The National League Championship Series (NLCS) Game Two starters put on a show on Friday night. Los Angeles’ Vicente Padilla allowed just one run on four hits and a walk in 7.1 innings (.258 WPA). Philadelphia’s Pedro Martinez (.500 WPA), who hadn’t pitched in a game since Sept. 30, pitched 7.0 innings and allowed just two hits (and no walks).

The most questionable move came when Martinez was pulled from the game with Philadelphia up 1-0 in the eighth. Manager Charlie Manuel chose to bring in reliever Chan Ho Park (-.296 WPA). Park had dominated his former team the night before, so it’s easy to understand the line of thinking.

However, the veteran had just been activated from the disabled list before Game One of the series. Park had not pitched since Sept. 16 due to the injury problem. Why would you sit a guy for a month and then ask him to pitch on back-to-back days? It was well publicized that Park was not at 100% at the start of the series.

On offense for the Phillies, only first baseman Ryan Howard and catcher Carlos Ruiz had positive WPAs at .141 and .058, respectively.

The rest of the offense will look to get rolling tonight against LA’s Hiroki Kuroda, who has historically had good success against Philadelphia. Kuroda was activated prior to the NLCS after missing time due to a neck injury. He has not pitched since Sept. 28. As a result, the bullpen will be on its toes.

Cliff Lee will head to the hill for Philly. The club has won both of Lee’s 2009 playoff starts. The game will begin in Philadephia shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern.

If one of the concerns of this space is to consider occasionally what about baseball is exciting, or to explore — as Ken Arneson puts it — the “why we watch” question, then last night’s contest between Los Angeles of Anaheim and New York of the Bronx makes an interesting study of three things we expressly don’t look for in a baseball game.

First, consider this graph:

With the exception of a brief downturn in the fourth inning — a frame which saw the Halos’ WE% improve from 25.4% after Torii Hunter’s fly-out to all of 34.9% after an RBI single by Kendry Morales — the slope of that line is depressingly even, inching ever upward to an increasingly predictable result: a Yankees victory.

Why? Because CC Sabathia and Mariano Rivera allowed only six baserunners between them on the night. Moreover, they allowed only one extra-base hit: a double by Vladimir Guerrero in that same fourth inning. In such a case when one team (in this case, the Yankees) scores early, Win Expectancy is unlikely to change dramatically unless the other team (read: the Angels) either (a) gets guys on and/or (b) moves them over. As L.A. was doing little of either after the fourth inning, the WE% of the game was unlikely to change.

Next, consider Leverage Index (LI). The average LI (aLI) of the game was 0.75 and the peak LI (pkLI) was 1.80 — just before Hideki Matsui’s fifth inning double with runners on first and second. By comparison, Game 163 between Minnesota and Detroit — what you might call an Instant Classic — had an average LI of 1.94. In other words, we can say roughly that the average plate appearance in Game 163 was more exciting than the most exciting plate appearance in Game One of the ALCS.

Egads, indeed.

Finally, on a more anecdotal note, Hideki Matsui’s first inning “single” — that is, the very catchable pop-up that fell between between hapless Angels infielders Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar — marked a sort of moment that one doesn’t particularly like to see in a game.

In his excellent Man, Play, and Games, Roger Caillois writes that an absolutely necessary component of the successful construction and/or playing of a game, is the impression that all parties involved are absolutely trying to win. It’s for this reason, I’m sure, that we hear color commentators, sports journalists, and whatever Skip Bayless is — it’s for this reason we hear those guys praising players for their competitiveness, or, less fortunately, their “want-to.” Despite the often repetitive and hyper masculine nature of this sort of eulogy, the reason it exists points to Caillois’ observation. That neither Figgins nor Aybar really seemed determined to catch Matsui’s pop-up inevitably left a sour taste in the spectator’s mouth.

“Clutch” as used on FanGraphs is defined as the following:

Clutch – How much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.

Does anyone have a problem with that as a non-mathematical definition for what people mean at the highest level when they talk about being clutch? Generally, they actually mean “players that do well,” but generally those are good players. Good players doing well are not “clutch,” they are just good. To truly measure the ideal of “clutch” you would have to compare the person’s performance against what you would expect normally. That’s what gets done here.

With that in mind, check this out.

Alex Rodriguez, postseason clutch score 2002-present: 0.73
Derek Jeter, postseason clutch score 2002-present: -0.80

I only included 2002-present because that is what FanGraphs currently has and I don’t have historical postseason WPA. That being said, here’s some numbers covering the years not mentioned above.

Derek Jeter postseason batting line 1995-2001: .304/.377/.448/.825
Derek Jeter regular season batting line 1995-2001: .321/.393/.471/.864

Alex Rodriguez postseason batting line 1994-2001: .340/.375/.566/.941
Alex Rodriguez regular season batting line 1994-2001: .311/.378/.571/.949

That A-Rod, boy he sucks in the postseason. If only he were more like The Captain.

Yesterday, Dave C. noted Vicente Padilla’s extreme platoon splits and how he matches up poorly against a lefty-heavy Philly team. I wanted to expand on this with a pitchf/x look at the issue.

As Dave noted, Padilla throws a ton of fastballs. He is fourth among starters behind sinker ball specialists Aaron Cook, Mike Pelfrey and Rick Porcello, in fastball percentage at 75%. Fastballs, on a pitch-by-pitch basis, show a large platoon split. So a pitcher with lots of fastballs should show an more extreme split. Curveballs and changeups generally show little platoon split. Padilla throws a splitter/changeup and a curveball, but he does so rarely and they are poor (changeup/spiltter) or average (curveball) pitches.

Padilla throws both a two-seam fastball and four-seam fastball. To RHBs, he throws the four-seam 35% of the time and two-seam 45% of the time, so to RHBs he throws fastballs 80% of the time. To lefties, he goes 55% four-seam and 16% two-seam. This makes sense: of fastballs, two-seamers have a larger platoon split, so it would be better to throw them more to RHBs and limit them against LHBs.

I plotted the location of all of this fastballs (green four-seam and blue two-seam) to LHBs and RHBs this year. The figures are messy, but should give a general idea of the location he goes with the two pitches.

To righties, you can see a kind of diagonal orientation of his two-seam fastballs running from up-and-in through the center of the zone to down-and-away. This is good: within the zone, pitches do best up-and-in and down-and-away. His two-seam to RHBs is thrown regularly to these locations. With his four-seam he mostly stays away.

To LHBs, the orientation of his two-seam would be opposite of ideal, where hitters do better. Because of this, he does not throw it as often and there is no general trend to where it ends up. He is left throwing his four-seam fastball much more, concentrating it on the outside half.

The differences are seen in the value of the pitches. Both of the fastballs are good to RHBs (0.4 runs above average for his four-seam and 0.7 for his two-seam), but against LHBs things fall apart (0.8 runs below average for the the four-seam and a horrid 2.5 runs below average for the two-seam).

As Dave noted, this is a really questionable call against a team with some good lefties.

According to Jon Heyman, the Angels have offered a two year contract extension for Bobby Abreu worth $8 million a season. Adding Abreu has been one of the things that has pushed the Angels offense forward this year, and they’d understandably like to keep his bat around for the next couple of years. Is a 2 year, $16 million offer fair for both sides?

Over the last three years, Abreu has established a pretty consistent skillset – he draws a bunch of walks, has gap power, runs the bases well, but defends like an old man. His wOBAs from 2007 to 2009: .360, .368, and .367, which makes him worth around 20 runs above an average hitter over a full season.

Defensively, it’s another story. Even as a corner outfielder, he’s bad. His UZR this year was “only” -10 this year after a disastrous -26 in 2008, but a decent chunk of that was from throwing – the ARM portion of his UZR went from +2.4 to +6.8 runs this year, somewhat hiding the fact that he still can’t run down balls in the outfield.

At 35-years-old, he’s essentially straddling the border between outfielder and DH, being equally valuable in either spot. Regardless of which position he plays, he’s basically an average player, and while he’s getting up there in age, he’s shown enough young player skills that he doesn’t appear to be on his last legs.

At $8 million a year, the Angels are essentially valuing him correctly on the assumption of a $4 million per win market rate, which is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen over the last few years. The offer essentially pays Abreu a fair wage if there won’t be any inflation in the market this winter. Given the economy, betting on salary inflation seems like quite the gamble.

Abreu probably won’t get a significantly better offer than this. If he enjoys playing for the Angels, he should sign the deal. It’s a fair offer.

As we looked at yesterday with John Lannan, inducing ground balls is a great way to overcome other flaws in a pitcher’s repertoire. Lannan’s ERA stands nearly a run below his career FIP because of his high ground ball rate. Similarly, Joel Piniero had his best season in at least six years, and he achieved much of his success via an astounding 60.5% ground ball rate.

Johan Santana, on the other hand, is a pitcher who has no problems striking batters out. Although he has slipped some in recent years, his career K/9 stands at 9.12, meaning he strikes out over a batter per inning on average. He doesn’t struggle with walks either, giving up almost a whole walk less than average, both in recent years and in his career.

However, Santana does not excel in inducing ground balls. His 35.7% ground ball rate last season ranked sixth in the major leagues. Clearly, Santana is a great pitcher, as his 3.38 career FIP, 3.60 career tRA, and 42.4 WAR in the win value era (second only to Roy Halladay) suggest. This begs the question – if inducing ground balls is so essential to pitcher success with guys like Lannan and Piniero, how come it doesn’t seem to affect Santana?

Of course, as mentioned above, Santana’s basic peripherals are incredible. With the amount of outs that Santana gets via the strikeout, his batted ball profile has a much lower impact than with a guy like Lannan (3.9 K/9) or Piniero (4.4 K/9). Also, with a low walk total, the impact of hits on balls in play is lower due to having fewer runners on base for those hits.

The fact that Santana’s peripherals make him a good pitcher isn’t terribly interesting to us here. That’s the crux of the DIPS theory behind FIP. However, tRA, based on batted balls, doesn’t see an issue with Santana due to low GB% as it does with players like Ted Lilly (34.5% GB, 5.12 tRA, 4.45 FIP) or especially Aaron Harang (38.0% GB, 4.98 tRA, 4.10 FIP)

Here, we see two major things come into play. First is line drive rate. As we hit upon with Lannan yesterday, the NL BABIP on line drives is .718. Giving up line drives is an almost sure way to give up hits. Santana, despite the fact that he doesn’t give up many ground balls, has a career line drive rate that is nearly average. Aaron Harang, on the other hand, has a career LD% over 2% above the average – significant for a statistic that has a range under 9% for a single season.

Also, Santana’s infield fly rate is one of the highest in the league. His 16.4% rate led the majors by 1.5%, and his 13.3% career rate is in the top 10 since 2002, the beginning of our batted ball data. The league BABIP on infield flies is miniscule. After a strikeout, the next best way to insure an out is to induce an infield fly. Santana has repeatedly been above average in this statistic since 2002. As a result, the true problem with fly balls – their penchant to turn into home runs – is minimized by this ability to induce weak contact on balls in the air. As such, Santana’s career HR/FB is below average, and has effectively cancelled out the sheer number of fly balls he gives up, resulting in an average HR/9.

With the amount of HRs and line drives Santana gives up limited, and the amount of essentially automatic outs he induces via the infield fly, Santana’s low amount of ground balls has no impact on his incredible peripherals, making him still one of the best pitchers in the game today.

The pitching was not pretty but the bats certainly picked up the slack for Philadelphia. The Phillies took Game One of the National League Championship Series on Thursday night with an 8-6 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

On offense, both left fielder Raul Ibanez and catcher Carlos Ruiz added nails to the Dodgers’ Game One coffin with three-run homers. Ruiz posted a WPA of .275, while Ibanez sat at .151. Ruiz added a single and walk to his performance on Thursday. Ibanez also had a single and scored a second run. For the third straight game, first baseman Ryan Howard made the most of one hit. He drove in two runs, scored once and walked twice. His WPA was .158.

Both left-handed starters, Cole Hamels for Philly (-.196 WPA) and Clayton Kershaw for LA (-.301), struggled. The pitcher of the game was Philadelphia reliever Chan Ho Park, who interestingly enough pitched for Los Angeles last year. He took to the mound in the seventh inning and posted a .240 WPA while striking out a batter and inducing two ground balls. Park missed the National League Division Series with injury woes and is not considered to be at full strength yet.

It’s not often that a team will walk away with a win in Los Angeles after allowing five Dodgers hitters to bang out two or more hits. Both James Loney (.193 WPA) and Andre Ethier (.176) had three hits. Manny Ramirez (-.042) was held to just one hit – but it was a two-run homer off of Hamels.

Let’s take a closer look at Carlos Ruiz‘ season. He doesn’t get a lot of attention as a top catcher because he doesn’t hit for a high average or slug a lot of homers, but the Panama native is better than most people realize (at least in the catcher context). For the ’09 season, Ruiz finished tied for fourth with St. Louis’ Yadier Molina in wOBA (.337) amongst catchers in the National League (300+ at-bats).

His ISO of .171 was good for fifth in the league for backstops. Ruiz also had the third highest walk rate and the third lowest strikeout rate. His BABIP of just .266 helps to explain the low batting average. He had the fourth best WPA (0.37) behind Atlanta’s Brian McCann (1.57), Arizona’s Miguel Montero (0.80), and Cincinnati’s Ramon Hernandez (0.62).

Overall, Ruiz was worth about $10 million to the Phillies in 2009 (he’s actually making just $475,000, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts), or slightly more than two runs above replacement. With his post-season contributions to this point added in, Ruiz has been worth much more than that to the Phillies.

Sam Fuld is unique.

Quite a few ballplayers have gone to Stanford University, and more than a few are known to be fans of numbers, but how many can say they interned with Stats Inc.? A somewhat recent ESPN.com piece told of Fuld’s duties for the numbers-tracking giant:

“I was one of their reporters, which meant that I looked at game video and plotted the ‘TVL’ — type, velocity and location — of every pitch,” Fuld said. “They have this grid where you click on exactly where the ball crosses the plate. Play the tape, pause and repeat.” A monotonous job, no? “It sounds tedious, and it was, but for whatever reason I handled it,” Fuld says. “I guess there’s a lot of baseball nerds out there.”

Coincidentally, Fuld nearly pulled a feat this season that his previous employer would’ve found amusing. Despite receiving more than 115 plate appearances, Fuld entered the final game of the 2009 season without a single run batted in. The odds of going that long are pretty miniscule; after all, a simple home run notches a RBI, yet until his fifth inning homer, Fuld had a clean sheet.

As it turns out, using Baseball-Reference’s Play Index tool, Fuld actually held the second longest RBI-less streak to begin a career since 1954. Cleveland’s Lou Camilli went 73 games and 135 at-bats without an RBI in a streak that lasted over three seasons. Fuld’s streak is more implausible because (a) he actually hit pretty well (.270/.397/.340) and (b) the entirety of his drought took place in just over 12 months.

The next highest OPS to go more than 30 games shares something in common with Fuld as he too was a member of the Cubs. Jesus Figueroa started his career on the 22nd of April and didn’t record his first RBI until June 15th of the same year. That’s a span of 32 games in which he hit .313/.371/.344. Cubs are all over the place when you limit the search from the year 2000 onwards and take away the caveat that it must be at the beginning of a player’s career. Tom Goodwin went 56 games back in 2004 and 45 games for Juan Pierre in 2006. Again though, neither hit quite as well as Fuld.

There may not be a prototypical player for such a trivial pursuit, but Fuld’s skill set does lend to this record, consider that a player must bat low in the lineup, not have great slugging abilities, and have weak batters ahead of him.

I just wonder whether Fuld was aware.

George Orwell once wrote, “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” Orwell was hardly writing about baseball and the bench players who come to bat only in place of a pitcher or weaker hitter, but that doesn’t stop us from appreciating the guys who do so more often than anyone else in the game.

Above is a table of the 20 players with the most pinch hit appearances along with some other pivotal information about them, such as their team, phLI (which is the average leverage index of their pinch hit plate appearances), plate appearances as a pinch hitter, and their OPS. While your eyes scan the chart looking for tidbits, allow me to outline some of the more notable ones:

– Yes, Greg Norton lead the league in pinch hit appearances and yes his OPS is quite poor. However, Norton’s line is pretty magic itself: 89 plate appearances, 20 walks, 18 strikeouts, and 11 hits. That works out to a slash line of .162/.360/.191. Only two of Norton’s hits went for extra bases – both doubles – and somehow he managed to walk more than he struck out. That’s incredible.

– Delwyn Young possesses the highest phLI, which means he was called upon to hit in situations with higher leverage than the rest of the guys on the list. On the flip side, there’s Darin Erstad who partook in a bunch of snoozers.

– Worth noting is how liberally some teams used multiple pinch hitters this much. The Astros, Dodgers, Marlins, Mets, Padres, Phillies, and Pirates are each represented once, while three National League teams aren’t represented at all: the Diamondbacks, Cardinals, and Nationals. This doesn’t mean those teams fail in using the pinch hitter or anything that telling; it could simply mean they use a number of players in lower doses.

– Also worth noting, the American League pinch hitting appearance leaders: Gabe Gross, Nomar Garciaparra, Hideki Matsui, Willy Aybar, and Ryan Raburn have the top five most appearances, and Gross is actually the only American League player with more than 30. His platoon counterpart, Gabe Kapler, appeared as a pinch hitter 15 times.

When you think of why the Phillies are a good baseball team, there are some obvious reasons – Chase Utley is one of the best players in the game, Cole Hamels and Cliff Lee are top-notch LHPs, and Ryan Howard can hit a baseball a very long way. However, there are also some less notable reasons why the Phillies have succeeded this year, including a pretty remarkable ability to stay out of the double play.

The Phillies hit into 90 double plays this year, fewest of any team in baseball. In fact, no team has hit into fewer than 90 double plays in a full season since 1992, when the Braves hit into just 82 twin-killings. Philadelphia hit into 41 fewer DPs than the Dodgers, or basically one fewer every four games.

What’s even more amazing, however, is that the Phillies avoided double plays while also putting a lot of men on base. In general, the best way to avoid making two outs on one play is to have a bad offense that rarely gets anyone on, but Philadelphia racked up the baserunners this year and still managed to avoid the 6-4-3 with regularity.

While there’s no single cause for double play avoidance, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the Phillies have been able to pull this off, given the types of players they employ. They have a roster full of guys who run well and prefer to hit the ball in the air. As a team, they had a GB% of just 40.4%, fourth lowest in the game.

Forty-seven percent of Chase Utley’s balls in play were flyballs – it’s really hard to turn two on a guy who uppercuts the ball and can run well when he does hit it on the ground. Those are the two main reasons Utley hit into only five double plays all season. That total was matched by Shane Victorino, and they were two of only six players in baseball with 600+ PA to hit into five or fewer double plays on the season.

It’s a little thing, but it’s one of those little things that can add up over the course of a season, and can play a big role in a short series like the NLCS. If the Dodgers find themselves having to pitch out of a jam, they better go for the strikeout, because they’re probably not going to get the rally-killing double play to bail them out. Not against this Phillies team.