How poor was Kyle Tucker’s regular season? So poor that fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, watching Vladimir Guerrero Jr. go underwater, consoled themselves with: “Could be worse … Kyle Tucker could have signed here.”
Tucker was the marquee free-agent position player last winter, turning down a longer, bigger contract offer from the Blue Jays (reportedly 10 years, $350 million) to sign a four-year, $240-million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He proceeded to have his worst offensive season, setting career lows in average and OPS and failing to break the 20-home-run mark for the first time. His OPS-plus was below league average and his bWAR came in under 1.0. People wondered whether he even liked the game. Shoot, he could have been forgiven for asking that question of himself.
But none of that matters now that the National League Division Series is here.
The Dodgers, of course, have played a ton of baseball in the last six years, winning the World Series three times — including back-to-back wins in 2024 and 2025 — while being eliminated in six games in the 2021 NLCS. A guy like Will Smith has played 72 playoff games since 2019. They are the oldest team in the majors, so Tucker was supposed to be a guy who could put a little extra spring in their step. Maybe be a little more excited and motivated. That was one of the ways the New York Yankees helped their core during their glory years. It was one of the reasons Pat Gillick overhauled the Blue Jays between 1992 and 1993.
It still might work out for Tucker, whose walk and chase rate held mostly true to form. He hit six of his 17 homers in September, including in back-to-back games twice, flirted with a cycle in two games and posted his best offensive month of the season. The Dodgers believed that a hand injury suffered in the second half of the 2025 season while he was with the Chicago Cubs got into his head and, by extension, his swing. The renaissance was key to a nice run to the finish line by the Dodgers, dovetailing nicely with Mookie Betts’ terrific month and helping alleviate some of the concern created by Freddie Freeman’s shockingly bad September and Shohei Ohtani’s biceps and knee issues.
The Atlanta Braves were the only one of the four wild-card survivors to need a third game, advancing with a 6-2 win over the Philadelphia Phillies on Thursday. They’ve won five of the six games they played against the Dodgers in 2026 but, well, the Milwaukee Brewers won all six of the games they played against L.A. in 2025 and outscored them by 15 runs. Fat lot of good it did them in the post-season: they were swept in four games in the NLCS, scoring just four runs.
The Brewers are back, this time to face the San Diego Padres. They have the best record in the majors but somehow, it still seems like the road to the Fall Classic goes through Chavez Ravine.
“Everyone knows the Dodgers are a juggernaut, but we played well against them this year,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said Friday. “I know that doesn’t carry a whole lot of stock. Once the playoffs begin, everybody starts at zero and the Dodgers are healthier now than they were when we saw them.”
They also seem to have an engaged Tucker.
Here, then, are six to watch in the best-of-five National League Division Series:
•Jacob Misiorowski, SP, Brewers: Let’s just talk about the velocity because let’s be honest: that’s why many of us will be watching. Just this season alone, The Miz threw 1,053 pitches over 100 m.p.h., 57 of them in a May 25 game against the St. Louis Cardinals. His top speed was 106. He threw 143 pitches over 103 m.p.h. and, yeah, led the majors in strikeouts (252), ERA (1.80) and WHIP (0.80). Nobody has ever held hitters to an average as low as his .157 opponents’ average. Sandy Koufax, J.R. Richard and Mike Scott are the only pitchers post-1950 to lead the majors in ERA, strikeouts and opponents’ average.
In the Padres, he’ll be facing the NL’s best offence in September and a team that just bullied the Cubs in their NL wild-card series. Things can get funky in the post-season if you’re a starting pitcher in a seven-game series. But coming off a rest week and in a five-game set like the division series instead of seven games like the league championship and World Series, the Brewers should be able to get away with Misiorowski not having to step out of his comfort zone. Bad news for the Padres.
• Adrian Morejon, RP, Padres: No other team in the post-season has as much of a gap between their rotation and bullpen as the Padres, and while Mason Miller is the focal point, middle relief could be where this series is won or lost if the Brewers revert to their low-scoring form of previous playoffs. Patience is one of the many hallmarks of the Brewers and the Padres bullpen — which led the majors in fWAR, well ahead of the second-place Boston Red Sox. While featuring electric stuff, it isn’t always around the plate. They rely on chase, in other words. But one of Morejon’s trademarks is efficiency. He has one of the game’s elite sinkers and, when in form, will not chase strikeouts, to go along with a 99th-percentile barrel rate and 98th-percentile fastball velocity and ground-ball rate.
• Matt Olson, 1B, Braves: Yeah, I’m thinking a bit like an ink-stained wretch here, looking at the first post-season meeting between Olson and Freeman, the guy he replaced as the Braves first baseman who remains an Atlanta icon. But for the Braves to somehow win this series, I think it’s going to have to be their offensive stars who do the heavy lifting against the Dodgers’ elite rotation and, man, it’s tough to find many Braves hitters with good numbers against L.A. Olson had a quiet September and has hardly been a post-season beast in his career, but his 41 homers deserve to be respected. His elite defence also will save outs and pitches for a team that will need all the help it can get.
• Ethan Salas, C, Padres: OK, so Fernando Tatis, Jr., Jackson Merrill and just about everybody else will play a bigger offensive role than this 20-year-old, who is one of three catchers on the Padres roster. Did we mention he’s 20? I mean, 20. He became the youngest catcher to start a playoff game in Game 2 of the wild-card series, drove in the eventual winning run on a sacrifice fly and used a gutsy ABS challenge in the first inning to overturn a 3-0 ball on Alex Bregman. The Padres’ other two catchers, Luis Campusano and Freddy Fermin, are right-handed hitters and with many of the Brewers’ big arms throwing right, Salas could find himself thrown into the deep end. The Brewers are the type of team that wins on the margins, and that puts a great deal of pressure on the opposing catcher. He’s special.
• Tarik Skubal, SP, Dodgers: I don’t know if Weiss would take it this way, but did his team’s better numbers against right-handers than lefties weigh into the Dodgers’ decision to start Skubal? Is that, like, an early win? The Dodgers know how to navigate this post-season pitching stuff better than most teams — ask John Schneider — and even though it’s a five-game and not a seven-game series, I wouldn’t put anything past manager Dave Roberts and his cadre of starters (Skubal, that Yoshinobu Yamamoto guy, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow).
Skubal, of course, will become the winter’s most sought-after free agent regardless of what transpires in the playoffs and he’s been more than simply an expensive hood ornament for the Dodgers: they won his last six starts, but two of them were just by one run and another was a 2-0 shutout. His ERA since joining the team at the trade deadline is 2.61 and there has been no hint of the elbow issues that had him shut down earlier in the season. A skeptic might suggest that the Dodgers will feel free to abuse an arm that might not be theirs next season … but that wouldn’t be fair, would it?
• Brice Turang, 2B, Brewers: Turang came off a splendid World Baseball Classic to put together a year in which he hit 21 home runs, scored 102 runs and drove in 100 while placing second in defensive runs saved among all MLB position players, just three back of the 26 DRS put up by the Red Sox’s Wilyer Abreu due largely to his 98th-percentile range.
The Brewers scored the second-most runs in the majors yet hit the third-fewest homers, so it’s all about contact and speed and making the other team make plays. “We try not to hit homers,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said Friday. “We try to get above the ball and chop it on the ground and run. We’re the anti-homer.” OK, so Murphy was having a little fun but a closer look at Turang reveals how the Brewers go about business: 53 of his RBIs came out of the lead-off or second spot in the order, so a lot was going on at the top and bottom of Murphy’s lineup. The Brewers had the second-best slugging percentage in the game behind the Phillies, and Turang’s .331 average with runners in scoring position was a team best. He was just 4-for-35 last post-season. So, it’s his time, right?
Jeff Blair’s picks: Dodgers defeat Braves 3-1; Padres defeat Brewers 3-2.
