Alcides Escobar and a Bat and a Ball

Alcides Escobar is not a good hitter. I don’t say that to be mean — I say that to be honest. Even the Royals don’t really know how to explain Esky Magic. There’s no getting around his regular-season numbers, and when you mix in what he’s done in the playoffs, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. He’s the kind of hitter that, if you saw him in a community park, you’d think, that guy ought to play in the majors. But he’s the kind of hitter that, when he’s in the majors, you think, that guy plays a hell of a shortstop. In his best year, Escobar was a bit below average. He followed that year with a year where he hit like a good-hitting pitcher.

Escobar doesn’t walk, and Escobar doesn’t hit for power. The thing he has going for him is he’s tremendously difficult to strike out. In that sense he blends in with the Royals, although even on that roster he’s one of the standouts. Escobar, in short, is good at taking the bat to the baseball. From there, things will sort themselves out. The most charitable way to describe Escobar’s offense is that, with his speed and his contact ability, he’s usually capable of making something happen. Better a ball in play than a whiff, right? You never know, with a ball in play.

In the World Series opener, Escobar’s contact allowed for things to happen. After days of talking about the Royals’ ability to avoid the whiff, Escobar put contact to good use. Two examples were and are obvious. A third was subtle, but without it, Escobar doesn’t score the winning run on the Eric Hosmer sac fly.

If you can take yourself all the way back, go back to the bottom of the first. By this point, even my houseplants know that Escobar has shown a habit of swinging at the first pitch of the ballgame. Seemingly unconcerned — because I can’t imagine he was unaware — Matt Harvey tried to groove a fastball into the glove of Travis d’Arnaud. Escobar swung, like he does, and after he was finished swinging, he subsequently began scoring.

Escobar drove the pitch, for sure. The contact was good. That still probably should’ve been an out, but because of a defensive miscue, Escobar wound up credited with an inside-the-park home run. That’s literally how the Royals offense began its World Series. The big thing Escobar did was hit the ball somewhere fair. The Mets did much of the rest. Balls in play can go for legitimate hits, and they can get messed up by the opponent. Contact. Something happened. All right.

Move all the way ahead to the 14th. Leading off against Bartolo Colon, Escobar got to two strikes, stayed alive, and then pulled a grounder. Seconds later, Escobar was on proper course to become the winning run.

David Wright actually made two mistakes. He seemed to recover from the first, but perhaps because Escobar runs well, Wright had to hurry a throw, and it pulled his teammate off the bag. That put Escobar on first, and Ben Zobrist put Escobar on third, and Eric Hosmer brought Escobar home. Contact. Something happened. All right. Escobar demonstrated one of the upsides of not striking out.

Stay with that at-bat, though. What people will remember is the error. They’ll remember Lucas Duda getting pulled inches off the base. Maybe inch, at the point where he caught Wright’s throw. The error was indeed the biggest thing, but it wouldn’t have happened had Escobar not managed to stay alive. The at-bat began, unexpectedly, with a pair of called strikes. Then Escobar fought off a pair of fastballs up and away. Maybe frustrated, maybe just looking to catch Escobar by surprise, Colon threw his first slider of the outing.

Colon doesn’t throw that many sliders. He’s a fastball guy, a command guy. Escobar took an emergency hack, and he finished his swing standing in front of the left-handed batter’s box. The moving image is wild enough, but there’s nothing better than a still. The still shows the truth, and it shows it permanently.

Were it not for the glove, and, improbably, the bat, the pitch would’ve been on a collision course with d’Arnaud’s right knee. Escobar lunged, and while the pitch was down and more than a foot outside, Escobar slapped it away, forcing another delivery. It was that next delivery that led to Wright’s error, that led to the game ending. I decided to create this plot — here’s all of Escobar’s career contact, with the above pitch clearly highlighted. (This does not include foul tips; only regular fouls, as far as fouls are concerned.)

You see the pitch, toward the fringes. By PITCHf/x coordinates, the pitch was 28 inches from the center of the strike zone, making it the fifth-wildest pitch Escobar has ever hit. It’s separated from No. 1 by barely over an inch. It was contact to the extreme. When a hitter elects to swing at that pitch, it’s pretty much always going to be a whiff. Escobar kept himself battling, and he shortly thereafter arrived on base.

The easy response: Escobar could’ve also stayed alive by just not swinging at the slider in the first place. There are borderline balls, and there are pretty obvious balls, and there are very obvious balls, and there is that pitch. Then Escobar would’ve faced Colon with the count 1-and-2. Absolutely, yes, this is correct. Escobar would be better if he were more disciplined, and this is evidence in a way of why Escobar isn’t more productive overall. He goes after too many bad pitches.

But being aggressive is just part of his game. As such, he goes outside the zone, so he damn well better be able to put the bat on the ball. Despite the aggressiveness, Escobar doesn’t strike out very much. He’s learned how to put the bat on bad pitches, and that’s precisely what he did against Colon. So much of the talk in the lead-up was how hard it can be to put the Royals hitters away. Escobar kept himself going just long enough to benefit from a defensive mistake. Contact. Something happened.

The best thing to do on that pitch is just not swing. Given a swing, however, the best thing to do on that pitch is knock it away foul so you might get something better. This is how Escobar did a bad thing and a good thing at the same time.

And in the end, the numbers show that Alcides Escobar’s plate appearances were a net positive for the Royals. Escobar himself wasn’t all that good. The biggest plays were just mistakes by the Mets. But that’s just one of the things that can happen when you don’t strike out very much — you gain additional opportunities for good breaks. Sometimes it’s a non-factor, sometimes it’s a small factor, and sometimes it’s a huge factor. You could say this is just one of the ways that Alcides Escobar can beat you. He can put the bat on the ball and put you in position to beat yourself.