word during a third consecutive championship parade, while the Yankee household, its October concluded on Wednesday, has until spring to rehearse.

The travel trunks own this Friday — not a contest on the continent — and then the calendar crowds: Saturday at eight o'clock, the fifth and final sitting of Cleveland and Chicago by the lake; Sunday at eight, the National League's curtain rises in Milwaukee; Monday, the American League's opens at Tampa Bay while the senior circuit plays its second at five o'clock.² One series alone of October's first four went the full distance, and it is the one between two clubs who met thirteen times in the summer, settled their division by a single game, and now cannot be told apart at two games apiece.⁴ The Herald knows better than to predict it, and would not spoil it if it could. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Friday, October 9, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Tim Stebbins, Not done yet! Guardians storm back to force Game 5 in Cleveland — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Scott Merkin and Anthony Castrovince, White Sox-Guardians ALDS Game 5 FAQ (Sat., 8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Mark Feinsand, MLB proposes 154-game schedule, new playoff features — MLB.com
Max Ralph, All signs pointing to a dream Skubal-Miz showdown for NLCS Game 1 — MLB.com
Adam Berry, 'Maniac' Baker is on the most dominant run a Rays closer has ever had — MLB.com
Brian Murphy, Jimmy Fallon partners with MLB to write children's books — MLB.com
Cy Young Award Winners — Baseball-Reference
Tarik Skubal Stats — Baseball-Reference

A SPECTATOR'S HAND RETURNS TO THE RIGHT-FIELD STANDS AND THIS TIME THE COURT COLLECTS — MESA'S TWO-RUN BROADSIDE OFF FRIED STANDS AS THE DIFFERENCE, VOLPE'S TYING BLOW IS RULED DOWN TO A DOUBLE, AND TAMPA BAY SWEEPS NEW YORK FROM OCTOBER: RAYS 4, YANKEES 3

2026-10-08T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

A SPECTATOR'S HAND RETURNS TO THE RIGHT-FIELD STANDS AND THIS TIME THE COURT COLLECTS — MESA'S TWO-RUN BROADSIDE OFF FRIED STANDS AS THE DIFFERENCE, VOLPE'S TYING BLOW IS RULED DOWN TO A DOUBLE, AND TAMPA BAY SWEEPS NEW YORK FROM OCTOBER: RAYS 4, YANKEES 3

Thirty Octobers less a single evening after a boy of twelve turned a fly ball into Bronx scripture, the replay court reverses the old miracle — Anthony Volpe's apparent game-tying two-run wallop in the sixth is found to have met a spectator's glove over the field of play, worth one run and second base and nothing more — while Victor Mesa Jr., who had already answered Ryan Vilade's first October four-bagger with a two-run drive of his own off Max Fried, supplies the margin; Ian Seymour wins in relief of the opener Martinez, Baker locks the ninth, and the Rays claim the first three-games-and-out sweep of a best-of-five in franchise annals, their third Championship Series berth, with the Guardians-White Sox survivor due at their dome Monday

On the ninth of October, 1996, a twelve-year-old named Jeffrey Maier reached over the right-field fence of the old Yankee Stadium and knocked a fly ball of Derek Jeter's into the seats. The umpires called it a home run rather than the interference it plainly was; the Yankees tied the Orioles that evening, won the game, won the series, and in time won everything, while the boy was toasted in Manhattan and cursed in Baltimore.⁵ The National Pastime keeps its ledgers open a long while, and on Wednesday night — thirty years later, less one evening, in the same right-field corner of the Bronx — the account came due.

The situation was composed with an archivist's care. Sixth inning, New York trailing 4-2, George Lombard Jr. aboard, and Volpe lined a sinker from Griffin Jax deep to left-center, where it carried to the wall, over the leap of Victor Mesa Jr., and was signaled a game-tying home run. Then the modern instrument did what 1996 could not: the replay court found that a spectator had met the ball with his glove over the field of play, that it would neither have cleared the barrier nor been caught, and wrote the entry down as it deserved — an RBI double, one run in, 4-3.⁴ Even the aggrieved manager filed no true grievance. “I thought they got it right,” said Aaron Boone, which may stand as the evening's epitaph.

The game around the famous call was a taut and worthy thing. Tampa Bay scratched first in the third, Jonathan Aranda singling home DeLuca while Taylor Walls was cut down at the plate on a relay that traveled right field to first base to shortstop to catcher. Ben Rice — the one Yankee bat October never cooled — answered at once. Vilade, a name new to the postseason register, put the visitors ahead with the first October home run of his life in the fourth; Spencer Jones doubled the score level again. And in the sixth Mesa turned on Fried for the two-run drive to right-center that settled the business, the left-hander's second surrender of the night and his last.

From there the Tampa relay — Seymour, Jax, Booser, Kelly, Baker — carried the one-run verdict home, the staff fanning twelve New York batsmen in all, and when Trent Grisham went down swinging to end the ninth, the visitors' clubhouse became a dance hall for the third time in a fortnight. The sweep is the first Tampa Bay has ever administered in a series of five, and only the second ever suffered by the Yankees in one, the other dating to the Championship Series of 1980. The Rays, champions of their division for the first time in five years, advance to the third Championship Series in the franchise's history, where the survivor of Cleveland and Chicago will call upon them Monday.³

The scrapbook this paper watched New York take down from the shelf on Tuesday — the flip of 2001, the rally of 2017 — stayed shut. The Bronx offense managed seven hits on the final night and never once held the lead; its season ends in the Division round for want of swinging, as its manager conceded, and the winter's accounting, which began within minutes of the final strike, is taken up elsewhere in this number.

“There's two more bites on the bone for us,” said the reliever Nick Martinez amid the champagne, quoting his manager's arithmetic — eleven wins wanted, eight remaining.³ The Herald observes only that a franchise long praised for doing much with little has now done the hardest thing October asks: it has made the Yankees watch.

The Postseason Card

RAMÍREZ EMPTIES EVERY POCKET OF THE TOOLBOX AND CLEVELAND DECLINES THE BROOM — TWO TWO-OUT TRIPLES, NINETEEN STRIKEOUTS BY THE VISITING RELAY, AND THE LAKE ERIE MEN DRAG THE QUARREL TO A FOURTH EVENING: GUARDIANS 9, WHITE SOX 3

The cold order this paper weighed yesterday — seven hits in sixty-one at-bats — wakes all at once on the South Side: Kwan singles home the tying run, Adell clears the sacks with a two-out triple in a four-run third, and Ramírez, wrist be hanged, files a double, a triple, two runs, two runs driven home, a stolen base and a diving stop at third into a single afternoon's work, while seven Cleveland pitchers fan nineteen Chicago batsmen and the bullpen-made hosts are left to answer at eight o'clock tonight, Messick against Hagen Smith, still one win from a first pennant-round berth since 2005

Cleveland arrived at Rate Field with its season reduced to a single afternoon and its batting order, as this paper measured only yesterday, carrying seven hits in sixty-one October at-bats. The response was a nine-run recital. The hosts struck first — Kyle Teel's double cashing Sam Antonacci in the opening inning — and then the third arrived and the famine ended: Steven Kwan lined the tying single, and Jo Adell, with two down, emptied the sacks with a triple past the right fielder — three runs on one swing and a 4-1 lead that was never seriously disputed again.

The afternoon belonged, as Cleveland afternoons will, to José Ramírez. The 34-year-old captain — he of the fractured summer and the aching wrist who told this paper's wire brethren that pain was no excuse — went 2-for-4 with a double, a two-run triple sliced on an 0-2 curveball in front of a diving Grichuk in the eighth, two runs scored, a stolen base, and a gloved robbery at third base that the Chicago crowd heard in silence.⁸ His teammates have ceased to be surprised. “Why are you surprised? This is what I do,” runs his standing answer, as catcher and outfield alike attested.

The pitching ledger deserves its own paragraph: seven Cleveland arms — Espino briefly, then Griffin brilliantly, seven strikeouts across two and two-thirds for the win, then Armstrong, Cantillo, Gaddis, Herrin and Smith — fanned nineteen White Sox batsmen in nine innings, a smothering the box score renders as six hits and three runs, one of them pushed across by a hit batsman. Chicago's own relay, assembled bullpen-fashion behind the opener Newcomb, was solvent for two innings and ruinous thereafter; Hudson was charged with the third-inning collapse.

So the series stands two games to one for Chicago, and the arithmetic is simple and loud. Game 4 is tonight at eight o'clock Eastern on the South Side, the left-hander Parker Messick (12-9, 2.56, with 193 strikeouts on the season's books) against the left-hander Hagen Smith (3-3, 1.29);¹⁰ a fifth game, should Cleveland force it, would be played Saturday by the lake in Cleveland.² The White Sox remain one victory from a first Championship Series since 2005 — and, as this paper has noted, from a first home playoff clincher since the World Series of 1906. The ghost of that drought now has company in the building: all four of Chicago's October wins this fall were taken on the road, and the home crowd has yet to see one.

THE NINTH MAN IN THE ORDER SPEAKS LOUDEST FOR THE DEEPEST ORDER IN THE LAND — PAGES UNLOADS THE BASES IN THE SEVENTH, MUNCY APPENDS A PARTING SHOT, AND THE ANGELENOS PASS TO A THIRD STRAIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: DODGERS 4, BRAVES 1

A game of errors, walks and one wild pitch waits all evening for a single clean swing, and it belongs to the No. 9 hitter — Andy Pages lining a bases-loaded single to center with two out in the seventh for the lead — before Muncy's ninth-inning drive to right, his third of this postseason, closes both the 4-1 verdict and Atlanta's season of eight runs in four October games; Glasnow survives five walks on one hit allowed, Henriquez wins in relief, Díaz seals it, and the Atlantas go to winter while Los Angeles packs for Milwaukee and Sunday

The clinching game at Truist Park was an untidy affair that waited seven innings for someone to put it in order, and it was fitting — perhaps ominous, if you bat leadoff for anyone remaining in this tournament — that the man who did so hits ninth for Los Angeles. With two out and the bases loaded in the seventh of a 1-1 game, Andy Pages lined a single to center that cashed two runs, and the Division Series was, in every sense that matters, concluded on the spot.¹

What preceded it was attrition. Atlanta's lone run scored in the first on a wild pitch from Tyler Glasnow, who then walked five men across four and two-thirds innings while allowing precisely one hit — a tightrope act above a canyon that never quite became a plunge. Los Angeles leveled in the second when Max Muncy reached on a Dubón error that let Ohtani cross, one of two Atlanta misplays on the night. Mahle, the Atlanta starter, was excellent and unlucky: six and a third innings, three hits, one earned run, beaten by the seventh-inning inheritance his bullpen could not protect. Muncy supplied the coda in the ninth, a drive over the right-field barrier — his third circuit of this postseason — for the final 4-1.

The Atlanta epitaph is written in the hitting column: three hits on the night, two of them by the blameless Michael Harris II, and eight runs across the four games of the series. The pitching kept every defeat within reach; the batting declined, to the last, to reach. A franchise that pushed the titleholders to a fourth game will spend its winter asking why the lumber never arrived.

Los Angeles, by contrast, advances to a third consecutive Championship Series in pursuit of a third consecutive title, and does so with its October machinery humming in the late innings — Henriquez the winner, Scott the bridge, Díaz the lock for his second save of the round. The itinerary is fixed: Game 1 of the National League Championship Series is Sunday the 11th in Milwaukee, Game 2 Monday, against the Brewers outfit that eliminated San Diego hours later.² The two clubs met in this very round last October; the rematch the whole league assumed all summer is now a fact of the schedule.

THE WALL AT THE MISSION SHORE GIVES NOTHING BACK — MITCHELL TRIPLES AND SCORES THE GO-AHEAD RUN, THEN LEAPS THE BARRIER'S EDGE TO STEAL MACHADO'S EQUALIZER, AND THE SUDS MEN TAKE THE SERIES WHILE AN OCTOBER ROAD FAMINE DIES AT A DOZEN: BREWERS 3, PADRES 1

One night after this paper measured Milwaukee's twelve straight October road defeats against a mark sixty-two years old, the streak is put to death in the clinching game — Garrett Mitchell authoring the whole verdict with an RBI single in the third, a fifth-inning triple and the tie-breaking run that followed it, and at the last a leaping, fan-jostled catch at the center-field wall that swallows Manny Machado's 406-foot bid to square the eighth; Gasser and Ashby split seven strong innings, Megill closes a three-hitter, the new father Miller throws a scoreless frame in a lost cause, and San Diego's season ends one swing short of extra arguments

Every October series ends on a handful of inches, and the National League's second Division Series ended on the few between Garrett Mitchell's glove and the top of the center-field wall. Eighth inning, Milwaukee ahead 3-1, a man aboard, and Machado met a sinker from Abner Uribe with the full fury of a proud season — 106.7 miles the hour off the bat, a projected 406 feet, Petco Park rising as one to call it even.⁹ Mitchell drifted back, leapt at the barrier's edge, took a nudge from the reaching crowd — “I'm not quite sure if I got grabbed,” he allowed afterward — and came down with the baseball and, for all practical purposes, the series. “Nice play,” was Machado's verdict. “Should have hit it harder.”

It was Mitchell's game long before the catch. His single cashed Frelick for the first run in the third; after Tatis answered with a drive to center to level it, Mitchell tripled in the fifth and came home on Chourio's single for the lead that never left. Frelick's sacrifice fly added the third run in the sixth. The pitching was a two-man argument settled early: the young Gasser gave four innings and the Tatis run, Aaron Ashby followed with three hitless, and Uribe and Megill — the latter for his second save of the round — carried the three-hitter home. San Diego's offense, so resourceful in the middle games of this series, finished with three hits and the lone Tatis blow.

And so fell a famine of genuine antiquity. As this paper set down only yesterday, Milwaukee had lost twelve consecutive October road games, a run tying a mark sixty-two years in the making; it ends in the most emphatic manner available, a clinching on foreign ground. The Brewers advance to a second consecutive Championship Series, where the Dodgers — their executioners of last autumn — arrive in Milwaukee for Game 1 on Sunday the 11th.² The first seed in the league will at last play a round with the home advantage it spent six months earning.

For San Diego the ledger closes: a series lost three games to one, a closer restored from the paternity list in time to throw one spotless and irrelevant inning, and a winter of hard questions taken up, as all such questions are, in the colder columns of November.

News Around the League

THE RECKONING DESK: JUDGE BIDS THE COUNTING-HOUSE GO ALL IN — THE CAPTAIN, A SPECTATOR FOR ALL FIVE OCTOBER CONTESTS, SETS THE WINTER'S AGENDA WHILE BOONE KEEPS THE WHEEL

The last strike was scarcely called in the Bronx before the captain convened the winter. Aaron Judge, held out of all five of New York's postseason games by the right calf he had spent two weeks arguing with, delivered a pointed message to the front office: “We're the Yankees... I feel like they should go all in and do what they need to do,” naming no player and sparing no purse. Asked whether the club had gone all in heretofore, he hesitated — “It's tough to say” — before allowing that a winning team every year “is not good enough here in New York.”⁶

The seventeenth season has now passed since the organization's last championship, and the machinery is creaking audibly. General manager Brian Cashman's contract expires this offseason; manager Aaron Boone, nine years at the helm with a regular-season ledger of 790-565 and one pennant (the 2024 flag, surrendered to Los Angeles in five), has a year remaining, and the grandstands were chanting for his removal even as Grisham swung through the season's final pitch. Judge, for his part, wants Boone kept: “He's our manager. He's running the ship.” Among the prominent men whose papers now come due: Jazz Chisholm Jr., Trent Grisham, and the closer David Bednar.⁶

The Herald will note, as is its custom when a counting-house pleads its circumstances, that the captain's arithmetic is sound. The purse exists; the question, as ever, is the will to open it.

THE PENNANT DESK: THE FINAL FOUR TAKE THEIR MARKS — MILWAUKEE RECEIVES THE CHAMPIONS SUNDAY IN A SECOND STRAIGHT OCTOBER QUARREL, AND TAMPA BAY AWAITS A GUEST STILL TO BE NAMED

The bracket, so crowded a week ago, is nearly swept clean. In the National League the Championship Series is fixed: Los Angeles at Milwaukee, Game 1 Sunday the 11th, Game 2 Monday the 12th, both in Milwaukee.² It is a rematch of last autumn's quarrel and a meeting of the league's first and second seeds — the Brewers reach a second consecutive Championship Series; the Dodgers, winners of the last two World Series, a third straight. Milwaukee will remember that its October road famine ended only Wednesday; Los Angeles will remember everything else.

In the American League, Tampa Bay's seat is reserved and the other chair stands empty. The Championship Series opens Monday the 12th at the Rays' dome, against whichever of Cleveland and Chicago survives a Division Series that Chicago leads two games to one with Game 4 on the South Side tonight.²³ The Rays, having dispatched New York without the inconvenience of a defeat, are granted four days' rest and the pleasure of watching their next opponent spend its pitching.

The World Series is appointed to begin the 23rd of October, with ground held for a seventh game on the 31st should the quarrel require one.² The Herald counsels against wasting an evening of it.

THE ALMANAC DESK: FOUR CONTESTS, FOUR VISITORS VICTORIOUS — A THING NEVER BEFORE SEEN IN OCTOBER'S LONG LEDGER

Wednesday's slate deserves a line in the annals apart from its clinchings. Four postseason games were played, and the road team won every one of them — Cleveland at Chicago, Tampa Bay at New York, Los Angeles at Atlanta, Milwaukee at San Diego — and the researchers confirm it had never happened before. Days of four or more postseason games have occurred fifty times, beginning once in the split season of 1981 and yearly since the Division Series arrived in 1995, and never until now had the visitors run the table.⁷

The opposite feat is on the books twice: the home nines swept four-game days on the 5th of October, 2018, and the 1st of October, 2020 — though the latter, played in the empty ballparks of that strange season, had no crowds to please.⁷ Wednesday's grandstands, by contrast, were full and went home disappointed in four cities at once, a melancholy quadruple the Herald does not expect to see matched soon.

The moral, if October owes us one: the modern game has made a fiction of the home advantage in its sternest month. Three of the four visitors clinched on foreign lawns; the fourth, Cleveland, saved its season there. The bunting, it appears, is purely decorative.

THE STORK DESK: THE NEW FATHER RETURNS TO A CAUSE PAST SAVING — MILLER, BACK FROM THE CRADLE-SIDE, THROWS A SPOTLESS INNING IN THE EVENING HIS CLUB EXPIRES

A coda to the week's most human story. Mason Miller, the hardest-throwing man in San Diego's employ, was restored from the paternity list Wednesday, his first child safely arrived, and took the ball in a game his club could not afford to lose.¹ He gave it his customary best — an inning without a run, two singles stranded — and it mattered not at all, for the Milwaukee men had already banked the lead that ended the Friars' season.

The Herald's readers will recall the arc entire: Monday's number found Miller lined into heartbreak by young Chourio with the bases loaded; Tuesday's found the film men of San Diego declining, twice, to say whether the closer was showing his cards; yesterday's found him departing an elimination game for the birth of his first child, with Peralta summoned to his roster seat. Now the season he left is finished, and the fatherhood he left it for endures. Of the two ledgers, the Herald knows which it would rather hold.

San Diego's winter questions — the aging core, the thin purse, the closer's own approaching market — are questions for another number. Today the paper records only that a man kept both of his appointments in the same week, and that neither the ballclub nor the baby can claim he shorted them an inning.

A rare economy tonight: one contest only, Cleveland at Chicago at eight o'clock Eastern, with a season on one side of the scale and a pennant-round berth on the other. Friday the calendar rests entirely; Saturday holds a fifth game by the lake should Cleveland force it tonight; Sunday the National League's Championship Series opens in Milwaukee, and Monday the American's at Tampa Bay, with the World Series appointed for the 23rd.² The Herald, having watched four road clubs strip four home crowds of their evening in a single day, offers the grandstands of the South Side its sincerest wishes and no guarantees. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Thursday, October 8, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Adam Berry, Rays sweep their way past Yankees to reach 3rd ALCS in franchise history — MLB.com
Matthew Leach, Volpe's potential game-tying homer waved off due to fan interference — MLB.com
Jeffrey Maier — Wikipedia
Bryan Hoch, Judge wants front office to go 'all in' — with Boone remaining in charge — MLB.com
Sarah Langs, Road teams rule on historic postseason day — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, J-Ram shows off all his tools as Guardians refuse to go quietly — MLB.com
Jessica Camerato, Manny Machado robbed of game-tying home run in NLDS Game 4 — MLB.com
Probable Pitchers — ALDS Game 4, Guardians at White Sox — MLB.com

TWO CAPS TIP ACROSS SIXTY FEET, AND THE SECOND SITTING GOES TO THE VISITORS — YAMAMOTO FANS TEN THROUGH SEVEN, KIKÉ AND FREEMAN STRIKE TWICE IN THREE BATTERS OF THE FOURTH, AND ATLANTA STANDS ONE DEFEAT FROM WINTER: DODGERS 3, BRAVES 1

2026-10-07T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

TWO CAPS TIP ACROSS SIXTY FEET, AND THE SECOND SITTING GOES TO THE VISITORS — YAMAMOTO FANS TEN THROUGH SEVEN, KIKÉ AND FREEMAN STRIKE TWICE IN THREE BATTERS OF THE FOURTH, AND ATLANTA STANDS ONE DEFEAT FROM WINTER: DODGERS 3, BRAVES 1

Before a pitch is thrown the two aces exchange tipped caps across the Truist Park lawn, and for three innings the rematch of the August masterpiece honors its billing — six strikeouts apiece, nothing scored — until Enrique Hernández turns on Sale for a two-run four-bagger and Freeman, a month's drought lately behind him, clears the barrier two batters later; Yamamoto, in his first appearance since recording the final outs of last autumn's seventh game, carries a postseason-best ten strikeouts through seven innings of one-run ball, Díaz holds the ninth for his first save in nearly two months, and the champions stand one victory from a third consecutive Championship Series while Atlanta's offense, seven runs in three games, runs out of evenings to find itself

The engagement opened with a courtesy. Before a pitch had been thrown Tuesday night at Truist Park, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Chris Sale tipped their caps to one another across the diamond — two craftsmen acknowledging the appointment this paper's Tuesday number called the hinge of the whole quarrel.³ For three innings the bill was honored to the letter: six strikeouts apiece and nothing scored, the first postseason game to open so since Kershaw and deGrom traded ciphers in the first game of the 2015 Division Series.⁴ The 42,420 in the seats had every reason to expect the sequel to run like the original — the 1-0 shutout Sale pitched against this same club in this same yard on the 27th of August, when Yamamoto allowed one run and took the loss for his trouble.³ Then came the fourth inning, and with it the oldest chapter in the Los Angeles October hymnal.

Andy Pages singled, and Enrique Hernández — the October familiar whom his own teammates discuss in tones of baffled admiration — turned on Sale and dropped a two-run drive over the left-field wall, the 17th postseason home run of his career. The man homers once in every 19.5 October trips to the plate, against once in every 31.7 the summer long. Two batters later Freeman, who before Monday had gone better than a month without an extra-base hit, found the right-center seats for his second home run in as many games and the 18th of his playoff life. "I wish there was a recipe for that so we can all take it from him," said Freeman of his colleague's annual transformation. "He's incredible. He shows up when you need him." Sale's evening closed after five innings and seven hits, three runs in all, and Atlanta had lost behind its ace for the first time since the 21st of August.⁴

Yamamoto wanted no more. The splitter working from the first, he retired 12 of his first 14 men, and when Atlanta loaded the bases with one out in the fifth, the damage was held to a groundout — struck by Baldwin, who in the August meeting had supplied the lone run off Yamamoto by home run, as these columns recalled only yesterday, and now supplied Tuesday's lone Atlanta run by humbler means. Ten strikeouts across seven innings made a postseason high for a man pitching for the first time since he closed the seventh game of last year's World Series; he is the third Japanese-born pitcher to reach double figures in an October game, after Ohtani and Kuroda, and the first Dodger to pair seven innings and ten strikeouts with one run or fewer since Snell in last autumn's Wild Card round. His club has now won 10 of the 11 postseason games in which he has pitched. "He was attacking us and putting the ball where he wanted to put it," testified the Atlanta second baseman Albies. "I mean, it was really rough." The pitcher's own account was briefer: "I was able to carry that feel into today's game."³ Scott took the eighth without a run, and the ninth went to Edwin Díaz — the reclamation project whose mid-game trumpets this paper heard Monday — who banked his first save in nearly two months, having recorded but three all summer after the 7th of April.⁸

The manager Roberts pronounced the method: "We played tonight like an elimination game."³ The arithmetic explains the urgency and now rewards it: in best-of-five series standing one game apiece, the winner of the third has taken the series 48 times in 67, and clubs carrying a two-games-to-one lead into a fourth game on the road have gone through 26 times in 37, twenty of those clinchings coming in the fourth game itself.³ Atlanta's remaining case rests on bats that have produced seven runs in three games: Baldwin bats .130 for the October, Olson .174, and Acuña — moved to designated hitter 90 minutes before the first pitch to spare his right knee — .143 without an extra-base hit since the 19th of September. "Those guys have been our aircraft carriers all year," insisted the manager Weiss. "They're always one at-bat away from changing a game." Los Angeles has questions of its own carried lightly: Ohtani, dropped to fifth in the order for the first time in six years, went hitless again — "he's going to come to life. It will happen," shrugged Roberts — and Rojas left the eighth inning with pain in his lower back.⁴³ The fourth game goes this evening at 6 o'clock Eastern at Truist Park, Glasnow opposite Mahle; should Atlanta force a fifth, it would be played Friday at 8 at Dodger Stadium.²⁸

The Postseason Card

NO MILLER, NO MOREJON, NO MATTER — KING RETURNS TWO DAYS AFTER A FIVE-INNING START TO SEIZE THE LAST SIX OUTS, BOGAERTS SLAMS THE GATE WITH A GAME-ENDING DOUBLE PLAY, AND MILWAUKEE'S TWELFTH STRAIGHT OCTOBER ROAD DEFEAT TIES A MARK TWO-AND-SIXTY YEARS IN THE MAKING: PADRES 4, BREWERS 3

San Diego's third early two-run lead of the series is erased a third time, Cronenworth's first-pitch answer off Romero restores the advantage for good, and Bogaerts manufactures the decisive run with his spikes — leaping clear of a broken bat on his way to third and racing home when the rookie Pratt bounces the throw — before Michael King, who gave five innings and 72 pitches in Sunday's second game, walks the tying and go-ahead men aboard in the ninth and watches Yelich's 107-mph liner die in Bogaerts' glove; the Mission nine, their closer called to the cradle and their best left-handed reliever shelved by a weary shoulder, force a fourth game at 10 o'clock Eastern tonight, while Milwaukee — still ahead two games to one — has now lost twelve consecutive postseason road games, equaling a record the Senators and Twins spent 62 years assembling

San Diego came to its elimination evening missing the two best arms in its bullpen — Miller summoned to the paternity rolls hours before the first pitch, as the Stork Desk reports above, and Morejon shelved by a weary shoulder — and played before 47,708 at Petco Park the third consecutive game of this series to be decided by a single run. No postseason series had opened with three one-run games since the 2021 Championship Series, and only thirteen on record have ever done it.⁵⁶ For the third time running the home nine banked an early two-run lead, this one in the third on Tatis' run-scoring groundout and Machado's single; for the third time running Milwaukee erased it, Contreras lifting his second home run of the series in the fourth and Chourio's sacrifice fly squaring the account in the fifth — though only after Turang had bounced out with the bases full in the top of that inning, the costliest of a night of strandings. Cronenworth answered Romero's first pitch of the bottom half with the go-ahead drive into the right-field seats, and the decisive run scored in the sixth on pure larceny: Bogaerts singled, took second on a wild pitch, broke for third as Andujar's broken-bat bouncer and half the bat itself spun toward the rookie shortstop Pratt, leapt clear of both in stride — and raced home when Pratt's hurried throw found the dirt. "You can make excuses about everything, but I fielded the ball and I threw the ball in the dirt," said Pratt. "I cost us a run."⁶

Milwaukee's reply made it 4-3 in the seventh, Yelich lining a single to center to cash Contreras — snapping a drought of nineteen postseason games without a run batted in, reaching back to the opening game of the 2018 pennant round — and then the evening became Michael King's. The San Diego ace, 72 pitches into Sunday's second game, had presented himself in the manager's office in the afternoon: "He came in the office today and said I'm available," Stammen related. King paced the bullpen through the seventh, breezed the eighth, and in the ninth walked Contreras and Turang with one out before Yelich lined his 40th pitch — 107.1 miles the hour off the bat, an expected average of .630 by the instruments — directly at Bogaerts, who scooped the one-hop, stepped on second, and fired to first for the ending. It was King's first save in more than four years; he is the sixteenth pitcher since the save became official in 1969 to start a game of five innings and record a save in the same postseason series, and the first since Buehler in the 2024 World Series — the same Buehler who takes the ball for San Diego tonight. "I have bullets in my arm that I don't want to save," said King. "You're in an elimination game, you want everybody to be all-in on it. Not just me included. We have a bunch of dogs down there that are all-in."⁵

For Milwaukee the loss carried an antique echo: twelve consecutive postseason defeats on the road, tying the dubious record the Senators and Twins assembled across 62 years and one change of address, 1925 to 1987. The franchise stands 6-24 away from home in October play and has not won on the road since the third game of the 2018 Championship Series — a club, its men note, with exactly one survivor from that evening. "I mean, this team has one person playing from 2018," said Yelich, who is that person. "So that really has no effect on this group." The manager Murphy entered a plea for the ancestors — "I wouldn't beat up the old Brewers if you don't mind," says he, noting that all but one of the clubs that handed Milwaukee those twelve went on to the World Series — and the reliever Ashby supplied the banner for tonight: "It's like we've got 40 guys versus 50,000. That's a cool feeling." Merrill, it should be entered, twice robbed the visitors with his glove in center, beginning with Chourio's first-inning drive to the wall. The fourth game goes at 10 o'clock Eastern at Petco Park, Milwaukee's starter unannounced against Buehler; a fifth, should San Diego force it, would be played Friday at half past four in Milwaukee.⁶²

News Around the League

THE GAUNTLET DESK: FOUR CONTESTS, FOUR POSSIBLE CODAS — THE YEAR'S LAST FOUR-GAME DAY RUNS FROM THE SOUTH SIDE AT FOUR O'CLOCK TO THE PACIFIC AT TEN, AND EVERY ONE OF THEM COULD END A SERIES

Mark the date: today is the final day of 2026 with four games on the card, and each of the four could close a Division Series.⁸ The order of ceremonies, by the forward ledger: Cleveland at Chicago at 4 o'clock Eastern, Espino opposite Newcomb, the White Sox two games up; Los Angeles at Atlanta at 6, Glasnow against Mahle, the champions leading two games to one; Tampa Bay at New York at 8, Martinez against Fried, the Rays likewise two up; and Milwaukee at San Diego at 10, the Brewers' starter unannounced against Buehler, Milwaukee a game from the pennant round.²¹

For Chicago the afternoon is a homecoming besides — the whole of this White Sox October has been played on the road, and the South Side has not hosted a playoff game since 2021. Mr. Leitch of MLB.com ventures that the yard now called Rate Field has not known an atmosphere to match this one since the first two games of the 2005 World Series, the opener of which was attended by the Chicago-born churchman who, twenty years on, would be elevated as Pope Leo XIV. The scrapbook counsels humility all the same: in 2008 and again in 2021 the club came home down two games, won once, and was eliminated in the fourth game. The present edition — four October victories without a defeat, every one of them taken in somebody else's yard — aims at the franchise's fourth Championship Series and, as this paper's columns have lately rehearsed, a first home series-clinching victory in 120 years.⁸

THE STORK DESK: THE BULLPEN'S GRANDEST ARM ANSWERS A HIGHER SUMMONS — MILLER LEAVES AN ELIMINATION GAME FOR THE CRADLE, PERALTA TAKES HIS ROSTER SEAT, AND SAN DIEGO AWAITS TWO ARRIVALS AT ONCE

The paternity rolls, whose first October call this paper entered Sunday, have now claimed the heaviest arm in the San Diego bullpen. Mason Miller telephoned the club early Tuesday afternoon: his wife, Jordan, had gone into labor. The closer — a 1.67 figure across 66 regular-season appearances, and lately the subject of the tipping inquest these columns conducted Tuesday — was placed on the paternity list hours before an elimination game, the left-hander Wandy Peralta taking his seat on the series roster.⁷ The statute allows an absence of one to three days; the club anticipates its man back for tonight's fourth game — "That's what we're anticipating," said the pitching instructor Niebla — and failing that, for a fifth game Friday, when by rule it must be Peralta who gives way. His teammates waved him off without a murmur. "We have his back," said Tatis. "Let him have his family time right now." France, himself called to the same rolls in September, allowed: "I know it's a hard thing to balance, but he's doing the right thing." The stork has thus visited the San Diego club three times this season — France in September, Buehler on the eve of the third game, and now Miller.⁷

The evening disclosed a second subtraction more quietly. Morejon, the bullpen's best left hand, has been nursing fatigue in his throwing shoulder — "stickiness," the manager Stammen called it — and though he played catch and even took the bullpen mound before the game, the club declined to push him. How San Diego lines up behind Buehler tonight is, by the manager's own admission, contingent on both men; the club professes not to know.⁵

THE INFIRMARY DESK: SEVEN HITS IN ONE-AND-SIXTY AT-BATS — CLEVELAND'S COLD ORDER FOLLOWS ITS CAPTAIN'S FRACTURED SUMMER TO CHICAGO, WHERE RAMÍREZ HAS STRUCK MORE HOME RUNS THAN ANY VISITOR NOW PLAYING

Cleveland's predicament, reduced to a line of agate: the order has gone 7 for 61 in this series — a .115 mark — with eight hitless at-bats when a runner stood in scoring position, and José Ramírez, the franchise's dearest son, has yet to record a hit. The fuller explanation resides in his left wrist. Ramírez fractured the hamate bone on the 13th of June and returned in five weeks and a day — quicker than the surgeons asked — and the power never followed: twelve home runs and a .688 OPS across 125 games, his poorest figures since 2015, with two home runs in his final 53 games. The pain, he has acknowledged, will keep until winter, and the strength is not expected whole before spring training. "It has been difficult," said Ramírez. "There are days when it might feel better, and others when it feels worse. But that is no excuse. The mentality is to go out and compete and try to win."⁹

The manager Vogt declines the alibi on his man's behalf and the despair besides: "He's not 100 percent and hasn't been since June, but he's giving us everything he has, and we all know José's one swing of the bat away from getting it going... I have a feeling he's going to come through for us." And the venue argues for the feeling: Ramírez has hit 23 home runs at Rate Field as a visitor, the most of any man now active and second in all history to Cabrera's 26. Cleveland, two defeats into the series with none to spare, will learn by suppertime whether the one swing arrives in time.⁹

THE ARCHIVES DESK: AT TWO GAMES DOWN, NEW YORK TAKES ITS SCRAPBOOK OFF THE SHELF — THE FLIP OF 2001 AND THE RALLY OF 2017 ARE READ ALOUD IN THE BRONX, WHERE FRIED AND THE UNANSWERABLE RICE MUST HOLD THE LINE TONIGHT

No franchise keeps a thicker scrapbook, and at two games down the Bronx has turned to the comfortable pages. Mr. Lupica of MLB.com directs the anxious reader to the 13th of October, 2001 — third game of a Division Series against an Oakland club that, like these Rays, had bettered New York's season record and taken the first two games — when Jeter crossed the whole infield to collect an overthrown relay and backhanded his famous flip to Posada, the runner Giambi beaten by a step, the game held 1-0, the series in time won entire. Beside it sits 2017, when the club climbed from the same 0-2 grave against Cleveland. The less comfortable page — last October's 0-2 against Toronto, never answered — the readership declines to open.¹⁰

The case for hope bats left-handed. Rice is hitting .467 for the October with four home runs and eight runs batted in through four games, carrying the offense as he carried it through the captain Judge's absent summer; and the starting pitching has committed no crime, Cole and Schlittler having yielded three earned runs between them in the series while the defense kicked away the second game behind them. Tonight the ball goes to Fried, who opened the Wild Card round with six innings of one-run ball against Boston. The sober entry on the facing page: Tampa Bay has beaten New York nine times in fifteen meetings this season, puts every ball in play, and does not beat itself. The manager Boone states the assignment without ornament: "We've got the chance to do something great... We've responded to difficult times all season. Now we gotta do it again." And, more plainly still: "We gotta get a game."¹⁰

The National League supplied both of the day-prior entries and left both of its quarrels standing two games to one — Los Angeles a win from the pennant round after the aces' rematch went to Yamamoto, San Diego alive by the width of a double play. Now comes the densest page left on the calendar: four contests today, every one a possible ending — Cleveland at Chicago at 4 o'clock Eastern, Los Angeles at Atlanta at 6, Tampa Bay at New York at 8, Milwaukee at San Diego at 10 — and no day hereafter holds more than two, the Championship Series opening the 11th of the month in the National League and the 12th in the American.² Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Wednesday, October 7, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Sonja Chen, Yamamoto (10 K's) dazzles, putting Dodgers 1 win from return to NLCS — MLB.com
Paul Casella, Yamamoto-Sale duel doesn't disappoint, and other takeaways from NLDS Game 3 — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Led by King's all-in relief effort, Padres fight and force Game 4 — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Unable to sweep, '40 of us versus 50,000' mentality driving Brewers into Game 4 — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Padres closer Miller misses NLDS Game 3 on paternity list, could return for Game 4 — MLB.com
Will Leitch, 4 games. 4 potential clinches. Here's everything to know today — MLB.com
Martín Gallegos, J-Ram says wrist pain is 'no excuse' as he seeks signature playoff moment — MLB.com
Mike Lupica, Yanks have seen this 0-2 script before and flipped it — MLB.com

ELEVEN STRIKEOUTS BUY CLEVELAND FIVE INNINGS AND NOT AN OUT MORE — VOGT LIFTS WILLIAMS AT HIS EIGHT-AND-NINETIETH PITCH, THE SIXTH COMES APART IN RELIEF, AND MONTGOMERY'S TWO-RUN DOUBLE SENDS CHICAGO HOME NEEDING ONE: WHITE SOX 4, GUARDIANS 3

2026-10-06T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

ELEVEN STRIKEOUTS BUY CLEVELAND FIVE INNINGS AND NOT AN OUT MORE — VOGT LIFTS WILLIAMS AT HIS EIGHT-AND-NINETIETH PITCH, THE SIXTH COMES APART IN RELIEF, AND MONTGOMERY'S TWO-RUN DOUBLE SENDS CHICAGO HOME NEEDING ONE: WHITE SOX 4, GUARDIANS 3

The hardest arm on the lakefront fans eleven with 18 pitches at 100 miles the hour or better, hands a one-run lead to his bullpen after a leadoff single in the sixth, and watches it burn — Sabrowski walking the pinch-hitter Grichuk on four pitches, uncorking a wild pitch, and standing one short fly from escape when Braden Montgomery lines a two-run double the opposite way; Sean Burke retires 13 in a row in bulk relief, Grant Taylor survives Adell's first-pitch triple to close the 4-3 verdict, and the Pale Hose — who trailed for the first time all postseason after an unearned two-run first — fly home with four October victories, all of them taken on the road, one win from a first Championship Series since 2005 and a first home playoff clincher since the World Series of 1906

For five innings and one batter Monday evening, the argument belonged to the heaviest artillery this paper promised. Gavin Williams was everything Cleveland's predicament required: eleven strikeouts, five of them in unbroken succession from the end of the first inning to the top of the third — no Cleveland pitcher had ever done that in October — and 18 pitches at 100 miles the hour or better, tying Emmanuel Clase's franchise mark of the whole tracking era. He became but the third Cleveland man to reach double figures in strikeouts in a postseason game, one shy of Charles Nagy's record twelve of 1996, and he carried a 2-1 lead into the sixth.⁵ The lead itself had been staked in the first, and not honestly earned: Kwan's leadoff single off the opener Kay, a pass to Ramírez, an intentional walk around Adell — and then Lowe's comebacker to the second relayman Newcomb, whose throw sailed past Murakami at first while two runs crossed. Thus did the White Sox trail in a 2026 postseason game for the first time, their streak expiring at 27 innings, 24 of them led, as this paper's columns had counted them.³

Then came the hinge on which Cleveland's whole October may yet swing. Miguel Vargas — the one Chicago batsman giving Williams honest trouble, with two walks already to his evening — led off the sixth with a single to left, and the manager Vogt, his starter at 98 pitches, went to the bullpen. "If he has to face two more hitters, now you're running him up to 110, 115," Vogt reasoned afterward. "It was the right time to get him out of there. He pitched his backside off. Just unfortunate we were not able to get the result." The left-hander Sabrowski, nearly untouchable since August, chose this night to have nothing: Murakami's groundout moved the runner, Grichuk walked on four pitches, a wild pitch advanced the pair, and after Pham's short fly to left brought escape within a single out, Braden Montgomery — a rookie who has labored all season from the right side — lined a two-run double down the right-field line. Gaddis relieved and was greeted by Meidroth's run-scoring single, and a 2-1 Cleveland lead had become a 4-2 Chicago one, five batters wide. "Just lack of control," said Sabrowski. "It's unfortunate. It was a pretty big part of the game, and I let a lot of guys down."⁵

The relay that followed was the one this paper sketched in Monday's columns, run precisely to the drawing. Sean Burke, the staff's ace recast as a man of bulk, gave five innings and a third on one hit and one run, striking out six and at one stretch retiring 13 in succession — tied for the second-longest such run by a reliever in any postseason game, behind only Bumgarner's 14 in the seventh game of the 2014 World Series.⁴ "Tip your cap to Burke, what an unbelievable performance," ruled Vogt. "He was mixing and matching, criss-crossing away, criss-crossing in." Kwan testified that the fastball "just had a little extra life on it." Murakami's fourth-inning single had meanwhile cashed Teel for Chicago's first run, and when Burke yielded a two-out single to DeLauter in the eighth, the closer Taylor — twelve outs of save on Saturday, seven pitches wanted Monday — was greeted rudely: Adell's first-pitch triple to the left-center gap, a foot or two of wall shy of a tying home run, scored DeLauter to make it 4-3. Lowe then lined to left, where Antonacci ran the ball down at full stretch, and Taylor's ninth went three up, three down for the save.³

So Chicago, which has not played a home game this October, carries two victories to Rate Field, where Wednesday's third game goes at 4 o'clock Eastern before a sellout that will wear the Blackout in broad daylight. The arithmetic is stern for the hosts-to-be-visitors: clubs ahead two games to none in a best-of-five have gone through 83 times in 93, and clubs that took the first two on the road under the present format 17 times in 19; the last side to climb from such a hole was the 2017 Yankees — at Cleveland's own expense, the Guardians will not need reminding, though they may prefer the omen that they played better on the road (44-37) than at home this summer.³⁶ Cleveland had named no starter by press time — Bibee, Griffin, and Cantillo, whose September behind the opener Espino ran 15 scoreless innings with 17 strikeouts, are the candidates, and Williams himself volunteers for the bullpen on one day's rest — while Chicago's likeliest man is the rookie Smith, author of 5 2/3 scoreless innings this postseason.⁶ The stakes on the South Side want no embroidery: one victory sends the White Sox to a first Championship Series since the 11-and-1 champions of 2005, and would seal the club's first home playoff clincher since the 14th of October, 1906, when they beat the Cubs at South Side Park for the title — 120 years gone. "It's going to be unbelievable. Those fans deserve it," said Taylor. "They have been with us for three years of 100 losses." Cleveland's answer came from Kwan, and it was steady as ever: "There's no panic button. We're not trying to do too much."³

The Postseason Card

THE GLOVES OF GOTHAM GIVE FOUR TIMES AND THE FIFTH INNING COLLECTS IN FULL — RICE'S PAIR OF CIRCUIT CLOUTS STANDS ALONE AGAINST A RALLY OF SINGLES AND SHOE LEATHER: GULF COAST CLUB 5, PINSTRIPES 2

The league's most un-strikeout-able order plays its signature hand — Aranda's single and Caminero's 112.4-mile double opening a four-run fifth finished by Simpson's legs, a stolen base, another New York misplay, and Palacios' two-run single on the eighth pitch of his turn — while Schlittler, the presumptive Cy Young choice of the scribes, is wrung for the fewest strikeouts of his career, two; Ben Rice homers twice on changeups and becomes the first Yankee ever to post two multi-homer games in a single postseason, Jones' fly ball strikes the B-ring catwalk and is patiently caught, and the top seed flies north two games to none — Game 3 Wednesday at eight in the Bronx, Fried against Martinez, with New York's season on the board

The Rays were asked before the game for their plan against Cam Schlittler, the young road warrior whose new curveball this paper admired only yesterday, and the shortstop Walls gave the answer of a man with nothing to hide: "Just kind of do what we've been doing all year." What they have done all year is strike out less than any club in the majors and put the ball upon the ground until something gives, and Monday night at Tropicana Field, before a sold-out house of 40,226, what gave was the New York infield. The first inning yielded a run without an earned deed in it — McMahon fumbling Díaz's grounder, Aranda singling, and Chisholm throwing away the force at second as Díaz crossed — one of three New York errors in that frame alone and four on the night, charged to four different gloves. Schlittler, for only the third time in his young career, finished his first two innings without a strikeout.⁷

Ben Rice answered alone. In the fourth he turned on a Peralta changeup — a pitch that had yielded no extra-base hit since the right-hander crossed to Tampa Bay — and found the right-field seats to square the account; in the eighth he did it again, off a Seymour changeup, and the scribes' ledger opened wide. Rice is the first man in the franchise's 61 postseason appearances to post two multi-homer games in a single October, and the first player in all postseason history to do it within his club's first four games; his five home runs in his first ten postseason games trail only Bernie Williams' six among Yankees, and his four this October tie Gehrig's 1928 for the second-most in the club's first four games of an autumn, behind Stanton's five of 2020. He is also, the instruments attest, the first man since the tracking began to hit two changeups out in a single postseason game.⁸ Between his salvos the game was settled: Booser wriggled New York's bases-loaded fifth shut, and in the home half Aranda singled, Caminero doubled at 112.4 miles the hour, Hicks grounded a run home, Simpson beat a ball that the shortstop Lombard could not corral, stole second, and watched DeLuca reach on Lombard's error before Palacios — second on the club this season with 31 two-out runs batted in — lined a two-run single up the middle on the eighth pitch of the turn. Four runs, one inning, scarcely a ball struck hard but one. "Constant pressure, constant long at-bats," said the manager Cash. "It's our M.O. all season long."⁷

The evening's curiosity arrived in the second, when Jones' towering fly struck the B-ring catwalk beneath the dome's roof and hung an age before Mesa settled under it for the out — a lawful catch under the house rules, the higher two rings being in play, and the second piece of October architecture to side with the home nine in three days, the roof cable of Milwaukee having lately confiscated France's home run in these columns. Boone came out to inquire and was shown the statute.⁹ The fuller indictment of his club wants no catwalk: shut out on one hit in the opener, undone by its own gloves in the second game, New York has scored two runs in 18 innings of this series while the Tampa Bay relief corps proper has been needed for but seven of 54 outs. "We've got to get ourselves up off the mat," said Boone.¹⁰

The remedy must be found at home, where the arithmetic grants little: clubs up two games to none in a best-of-five have advanced 83 times in 93, and home winners of the first two under the present format 33 times in 36. Game 3 goes Wednesday at eight o'clock at Yankee Stadium, and the pitching is the hosts' best case: Fried, 5-1 at a 1.81 figure in seven career starts against Tampa Bay and sharp against Boston in the Wild Card round, against the veteran Martinez, a first-time All-Star whose club won 22 of his 31 starts and who held New York to three runs across 12 innings in the Bronx this summer. New York took four of six from the Rays at home this season — but the guests have already corked champagne in that building once this autumn, having clinched the East there on the 22nd of September, and the captain Judge, whose exclusion from these rolls this paper recorded Saturday, remains a spectator still.¹⁰

News Around the League

THE ARMS DESK: THE DUEL OF AUGUST IS GRANTED A SECOND SITTING — SALE AGAINST YAMAMOTO AT SIX O'CLOCK IN GEORGIA, THE SERIES SQUARE AND THE THIRD GAME, BY THE LONG LEDGER, THE HINGE OF THE WHOLE QUARREL

The engagement this paper's Monday number announced — the aces unsheathed at last — holds for this evening at Truist Park, and it arrives with a rehearsal already in the books. On the 27th of August these same two men met in this same yard and played a 1-0 masterpiece: Chris Sale a five-hit shutout of the Dodgers, Yoshinobu Yamamoto one run across 6 1/3 innings and the loss for his trouble. Sale, 37 years old, finished the summer with the game's third-best figure at 2.16 — a 1.96 mark over his final 24 starts — and opened this October by holding Philadelphia to three runs over 6 1/3 in the Wild Card round; he was held back from the second game because he had recorded the final four outs of the Wild Card clincher. Yamamoto, the reigning hero of the World Series, makes his first appearance of this postseason carrying a 0.87 WHIP, second among all qualified starters.¹¹

The counting-men assign tonight its full weight: in best-of-five series standing one game apiece, the winner of the third has claimed the series 48 times in 67. The bullpens behind the aces are unevenly provisioned — Atlanta has Iglesias, Suarez, and Lee rested but must do without Fuentes and Kerr, both past 40 pitches Sunday, while Los Angeles returns nearly whole, the rookie Sasaki's 36 pitches the lone question. As for the bats: Harris, 8 for 20 this October, carries Atlanta's order; Acuña (3 for 18 without an extra-base hit) and Olson (3 for 19, seven strikeouts) have yet to join him; Freeman, 3 for 7 with a home run in the series, looks repaired; and Baldwin's leadoff blast accounted for the only run Yamamoto allowed in the August meeting. First pitch at six o'clock.¹¹

THE BRINK DESK: MILWAUKEE CARRIES TWO GAMES AND A PLAIN-SPOKEN STARTER TO THE MISSION SHORE — MAY, THE DEADLINE PRIZE WHO CALLS HIS OWN AUTUMN FRANKLY, AGAINST PIVETTA, FIVE MONTHS MENDED, AT HALF PAST NINE

The National's other quarrel resumes at Petco Park with San Diego's season reduced to a single sentence, supplied by the second baseman Cronenworth: "Win-or-go-home games from here on out, so yeah, we have no choice." Milwaukee hands the ball to Dustin May, its highest-priced freight of the Trade Deadline, whose candor has outrun his results — three earned runs over his first 13 Milwaukee innings, then a 1-2, 7.61 slide across his final eight turns, of which the man himself testified: "It sucks to be sucking right now." The club's wager rests on the fuller ledger: a 3.14 figure in 16 career games against the Friars, and a 1.23 mark in his three starts against them this season. San Diego answers with Nick Pivetta, who lost nearly five months to a flexor strain and has been excellent since his September return — a 1.64 figure across five starts — and whose ugly career number against Milwaukee, 8.76, traces nearly whole to one rookie afternoon of 2017.¹²

The arithmetic of relief favors the visitors besides: Milwaukee's bullpen has thrown nine scoreless innings in this series, with Megill, Uribe, and Ashby rested by the travel day and the fresh starters Gasser, Drohan, and Harrison standing behind May should the leash run short. San Diego's one reinforcement is a familiar name — Buehler, restored Monday from the paternity rolls whose visit from the stork this paper entered Sunday, and available in relief. Among the bats, Chourio's 15 career postseason runs batted in stand one shy of Braun's franchise mark, while France has opened this October 7 for 15 — with a fair claim, these columns have conceded, to eight and a home run besides, the roof at American Family Field having ruled otherwise. Milwaukee, it bears noting, won 42 games in come-from-behind fashion this summer, tied for fifth most in the league — and has now added two more in October. First pitch at half past nine.¹²

THE INQUEST DESK: WAS THE CLOSER SHOWING HIS CARDS? MILLER PLEADS COMMAND, NOT TELLS — AND SAN DIEGO'S MEN OF FILM, ASKED TWICE, DECLINE TWICE TO SAY

No topic buzzed louder at San Diego's off-day workout than whether Mason Miller, in the ninth inning this paper chronicled Monday, was tipping his pitches. The internet's magistrates have produced their exhibits: still images suggesting the closer's hand sat more visible out of the glove on his fastballs, and film of Frelick, leading off second, touching his neck before the 1-2 slider that Chourio declined with the season's composure. "That just seemed like a really confident take," Miller allowed of the pitch, though he holds the larger charge unproven and beside the point: "I just don't think it had anything to do with the walks. I also have a hard time believing I just magically started doing it... If you execute pitches, you're still going to get guys out." The batsman Sánchez, for his part, swore ignorance — "I don't know if he was tipping or not. Seriously, I don't" — while the Milwaukee manager Murphy delivered a connoisseur's lecture on the art itself: "Where they stand, if their mouth is open or closed, eyes are down, head is up... Big breath. Small breath. There's so many ways to give away a pitch." Asked plainly whether his club had something, Murphy observed only that the practice "is happening" in today's game — and no club mid-series ever says more.¹³

The San Diego manager Stammen, twice invited to deny a tell, twice declined, pleading instead a crew "dedicated to that every single day" — and offered the more prosaic diagnosis: Miller's trouble arrives chiefly in his second inning of work, and the six-out ask may be retired for the balance of the round. Miller himself sees no cause to renovate: "It kind of seems like a bad time to try to change everything, too." The Herald notes merely that he may be handed the ball tonight with the season in his palm, and that October is a poor month for unanswered questions.¹³

THE AWARDS DESK: TWENTY NAMES POSTED FOR THE AARON PRIZE — A PANEL OF LEGENDS AND THE PUBLIC'S FRANCHISE OPEN THROUGH THE TWELFTH, WITH THE VERDICTS SEALED UNTIL NOVEMBER

The league Monday posted its finalists for the Hank Aaron Award, the honor for each league's finest regular-season batsman, and the Herald reports the ballot as a ballot: winners will be named the 11th of November at the MLB Awards in Las Vegas, and until then no man has won anything. The American's ten: Alonso of Baltimore, Alvarez of Houston, Arozarena of Seattle, Caminero and Díaz of Tampa Bay, Contreras of Boston, Greene of Detroit, Rice of New York, Vargas of Chicago, and Witt of Kansas City. The National's: Abrams of Washington, Bauers of Milwaukee, Crow-Armstrong of Chicago, De La Cruz and Stewart of Cincinnati, Ohtani of Los Angeles — thrice the holder, 2023 through 2025 — Olson of Atlanta, Schwarber of Philadelphia, Tatis of San Diego, and Walker of St. Louis. The electors are a bench of legends — Jeter, Ortiz, Pujols, Griffey, Chipper Jones, Pedro Martínez, Smoltz, Bench, Biggio, and Murray — and the public may cast its own votes through noon of the 12th.¹⁴

The reader with one eye on the bracket will note the resonance: eight of the twenty finalists are still at their labors in the Division Series — Caminero, Díaz, Rice, and Vargas in the American's two quarrels, Bauers, Ohtani, Olson, and Tatis in the National's — and three of them, Rice, Vargas, and Caminero, spent Monday evening adding to the testimony, as the columns above attest.¹⁴

THE JURISPRUDENCE DESK: ROBERTS REVOKES A BATSMAN'S RIGHT OF APPEAL — PAGES, AMONG THE LEAGUE'S LEAST SUCCESSFUL PETITIONERS, IS TOLD TO TAP HIS HELMET NO MORE

The machine's new jurisprudence, whose first-season audit these columns entered Saturday, has produced its first October disbarment. Andy Pages, the Los Angeles center fielder, spent a challenge in the second inning of the series opener on a 2-2 pitch that the instruments placed 2.6 inches above the bottom of the zone — comfortably a strike — and the manager Roberts has now withdrawn the privilege entirely. "We talked about obviously a lot this year with Andy's success rate or lack thereof," said Roberts. "I did have a conversation today. So, yeah, we've managed that one going forward." The figures argue the manager's side: among 182 batsmen with ten or more challenges this season, Pages ranked 142nd in overturns against expectation while spending the 33rd-most challenges, and after a clubhouse address on the subject during an August losing streak he did not challenge again all summer. Roberts was at pains to call the policy a tailored one — "it's not a one-size-fits-all situation," says he, professing full faith in Betts's eye for the outside corner — and the club at large rated a respectable challenger, its 51 percent success standing tied for eighth. But October, as Philadelphia's game-ending helmet tap lately demonstrated and as this paper then observed, is no month for a losing petition.¹⁵

Two contests on the Tuesday tables, and the American League wrote the same sentence twice: the visitor won, the favorite's yard fell silent, and both series now stand two games to none — Chicago over Cleveland, Tampa Bay over New York, each leader needing one. Tonight the National answers with its third chapters, Los Angeles at Atlanta at six o'clock with Sale opposite Yamamoto, and Milwaukee at San Diego at half past nine with a sweep in prospect and a season in the balance. The morrow returns the American to the stage — Cleveland at Chicago at four o'clock, Tampa Bay at New York at eight — with the National's fourth games to follow in the same evening as needed; and beyond stand the pennant rounds, the National's Championship Series opening the eleventh of the month and the American's the twelfth, by the league's forward ledger.² Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Tuesday, October 6, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Scott Merkin, First home playoff clincher in 120 years? White Sox on cusp of making it happen — MLB.com
Rhett Bollinger, Lights out: Burke sets down 13 straight to aid Game 2 comeback — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins and Martín Gallegos, Why Vogt pulled a dominant Williams -- and why the decision will be debated — MLB.com
Scott Merkin and Tim Stebbins, Guardians-White Sox ALDS Game 3 FAQ (Wed., 4 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Relentless Rays give Schlittler fits in 4-run 5th, move 1 win from ALCS — MLB.com
Sarah Langs, Rice makes history with second two-homer game of postseason — MLB.com
Matthew Leach, Another playoff roof ball?! Rays record out after Jones' fly dings Trop catwalk — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Bryan Hoch, Rays-Yankees ALDS Game 3 FAQ (Wed., 8 p.m. ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Paul Casella, Sonja Chen and Mark Bowman, Dodgers-Braves NLDS Game 3 FAQ (Tues., 6 p.m. ET, FS1/FOX One) — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Mark Sheldon and AJ Cassavell, Brewers-Padres NLDS Game 3 FAQ (Tues., 9:30 p.m. ET, FS1 /FOX One) — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell and Adam McCalvy, Was Miller tipping pitches? Closer -- and Brewers' skipper -- both say no — MLB.com
VOTE NOW: MLB announces finalists for Hank Aaron Award — MLB.com
Max Ralph, Roberts pulls Pages' ABS challenge privileges after Game 1 miss — MLB.com

A SEASON'S PHILOSOPHY, REDEEMED ON THE FORTIETH PITCH — MILWAUKEE PLAYS EIGHT UNTIDY INNINGS, THEN WALKS THE NINTH ALIVE ONE BASE AT A TIME UNTIL CHOURIO, DOWN TO HIS FINAL STRIKE, LINES THE CLOSER MILLER INTO HEARTBREAK: BREWERS 4, PADRES 3

2026-10-05T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

A SEASON'S PHILOSOPHY, REDEEMED ON THE FORTIETH PITCH — MILWAUKEE PLAYS EIGHT UNTIDY INNINGS, THEN WALKS THE NINTH ALIVE ONE BASE AT A TIME UNTIL CHOURIO, DOWN TO HIS FINAL STRIKE, LINES THE CLOSER MILLER INTO HEARTBREAK: BREWERS 4, PADRES 3

Asked for the evening's last six outs, San Diego's splendid closer retires the eighth in order and then unravels in the ninth — Yelich, the newly anointed captain, walking and stealing second, Frelick climbing out of a one-and-two count, the pinch-hitter Sánchez declining a hundred-and-three-mile fastball a hair beneath the zone to fill the bases — whereupon Chourio, who had failed with these same bases loaded in the seventh, fouls off a hundred and three and a half, spits on the signature slider, and lines a two-run single to center for the first trailing-into-the-last-inning resurrection in the franchise's October annals; King outpitches the debutant Henderson, France drives in two against the yard whose roof robbed him Saturday, five errors litter the ledger, and the Brew Crew flies west two games to none with history offering San Diego ten chances in three-and-ninety

A week ago, asked why this Milwaukee club should fancy itself different from the seven other October entries the Cream City has sent forth in the past eight autumns — every one of them stopped short of the World Series — the center fielder Garrett Mitchell gave the scribes a plain man's answer: "We're in it until the 27th out. This year, even down to the last out, we still have a chance. That feels different." Sunday his club spent eight innings making the prophecy look foolish and one inning making it scripture. The Brewers resembled nothing less than a nine that had won a hundred and three games: the postseason debutant Henderson loosed a costly wild pitch in the first that opened the scoring's door, the gloves committed three errors to tie the season's high, and the order managed but five hits all afternoon. They entered the ninth trailing 3-2 against Mason Miller, who had breezed through the eighth on three batters and returned for a second inning of work — a closer who posted a 1.67 figure this summer with 129 strikeouts, the most any San Diego reliever has ever collected, and who had twice this season been asked for six outs and twice delivered them without blemish.

The ninth began obediently, Mitchell himself grounding out. Then Christian Yelich, Milwaukee's newly anointed captain, worked a walk and stole second for his trouble; Sal Frelick climbed out of a one-and-two count to walk behind him; and after the pinch-hitter Vaughn flied to center — the seven-and-twentieth out of Mitchell's sermon now standing one swing away — Gary Sánchez came cold off the bench and performed an at-bat of the quiet heroic kind, declining a 103.3-mile fastball a hair beneath the zone and then a slider boring in at his hands, and the bases were full. Up stepped Jackson Chourio, two-and-twenty years old, one day removed from becoming the franchise's October home-run king, as this paper recorded yesterday, and two innings removed from grounding out with these same bases loaded in the seventh. Miller came at him with pure fire: three triple-digit fastballs, and the young man stood at his final strike. He fouled off a hundred and three and a half. He let the signature slider dart for the dirt. And on the fortieth pitch of the closer's evening — a fastball at a hundred and one, in a hittable spot — Chourio lined it to center. Cronenworth laid out at second and missed by inches; Merrill came up throwing and was late by half a second; Yelich and Frelick crossed, 41,683 shook the yard, and Milwaukee had a 4-3 verdict in a game it began the ninth losing — the first such last-inning resurrection in all the franchise's postseason history, and its third October walk-off, joining Moustakas's in 2018 and Morgan's in 2011. The fates, ever fond of a flourish, had arranged for Nyjer Morgan himself to throw one of the evening's ceremonial first pitches. "We're a team that never backs down," said Chourio. "I knew that he was going to come at me with the fastball at some point, so mentally I was just making sure that I was prepared for that."

The lawful innings beforehand had belonged, narrowly, to the visitors. Michael King gave five innings of three-hit, one-run work with six strikeouts, out-pitching Henderson, who surrendered two runs across five frames in his October baptism; Ty France — the same man whose apparent home run the roof confiscated Saturday, as these columns told — singled home runs in the first and the seventh by way of answer, and San Diego led 3-1 in the seventh. The afternoon's untidiness kept the ledger close: five errors between the clubs, three of them Milwaukee's, and two charged to Cronenworth on a single seventh-inning play that let the hosts back within one. Thus was the stage dressed, and thus did a bullpen built precisely for this month hand back a game the Padres had all but banked.

In a clubhouse quiet as a reading room, the closer declined every extenuation. "I didn't do my job today," said Miller. "The cardinal rule is you don't beat yourself. I beat myself today. A base hit with nobody on doesn't win them the game. A base hit after you walked the bases loaded does." The ledger he leaves behind is stern: clubs down two games to none in a best-of-five have come through but ten times in three-and-ninety tryings, and none since the Yankees of 2017. San Diego's consolations are genuine — both games here were settled by a single run, the Friars won three-and-fifty of three-and-eighty at their own yard this year counting two October victories over the Cubs, and the manager Stammen vows the ground will be defended: "We like where we are when we play at home." But Milwaukee flies west with two victories and a two-and-twenty-year-old who slashed .291/.351/.487 this summer, authored the third straight twenty-and-twenty campaign to open a career — a feat previously belonging only to Julio Rodríguez and Bobby Witt Jr. — and now owns the two loudest hits of this October. Game Three goes Tuesday night at half past nine, Eastern time, at Petco Park. "The series isn't over," said Miller, and he is right; it merely leans.

The Postseason Card

THE PLAN WAS PATIENCE, AND PATIENCE THROWS A HUNDRED MILES THE HOUR — KERR OPENS WITHOUT BLEMISH A SECOND TIME, THE BOY FUENTES CLAIMS ELEVEN OF THE LAST TWELVE OUTS, AND HARRIS FINISHES A HOME RUN SHY OF OCTOBER'S SECOND CYCLE AS THE TOMAHAWK NINE SQUARE THE SERIES: BRAVES 3, DODGERS 2

Weiss holds Sale back for full strength and is vindicated twice over — Kerr giving two and two-thirds scoreless three days after a seven-and-forty-pitch night, and the one-and-twenty-year-old Fuentes pouring four-seamers at 99.4 miles the hour across three and two-thirds innings of one-run relief; Snell, rusted by a fortnight's idleness, walks five in three and two-thirds and is lifted at his ninetieth pitch, Dubón cashes the bases-full passes in the first, Harris triples on a sliced sweeper the instruments valued at .016 and scores the decider on Bubic's wild pitch, and Muncy's two-out thunder in the ninth arrives a run short; the aces come off the shelf Tuesday at six at Truist Park, Sale against Yamamoto, with the road split favoring Atlanta thirty times in nine-and-forty under the present format

The manager Weiss spent Saturday night explaining why a fatigued Chris Sale would not pitch Sunday — "We want full-strength Chris Sale. I know him at 80 percent is really good, but that's what it came down to" — and spent Sunday night being proven entirely right. His second consecutive bullpen game ran like a railroad timetable. Ray Kerr, opening for the second time in four days and three days removed from a seven-and-forty-pitch evening against Philadelphia, gave two and two-thirds scoreless innings with four strikeouts, at one point surrendering a leadoff double to Rojas and deliberately pitching around Betts to claim the left-on-left argument with Ohtani. Holmes lasted five batters and gave Freeman's leadoff homer in the fourth — the first baseman's first extra-base hit since the second of September — but Lee tidied the fourth for the victory, Suarez escaped a two-on, none-out crisis in the fifth in just his fourth appearance since the elbow began complaining in late June, and then came the revelation. Didier Fuentes, one-and-twenty years old, poured four-seamers averaging 99.4 miles the hour — two full ticks above his summer figure — across three and two-thirds innings of one-run relief, claiming eleven of the final twelve outs and touching 99 or better four times in the ninth. "I couldn't believe he came back out there for the ninth, but he did and he was still chucking 100," testified Olson. Muncy's two-out blast off the youngster was the only dent, and Iglesias retired De Paula on a popup for the save.

The runs the relay protected were largely the work of one Georgian. Michael Harris II — whose first-inning thunderclap decided Thursday's Wild Card finale, as these columns told — went 3-for-5 and finished a home run shy of what would have been but the second cycle in all postseason history, Brock Holt's of 2018 standing alone. His fifth-inning triple was a thing of fortune honestly collected: an 86-mile sweeper off the plate, sliced away from Hernández, who broke sideways and lost it — the instruments valued the ball at .016 of expected average — and Harris legged it to third, whence Bubic's wild pitch brought him home with the lead. His double cashed Olson for insurance in the seventh, making him the fifth Brave ever to triple and double in a single postseason game, after Acuña, DeRosa, Lemke, and Gowdy of 1914. The boy who watched the 2021 champions from the Truist Park stands now carries their successors. "There seems to always be unsung heroes in the postseason," said Weiss. "Tonight it was Michael Harris."

Los Angeles, by contrast, beat itself with a thousand small cuts. Snell, who had thrown but five innings on six-and-ninety pitches in the fortnight and a half since his groin tightened in mid-September, walked five in three and two-thirds — two of them loading the first-inning bases for Dubón's two-out single — and was lifted at his ninetieth pitch. "He just was fighting himself with his delivery all game," said Roberts. The order went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position, stranded seven, and has now scored all seven of its series runs by the home run. The champions' consolations were Díaz's electric sixth, entered in the columns above, and the knowledge that their rotation remains the deepest in the field. "So now it's a three-game series," said Roberts — one that resumes Tuesday at six o'clock at Truist Park with the aces unsheathed at last, Sale against Yamamoto, and Mahle to follow in Wednesday's fourth game. The counting-men give the side that splits on the road and goes home thirty series in nine-and-forty under the present arrangement; Weiss, for his part, keeps the accounting simpler: "Every starter on their staff is a Cy Young guy. It doesn't get any easier, but I like the fact that we go back home even and we have Chris Sale."

News Around the League

THE OCTOBER DESK: CLEVELAND'S OCTOBER NARROWS TO A SINGLE EVENING — WILLIAMS AND HIS TWO-HUNDRED-AND-FORTY-EIGHT STRIKEOUTS TAKE THE BALL AT FIVE O'CLOCK, AGAINST A SOUTH SIDE RELAY OF KAY AND BURKE, WITH THE HOSTS ONE DEFEAT FROM A TWO-GAMES HOLE

The particulars this paper left open yesterday are now filled in. For this evening's second chapter on Lake Erie's shore, the manager Venable confirms the South Siders will repeat the method that shut Cleveland out in the opener: the left-hander Anthony Kay opens against the top of the order — Kwan, Ramírez, DeLauter, two lefties and a switch-man — and Sean Burke, the staff's ace by every figure, follows in bulk. The assignment could scarcely suit him better: Burke went 2-0 against Cleveland this summer at a 1.04 figure, one-and-twenty strikeouts in seventeen innings and a third, and carries a lifetime 2.57 mark at Progressive Field; across the season he struck out 185 in 172 and a third. "I dreamed of the World Series when I dreamed of playoff starts," says he of the unglamorous role. "So whatever's going to get us to the World Series, I'm all in on doing that." The heroes of Saturday may even reappear, Venable declaring both Smith and Taylor candidates according to feel, aided by Sunday's idleness and another off day Tuesday.

Cleveland answers with its heaviest remaining artillery: Gavin Williams, second in all the game with 248 strikeouts and author of eleven starts of ten strikeouts or better, the most in the majors. The hosts' predicament wants no embroidery — shut out on three hits in the opener, they stand one defeat from a two-games hole with the series then removing to Chicago. The manager Vogt declines the panic: "It was one game. We've lost a lot of games this year, and we've bounced back the next day... We still have a great opportunity ahead of us to even the series tomorrow and go to Chicago with a chance to win it." First pitch at five o'clock.

THE ARMS DESK: AT THE DOME AT EIGHT, THE ROAD WARRIOR AND HIS NEW CURVEBALL MEET SEPTEMBER'S ADOPTED KING — SCHLITTLER AGAINST PERALTA, WITH NEW YORK WANTING THE SPLIT AND ONE HIT TO ITS NAME

The young right-hander Schlittler, named in these columns yesterday for tonight's assignment, arrives at Tropicana Field as the finest road pitcher in the game — an 8-2 account and a 1.16 figure across seventeen travelling starts this season, both tops in the majors, with a .153 average against — and with a new weapon besides. The game's foremost fastball merchant, who threw his three fastball shapes nine-and-eighty times in every hundred pitches this summer, the highest such rate among all starters, unveiled a power curve in earnest against Boston last week: two-and-thirty of them, a career high, drawing eight empty swings and accounting for four of his ten strikeouts. The scribes already presume him the American's Cy Young choice; that ballot is counted in November, and this paper will enter the verdict when the official rolls do. His catcher Wells states tonight's business plainly: "Hopefully get to their guy."

Their guy is Freddy Peralta, got from the Mets in August and transformed by the crossing: the American's Pitcher of the Month for September on a 5-0, 0.79 run across his final six starts, with a 1.69 figure in four home turns beneath the dome. "Everything changed when I got traded," says the right-hander. "I've been treated here as a king." He inherits a crowd still roaring from Saturday's one-hitter and an order that held New York to a single safety in the opener — the fewest of the franchise's four hundred and forty-seven postseason games, as this paper recorded. First pitch at eight o'clock.

THE BULLPEN DESK: THE TRUMPETS SOUND IN THE SIXTH INNING, OF ALL PLACES — DÍAZ, IN HIS LOS ANGELES OCTOBER DEBUT, THROWS HIS HARDEST PITCH IN TWO YEARS, AND THE CHAMPIONS NAME IT THEIR SILVER LINING

When the trumpets of "Narco" rang through Dodger Stadium Sunday evening, they announced not the ninth inning but the sixth — and Edwin Díaz, the closer signed at $69 million over three winters to anchor the champions' late innings, delivered the finest frame of his disrupted season in a losing cause. Three up and three down: Riley frozen on consecutive sliders for a three-pitch strikeout, the pinch-hitter Yastrzemski blown away at 100.8 miles the hour — Díaz's hardest pitch since the fourth game of the 2024 Division Series — and Baldwin's fly ball to end a twelve-pitch performance that touched a hundred three times, his most in any outing since September of 2024. "Try to find some silver linings — that was a silver lining and certainly a positive," ruled the manager Roberts, whose club has now seen every Atlanta reliever save the rookie Ritchie. The pitcher himself was less circumspect: "That's why I came here — to help this team win and pitch in big spots. I want to keep getting the ball and doing my job." The Herald observes that a bullpen's repairs, like a batsman's, tend to be tested soonest in Georgia.

THE ALMANAC DESK: BEFORE CHICAGO AND CLEVELAND QUARRELED FOR A PENNANT, THEY CONSPIRED TO INVENT THE LEAGUE THEY QUARREL IN — A REMINISCENCE OF BAN JOHNSON, THE SPIDERS' DREADFUL SUMMER, AND A BLUFF CALLED IN A MILWAUKEE HOTEL

As the Central rivals contest their Game Two this evening, the league's historians supply a pleasing symmetry: the American League itself was conjured largely out of these two cities. In the autumn of 1899, Ban Johnson — a former sporting editor running the minor Western League — renamed his circuit the American League and resolved to challenge the National's monopoly, exhorting his owners to "fight them with fire, gentlemen!" Cleveland lay open for the taking, the National's Spiders having just completed a season of 20 victories against 134 defeats, the worst ever entered in the books — a mark lately challenged, the Herald notes with a diplomatic cough, by the 121 losses of the 2024 White Sox — and Johnson moved the Grand Rapids franchise there under the purses of Somers and Kilfoyle. The league was formally incorporated at the Republican House Hotel in Milwaukee on the fifth of March, 1900; the National's threatened counter-invasion proved, in the end, nothing more than a bluff.

Chicago required delicacy of another kind: the National's man Hart permitted the upstart club his league's cast-off name "White Stockings" on the condition that the word "Chicago" form no official part of the title. The new league declared itself major by 1901, and its first big-league game, fittingly, matched these very antagonists — Chicago against Cleveland, the 24th of April, 1901, at South Side Park, the White Stockings prevailing 8-2 on their way to the new league's first pennant. The peace of 1903 brought the first World Series, and the rest is the national pastime as we know it. A century and a quarter on, the argument resumes at five o'clock.

Two contests only on the Monday tables, but each a chapter heading: Milwaukee stands two games to none over San Diego, its consecutive one-run escapes achieved by roof and by rally, while Atlanta and Los Angeles square at one apiece with the aces Sale and Yamamoto booked opposite for Tuesday at six. Today the American League takes the stage back — Chicago at Cleveland at five o'clock, New York at Tampa Bay at eight, the burgling South Siders and the top-seeded Rays each a victory from commanding their quarrels outright. Tuesday carries the National's third games besides, Los Angeles at Atlanta at six and Milwaukee at San Diego at half past nine; and the pennant rounds stand ready beyond, the National's Championship Series opening the eleventh of the month and the American's the twelfth, by the league's forward ledger. Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Monday, October 5, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Adam McCalvy, Chourio, Milwaukee's Mr. October, bests Miller with walk-off to give Crew 2-0 NLDS lead — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Game 2 heartbreaker has Padres on the ropes in NLDS — MLB.com
Mark Bowman, Braves follow manager's pitch-perfect plan to even series with Dodgers — MLB.com
Mark Bowman, Kerr twirls scoreless outing as opener; Sale set for Game 3 start — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, Snell's rust shows, Dodgers' bats can't pick up 'pen as NLDS evens up — MLB.com
Jacob Gurvis, Harris flirts with cycle in October breakout for hometown Braves — MLB.com
Rhett Bollinger, After 8 K's in WC start, Burke set for bulk role behind Kay in ALDS Game 2 — MLB.com
Scott Merkin and Tim Stebbins, White Sox-Guardians ALDS Game 2 FAQ (5 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Bryan Hoch, Yankees-Rays ALDS Game 2 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Jared Greenspan, The new pitch making Cam Schlittler even nastier — MLB.com
Courtney Hollmon, Does Díaz's high-velocity perfect inning trumpet a return to form? — MLB.com
Anthony Castrovince, How these ALDS teams spawned the American League — MLB.com

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

2026-10-04T11:00:00Z

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

Postseason Off-Day Edition — the Third of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

2026-10-03T11:00:00Z

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

0 days until the first pitch of the Division Series — four Game Ones this very day, beginning at one o'clock on Lake Erie's shore (Saturday, the 3rd of October, 2026).

News Around the League

THE OCTOBER DESK: THE QUIET DAY PASSES AND THE FOUR QUARRELS OPEN IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON — CHICAGO AT CLEVELAND AT ONE, ATLANTA AT LOS ANGELES AT FOUR, NEW YORK AT TAMPA BAY AT HALF PAST SIX, SAN DIEGO AT MILWAUKEE AT HALF PAST EIGHT

The calm this paper forecast arrived on schedule: Friday passed without a contest anywhere in the land, the travel day observed by all eight survivors, and today the October proper begins at the fuller measure. The card, verified against the league's forward ledger, reads thus: the Pale Hose call at Cleveland at one o'clock, Hagen Smith (3-3, a 1.29 figure) against Parker Messick (12-9, 2.56), the rookie left-handers squared off; Atlanta calls at Los Angeles at four, the hosts sending Tarik Skubal (12-7, 2.72) against a visiting starter yet unnamed; the Yankees call at Tampa Bay at half past six, Gerrit Cole (10-9, 3.61) against Drew Rasmussen (16-5, 2.67); and the Friars call at Milwaukee at half past eight, Robbie Ray (13-8, 3.59) against Jacob Misiorowski (16-5, 1.80), the leader of all the game in earned runs.

The second chapters follow hard upon: Sunday carries San Diego at Milwaukee at four o'clock and Atlanta at Los Angeles at eight; Monday, Chicago at Cleveland at five and New York at Tampa Bay at eight; and Tuesday the National League quarrels remove to Atlanta and San Diego. Four series, every one a best-of-five, and the particulars of each are entered below — the Herald having spent the idle Friday at the armory, as a paper should.

THE CENTRAL QUARREL, FOURTEENTH MEETING: A DIVISION SETTLED BY ONE GAME RESUMES ON LAKE ERIE'S SHORE — ROOKIE LEFT-HANDER AGAINST ROOKIE LEFT-HANDER AT ONE O'CLOCK, AND THE SUMMER'S LEDGER GIVES THE GUESTS THE EDGE

The thirteen meetings of the summer were not enough to settle the argument, so Cleveland and the Pale Hose will hold a fourteenth with everything at stake. The division fell to the Lake Erie men by a single game, 85 victories against 84, and by the narrowest of mechanisms — a three-game set taken at Progressive Field in the middle of September, the lead changing hands for the last time. Yet the season's ledger between them belongs to Chicago, seven games to six, the aggregate scoring 58 runs to 57; seven of the thirteen were settled by a single run, and four ended in walk-offs. Chicago held at least a share of first place for six-and-ninety days, Cleveland for nine-and-eighty. "Obviously we know Chicago really well," allows the Cleveland manager Vogt. "A really good team offensively. They've got a lot of power and they match up really well with us pitching-wise."

The pitching opens with a curiosity the deadball fathers never saw: two rookie left-handers, each his club's chosen man. Messick, whose Game One assignment this paper entered Friday, has faced the Chicagos four times this summer at a 2.81 figure, nine-and-twenty strikeouts against five passes in five-and-twenty innings and two-thirds. Smith, for his part, makes his second start of the week — three scoreless innings in Tuesday's Wild Card victory over Houston — and has held Cleveland to a 3.18 figure across his innings against them; three or four efficient frames would seem his ration, after which the manager Venable may call on young Grant Taylor and the rest of a bullpen that shut Houston out across the final five frames of the clincher. The South Side club used an opener one-and-thirty times this season, the most in the majors, and with idle days Sunday and Tuesday, Venable declares both Smith and Taylor may appear in any of the first three games. The first October meeting of the Central neighbors in their whole long acquaintance, and it could scarcely be drawn tighter.

THE EXPECTATION OVERTURNED IN CHAVEZ RAVINE: SKUBAL, NOT YAMAMOTO, TAKES THE BALL FOR GAME ONE — WHILE ATLANTA, ITS ROTATION ON THE INVALID ROLLS, DECLINES TO NAME A STARTER AT ALL

The expectation this paper recorded Friday is overturned: the Angelenos hand Game One not to Yamamoto but to Tarik Skubal, the left-hander acquired at the summer's Trade Deadline. The reasoning is a tailored one — the Atlanta order struggled against southpaws all season — and the price is acknowledged: Yamamoto, who last autumn threw consecutive complete games in the Championship Series and the World Series and then closed out the seventh game of the latter on no rest at all, was the only arrangement that returned the Japanese right-hander twice on regular rest in a five-game series. "I loved delivering that message," said the manager Roberts of informing Skubal. "I don't always get to deliver good messages, and that was a good one." The pitcher learned his assignment on the five-and-twentieth of September, walking off the mound after seven scoreless innings in San Francisco. His October credentials want nothing: a 2.04 figure across six postseason starts, six-and-fifty strikeouts in nine-and-thirty innings and two-thirds — every one of those starts made on the road, in his Detroit years. Saturday, at last, a home crowd. "Usually when I walk out onto the field in a playoff game, it's received with a lot of boos," said Skubal. "I'm excited to get some cheers in there for us."

Atlanta, by the sharpest contrast, arrives with no starter named at all, its rotation depleted exactly as this paper entered Friday: Sale unavailable before Sunday's second game, Mahle before Tuesday's third, Pérez — on the invalid rolls with the low back since the first of September — likewise barred until Game Three. The likeliest arrangement asks Grant Holmes, who threw but two innings in Thursday's clincher, for the early frames, perhaps behind the left-hander Suter as an opener. The handedness will also arrange the home order: against left-handed pitching the champions lead off Betts rather than Ohtani, and Skubal's presence makes the choice for them. Triple-digit heat is in the forecast for the four-o'clock first pitch — the two clubs' first October meeting since the 2021 Championship Series, which Atlanta took on its way to the title, and the hosts' first step toward a third consecutive one.

THE CAPTAIN'S CASE, THIRD HEARING: NEW YORK WEIGHS JUDGE'S NAME FOR THE DIVISION SERIES ROLLS AS THE DEADLINE ARRIVES — THE CALF HAS NOT YET RUN THE BASES, BUT THE SHIRT SAYS 'NO TIME LIKE OCTOBER'

The case this paper has followed since the calf first gave way on the sixteenth of September reached its final hearing Friday at Tropicana Field, where Aaron Judge — dressed for work hours before his teammates arrived, a shirt across his chest reading "No time like October" — awaited the club's verdict on his place on the Division Series roster, due by the evening. The docket of his rehabilitation is thorough: a platelet-poor plasma injection in late September, four turns of live batting practice Monday in the Bronx, further at-bats Wednesday at the Double-A grounds in Somerset, more hitting Thursday, and an early workout Friday across the bay in Tampa. What the captain has not yet done is run the bases, though the manager Boone suggests he may not need to — "sometimes running the bases, they replicate things in other ways," says he, framing the question before the club thus: "Is he going to be available at some point in this series potentially as a player?" The moderate strain of the soleus ordinarily asks three weeks; the three-time Most Valuable has spent seventeen days arguing with the arithmetic.

With or without him, the series wants no garnish. The Yankees and the Sunshine nine have met in October once in all their quarrelsome acquaintance — the 2020 Division Series, played in the neutral yard at San Diego and ended by Brosseau's blast off Chapman — and never once with both home crowds in attendance. Tampa Bay, the American's top seed at 98-64, went 55-26 in its return to the home dome this summer, and celebrated its division title on the Yankee Stadium lawn besides. New York's answer is the man it pays for precisely this assignment: Cole has given the Rays nine earned runs across his last six starts against them, a 2.09 figure. "Every time we play them, it's a tight game, it's a dogfight," says Rasmussen, who takes the ball opposite. The captain himself, whatever the rolls say by game time, put it plainest: "It's going to be a grind the next five games."

THE TOP SEED'S EXAMINATION: MILWAUKEE'S HUNDRED-THREE-WIN SUMMER MEETS THE ONE CLUB THAT SWEPT IT — RAY CHOSEN OVER BUEHLER TO EXPLOIT THE SUDS MEN'S ONE SOFT SPOT, AND MISIOROWSKI ANSWERS WITH THE BEST FIGURES IN BASEBALL

The season's best club takes the field at last tonight, and the examiners are the one nine that handled it roughest. The Suds men won a franchise-record 103 games, took the Central for the fourth consecutive year — no club had ever done it — and claimed the first seed of the whole field, closing at 18 won and 6 lost for September. Yet when they visited San Diego in August they were swept in three, their batsmen held to three hits in eight-and-twenty tries with runners in scoring position, and it was there that Jake Bauers, the thirty-year-old enjoying the season of his life, issued the prescription the clubhouse still quotes: "I just think we need to chill the [heck] out a little bit." They did — went straight to Dodger Stadium, took three of four, and never looked back. The Friars, for their own part, matched that 18-6 September stride for stride, needing every win of it to secure the league's top Wild Card berth, and arrive carrying a bullpen that has not yet surrendered a run this October, as this paper's Thursday columns recorded.

The pitching choices tell the whole strategy. San Diego passes over Buehler to start Robbie Ray, the left-hander got at the Deadline — for Milwaukee's order, first in the majors against right-handed pitching by the weighted measures, ranks but thirteenth against the southpaws, and Ray carries a career 2.82 figure against the Cream City club with a .193 average against. Milwaukee answers with the summit itself: Misiorowski, leader of all baseball in earned runs (1.80), strikeouts (252), base-runners per inning (0.80), and batting average allowed (.157). The hosts restored a bat for the occasion besides, activating Andrew Vaughn from the ten-day invalid rolls Friday. First pitch at half past eight; the first October meeting of the franchises born together in 1969 continues Sunday at four.

THE RESTING CHAMPIONS, A FULLER ACCOUNTING: OHTANI CONCEDES THE KNEE AND THE BICEPS MUST BE 'MANAGED' THROUGH OCTOBER — THE CHAMPIONS AWAIT THE RETURN OF A SWING LAST SEEN IN AUGUST

When this paper last took the champions' pulse, on the eve of the Wild Card round, Ohtani pronounced himself "feeling great physically"; Friday, speaking to the scribes for the first time since before his September stay on the invalid rolls, the four-time Most Valuable supplied the fuller ledger. The right biceps and the left knee that have troubled him since early summer remain unsolved. "I haven't been able to get a good grasp of the root cause of all this," said he through his interpreter. "That process is going to happen during the offseason... as of now, it's something I'm just going to have to manage." He will not pitch this postseason — the mound ambitions that produced 8 victories against 2 at a 1.79 figure through fourteen starts were shelved when the knee barked in July — and the bat's recent testimony is sobering: a .198 average with four-and-thirty strikeouts in the four-and-twenty games before his trip to the rolls, five hits in one-and-twenty tries upon his return, no home run since the eighteenth of August, and a season's total of thirty — his fewest in three Los Angeles summers — after six-and-twenty had come by midsummer at a .296 clip.

The bye week was spent on repairs: simulated at-bats against teammates and the pitching machine, rest for the joints, work for the timing. "I know that once the lights turn on, the postseason starts, the focus will be heightened," says the manager Roberts. "I expect good things. I really do. We just haven't seen it enough... for me to forecast it." The Herald, which entered the champion's own rosier bulletin in these columns Wednesday, enters Friday's candor beside it and lets the reader weigh the pair — observing only that a man who hits thirty home runs in a season his physicians would call lost remains a man no pitcher cares to see in October.

THE ALMANAC DESK: THE MACHINE'S FIRST SEASON IS AUDITED — FOUR-AND-FIFTY OF EVERY HUNDRED CHALLENGED CALLS OVERTURNED, AND THE CATCHERS PROVE THE SHARPEST LAWYERS AT THE NEW BAR

The automated ball-strike system closed the books on its first regular season, and the audit makes agreeable reading for the challengers: four-and-fifty percent of all challenged calls were overturned, the human eye corrected by the machine more often than it was confirmed. The catchers proved far the most successful class of petitioner — fitting enough, for no man in the yard studies the strike zone at closer range — with the batsmen trailing well behind. This paper's readers have already seen the device's October debut: the first game-ending challenge in postseason history, raised by the catcher Realmuto in Philadelphia's Game Two resurrection, a called ball converted to strike three with the season in the balance — the new jurisprudence, as these columns recorded Thursday, arriving at the sport's biggest moments right on schedule.

And from the North Side, a first entry in the winter ledger this paper opened Thursday: the Cubs' operations chief Hoyer, surveying a lineup that scored one run in its two October games, declares the winter's first business will be the pitching — "pitching acquisition" the stated priority, with nothing, says he, off the table. The free agencies of Happ and Suzuki already stand on the docket; the North Side winter promises industry.

No tables this morning — Friday passed without a contest from coast to coast, the lone such pause the bracket will grant until the rounds are settled, and the Herald has spent it as the eight survivors did: in preparation. Today the quiet ends emphatically. Four Division Series open inside eight hours — Chicago at Cleveland at one o'clock, Atlanta at Los Angeles at four, New York at Tampa Bay at half past six, San Diego at Milwaukee at half past eight — and from this morning until the last pennant question is answered, every edition of this paper will carry October's fuller measure: no playoff game a two-sentence note, every contest given its full accounting. The morrow's number will bring the first four verdicts. Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Saturday, October 3, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Courtney Hollmon, Skubal gets the nod over Yamamoto for LA in NLDS Game 1 — MLB.com
Sonja Chen and Mark Bowman, Braves-Dodgers NLDS Game 1 FAQ (4 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX One) — MLB.com
Scott Merkin and Tim Stebbins, White Sox-Guardians ALDS Game 1 FAQ (1 p.m. ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Bryan Hoch, Yankees-Rays ALDS Game 1 FAQ (6:30 p.m. ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy and AJ Cassavell, Padres-Brewers NLDS Game 1 FAQ (8:30 p.m. ET, FS1) — MLB.com
Bryan Hoch, Will Aaron Judge be on the Yankees' ALDS roster? Here's the latest — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, 'Giving everything he has': Ohtani seeks power surge in NLDS — MLB.com
Robot umpires flip 54% of challenged calls as Reds lead way — ESPN
Jesse Rogers, Cubs' Jed Hoyer makes 'pitching acquisition' top offseason priority — ESPN

THIRTY YEARS OF WINNER-TAKE-ALL SORROW, STRUCK FROM THE LEDGER IN NINE INNINGS — HARRIS GOLFS A SINKER THIRTEEN INCHES OFF THE EARTH FOR THREE, KERR THE ONCE-FORGOTTEN JOURNEYMAN BLANKS THE ORDER, AND SALE WALKS OUT OF THE BULLPEN TO BAR THE DOOR: ATLANTAS 6, PHILADELPHIAS 2, AND THE SERIES WITH IT

2026-10-02T11:00:00Z

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

The Game of the Day

THIRTY YEARS OF WINNER-TAKE-ALL SORROW, STRUCK FROM THE LEDGER IN NINE INNINGS — HARRIS GOLFS A SINKER THIRTEEN INCHES OFF THE EARTH FOR THREE, KERR THE ONCE-FORGOTTEN JOURNEYMAN BLANKS THE ORDER, AND SALE WALKS OUT OF THE BULLPEN TO BAR THE DOOR: ATLANTAS 6, PHILADELPHIAS 2, AND THE SERIES WITH IT

Nola cannot find the plate and the hometown boy makes him pay the full tariff — a three-run thunderclap in the first on the lowest pitch ever hit for one of his hundred-and-one home runs — whereupon Albies and Olson add blasts of their own, three homers from the three men Philadelphia evicted from October in '22 and '23 alike; Kerr, told only Wednesday night he would open the decider, carves three and one-third one-hit innings out of the season's biggest game, and Sale, two days removed from ninety-five pitches, claims the final four outs to become the first man since his own 2018 self to start a series' first game and finish its last — Atlanta's first series won since the 2021 World Series, its first winner-take-all survived since the seventh game of the 1996 Championship Series, and a date with the twice-defending champion Dodgers on Saturday afternoon

Measure the decisive blow in inches, as the counting-men did. Aaron Nola's 2-0 sinker stood thirteen inches and a fraction above the Georgia clay — 1.11 feet, by the official instruments — when Michael Harris II reached down and golfed it on a line at a hundred miles the hour and a half more, Bryce Harper tracking it to the right-center wall only to watch it clear the brick by a hand's width. Three runs, first inning, and all the evening's scoring Atlanta would strictly require. The instruments pronounced it the lowest pitch ever converted into any of Harris's hundred-and-one home runs, the lowest Nola has ever had hit for one, and the third-lowest struck for a postseason homer since the tracking era began in 2008 — and it was hit by a son of the Atlanta soil, drafted by the home club out of its own suburbs, in the first winner-take-all October game of his life. Nola, who had walked Acuña and Olson on five pitches apiece to load the crisis and thrown but three of his first thirteen offerings for strikes, lasted five outs; Wheeler, the arm Philadelphia spent Sunday just to reach this round, gave four creditable innings of relief behind him, but the deficit had been dug.

The shutting of the door was a relay of improbables, and the first hand on it belonged to Ray Kerr. Told only Wednesday night that he would open the season's biggest game, the two-and-thirty-year-old left-hander — six weeks removed from Triple-A Gwinnett and the long road back from the 2024 elbow surgery — was handed the one assignment that mattered, the neutralizing of Schwarber and Harper atop the order, and he did that and more: three and one-third scoreless innings, a single hit, the Philadelphia bats carving at air. The man's history makes the arithmetic look small. A boyhood spent partly in foster homes while his father served time; a 2015 season pitching for a men's-league nine in Reno while clerking at a 7-Eleven and a movie house; and now the opener's ball in an October decider. "This was just another Thursday," said Kerr. "Growing up, I had a hard time. So, this was nothing." His manager Weiss put it otherwise: "Hopefully Ray Kerr became a bit of a household name tonight. He deserves it."

The middle chapters confirmed the verdict. Albies turned a Wheeler offering into the right-center seats with Riley aboard in the fourth, 5-0; Olson added a solo clout off Bowlan in the seventh — three home runs on the night, struck by the three Braves who were present to be evicted from October by these same Philadelphians in both 2022 and 2023, each man collecting a measure of his own account. The visitors' resistance came in polite installments: Schwarber came round on Bohm's sixth-inning groundout, and Derek Hill, having tripled in the eighth, scored on Turner's sacrifice fly — two runs, no more, against the procession of Holmes (two innings and the victory), Suarez, Fuentes, and Dodd.

And then the theater. Chris Sale — who had planted himself in Weiss's office chair in the afternoon before the manager could even raise the question, announcing "I feel amazing" — emerged from the bullpen in the eighth and struck out Harper to end it, then finished the ninth: four outs, a little more than eight-and-forty hours after throwing ninety-five pitches across six and one-third innings in Game One. The scribes certify him the first pitcher to start a series' opening game and close out that same series since one Chris Sale, Boston, World Series of 2018 — he and Kershaw now the only men to have done it twice. So fell a pair of droughts at a single stroke: Atlanta's first postseason series won since the 2021 World Series, and its first winner-take-all game survived since the seventh game of the 1996 Championship Series, six straight such defeats — the third-longest run of them in the annals — now closed. The application the Phils filed in these columns to become the fourth club of the best-of-three era to lose an opener and advance was denied without comment, before a sold-out Truist Park that stayed to watch the champagne. Next: the Division Series, Saturday at four o'clock Eastern at Dodger Stadium, on the Fox circuits, with triple-digit heat in the forecast and the twice-defending champions waiting — a club Atlanta beat five times in six meetings this summer, outscoring them 26 to 15, for whatever such summer arithmetic is worth in October.

News Around the League

THE OCTOBER DESK: THE EIGHT ARE NAMED AND THE CARD IS FULL — FOUR DIVISION SERIES OPEN SATURDAY FROM ONE O'CLOCK TO HALF PAST EIGHT, CLEVELAND HANDS ITS OPENER TO THE ROOKIE MESSICK, AND LOS ANGELES IS EXPECTED TO ANSWER ATLANTA WITH YAMAMOTO

The bracket's last blank is filled, and the schedule stands thus: Saturday the White Sox call at Cleveland at one o'clock, Atlanta at Los Angeles at four, the Yankees at Tampa Bay at half past six, and the Padres at Milwaukee at half past eight; the second games go Sunday at four in Milwaukee and eight in Los Angeles, Monday at five in Cleveland and eight in Tampa Bay, with Atlanta's series returning to Truist Park for a third game Tuesday evening. Friday carries not a contest anywhere in the land — the last quiet day before the four quarrels run concurrent.

Cleveland has shown its hand first. The manager Vogt names Parker Messick, the five-and-twenty-year-old rookie left-hander, for Game One against Chicago — a man who had to argue his way onto the roster in the spring and finished sixth in the game at a 2.56 figure, his three-and-ninety-and-a-hundred strikeouts the most by a Cleveland first-year man save Herb Score's 245 of 1955 — with Gavin Williams, whose 248 strikeouts led the American League and trailed only Misiorowski's 252 in all the game, to follow in Game Two. "They've been our two best pitchers," says Vogt. "They've earned it and then some." The Dodgers have made no formal announcement, but the expectation of the Los Angeles camp is Yamamoto for Game One — the only arrangement that returns their ace on regular rest for a fifth game, with Skubal, Snell, and Glasnow filling out a rotation of uncomfortable depth, and the Ohtani-Betts platoon atop the order sorting itself by the hand of the opposing starter. Atlanta, by contrast, arrives with its rotation depleted: Sale cannot go before Sunday's Game Two, Mahle not before Tuesday, and Pérez, on the invalid rolls since the first of September with the low back, not before Game Three — leaving Holmes, who threw but two innings Thursday, to be asked for the early innings Saturday, with young Ritchie an option and a left-handed opener under consideration besides.

THE PHILADELPHIA RECKONING: A FOURTH STRAIGHT OCTOBER SERIES SURRENDERED AND THE COSTLIEST CORE IN THE GAME AT A CROSSROADS — MATTINGLY DECLINES TO PLEAD HIS OWN CASE WHILE THE SHADOW OF CORA FALLS ACROSS THE INTERIM CHAIR

In the visitors' clubhouse Thursday night the beat men watched a group of Phillies — Schwarber, Realmuto, Turner, Stott, Nola, Stubbs — stand in a corner and talk quietly, and noted that it was not like the gatherings of a few years ago. The club has now surrendered four consecutive postseason series while carrying one of the heaviest payrolls in the game, and the Philadelphia correspondent pronounces changes not merely likely but overdue. "It's going to be a long offseason, obviously," said Harper. "I obviously have trust in the organization and people that are in charge. We'll see where we go."

The first question on the docket is the manager's chair. Mattingly, who took the club at 9-19 and steered it to the fourth-best record in the game thereafter — 79 won, 55 lost, and likely votes for Manager of the Year to come — declined to argue his own retention: "It's not the time to talk about anything like that. My stuff doesn't really matter." He reports no conversations with the front office on the subject. But the shadow over the interim chair has a name: the beat men record that Dombrowski offered the position to Alex Cora on the 26th of April, two days before Thomson's dismissal, that Cora declined it then, and that so long as Cora sits available and the interim tag stays unaddressed, the industry expects the pursuit to resume. The players, for their part, spoke for the incumbent — "his demeanor was great for us," testified Schwarber — while Harper, asked directly, declined the question. The Herald observes that a man who inherits a shipwreck in April and has it racing by June has earned at least a hearing in November.

THE DUGOUT DESK: ESPADA DECLARES HE WOULD 'ABSOLUTELY' RETURN TO A HOUSTON THAT HAS NOT YET SAID SO — WHILE ARIZONA, WANTING NO SUSPENSE, RETAINS LOVULLO ON NEW PAPER

The succession question this paper opened Thursday has its first testimony: Joe Espada, whose contract expired with Houston's elimination, declares he would "absolutely" like to return to the Astros in 2027. The club, which must also seat a new general manager, has not yet said whether the feeling is mutual — and the Herald notes that a manager auditioning for his own job while the office above him stands vacant is a delicate position even by Texas standards.

Arizona, meanwhile, declined to let any such question linger: the Diamondbacks retain Torey Lovullo on a new contract, the winningest manager in the franchise's annals across his ten seasons, now bound for an eleventh. One chair filled, one chair wobbling, and the music only beginning — the autumn's managerial carousel is hereby declared open.

THE ALMANAC DESK: FALL BALL IN THE DESERT — THE ARIZONA AUTUMN CIRCUIT OPENS ITS FOUR-AND-THIRTIETH SEASON SATURDAY, FIFTEEN OF THE GAME'S HUNDRED FINEST PROSPECTS ON THE ROLLS

While eight clubs quarrel over the pennants, the future reports for duty in the desert: the Arizona Fall League opens its four-and-thirtieth season Saturday, carrying fifteen members of the game's Top Hundred prospect list — matching the richest enrollment of the past four years. The rolls run from a seventeen-year-old, Angeibel Gomez, ranked one-and-eightieth in the game, to a nine-and-twenty-year-old in Tyler LaPorte, four winters a veteran of the independent circuits, with a genuine All-Star among them in the rehabilitating San Francisco closer Randy Rodriguez. The circuit's pedigree wants no argument — Judge, Trout, and Harper all took their autumn cuts there, former Fall League Most Valuables include Arenado, Acuña, and Bryant, and ten of the eighteen position men who started this summer's All-Star Game are alumni. Last autumn's Most Valuable, the Detroit infielder McGonigle, hit .362 in the desert and proceeded to lead the whole American League in wins above replacement at one-and-twenty this summer. The games count for nothing and foretell a great deal; the Herald will keep an eye on the box scores from the cactus country.

The Friday tables, then — one contest entered, and the Wild Card round closed at three days' length: four series, three settled by sweep, and the one that went the distance settled by the club that had waited thirty years to win a game of the winner-take-all kind. The field for the Division Series is therefore complete — Chicago's White Sox, Cleveland, New York, and Tampa Bay carrying the American's colors; Atlanta, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and San Diego the National's — and today the land is quiet, not a game from coast to coast, the calm before four quarrels run at once. Saturday the cannonade: Chicago at Cleveland at one o'clock, Atlanta at Los Angeles at four, New York at Tampa Bay at half past six, San Diego at Milwaukee at half past eight. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Friday, October 2, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Mark Bowman, Kerr the reason 'everything fell into place' for Braves to fight off Phils — MLB.com
Paul Casella, Sale's pitch to Weiss pays off: Lefty bookends Braves' Wild Card Series win — MLB.com
Paul Casella, Harris starts fireworks in hometown early with 3-run blast — MLB.com
Todd Zolecki, Phillies' latest early playoff exit puts veteran core at crossroads — MLB.com
Todd Zolecki, Mattingly not ready to talk managing in '27, but Phillies' stars back skipper — MLB.com
Mark Bowman and Sonja Chen, Braves-Dodgers NL Division Series Game 1 FAQ (Sat., 4 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX One) — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Guards tab star rookie Messick, AL strikeout king Williams for ALDS Games 1-2 — MLB.com
Astros manager Joe Espada wants to return as contract expires — ESPN
Diamondbacks retaining Torey Lovullo as manager — ESPN
Jesse Borek, The Arizona Fall League begins Saturday! Here's what you need to know — MLB.com