MLB Division Series Losers: What Went Wrong?

With the MLB Division Series now over, the Philadelphia Phillies, Kansas City Royals, Detroit Tigers, and San Diego Padres have all been eliminated. The question though is how and why? Here is a look into why each Division Series loser actually lost and what moves they could make this offseason to improve upon these outcomes.

Philadelphia Phillies: Lost 3-1 to the New York Mets 

• Key Free Agents: RHP Carlos Estevez, RHP Jeff Hoffman 

This was supposed to be the year for the Phillies. For the first time since 2011, they captured the NL East crown and had home-field advantage in the MLB Division Series. They were able to line up their pitching rotation with the opportunity to start Zach Wheeler in Games One and Five. Their lineup was completely healthy, and they were facing a New York Mets team that barely snuck into the playoffs. 

All seemed to go according to plan when Kyle Schwarber led off Game One with a solo blast, and Wheeler overmatched the Mets over seven scoreless innings. Yet in what became a theme in this series, the Phillies bullpen imploded. They allowing five runs in the top of the eighth and one more in the ninth for good measure as part of a stunning 6-2 loss in Game One. The Phillies were able to even the series with a thrilling 7-6 victory in Game Two, but things went south quickly when the scene shifted to Citi Field. Jose Quintana dominated the Phillies lineup over seven shutout innings in Game Three, and Francisco Lindor put the nail in the coffin with a go-ahead grand slam in the sixth inning of the Game Four clincher.  

So how did a team with eight All-Stars and the fourth-highest payroll in baseball only win a single game in the postseason? The easy answer is the bullpen, which blew three late-inning leads and posted an 11.37 ERA in the series. It was a shocking result, not just because Jeff Hoffman, Carlos Estevez, and Matt Strahm were coming off excellent regular seasons, but because the Phillies bullpen was a major part of their postseason runs in the last two seasons. With Estevez and Hoffman entering free agency, the Phillies have the opportunity to rebuild their bullpen if they so choose.  

The more pressing issue for the Phillies is their lack of lineup depth. Their bottom of the order provided almost no resistance to the Mets pitching staff, as J.T Realmuto, Brandon Marsh, and Alec Bohm combined to go just 1-for-37. This spelled doom for the Phillies offense as although Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper combined to reach base 16 times in the four games, the batters behind them just couldn’t drive them in. Additionally, Kyle Schwarber got just one hit after his leadoff homer in Game One, and Trea Turner only hit .200 during the series and did not have a single extra-base hit. You can blame the long layoff if you want, but the fact of the matter was that an offense that sputtered to a 33-34 second-half finish wasn’t going to suddenly turn it back on once the calendar flipped to October.  

If we know one thing about GM Dave Dombrowski, it’s that he’s not going to sit on his hands after an embarrassing postseason loss. The Phillies are going to spend money this season, and will likely be involved in the Juan Soto sweepstakes. Yet no money in the world can make an aging roster younger. Harper, Turner, Realmuto, Castellanos, Schwarber Wheeler, and Aaron Nola are all on the wrong side of 30 and in turn the Phillies may have to accept the reality that they possibly missed their championship window. 

Kansas City Royals: Lost 3-1 to the New York Yankees 

• Key Free Agents: RHP Michael Wacha (Player Option), OF Hunter Renfroe (Player Option), LHP Will Smith, RHP Michael Lorenzen, OF Tommy Pham 

Even though the end result was not what they wanted, 2024 proved to be a fantastic season for the Kansas City Royals. After winning just 56 games in 2023, the Royals surprised many by being aggressive in free agency. They signed veteran hurlers Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo as well as power-hitting outfielder Hunter Renfroe and veteran reliever Chris Stratton.

It was a bold approach for one of the league’s worst teams, but the veterans meshed perfectly with the emerging young core. Young starters Cole Ragans and Brady Singer took a step forward and joined Wacha and Lugo in the league’s best rotation while Bobby Witt Jr. emerged as a legitimate MVP candidate as the centerpiece of one of the game’s best defenses. 

By the end of the season, however, it was clear the Royals were running out of steam. An injury to Vinnie Pasquantino left an already top-heavy lineup extremely short-handed and Singer wore down under the strain of a career-high workload. The Royals suffered two separate seven-game losing streaks over the season’s final five weeks and needed an even more epic collapse from the Twins to squeak into the playoffs. Despite scoring just three runs in two games, the Royals were able to sweep the Orioles in the Wild-Card round thanks to some dominant pitching performances, but they didn’t have the firepower to match the Yankees in the MLB Division Series.  

While the future is bright in Kansas City, it’s clear they need to improve on offense to compete with the American League’s best. Besides the other-worldly Bobby Witt Jr., the only hitters to post an OPS+ above .750 were the 34-year-old Salvador Perez with a .786 OPS and Pasquantino with a .760 OPS. The Royals cannot afford to be so Witt-reliant, because when he goes as cold as he did against the Yankees, it becomes a very difficult task to score runs.  

The good news for the Royals is that, presuming Wacha picks up his option, they will return their entire rotation next year. Though the AL Central is suddenly the strongest it has been in years with the Tigers’ emergence and the Guardians’ rejuvenation, the Royals have to like their chances to compete for years to come.

San Diego Padres: Lost 3-2 to the Los Angeles Dodgers 

• Key Free Agents: LHP Tanner Scott, LHP Wandy Peralta, C Kyle Higashioka, LF Jurickson Profar 

There was a moment when Fernando Tatis Jr.’s fly ball was sailing over the Petco Park fence that the Padres were the favorites to win the World Series. Tatis blast put the exclamation point on a six-run third inning that effectively sealed a 6-5 Game Three victory. The win put the Padres just one win away from an NLCS matchup with the 89-win Mets, and they had starters Dylan Cease and Yu Darvish lined up in the final two games to get them there. 

Nobody could have predicted that Tatis’ homer was going to be the last run the Padres scored all series. Cease got bombed in Game Four while the Dodgers bullpen pitched a shutout. Then Yoshinobu Yamamoto and friends did the same from the bump in a 2-0 victory in Game Five. Remarkably, a Padres offense that led the major leagues in average and finished in the top ten in both runs and OPS failed to score a single run in the final 24 innings of the series.  

The Padres now have to ask themselves whether such ineptitude was the product of short-series randomness or emblematic of a deeper issue. With the Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, and Fernando Tatis Jr. contracts taking up much of the payroll, the Padres are limited in what moves they can make. Although rookie Jackson Merrill and 2024 National League batting title champion Luis Arraez paired with that core made the lineup one of the deepest in baseball, sometimes you just have to tip your hat to a great pitching staff. There is nothing to indicate that the Padres can’t be right back atop the offensive leaderboard in 2025. 

The pitching staff, however, is a different story. The Dylan Cease and Michael King additions worked out about as well as anybody could have hoped for, but Yu Darvish will be entering his age 38 season and Joe Musgrove will miss the entire season after undergoing Tommy John surgery. The bullpen also figures to lose left-handed fireman Tanner Scott to free agency, as well as veteran catcher Kyle Higashioka who played a major role in the pitching staff’s success. 

Over the past three years, the Padres have shown they can compete with the juggernaut Dodgers, beating them in one division series and pushing them to five games in another. Yet for them to get over the hump and reach their first World Series since 1984, they are going to need to continue to supplement their pitching staff and hope their offense doesn’t disappear again in the biggest moments. 

Detroit Tigers: Lost 3-2 to the Cleveland Guardians 

• Key Free Agents: None 

Despite falling short in the ALDS, it was a truly remarkable run for the Tigers. Sitting at 56-63 and with a 0.2% chance of making the playoffs on August 12, the Tigers went an MLB-best 30-13 from then on to sneak into the playoffs as the six seed. They then shocked the AL-West champion Astros in a two-game sweep in the American League Wild Card round before pushing the AL-Central Champion Cleveland Guardians to the limit in five games in the MLB Division Series. For the first time in 10 years, there was postseason baseball in Detroit, and that’s something almost every baseball fan was glad to see. 

Now that the streak is over and the focus is on to 2025, the question must be asked about whether the run was sustainable or simply lightning in a bottle. What made the Tigers so incomprehensible was that other than Triple-Crown winner Tarik Skubal, they really didn’t have any star players. They didn’t have a single hitter with over 25 home runs or over 75 RBI.  Among pitchers who finished the season with the team, only Skubal struck out more than 101 batters or made more than 22 starts. The Tigers run centered around two men: Tarik Skubal and manager A.J Hinch, who mixed and matched an over-achieving bullpen and lineup with mastery. 

Going forward, however, the Tigers can’t rely so heavily on Hinch’s magic. They need to get more reliable hitters in addition to Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter, who were their only two hitters with a season OPS above .750. Sure, Spencer Torkelson, Parker Meadows, and Colt Keith made strides toward the end of the season, but getting a proven right-handed bat to slot in between Greene and Carpenter and complement the young core would make a huge difference. On the pitching side, adding at least one more starter must be a priority. Perhaps a reunion with Jack Flaherty, who dominated in Detroit this year before getting traded to the Dodgers at the deadline, is in the cards. 

After ten long years of dysfunction, this magical postseason run showed the Tigers could finally be on the other side of the rebuild. Now comes a hard task that the Tigers have failed to do since the days of Justin Verlander, Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder and Max Scherzer: spend in free agency. This offseason will be critical to determining whether the Tigers were a one-year wonder or legitimate contenders for years to come. 

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Spencer Torkelson #20 of the Detroit Tigers reacts after striking out during the seventh inning against the Cleveland Guardians dduring Game Five of the Division Series at Progressive Field on October 12, 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)