Midnight struck for baseball’s Cinderella last night, as Adam Wainwright’s curveball played the part of the wicked stepmother. Actually, I don’t know the Cinderella story well enough to know if that sentence makes sense, so let’s move on from this tortured analogy after just one sentence. The Pirates lost last night, and the season that put the city back on the map as a baseball town is now over. So now, there’s one question hanging over the franchise: was this was a one year aberration or was this was the emergence a new force to be reckoned with in the NL Central?

From one perspective, it’s impossible to answer this question right now. We have no idea what the 2014 Pirates will actually look like after an off-season of roster shuffling. They could pony up their entire farm system to land both David Price and Giancarlo Stanton, and then, yeah, they’re obviously a contender next year. Or they might decide to play it safe, wait for the next wave of prospects to hit Pittsburgh, and take a step backwards in a consolidation year. There’s no way to know what the 2014 Pirates are going to do without knowing who is going to be playing for them.

But, we know some of the players that are almost certainly going to be on the team, and we know some things about how the 2013 Pirates won 94 games, so we can look at how much of what they did this year could reasonably be expected to carry over to 2014. So let’s do that.

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Episode 387
Nathaniel Stoltz is a prospect writer for FanGraphs. He’s also the guest on this very compelling edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 58 min play time.)

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2013-14 free-agent market.

Note that, this year, in addition to asking readers to estimate the years/dollars each free agent is likely to receive, FanGraphs is also requesting that readers make note of how much they’d pay each free agent were they, themselves, actual GMs.

In this edition: Bartolo Colon.

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Ahead of game five, Oakland manager Bob Melvin had a tough choice to make. Both Bartolo Colon and Sonny Gray were available on full rest. And though he has indicated that Sonny Gray is his starter, what this post presupposes is: what if he hadn’t told us who was starting. Who would we choose to be his starter?

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2013-14 free-agent market.

Note that, this year, in addition to asking readers to estimate the years/dollars each free agent is likely to receive, FanGraphs is also requesting that readers make note of how much they’d pay each free agent were they, themselves, actual GMs.

In this edition: A.J. Burnett.

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Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies in the World Series in 2009, and though Lee and the Phillies didn’t win, the ace impressed armchair psychiatrists and industry officials alike with his apparent countenance and composure under stress. One of my favorite baseball anecdotes is that, the next spring, in a team meeting, a coach pointed to Lee and held him up as an example of how to stay balanced and perform when the pressure’s really on. It was then that Lee spoke up and said, paraphrased, “actually I damn near s*** my pants.”

In a postgame interview Wednesday night, Adam Wainwright admitted to having been nervous, given that he was tasked to start a do-or-die Division Series Game 5. Wainwright’s pitched in a World Series before, and he already had 14 games of playoff experience, but you could hardly blame him for being human. Experience doesn’t make you immune to feelings. It maybe gives you a better idea of how to handle them. Wainwright was chosen for the postgame interview because he threw a complete game to allow the Cardinals to advance to the NLCS. For the second time in two starts, Wainwright was dominant, and though there’s no such thing as an unwinnable game, Wainwright is the reason why you talk about avoiding aces in October. The Pirates technically had two chances to win this series, but this is why it felt like they only had one.

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Ben and Sam discuss Cubs prospects and (at the end of the episode) Joe Girardi’s managerial decision, then talk about the Pirates’ loss and answer some listener emails.

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Something I like to look at after every season is a chart of the locations of all the season’s intentional balls. Intentional balls, of course, are supposed to be super far away from the strike zone, but out of any such group there has to be a pitch that’s closest to being a strike, and for some reason those pitches fascinate me. This project would by no means be timely right now, in the middle of the playoffs, but something that is timely is something very similar. Along a similar vein to intentional balls, we have hit-by-pitches.

Hit-by-pitches just about have to be pitches out of the zone, in order to hit a batter, since batters stand some distance away from the plate. These pitches aren’t thrown wildly intentionally, but the locations are generally way off regardless, because pitchers aren’t perfect. But out of the pool of all hit-by-pitches, there has to be a pitch closest to having been in the zone. What follows is inspired by Shane Victorino.

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The other day, in one of my chats, someone asked if I could design a dream starting pitcher, throwing any four pitches of my choosing. Of the pitches, I wanted a curveball, and of all the curveballs, I settled on Adam Wainwright‘s. There are a host of excellent curveballs out there — Clayton Kershaw‘s is famous, and Jose Fernandez’s will be — but Wainwright’s is spectacular, and I was also dealing with recency bias after Wainwright’s start against the Pirates in which his curve flat-out dominated. That curve was fresh in my mind, and the worst thing about Wainwright’s game ending was that I wouldn’t be able to watch that curveball anymore.

A funny thing happened on an earlier tour through the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. I was looking at 2013 starting pitchers, and I was looking at curveballs, and almost by accident, I noticed that Wainwright’s curve generated a good whiff rate, but Gerrit Cole’s generated an excellent whiff rate. Cole — Wainwright’s opponent in just a couple hours in Game 5 of that series. This was originally slated to be a matchup between two great curves. Now it looks like a matchup between one of those great curves, and another, also great curve. There are a few things we can take away from this.

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2013-14 free-agent market.

Note that, this year, in addition to asking readers to estimate the years/dollars each free agent is likely to receive, FanGraphs is also requesting that readers make note of how much they’d pay each free agent were they, themselves, actual GMs.

In this edition: Bronson Arroyo.

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