Episode 780
Like any pair of clubs, the pair of clubs currently participating in the World Series features certain players who’ve achieved major-league relevance by atypical means. Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen discusses that topic and also not that topic.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 2 min play time.)

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No one ever wants to have to talk about the strike zone. If the zone is called well, there’s nothing to discuss; if it isn’t, that’s a problem, but it’s all deeply unfulfilling. Fans don’t want to be helped by the strike zone, because it takes something away from a team’s own achievements. And fans don’t want to be hurt by the strike zone, because it leaves them feeling cheated. Every baseball fan everywhere acknowledges that the game involves a certain human element, but we all prefer to think the games are decided by the players, and by the players alone. Introducing a third party tends to make people upset.

Among the great reliefs of Game 5 is that it won’t be remembered for home-plate umpire Bill Miller. The game packed in enough astonishing action that there are more interesting and important points to make besides the zone having been so weird. Miller made some strange calls, but every pitcher was also entirely gassed, and balls were flying over the fence. Alex Bregman won the game with a walk-off single. Although the zone was pitcher-friendly, there were still 11 total walks and 25 total runs. The lingering image isn’t one of a hitter shaking his head.

Yet the obnoxious reality is that the zone was a factor. The zone is always a factor, because every game changes with every individual pitch. On Sunday, some pitches were called unlike how they usually are. The zone is woven in, inextricable, a part of the larger game story. We’d prefer not to think about it, but blissful ignorance doesn’t acknowledge all that went on.

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This has been a crazy World Series. Last night’s game was particularly nuts, but this whole series has been one long string of unlikely outcomes. Even the run-of-the-mill 3-1 Dodgers victory in Game 1 was remarkable for how short it was. Nothing in this series is usual.

But amidst all the bonkers plays that we’ve seen, I think there was one particular moment last night that still lingers. As I sit here roughly 12 hours after the game ended, I still don’t know how this happened.

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The ball is going faster in both directions these days. Velocities are up, exit velocities are up, and the players are openly discussing the changed nature of the ball. Slippery balls are maybe flattening out sliders this World Series. Are they, though? We can look at what’s happening now, and then we can also compare movement across different times in baseball’s rapidly changing environment as a comparison.

Turns out, movement is the product of a complicated relationship between the pitcher’s mechanics, the seams on the baseball, and how fast the ball is going. (Who would’ve guessed? Pitching is complicated.) Every ball is also slightly different — it’s put together by humans from the hide of a cow, after all — but we’ll never truly know exactly how different this World Series ball really is.

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HOUSTON — Game 5 resided at an extreme pole along the baseball entertainment spectrum. It’s not a game you want to experience every night, but it’s something about which we’ll be talking and of which we’ll be trying to make sense for a while. At least until Game 6.

That said, the aesthetic appeal of the game can certainly be debated: the way fly balls were leaving Minute Maid Park gave the night something of a College World Series feel during its peak-offense period. If you recall, that was an environment that forced the college game to make adjustments to its bats and balls to suppress run scoring, to provide sanity.

One of the overriding themes of the sport this season is the speed at which it has changed, how extreme it has become so quickly. The game continues to evolve even in the postseason, where the average launch angle is 11.9 degrees — up a fraction of a degree from the 11.8 mark during this year’s regular season and 10.8 degrees in 2015 regular season. The average air ball is traveling 291 feet, up from 287 feet in the regular season.

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For most of this postseason, the primary story tying all these disparate series together has been the significant change in the way pitchers are deployed. After Andrew Miller’s dominance last October, aggressive bullpen usage has become the norm. The tone was set in the very first Wild Card game, when Luis Severino got one out but the Yankees advanced anyway, thanks to 8.2 dominant innings from their relief corps.

But now, here we are at the end of the month, and the two bullpens left standing combined to give up 15 runs last night. To be fair, the two starters combined to give up 10 runs, so they didn’t exactly impress either, but neither bullpen had any ability to hold any kind of lead last night. And the players entrusted with those opportunities just looked exhausted.

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I don’t know exactly what it is we just watched. From almost the very first pitch, Game 5 was unrelenting, and it didn’t let up for five hours and seventeen minutes. Even now, I’m afraid it might not be finished — if I turn the feed back on, the Astros and Dodgers might be in the 81st inning. It doesn’t feel right that the game is completed. It also very much needed to end, because it was becoming a matter of survival. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

I’m still not entirely sure that was a good baseball game, in one sense of the word. It was driven by homers, some of them silly, and I wouldn’t call the pitching quite sharp. Each of the bullpens was an absolute nightmare, after the starters threw a combined 8.1 innings, and the overall aesthetics left something to be desired. It wasn’t a game marked by its crispness. The only thing that stopped it from being the longest-ever nine-inning baseball game is that it had to progress to the tenth. The allotted nine innings weren’t enough. They should’ve been enough.

But they weren’t enough, and for that reason, and for so many others, that was a good baseball game, in the other and more obvious sense of the word. Every baseball game asks two things: that you play, and that you play to the end. Every game has a winner, and every game has a loser, and as with any such competition, the drama’s a product of probability swings. Game 5 had more than almost any other World Series game on record. On several occasions, it seemed like it was over. The winning run scored on the game’s final pitch, which was pitch number 417. Hopes were dashed, over and over and over again, as the World Series went completely off-script. That was a contest that spiraled out of control.

As with Game 2, it’s an impossible assignment to do the game justice through writing. We are mostly just fortunate that this series has been so evenly matched. But Alex Bregman won it with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. Here are the times the game seemed over before that.

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Source: FanGraphs

One of the most insane baseball games anyone has ever seen. We will have attempts at analysis later. Now, just amazement.

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HOUSTON — The investigative team of Ben Lindbergh, Rob Arthur and Alan Nathan might have to get back to work. Not only has the ball played differently since 2015 when it became livelier, now the World Series ball is playing differently players told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci.

“Lance McCullers took the blindfold test in the bullpen,” said Charlie Morton, Houston’s Game 4 starter, referring to another Astros pitcher. “He could tell which ball was which with his eyes closed. It’s that different.” Read the rest of this entry »