Call to the pen
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MLB playoffs: Who’s best equipped to handle the October pressure cooker?

ByBill Felber|
OAKLAND, CA - JUNE 30: Manager Terry Francona #77 of the Cleveland Indians signals the bullpen to make a pitching change against the Oakland Athletics in the bottom of the six inning at Oakland Alameda Coliseum on June 30, 2018 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
OAKLAND, CA - JUNE 30: Manager Terry Francona #77 of the Cleveland Indians signals the bullpen to make a pitching change against the Oakland Athletics in the bottom of the six inning at Oakland Alameda Coliseum on June 30, 2018 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
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MLB playoffs
PHOENIX, AZ – MARCH 30: The bullpen cart drives on the field during a break from the sixth inning of the MLB game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies at Chase Field on March 30, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Which potential MLB playoffs teams are best-equipped to win the late innings?

In MLB playoffs baseball, that’s where the outcomes are generally decided. But you already knew that if you watched the 2017 World Series, where 42 percent of the 68 runs produced by the Astros and Dodgers crossed home plate from the seventh inning onward. In three of those decisive seven games, the eventual winning run came home after the sixth inning.

The modern game of baseball, which its hyper-emphasis on bullpens, emphasizes late-inning performance. More than at any time in the game’s history, that emphasis means asking no more than two trips through the batting order out of one’s starter, hoping to establish a lead and holding on for dear life through a succession of pitching changes made possible by bullpens now often running 8 pitchers deep.

But the equation for measuring that late-inning performance hasn’t really changed much: it still comes down to out-scoring one’s opponent. In assessing that postseason prospects of the 13 teams still generally viewed to be in contention for the 10 available MLB playoffs spots, that reduces the questions to four that reflect the relative offensive and defensive abilities of teams in late-game stress:

  1. What is the difference between the number of runs your team scores in a game’s final innings and the number of runs it allows?
  2. Same question, substituting OPS for runs scored?
  3. Same question, substituting OPS in high-leverage situations?
  4. How did the team fare in games that were tied after 6 innings?

What follows is a ranking of the 13 MLB playoffs contenders based on their performance in response to those four questions. For each question, each team is ordered from 1st to 13th, and its final ranking is based on its average ordinal finish. That means a perfect score – reflecting a team that is prismatically fortified to handle late-inning pressure – would be 1.00. The opposite, reflecting a team poorly responding to late-inning pressure – at least by the average of the 13 playoff contenders – would be 13.00.

What could go wrong with such a ranking system? Plenty, but most obviously these two things: First, the postseason isn’t the regular season…it’s far more pressurized. Second, any postseason series of one, five or seven games is a poster-child for the whims of small sample size. Keeping that in mind, here’s the order of teams best-prepared to handle the pressures of late-inning MLB playoffs play, based on their regular season performance to date:

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