Kyle Schwarber was the show, or at least the story, in last night’s Game Two of the World Series. After five plate appearances in April without a hit — followed by a six-month layoff that prevented him from facing even one major-league pitcher in a game situation — Schwarber has been up to the plate nine times on the biggest stage baseball has to offer. In those nine plate appearances, Schwarber has reached base safely more often than he hasn’t, and has yet to be retired when hitting the ball in play. Last night, his hits proved timely, producing the second and fourth runs for the Chicago Cubs as they evened a series that now heads back to Chicago. How has Cleveland approached him, and how has he responded?

It’s often said at the beginning of spring training that the pitchers are ahead of the hitters; batters don’t yet have their timing back and can have difficulty recognizing pitches. The chart below depicts all 40 pitches Schwarber has seen this postseason, color-coded by the result of the pitch. From Baseball Savant:

Of the 20 or so pitches clearly outside of the box above, Schwarber has offered at just three of them. Read the rest of this entry »

There are few people I know that like baseball as much as Jeff Sullivan. I’m continually jealous of the way he can see things that I can’t see in the game, spotting little details that make for fantastic stories, and engaging with aspects of the sport that most people gloss over. While some may like the history of the game, or the ability to parse all the information it provides, Jeff is one of those who you can say truly enjoys the game on the field.

With that said, here’s Jeff’s take on last night’s game, as he was live-blogging as it went down.

Jeff wasn’t just being grumpy. August Fagerstrom, who was at the game in person, said this in our postgame chat about who was covering what.

If Game Two of the 2016 World Series was a movie, it would have 0% on Rotten Tomatoes this morning. Even with Jake Arrieta carrying a no-hitter into the sixth inning, that was not a display of baseball at its best. This was a four hour and four minute contest that featured a grand total of six runs over nine innings, and Major League Baseball needs to spend some serious time trying to make sure that they don’t offer up many more games like that to the general public.

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One of the biggest strikeouts in last night’s World Series Game Two came in the seventh inning when Carlos Santana swung through a curveball from Mike Montgomery. The Indians had two on and two out, and trailed 5-1. One swing of the bat would have brought them to within a run.

The curveball has been Montgomery’s secret to success. The 27-year-old lefty began featuring it prominently after coming to the Cubs from the Mariners in late July. His sinker has also became a primary weapon. His pitching coach, Chris Bosio, deserves much of the credit.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Arizona Diamondbacks farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Strikeout rate dropped from 17% to 13% after promotion to Triple-A, while walk rate held steady at 8.5%.

Scouting Report
The Diamondbacks drafted Banda out of high school in 2011. He didn’t sign, though, and then matriculated to JUCO powerhouse San Jacinto in Houston. The Brewers drafted and signed him the next year and Banda spent two years struggling in Rookie-level ball before the Diamondbacks acquired him in the Gerardo Parra deal (along with Mitch Haniger) in July of 2014. Banda took off after that, went to the Futures Game this year and had success at Triple-A in the hitter-friendly environs of Reno.

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Potential rooting interests notwithstanding, last night’s World Series Game Two was pretty brutal, as far as World Series games go. It was a cold, wet, dreary night in Cleveland. One team’s win expectancy was greater than 90% by the fifth inning. It lasted more than four hours. The Indians made six pitching changes. The Cubs made more mound visits than pitches. Trevor Bauer started for Cleveland, and of his 87 pitches, just 53 were strikes. Jake Arrieta started for Chicago, and of his 98 pitches, just 55 were strikes.

Tough game to watch, all around. So, rather than dissect the game, let’s dissect Jake Arrieta’s postgame press conference. These things aren’t always very revealing, but in the spirit of the current political season, maybe some fact-checking can reveal some truths.

* * *

Q. You started off a little rocky and then you got it back. How did you turn it around?
JAKE ARRIETA: “Well, I think really controlling my effort is when I was able to get locked in. I kind of had my foot on the gas a little too much at the start, trying to do more than I needed to.”

The first pitch Arrieta threw was his hardest of the night! As easy as it can be to write off something like “I had to get locked in” as a ballplayer cliche, these are human beings who are prone to unintentional rushes of adrenaline, and this is, after all, the freaking World Series. Arrieta hit 95 on the first pitch of the night to Carlos Santana, and then never hit 95 again. He was all over the place in the first, throwing just 43% strikes, his lowest strike rate of any inning, and walking Francisco Lindor on four consecutive pitches with two outs. The adrenaline effect is real. It looks like it was real for Arrieta last night, and it may help explain part of his early-game troubles to command his pitches.

Q. You started off a little rocky and then you got it back. How did you turn it around?
JAKE ARRIETA (cont.): “Then I really got back to just executing good pitches towards the bottom of the strike zone. With the cutter going one way and the sinker going the other way, trying to be as aggressive as I could, and allow those guys to put the ball in play and let the defense work.”

In the first inning, 57% of Arrieta’s pitches were in the lower half of the zone or beyond. After that, it was 56%. The first-inning issue wasn’t necessarily leaving the ball up, but there’s a different between “pitches toward the bottom of the strike zone” and “good pitches toward the bottom of the strike zone.”

Lower-half pitches in the first:

After the first:

It’s tough to compare one inning to 4.2, but I think I’ll allow it. That really bad slider off the plate in the first didn’t come back. Those three middle-middle pitches didn’t come back. It seems like there’s a higher percentage of pitches catching the bottom edge of the zone.

Q. You started off a little rocky and then you got it back. How did you turn it around?
JAKE ARRIETA (cont.): “Then in the sixth, I think that maintaining a consistent feel and on a night like this with the weather the way it was can be tough. So I tried to keep the body warm and ready to go the best I could.”

Nope.

It was rainy, windy, and in the low-40s by a lake in Ohio. Wearing short sleeves is not how one tries to keep the body warm, you absolute madman.

Q. You mentioned the conditions, how did they affect your choices? And how would you compare tonight to that Game 2 you started in Citi Field last year?
JAKE ARRIETA: “Pretty similar, I would say. I think the temperature was probably close to what it was at Citi Field.”

Last night’s first-pitch temperature: 43 degrees, cloudy.

Last year’s first-pitch temperature: 45 degrees, partly cloudy.

Q. You mentioned the conditions, how did they affect your choices? And how would you compare tonight to that Game 2 you started in Citi Field last year?
JAKE ARRIETA (cont.): “I think keeping my hand as warm as I could in between innings to not lose feel in the fingertips, because for, not even just a starting pitcher, but for a pitcher, you want to have that consistent feel off your fingertips, especially on your breaking ball, to maintain consistency with how you execute those pitches.”

Arrieta may not have made the best life choice for keeping the body warm, but as far as keeping the hand warm, it seems like he did a fine job, because last night’s success had plenty to do with his breaking pitches. As our own Jeff Sullivan detailed back in late-August, a big part of Arrieta’s midseason skid had to do with his struggles against left-handed batters. This, coming on the heels of his excellent slider disappearing. Against lefties in 2015, Arrieta was able to paint the outer edge of the zone, back-dooring his breaking pitches in at the last second. During much of 2016, rather than starting his breaking pitches outside the zone and back-dooring them to the edge, he was too often starting them on the edge and moving them to the middle of the plate.

Last night, Arrieta threw 36 breaking balls to lefties out of 71 pitches — 51%, almost double his season rate. And here’s the location of those pitches to lefties:

Arrieta absolutely lived on the outer half of the plate, and you see all the purple in the bottom-left quadrant of the zone, indicating well executed back-door sliders, and enough light blue in the area, too, indicating those big, looping curves that catch the zone at the last second.

He was wild, but he managed to keep the walk total down, and he was wild out of the zone, rather than being wild with hittable mistake pitches. When Arrieta was able to find the zone, it was with pitches that stuck to the game plan, and with his movement, pitches that stick to the game plan are tough to square up.

And the press conference? Good. More insightful than most. Mostly truthful and supported by the evidence. I give it an 8/10. But, my God man, put on some sleeves.

It would’ve been the thrill of his life to play in his first-ever World Series game, but I don’t think Anthony Rizzo’s going to be telling many stories. Though just being there is an achievement in and of itself, Rizzo finished the game 0-for-4, and he popped up against Corey Kluber three consecutive times. Rizzo is a fly-ball hitter, but he’s not a pop-up hitter. Kluber made him uncomfortable. He made the lot of them uncomfortable. The Cubs were defeated, and I’m sure Rizzo doesn’t want to talk much about it.

But don’t confuse a lack of discussion for a lack of remembrance. Rizzo might not have been successful on Tuesday, but he did pick up on a tell. And he brought that information with him into Game 2, a somewhat sloppy affair the Cubs took 5-1. Rizzo, in the first inning, doubled home Kris Bryant while facing Trevor Bauer. By WPA, it was the most important play of the game, and even just in the moment, it got the Cubs on the World Series scoreboard. Rizzo’s two-strike double was a big one, and had it not been for the night before, it very well might not have happened.

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Earlier today, Eno Sarris took a look at the arsenals of tonight’s World Series Game Two starters, Trevor Bauer and Jake Arrieta. In this article, I’m going to hone in on one of those pitches in particular: Bauer’s curveball.

Pitchers want to disguise their pitches. This is a pretty obvious statement – it’s harder for a batter to hit a pitch if he can’t tell what’s coming. So naturally, conventional wisdom dictates that pitchers should try to make every pitch look the same coming out of their hand. You don’t want drastically different mechanics while throwing one type of pitch than while throwing another.

So when Trevor Bauer throws his curveball from a significantly different height than all his other pitches, that stands out. It’s hard to notice on television, but Bauer releases his curve a full six inches higher than all his other pitches.

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Jon Lester doesn’t throw to first. This isn’t new. In the National League Championship Series, Dodgers runners tried to dance off the first-base bag, taking large leads to try and disrupt Lester. By and large, it didn’t really work. The Dodgers didn’t take the extra base, and Lester had few problems pitching to the Dodgers with runners on.

Last night, in Game One of the World Series, the circumstances were mostly the same. On paper, at least. Cleveland did steal a base against Lester, but they also got caught stealing once, too. That’s actually a net positive for the Cubs in terms of runs. Again, on paper.

One of those stolen bases belonged to Francisco Lindor, though. Not only did the young shortstop steal a base in the first inning, but he preceded it with some of the same sort of dancing with which the Dodgers experimented previously. The end result of that first innings was two runs for Cleveland — the only two they’d need to win the game.

Was there anything Francisco Lindor did that might have gotten Lester out of rhythm in the first inning, or were the two walks and hit-by-pitch that followed simply ill-timed luck. Is there any evidence that ties Lindor’s steal to Lester’s head?

On the season, Lester threw 64% of his pitches for strikes. Generally speaking, he relies on swinging strikes to get batters out, as his strike-zone percentage of 46% placed him among the bottom quarter of qualified pitchers this year. Of the first eight pitches he threw before Lindor’s single, Lester recorded seven strikes, retiring Rajai Davis on four pitches and inducing a first-pitch out from Jason Kipnis. Lindor was only on first base for two pitches, both called balls by the umpire. The second pitch was in the strike zone, but as is sometimes the case on stolen-base attempts, David Ross‘ movements to prepare for throwing out the runner didn’t provide a good opportunity for framing; the pitch, likely as a result, was called a ball.

Six of Lester’s next eight pitches were balls, and suddenly the bases were loaded. For the rest of the game, Lester threw 64% of his pitches for strikes, just like the regular season. Unfortunately for Lester, one of the balls went to human ball-magnet Brandon Guyer, who has what could be generously called a “strategy” for getting hit. That HBP and a swinging bunt on the previous pitch led to the 2-0 Cleveland lead that proved to be the difference.

Let’s take a look at what Lindor did to “distract” Lester. Here’s the stolen base itself:

It doesn’t appear that Lindor does anything out of the ordinary here. He took perhaps a slightly larger lead than normal, and then ran on first movement. Lindor was safe, as Ross had difficulty getting the ball out of the glove. When August Fagerstrom discussed Lester and Ross, he went through the numbers on why it’s so difficult to steal on them despite Lester’s throwing problems:

Well, let’s run some math. The problem here is, Lester and Ross are quick. All of the following information comes from Statcast, provided by Mike Petriello. Lester was getting the ball to the plate between 1.1 and 1.2 seconds last night, and Ross’s average pop time for the season was 1.95, which ranked sixth among 83 catchers with at least five throws to second base. Both those figures could be considered plus to elite on a scouting scale, and as a battery, their ~3.15 time to second base is hard to beat.

Lindor took advantage of a slightly larger lead and the knowledge that he could leave on first movement without consequence. Those two things together likely put Lindor’s chances of stealing a base at something like average for him, after factoring in the speed of Lester’s delivery and Ross’s pop time. Did the steal get in Lester’s head to help cause the walks of the next two batters as Rajai Davis intimated?

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