the many more who didn\u2019t live up to their regular season numbers<\/a>. Won\u2019t be me telling Mike Schmidt he was unclutch.<\/p>\nFatigue<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re going to win the Cy Young or the MVP, you\u2019re going to have to play most of the season. The Cy Young winners in our sample averaged 194 regular-season innings, and while that\u2019s skewed a little by bigger starter workloads earlier this century, it\u2019s also a number that fewer than 10 pitchers will surpass this season. It\u2019s certainly possible that even a young Justin Verlander in 2011 was fatigued after throwing a career-high 251 innings before he went and put up an ERA over five in the playoffs that year.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/GettyImages-129176601-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Verlander may have been wiped by the time the 2011 postseason rolled around. (Harry How \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Hitters may suffer from this malady, too. On average, hitters have had 649 plate appearances in their MVP seasons. Last year, 37 players had 650 or more plate appearances, a number that represents less than 6 percent of all the players who took a plate appearance. Dominate the league all year like Mookie Betts and Christian Yelich did in 2018, and maybe it\u2019s not super surprising to see that their collective batting averages sat around .200 during those playoffs after so many at-bats.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s something unsatisfactory about this explanation. Everyone\u2019s tired in October. Catchers, for example, see more of a downturn in performance in October than any other position, presumably because all that squatting catches up to them. If everyone\u2019s tired, then that should change the baseline enough for the MVPs to still shine. A tired MVP is still an MVP among a bunch of tired players.<\/p>\n
Better competition<\/p>\n
This reason certainly rings true. The average fastball in the postseason was a mile per hour faster than it was during the regular season last year, and these days that means the average postseason fastball is pushing towards 96 mph. And it\u2019s not just velocity: the average fastball in the postseason has an inch more ride. Generally, hitters are seeing better stuff in the postseason than they faced all year, and that\u2019s going to impact their numbers.<\/p>\n
On the pitching side, the opposite also holds \u2014 pitchers are obviously going to face better hitters. Last year, only two teams of the 12 that made the postseason had below-average lines from their hitters, and that\u2019s about the normal ratio in a given playoff year. There\u2019s no getting fat on the Pirates or White Sox in the postseason if that\u2019s how you racked up your regular-season credentials.<\/p>\n
Both the Cy Young and MVP winners fared worse in the postseason, so it\u2019s certainly possible that the higher quality competition is the main reason those stars falter. But here\u2019s why it\u2019s not enough: On the aggregate, the postseason ERA over this timeframe was 3.82 and hitters hit .236\/.310\/.389 \u2014 meaning that the Cy Young pitchers together were worse than postseason average, while the MVPs collectively were still better, but not as good as they were in the regular season.<\/p>\n
Luck<\/p>\n
Nobody likes luck as the explanation for the difference in performance, but it\u2019s the most likely reason, and it helps explain some of the quirks we\u2019ve hit along the way. Twenty years of award winners seems like a big sample \u2014 we\u2019re talking 306 innings pitched in the postseason, and over 1,100 plate appearances. Isn\u2019t that a lot? Not really, not when you\u2019re talking about 40 different players, split over 20 different postseasons. It\u2019s a collection of a lot of small samples, not really a big sample.<\/p>\n
If we\u2019re talking about Buster Posey hitting .200 in the 2012 playoffs, or Shohei Ohtani hitting .230 last postseason, we\u2019re missing some context, like Posey catching all year, or Ohtani\u2019s shoulder injury. When we count up Joey Votto, Mike Trout, Josh Hamilton and Cody Bellinger and say that they were bad in the postseason and contributed to this poor MVP line, we\u2019re also taking four players who had a combined 115 plate appearances and treating that sample as if it was one number produced by a monolithic \u201cMVP\u201d instead of a collection of small samples that could be affected by all sorts of randomness.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s another way of saying it: It takes some luck to win the hardware in the first place. We\u2019re awarding the best players, but even those players have good years and then great years. The fact that the strikeout and walk rates for the Cy Young winners in the regular season and postseason are so similar points to some noise in their postseason ERAs. The batting average on balls in play every year in the league is between .285 and .300, and that\u2019s true over our sample in the postseason, too. But our Cy Young winners had a collective .264 BABIP in their award-winning years, and our MVP winners had .341 BABIPs of their own. Maybe some of their regular-season luck ran out when it came to October.<\/p>\n
Perhaps none of these explanations is satisfying by itself, but somewhere in there is an answer. While there\u2019s no guarantee that being the best hitter or pitcher in the league means regression in the postseason \u2014 we\u2019ve had stellar playoff runs from Roy Halladay, Max Scherzer, Chris Carpenter, Kris Bryant, Freddie Freeman and Ryan Braun in the past \u2014 the pattern suggests that maybe all that heavy lifting during the regular season takes its toll in October.<\/p>\n
(Top photo: Kevin C. Cox \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The votes for the seasonal MLB awards are due before the first pitches in the Wild Card series…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":255969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1279,1280,1276,1281,1271,1274,5048,1282,1283,1885,2382,1284,1285,2502,1286,4247,1287,1266,1305,2228,5055,2083,1886,1306,1275,1288,62,3692,1289,1278,1290,67,132,68,1291],"class_list":{"0":"post-255968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-arizona-diamondbacks","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-baltimore-orioles","11":"tag-boston-red-sox","12":"tag-chicago-cubs","13":"tag-chicago-white-sox","14":"tag-cincinnati-reds","15":"tag-cleveland-guardians","16":"tag-colorado-rockies","17":"tag-detroit-tigers","18":"tag-houston-astros","19":"tag-kansas-city-royals","20":"tag-los-angeles-angels","21":"tag-los-angeles-dodgers","22":"tag-miami-marlins","23":"tag-milwaukee-brewers","24":"tag-minnesota-twins","25":"tag-mlb","26":"tag-new-york-mets","27":"tag-new-york-yankees","28":"tag-oakland-athletics","29":"tag-philadelphia-phillies","30":"tag-pittsburgh-pirates","31":"tag-san-diego-padres","32":"tag-san-francisco-giants","33":"tag-seattle-mariners","34":"tag-sports","35":"tag-st-louis-cardinals","36":"tag-tampa-bay-rays","37":"tag-texas-rangers","38":"tag-toronto-blue-jays","39":"tag-united-states","40":"tag-unitedstates","41":"tag-us","42":"tag-washington-nationals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}