Yesterday, Alex Anthopolous left the Blue Jays, turning down a contract to remain with the team because, as he said in his conference call, he didn’t think it was a good fit anymore.

“I don’t know that I’ve had to make a harder decision in my life, but I did what I felt like I needed to do,” Anthopoulos said. “I just didn’t feel like this was a right fit for me going forward.”

It’s pretty clearly not a coincidence that Anthopoulos’ exit coincides with the arrival of Mark Shapiro, who was hired in August to take over as the new team president. Shapiro was brought in to replace Paul Beeston, so while it’s not a new position in the Blue Jays organization, the fact that ownership openly courted guys with baseball operations backgrounds — first Kenny Williams, then Dan Duquette, and now Shapiro — makes it seem that they’re changing the responsibilities of the position. Beeston was a business guy, an accountant who worked his way up through the organization’s financial side, but the Blue Jays actions over the last year make it clear they wanted a baseball guy in the team president role.

This is the new trend in baseball, of course. Over the last five years, it has become en vogue to promote the General Manager to President of Baseball Operations, or some similar title. The Blue Jays, in fact, became the 12th team to employ a recently promoted GM (or manager, in one case) in that job, with the title of GM going to someone else in the baseball operations department.

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The narrative, coming into the World Series, was impossible to ignore. Boiled down to its most simple form, it went like this: the Mets are here, playing in the World Series, because they throw really good fastballs. The Royals are here, playing in the World Series, because they’re really good at hitting fastballs. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but that was the most talked-about story, the Mets’ fastballs vs. the Royals’ ability to hit them, and so something had to give. The Mets would either overpower the Royals like few other teams have been able to, or the Royals would become the first team to strike back against New York’s heat.

With the Royals now leading the series 2-0, you can guess what happened. You’d guess the latter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — you don’t outscore your opponent 12-5 and take a 2-0 lead in the World Series without hitting some heaters — but the correct answer might actually be “neither.”

Allow me to explain. The Mets, see, haven’t exactly thrown their fastball. In Game One, Matt Harvey threw a career-low rate of heaters to the Royals, throwing just 30 fastballs while going to his breaking and offspeed stuff 50 times. Granted, he also may have had his career-worst stuff, and the couple ticks he’d suddenly lost in velocity are a reasonable explanation for why he’d be more reliant on his non-fastball offerings.

Then also, there’s this:

Terry Collins said Matt Harvey throwing career-low fastball % was partly respect for Royals fastball hitting, partly lack of pitch sharpness

— Adam Rubin (@AdamRubinESPN) October 28, 2015

A line of thinking exists that if you change what it is that’s made you successful in light of your opponent’s strengths, then you’ve already lost. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the “playing not to lose, rather than playing to win” mantra. As a Mets fan, it’s probably not the thing you want to hear. On the surface, it makes it seem like the Mets had decided beforehand that their strength wasn’t as strong as the Royals strength, and so they changed courses before they had a chance to find out. Of course, there’s some give-and-take here, and it would have been silly for Harvey to not have considered a potential Plan B if he didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate. He didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate, and so he opted for Plan B. And in the end, he really didn’t pitch that poorly.

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After falling to 2-0 against the Royals and their high-contact ways, the Mets will turn to rookie Noah Syndergaard for game 3 tonight. After disappointing outings from both Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom, the Mets are hoping he’ll pitch like he has all season long, and keep his team within striking distance of a World Series title.

I last wrote about Syndergaard when he was called up back in May. Heading into the year, KATOH pegged him for 11.5 WAR through age 28, which was the second highest forecast among pitching prospects, and sixth highest overall. Although he posted an unremarkable 4.60 ERA in a full season at Triple-A in 2014, Syndergaard’s near-30% strikeout rate pushed his KATOH forecast to elite levels. A pitcher’s minor league strikeout rate is a very strong predictor of big league success, and Syndergaard’s was the highest of any Triple-A pitcher at the time of his call up. All while being one of the youngest pitchers at the level.

Thus far, Syndergaard’s lived up to KATOH’s high expectations — and then some. He maintained his near-30% strikeout rate in his rookie season, and actually improved his walk rate at the highest level. The end result was a 3.24 ERA and 3.25 FIP — both figures tops among rookies with at least 130 innings pitched. Those numbers don’t even consider the stellar job he’s done in this year’s postseason: a 1.44 FIP with a 38% strikeout rate against some of the best hitters the National League had to offer.

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During the fifth inning of Game Two, as Alcides Escobar attempted to bunt against Jacob deGrom, Harold Reynolds decried the current state of bunting in professional baseball. Even after he admitted that hard throwers are hard to bunt on, he went on a mini tirade: “I know it’s hard to get one down against a guy that throws this hard, but I’ve never seen this bad of bunting. Ever. Ever! In baseball, just across the board. I know Escobar can handle the bat, but we see this every night. They have to move the runner. Not just the Royals, but across the board.”

The moment was probably lost for a couple reasons. For one, Escobar decided to swing-away after two failed bunt attempts, and promptly tied the game with a single to center. There was too much excitement to think too deeply about the state of bunting in our game. Now we have a second to breathe, though.

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One of the many struggles of every baseball team in the major leagues is to balance the desire to win now and the desire to win in the future. That’s why we have arguments every April about reforming the arbitration system, why teams agonize over trade deadline decisions, and why we talk about pitcher workloads toward the end of each season. We want young, exciting players to be on the field as much as possible. Due to long-term team interests, that doesn’t always happen.

For the Mets, we’ve already witnessed an innings-limit battle play out during September with Matt Harvey, Scott Boras, and Harvey’s potential playoff availability in his first year back from Tommy John surgery. And, before the World Series started, Mets manager Terry Collins alluded to Jacob deGrom also feeling the possible effects of overuse:

“He’s at a stage where the ball doesn’t have the life down, even though he has the velocity,” Collins said. “It doesn’t have the life it once had. He’s been missing balls up in the zone.”

Usually, paying too much attention to word choice in manager interviews is a pointless exercise, but when the greatest strength of a team – its young, dominant starting pitching – is publicly called into question by the team’s manager, it’s at the very least something to pay attention to.

The concern over “the wall” that Collins has been voicing in relation to his young starters is merited. Harvey is coming off a Game One start in which he had some of the worst stuff of his career. And, despite deGrom’s healthy velocity during Game Two (his average fastball was 95.5 mph, not far from his regular season average of 95.8 mph), fatigue doesn’t affect every pitcher’s game in the same way. There are many indicators, as we’ll see below, that suggest deGrom hasn’t quite been himself in his past few starts.

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The other day, I received a tweet saying 72 wins is the new #6org. It was in response to a Jon Heyman article that ripped a Royals preseason 72-win projection. This is just about the best possible time to do that — the only better time, maybe, to write that article could be next week. Now, a difference: the #6org thing is ours. The 72-win Royals projection came from Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system. So, this could be their own version of #6org, but it’s not like PECOTA was all that exceptional. All the systems pretty much agreed. Our own systems projected the Royals to go 79-83. That looks better than PECOTA, but it still looks bad. The Royals have made the numbers look silly, is the point.

They were projected to go maybe .500, and they’re close to winning the World Series. A year ago, they were projected to go something like .500, and they came close to winning the World Series. The year before that, they were projected to go something like .500, and they won 86 games, up 14 from the year previous. Right now the Royals are being described every 10 seconds as relentless. They look like they’re unstoppable, and though they’ve come very close to being stopped, and though they were stopped just last October, there’s still something of a special feeling. The Royals, we’re told, do things differently. On observation, it’s hard to disagree.

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Before the World Series, Tom Verducci wrote an article about the Royals’ advance scouting. Specifically it discussed the scouting done by third base coach Mike Jirschele on Jose Bautista’s throwing habits. There was also a suggestion that the Royals had picked up on David Price tipping his changeup. They used both pieces of information to beat the Blue Jays. So it appears the Royals are pretty good at this advance scouting stuff.

Fast forward to last night’s Game Two against the Mets. Starter Jacob deGrom gave up four runs in the fifth inning on a walk and five singles. Following the game, which the Royals won 7-1, Adam Rubin of ESPN spoke to two people he identified as ex-Met players who suggested deGrom had been tipping his pitches.

From Rubin’s article:

As for deGrom, one ex-Mets player speculated he may have been tipping pitches.“I can’t figure it out yet, but they have something on deGrom out of the stretch,” the retired player indicated. “They better figure it out or they can’t win this series.” Another ex-Met saw the first ex-player’s comment and added: “He must speed up on his heater and a tad slower with other stuff. But I think it’s in his facial expressions — seriously.”

Interesting! The conspiratorial answer often is, after all. The fact that the Royals just did this to Toronto — and to such good effect, too — adds plausibility to the discussion. Even so, I’m not sure I agree. I went back and re-watched the inning to see.

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The World Series is delivering its thrills, but one can still feel a residual tingle from Lorenzo Cain‘s first-to-home dash on Eric Hosmer’s single in the deciding game of the ALCS. Part of that thrill is due to this being a repeat performance by Cain. In the fifth and deciding game of Kansas City’s ALDS, he went first-to-home on a Hosmer single, chipping away at Houston’s 2-0 lead on the way to a 7-2 triumph. Not as dramatic as plating the go-ahead run in the eighth, but it loomed pretty large at the time.

What hasn’t gotten so much attention is the parallel to one of the most fabled plays in baseball history: Enos Slaughter’s Mad Dash Home. In Game Seven of the 1946 World Series, the Red Sox scored two in the top of the eighth to tie the Cardinals 3-3. (Sound familiar?) In the home half, Slaughter got on first for St. Louis, and when Harry “The Hat” Walker laced a two-out hit, Slaughter never slowed down, racing home ahead of the throw to score the decisive run.

The similarities, and differences, between the plays are enlightening. The greatest apparent difference is that Walker was credited with a double. This is widely regarded as a scorekeeper’s mistake. Walker took second on the throw home, and should have had a single, thus making Slaughter’s basepath aggression much clearer. Hosmer left no room for doubt both of his times by staying at first base.

For other matters, it will probably help to look at the plays in question. First, Slaughter in 1946. The quality of the footage is not at all great — you can hear the rattle of the film projector from which it’s taken — but given the age of the play, we are probably a little fortunate to have something this good.

The footage shows Slaughter running with the pitch. We see a close angle on him breaking from first, then cut to a shot behind the plate for Walker’s hit, so it’s not seamless, but it’s clear from how fast Slaughter enters the second shot that he was indeed going.

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Ben and Sam banter about the brilliance of Roger Angell, then discuss the latest Ned Yost news, Jacob deGrom’s supposed pitch-tipping, and more.

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