Hey, Where Did All the Runs Go?

Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images First and foremost, I’ll remember the 2026 postseason as a triumph for the Milwaukee Brewers. They romped through October with both the best offense and the best pitching staff in the field, outscoring their opponents by a whopping two runs per game. The best team in baseball did best-team-in-baseball things, in other words. But I’ll also remember the 2026 postseason for its stifling lack of offense, and for the pitchers who caused that brownout. The playoffs are always a low-scoring environment, with every baserunner and out contested. But this year, hitters were particularly helpless. Teams scored just 3.56 runs per game in postseason play, a strikingly tiny number. And this wasn’t the result of one or two teams running out of gas in October. If you use the regular season’s .314 overall wOBA as a barometer, only the Brewers managed average or better offense in the playoffs: 2026 Playoff Offenses, Sortable Team AVG OBP SLG BB% K% ISO BABIP wOBA R/G Games Brewers .262 .346 .396 10.1% 21.7% .133 .328 .328 4.54 13 Yankees .238 .299 .381 8.4% 25.3% .144 .298 .298 4.60 5 Padres .230 .305 .346 8.4% 21.0% .115 .293 .293 3.67 6 Guardians .224 .313 .336 10.6% 20.0% .112 .291 .291 3.73 11 Phillies .231 .270 .394 3.6% 22.5% .163 .288 .288 3.00 3 White Sox .211 .316 .295 10.9% 36.0% .084 .283 .283 4.00 7 Braves .183 .294 .315 11.6% 24.4% .132 .274 .274 3.14 7 Dodgers .195 .267 .323 8.7% 23.6% .128 .264 .264 3.12 8 Rays .214 .269 .315 5.6% 21.3% .101 .262 .262 3.36 14 Astros .169 .229 .354 4.2% 31.0% .185 .257 .257 3.00 2 Cubs .129 .229 .145 10.0% 27.1% .016 .187 .187 0.50 2 Red Sox .117 .159 .250 4.8% 30.2% .133 .181 .181 1.00 2 I threw a smorgasbord of offensive statistics in that table so that you could see all the different ways that teams struggled. The obvious takeaway? The postseason hardly looked like the regular season: 2026 League Offense, Postseason vs. Regular Season Team AVG OBP SLG BB% K% ISO wOBA Runs/Game Reg Season .244 .318 .400 8.9% 22.1% .156 .316 4.48 Postseason .217 .295 .336 8.7% 23.9% .119 .282 3.56 It wasn’t due to a surge in strikeouts, or a decline in walks. Rather, it was that when offenses put the ball in play, they got very little for it. Balls rarely landed for hits, and hitters’ power vanished. The combination of great pitching and great defense was just too much for the put-it-in-play ethos of many of this fall’s teams. The playoffs are always a lower-scoring environment than the regular season. But at first glance, 2026 was an even tougher year than we’re used to: Playoff Run Scoring By Year, 2010-2026 Year Reg Season R/G Playoff R/G Playoff/RS 2010 4.38 3.62 82.6% 2011 4.28 4.88 114.0% 2012 4.32 3.49 80.8% 2013 4.17 3.55 85.1% 2014 4.07 3.98 97.8% 2015 4.25 4.36 102.6% 2016 4.48 3.7 82.6% 2017 4.65 4.29 92.3% 2018 4.45 4 89.9% 2019 4.83 4.03 83.4% 2020 4.65 4.4 94.6% 2021 4.53 4.28 94.5% 2022 4.28 3.66 85.5% 2023 4.62 4.1 88.7% 2024 4.39 4.21 95.9% 2025 4.45 4.01 90.1% 2026 4.48 3.56 79.5% We haven’t seen this low-scoring an October since before they juiced the baseballs. As a fraction of regular season run scoring, 2026’s 80% is the worst year for playoff scoring since 2006. Only five postseasons in the divisional series era (1995 onwards) have featured fewer runs. I’ll level with you – I started writing this article thinking that I could make some kind of amusing claim about how the Year of Small Ball was also the Year of No Runs. But those previous tables were lying by omission, at least a little bit. Implicit in the idea of comparing regular season and postseason scoring is the assumption that the talent pools are similar overall – that the playoffs aren’t disproportionately filled with elite pitching squaring off against elite hitting. I created a simple measure of “expected” playoff scoring to test this. I took each playoff team’s regular season runs scored and runs allowed per game marks, then used odds ratio approximation to create an estimated scoring mark for each playoff game. Take the World Series, for example. In the regular season, the Brewers scored 5.14 runs per game while the Rays allowed 4.01 runs per game. The regular season average was 4.48 runs per game; my estimation says that Brewers hitters projected to score 4.60 runs per game against the Rays. On the other side, the Rays scored 4.54 runs per game in the regular season and the Brewers allowed 3.81 runs per game; my estimation says the the Rays projected to score 3.87 runs per game against the Brewers. By simple average, 2026’s playoff offenses scored 4.64 runs per game in the regular season. As you’d expect, that’s better than the 4.48 runs per game that all major league teams scored this year. But 2026’s playoff pitchers (and the fielders behind them) were incredible; they allowed a mere 4.09 runs per game. The way that odds ratio works, each side’s contribution to an expectation comes from how far they are away from the average. Since this year’s playoff pitchers were far better than league average at preventing runs while this year’s playoff hitters were only a bit better than average at scoring them, the expected scoring environment for this year’s playoffs was quite low to begin with at 4.17 runs per game. Contrast that with 2025: Last year, playoff offenses scored 4.74 runs per game in the regular season, playoff defenses allowed 4.13 runs per game in the regular season, and league average was 4.45 runs per game. Because of the way matchups lined up – the Blue Jays and Dodgers played a lot of games featuring big offensive production and so-so run prevention – expected scoring came out to 4.59 runs per game. That’s higher than the regular season mark, because of the personnel involved. In other words, this year’s games set up to be lower-scoring right from the start. If I told you that the relatively punchless Rays and Guardians would play a six-game series, that the elite pitchers of the Brewers and Dodgers would make deep runs, and that the flammable Houston defense would only last two games, you’d shade your estimation of run scoring down by quite a bit. I did this going back through history so that I could look at how 2026 performed relative to expectations. To be clear, 2026 was still a tough environment for offense. Based on the actual matchups, you’d expect 4.17 runs per game, and we only got 3.56; that’s a deficit of 0.61 runs, or 14.6%. But that’s at least roughly in line with how the playoffs have gone since 2010: Playoff Run Scoring vs. Expectations By Year, 2010-2026 Year Expected Playoff R/G Playoff R/G Change As % 2010 4.36 3.63 -0.74 -16.9% 2011 4.61 4.88 0.27 5.9% 2012 4.21 3.49 -0.73 -17.2% 2013 4.25 3.55 -0.70 -16.4% 2014 3.88 3.98 0.10 2.6% 2015 4.15 4.36 0.21 5.0% 2016 4.19 3.70 -0.49 -11.6% 2017 4.47 4.29 -0.18 -4.1% 2018 4.37 4.00 -0.37 -8.6% 2019 4.73 4.03 -0.70 -14.8% 2020 4.49 4.40 -0.09 -2.0% 2021 4.48 4.28 -0.19 -4.3% 2022 4.08 3.66 -0.41 -10.1% 2023 4.79 4.10 -0.69 -14.4% 2024 4.46 4.21 -0.25 -5.6% 2025 4.59 4.01 -0.58 -12.7% 2026 4.17 3.56 -0.61 -14.6% In other words, this was a low-offense postseason, but after you account for the fact that eight of the nine teams that allowed the lowest runs per game this season played in it, it wasn’t outside of the norm for October offensive levels. As you’d expect, the playoffs almost always produce less offense than an expectation based on regular season play. That’s because teams use their rotations and bullpens quite differently when elimination is close at hand. The same hitters mostly play in the playoffs, give or take some platooning and some backup catchers, but the best pitchers disproportionately take the ball when their teams are in the postseason. That might feel like a modern development, but it’s not. I used the same methodology to look back all the way to the beginning of the World Series to see how offense has fared come playoff time through the years. For this longer study, I grouped by decade; back in the day, the entire postseason frequently only lasted four games, so aggregating helps tone down the noise. The playoffs have meant less offense since the dawn of time, as it turns out, and the 2020s are just a return to form: Playoff Run Scoring vs. Expectations By Decade, 1900-2026 Decade Games Expected R/G Actual R/G Difference As % 1900 36 3.87 3.43 -0.44 -11.3% 1910 58 3.75 3.22 -0.52 -13.9% 1920 60 4.84 3.54 -1.30 -26.9% 1930 54 4.80 3.87 -0.93 -19.4% 1940 60 4.21 3.48 -0.72 -17.2% 1950 61 4.36 3.77 -0.59 -13.5% 1960 66 4.01 3.77 -0.24 -6.1% 1970 140 4.15 3.88 -0.27 -6.5% 1980 176 4.12 3.87 -0.25 -6.1% 1990 228 4.57 4.14 -0.43 -9.4% 2000 322 4.65 4.34 -0.31 -6.7% 2010 356 4.32 4.00 -0.33 -7.5% 2020 248 4.43 3.97 -0.46 -10.3% If you wanted to fit a story to this, you surely could. The playoffs used to be incredibly low-scoring relative to the regular season until expansion increased the number of games, and thus presumably the number of pitchers; run scoring lagged behind expectations by 16% before the advent of the Championship Series, and by just 8% since then. But if the 2020s are any indication, teams are figuring out how to get more innings out of their best pitchers again, and that’s tough sledding for hitters. Some of that could easily be noise, and piecing together a trend line over such different eras comes with some inherent uncertainty. But regardless of how you slice it, one thing seems clear: The playoffs have always been a lower-scoring environment than the regular season. It’s hardly a new phenomenon that the 2026 Brewers got extra length out of their best pitchers in October; the 1926 Yankees allocated 100% of their World Series innings to Bob Shawkey, Urban Shocker, Waite Hoyt, and Herb Pennock, who combined for just 61.6% of their regular season innings. So put a pin in the arguments about why offense is down in October. Is it not enough homers? Too many strikeouts? Hitters not choking up enough? Hitters choking up too much? Do we need more bunts, more doubles, more defensive restrictions? We might – but the playoffs have been a land of relative offensive drought for about as long as we’ve had postseason baseball.