ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Before the post-season started, the Tampa Bay Rays met with their rotation and talked about how aside from ace Drew Rasmussen pitching the first game, they planned to remain fluid in lining up behind him.
Afterwards, Griffin Jax recalled, they turned to him, Freddy Peralta, Nick Martinez and Ian Seymour and “the question was, do you guys have any care as to what you do? And the answer was very quick. We all said no. We just want to pitch and whatever that means is whatever that means. … At the end of the day we just want to win and go as far as we can.”
As it turned out, the Rays rotation has run about as normal as possible en route to the World Series, which begins Friday against the Milwaukee Brewers.
They rolled out Peralta and Martinez behind Rasmussen in a division-series sweep of the New York Yankees and then inserted Jax between Peralta and Martinez during a six-game win over the Cleveland Guardians in the ALCS, while Seymour made six relief appearances and Peralta also emerged from the bullpen to record two Game 4 outs.
So far, Rays starters have logged 50 of their 80 innings this post-season, a whopping 63 per cent, making them outliers in the 2026 playoff field. The Brewers, in contrast, have gotten 30.1 of 71 innings, or 43 per cent, from their rotation, a little more than the Guardians, who were at 36 of 97, or 37 per cent.
Only the Yankees, who played six games compared to Tampa Bay’s nine, had a higher percentage of starter innings at 64 per cent. Half of the 12 post-season teams are at 51 per cent or above, the other half at 48 per cent or below.
Overall this October, starter innings are at 47 per cent, which is the second-lowest number in a decade. Intriguingly starters, at 3.12, have a better ERA than bullpens, at 3.56. It’s just the second time during the previous 10 playoffs that’s happened, the other coming in 2019, when starters carried a 3.36 ERA and relievers were nearly a run worse at 4.24.
In those ’19 playoffs the Washington Nationals — led by Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin and Anibal Sanchez — got 67 per cent of their innings with a 2.99 ERA from starters while beating the Houston Astros — featuring Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke and Jose Urquidy — who had starters log 64 per cent of their innings at a 3.30 ERA.
For context, the Toronto Blue Jays were at 52 per cent last year — with 89 innings at a 3.34 ERA compared to 4.44 ERA in 81 frames for their bullpen — while the Los Angeles Dodgers were at 63 per cent — with a 2.68 ERA in their 104 rotation innings versus a 3.84 in their 61 relief innings.
Heading into the World Series, Rays starters are carrying a 1.98 ERA, compared to a 3.60 for their bullpen, while Brewers relievers are at a 1.33 ERA versus 2.97 for starters Jacob Misiorowski, Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser and Dustin May, who pitched behind opener Shane Drohan in the NLCS.
How that disparity plays out over the best-of-seven is one of several interesting dynamics, as it ended up hurting the Guardians as the ALCS progressed.
Manager Kevin Cash noted that the Rays are “mindful of how many of these relievers are facing the same guy over and over,” and that before Game 5 they discussed internally “how many times, how many pitches to those specific hitters, what's the cost of that? I don't think anybody knows, but it's still good information to have.”
“As much as we talk about the time-through-the-order effect,” he added earlier, “if (a reliever) just continued to face the same hitters, I’ve got to think that somewhere in line that's an advantage to the hitter.”
Guardians manager Stephen Vogt agrees and before Game 4 described it as one of his learnings from his team’s 2024 run to the ALCS, a loss in five games to the Yankees, when “we didn't really have a choice … with how we were constructed.”
“I keep track of who’s seen who how many times, do we have another option to go through this area of the lineup tonight as opposed to yesterday?” he continued. “Familiarity is real. And the more pitches that these guys see from our relievers, they're going to become a little bit more familiar with them. Sometimes your hands are tied and you’ve just got to go do what you can to win the game. But we try to navigate that the best we can.”
Perhaps the Brewers, able to line up their rotation as they see fit thanks to more than a week of rest since sweeping the Dodgers in the NLCS, will be better equipped to handle a similar challenge.
