The Astros beat the Yankees 8-3 last night, moving within a win of their second World Series berth in three years, but the night didn’t have to turn out that way. The victory was comprehensive — Houston out-homered the Yankees, had more non-homer hits, struck out less than half as often, and committed three fewer errors. Five runs is an odd lead, but it’s also the first truly safe lead in baseball. The Astros could have spotted the Yankees a grand slam before the game and still come out ahead.

But baseball doesn’t really work that way. If the Yankees had started the game ahead 4-0, things would have gone differently. Batters wouldn’t have gotten the same pitches, different Yankees relievers would have thrown, A.J. Hinch would have been forced to manage differently; the things that happened last night weren’t deterministic, destined to play out in the same order regardless of circumstance.

So with that in mind, let’s look at a few places where the Yankees could have changed history. They might have lost anyway, and they might have won — but they had their chances to do something, and simply didn’t make the most of them.

Gary Sánchez Bats in the First
Gary Sánchez bats seventh for the Yankees, so when he appears in the first inning, something has gone very right. Not only that, but he came up with the bases loaded; Zack Greinke looked shaky, with three walks on the night already, and Sánchez had a chance to deliver a decisive blow early. Read the rest of this entry »

In a postseason full of headline-grabbing stories (the ball is de-juiced! Gerrit Cole is a cyborg! The Nationals win in the playoffs now!), a quiet bulletin came out on Wednesday. Bloomberg’s Scott Soshnick reported that Major League Baseball will now allow investment funds to take minority stakes in teams.

The news cycle moved on. The Yankees-Astros game was postponed! What will A.J. Hinch and Aaron Boone do with their rotation flexibility? Did you know Juan Soto isn’t yet 21? There are big baseball things happening right now! Investment mumbo-jumbo has a way of fading to the background.

I’m here to tell you that it matters. Not in an urgent, baseball-ends-today way, but in a way that could change the nature of the sport long-term. This story might not be on everyone’s radar right now, but it’s important to consider the ramifications and conflicts of interest that can arise from a small change.

To understand what this decision means, we’ll need a little background. First, let’s talk about what an investment fund is. It’s a broad term by design, one that encompasses many different ways of pooling together money. Without further comment from MLB, we can’t know the exact specifications of what they’ll allow, but we can make some educated guessed. A college endowment? Definitely. A special purpose fund raising money from 100 rich people to invest in teams? Certainly — one has already been started, and it plans to raise $500 million to purchase minority stakes.

What about a pension fund? Pension funds’ preferred tax status mirrors that of college endowments, and the two invest in very similar ways. A hedge fund? Baseball will have to spell out the rules, but that doesn’t seem so different from letting endowments or pensions own minority shares, and it’s certainly not much different than a special purpose vehicle. Heck, hedge funds are largely specialized investment pools already, and endowments and pensions make up a sizable portion of hedge fund assets under management. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about some intentional walk decisions that merited further scrutiny. One of them was pretty bad and one of them was a little bad, but both managers advanced to the NLCS — and now, like clockwork, we have more intentional walk decisions to analyze. Playoff baseball is predictable like that, even as it’s unpredictable in other ways.

Let’s take these two chronologically. The Yankees had their backs against the wall, down 2-0 against Gerrit Cole to start the seventh. It got worse quickly, with two of the first three runners reaching base. That gets us to our situation; second and third, one out, and Alex Bregman at the plate facing Adam Ottavino. Aaron Boone put up four fingers; he chose to face Yuli Gurriel rather than Bregman.

The surface level math on this one doesn’t look that bad for Boone. The trail runner here simply doesn’t matter that much; if Bregman scores, it’s 5-0, and three innings to score five runs is a tall task against Gerrit Cole and the best relievers the Astros can muster. To approximate the lower run-scoring environment they’re facing, I lowered the run environment in our WPA Inquirer to 4.5. The decision hardly hurt the Yankees; their odds of winning fell from 12.3% before the walk to 12.0% afterwards.

When an intentional walk only costs 0.3% of win expectancy when ignoring batters, it’s more often a good one, and a cursory look at Bregman and Gurriel’s wOBA agrees with that. That doesn’t even add in platoon splits; Gurriel has a reverse split in his major league career, and even regressing it back to the mean leaves him only 3% better against lefties than righties. Bregman, meanwhile, clocks in at 6.8% better against lefties than righties post-regression.

Put that all together, and Gurriel’s projected wOBA against Britton (accounting for Britton’s own splits) comes out to .314, while Bregman’s is .372. Given that the Yankees gave up so little win expectancy by putting Bregman on, the back-of-the-envelope math makes the decision obvious. The team would need to face a batter who projected to be at least 31 points of wOBA worse than Bregman to make the decision worth it, and Gurriel is 58 points worse. Good intentional walk! Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals are having a terrible postseason at the plate. They were no-hit for seven and two-third innings by Aníbal Sánchez for goodness sake, and while their subsequent struggles against Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg made more sense, it’s fair to say the team has a problem. But St. Louis had the worst non-pitcher wRC+ among teams to qualify for the postseason, so it’s hardly a surprise to see its roster scuffle against playoff rotations.

The Cardinals’ recent three game stretch of futility leaves their team postseason slash line at .207/.264/.331, a truly grim line. No one is questioning their credentials as the worst postseason offense. The next team on the list, though, might surprise you: it’s the Houston Astros, who are hitting a collective .218/.281/.367 through seven games. A dramatic Carlos Correa home run evened their series with the Yankees 1-1, but they’ve still only produced three runs over two games of the ALCS.

Houston’s offensive ineptitude hasn’t yet caught up to them, but it’s still concerning. Heck, the team literally cracked the code in their shelling of Tyler Glasnow in the ALDS, and their offense has struggled mightily even after accounting for that. There’s some chance, however remote, that the Astros’ offense is doomed, that everyone turned into a pumpkin at once. There’s a higher chance that we should just completely ignore this result; during the regular season, the offense produced a 126 wRC+, easily the best in baseball. But rather than take either extreme course, let’s take a closer look at what has happened and see if we can find any takeaways.

One thing you’ll hear ad nauseam at FanGraphs is that context is important when it comes to looking at a team’s season-long stats. Postseason rosters can be constructed quite differently than a team’s regular-season squad, and looking at 162 games of fill-ins and getaway day lineups can obscure a team’s true talent level. Read the rest of this entry »

In a matchup between the two best lineups in baseball, you don’t expect to see a pitching duel. In a matchup between the team with the best starting rotation in baseball and the team with the best bullpen in baseball, you don’t expect to see many runs scored. This series was hard to characterize before it started, but last night’s Game 1 of the ALCS between the Astros and the Yankees felt neither like a pitching duel nor a shootout; it felt like a regular season game between two mismatched opponents, the last thing we expected from this much-anticipated series.

Soon enough, the games will be dominated by high velocity and overpowering four-seam fastballs. Justin Verlander and James Paxton face off today, followed by Gerrit Cole and Luis Severino. The flames the broadcast shows on the score bug for the fastest fastballs will get a workout. But yesterday, we got the kitchen sink; Zack Greinke, who sometimes throws his fastball more slowly than his changeup, took on Masahiro Tanaka, who pitches off of his slider and threw the fifth-lowest rate of fastballs among all starters.

Tanaka stuck with the blueprint that has served him well throughout his time in the majors; an even split of sliders, splitters, and fastballs. The slider was on point all night, and it’s a good thing; all eight of the swinging strikes he generated came on sliders, and it also got more called strikes than any other pitch.

Now, eight swinging strikes isn’t an overpowering amount; Tanaka struck out only four batters. Even with the deadened postseason baseball, allowing that much contact is no way to live for a pitcher. How did Tanaka make it work? He controlled the count to great effect. He allowed 13 balls in play, and exactly one of them came with the batter ahead in the count (a pop up off the bat of Kyle Tucker). Read the rest of this entry »

I still remember where I was the first time Playoff Kershaw became a thing. It was 2013, and the Dodgers were a juggernaut. They’d steamrolled through the second half of the regular season behind an exuberant Yasiel Puig and a dominant Clayton Kershaw, and they manhandled the Braves in the NLDS behind two triumphant starts from their ace; 13 innings, a solitary earned run, and 18 strikeouts.

He pitched well against the Cardinals in his first start of the NLCS, a 1-0 loss, which brings us to my memory. Game 6, an elimination game for Los Angeles, wasn’t going to be easy for me to watch. My girlfriend and I were in a remote town in Argentinian Patagonia, and the satellite signal came in intermittently between cloudbursts. On a grainy, 18-inch TV, we sat down to watch the broadcast in Spanish.

Kershaw imploded. Michael Wacha dominated. The announcers screamed with joy at every run, exulted in rich and varied pronunciations of “Kershaw” and “Wacha,” and generally had a great time. I drank it in right along with them, marveling at the good fortune that led the Cardinals past such a formidable opponent with a rookie starter on the mound. I couldn’t have known it was the start of something bigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote about some dicey intentional walk decisions from the two NLDS series. One worked and one didn’t, but both of them were decisions managers made in huge leverage situations, and both managers tried to put their thumb on the scale of fate and influence the direction one way or another. Today, I’m going to talk about a decision that didn’t end up mattering nearly as much.

Brian Snitker tried to seize a small edge in yesterday’s Cardinals/Braves game, starting Adam Duvall in the outfield over Matt Joyce despite the fact that Joyce is left-handed and Jack Flaherty is a righty. It looked like a weird decision, one that might swing the game, but of course it didn’t. Nothing Snitker could have done, short of conducting a seance to channel the life force of a young Warren Spahn into Mike Foltynewicz, could have mattered.

The Cardinals scored 10 runs in the first inning, an endless deluge of offense, run stacked upon run. They added another in the second, and by the time Duvall stepped to the plate, our game win probability stood at 1.4% for the Braves, though the system doesn’t work well with such extreme margins. The leverage index of that at-bat was a measly 0.11, and it didn’t get better from there; his subsequent at-bats came with leverage of 0.02, 0.01, and 0.00.

So Snitker tried to make a small decision, and the gods of baseball laughed in his face. That doesn’t mean we can’t analyze his decision though, that we can’t evaluate it on its merits regardless of the actual outcome. If this game was played a million times, the vast majority would be closer than yesterday, and in some of those the difference between Duvall and Joyce would decide the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Over five postseason games, the Rays have had a plethora of heroes. Tommy Pham is batting .429/.455/.714, good for a scalding 213 wRC+. Willy Adames has been even better, with a 240 wRC+ and an actual cannon for an arm. Charlie Morton has thrown 10 innings and allowed only a single run. Nick Anderson and Diego Castillo have been lights out; the list goes on and on. Spare a thought, though, for Ji-Man Choi, who might not lead the team in batting but surely leads it in sheer delight.

If you want to understand how weird Choi’s contributions have been, a good place to start is the walk rate. He’s drawn six walks in 19 postseason plate appearances, good for a 31.6% walk rate. That’s second only to Giancarlo Stanton’s 36.4% among batters with 10 or more PA, and it’s the reason for his outrageous .154/.421/.385 batting line. When you see a slugging percentage lower than an on-base percentage, that usually means a batter has no power. Not so with Choi — he has a home run in the postseason and a solid .231 ISO. He just walks all the dang time.

But uh — a .154 batting average? Does he have a .000 BABIP or something? Not at all — it’s a reasonable .250. No, his batting average woes come down to a 42.1% strikeout rate, which is about as terrible as it sounds, even in the small sample theatre that is October baseball. It’s a strikeout world these days, but not that much of a strikeout world; the only players in the playoffs with a higher strikeout rate than Choi are A.J. Pollock (76.9%!), Miguel Sanó, Gavin Lux, and Brandon Lowe, and two of those guys have wRC+’s below zero.

In fact, Choi’s .250 BABIP is of the 1-for-4 variety, because 15 of his 19 plate appearances have ended in a strikeout, walk, or home run. That home run came in the Rays’ 10-3 pasting of Zack Greinke in Game 3, and it buoys Choi’s overall stats, so I might as well show it here:

Read the rest of this entry »

In my head, the playoffs have always had a unique relationship with analysis. Things are happening, always new and exciting things, and I feel a strong desire to know what’s skill and what’s luck, to sort out whether Adam Wainwright found the secret formula to pitching or whether he just had a good breakfast Sunday, while the Braves stubbed their collective toes on the hotel bed frame.

But for the most part, there’s not much to say conclusively about one pitching outing, or even a few pitching outings. The samples are vanishingly small in the postseason, and so I watch for the narratives and the drama, rather than trying to find an interesting line to analyze. Sure, I have opinions about the players in the playoffs, formed from a year of crunching numbers on their performances. But for the most part, I don’t use October to tell me new things about them.

If Patrick Corbin comes in and gives up six runs in relief, is he bad? Is he unsuited to relieving? Did he just not have it that day? I don’t know, and short of some velocity or spin rate smoking gun, I’ll probably never know.

Having said all that, there’s one thing I feel very comfortable analyzing. Managers still walk people intentionally in the playoffs, and maybe they shouldn’t. Dave Martinez and Mike Shildt succumbed to the temptation of making a difference over the weekend, and while neither decision ended up impacting the final accounting of the game, I was curious to see what those walks did to the teams’ chances of winning.

Let’s talk about Martinez’s decision first, because it’s much stranger. We’ll set the stage with all the essentials: in Game 2 of their series against the Dodgers, the Nationals took a 4-2 lead into the ninth inning, with Daniel Hudson taking the mound following a dominant inning by Max Scherzer. Justin Turner doubled to start the inning, but Hudson rebounded, striking out A.J. Pollock and getting Cody Bellinger to pop out to third. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is unpredictable, to a point. It’s a round bat and a round ball; anything can happen in 75 plate appearances. You’ve heard the platitudes. It’s not wild randomness, though. When the pitcher throws the ball to home plate, it won’t turn into a bouquet of flowers halfway there. Smashed line drives become hits most of the time. The Astros were always likely to win the AL West this year. The Dodgers outcome was similarly predictable.

In the same vein, we knew a lot about this Yankees-Twins series coming in. Maybe we didn’t know the outcome, but we could intuit a few themes. There would be dingers, more dingers than you can probably believe. The Twins hit the most single-season home runs by a team in baseball history this year, and the Yankees hit exactly one home run less than the Twins. There would be high-octane relief work; the Twins had the best bullpen FIP- in baseball while the Yankees were second, with both bullpens finishing in the top three in WAR.

And of course, the games seemed likely to go long. There’s a certain undefinable characteristic about Yankees playoff contests that leads to baseball in the hours. The team has long been at the forefront of the three true outcome trend in baseball, and in recent years they’ve spearheaded the transition to the modern, bullpen-heavy style of postseason play. Even ignoring that, however, the playoffs and the Yankees mix together to produce tension, and tension slows the game down.

Want an example? When Kyle Gibson walked Giancarlo Stanton in the bottom of the seventh inning, Cameron Maybin stepped in to pinch run. The game wasn’t over by any means, but the leverage index was a mere 0.24. Gibson walked Gleyber Torres on six pitches, with a stolen base in between. The sequence took what felt like an interminable three minutes and 40 seconds — signs checked and rechecked, long, focusing breaths, pickoff throws, and batting gloves readjusted until they fit perfectly.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How did the ball end up in Gibson’s hands, with the Yankees up 7-4? Naturally, there were five home runs involved. It is 2019, after all. James Paxton, a great condor of a pitcher with arms the length of legs and legs the length of really long legs, is a fly ball pitcher in Yankee Stadium in 2019 — Jorge Polanco took him out of the park on the ninth pitch of the game.

Though Paxton regrouped and José Berríos danced through trouble in the first two innings, they weren’t fooling anyone. Nelson Cruz deposited a 98 mph fastball into the short right field porch for a home run in the top of the third, though Paxton’s greatest skill, his elite strikeout rate, meant that both blasts were solo home runs.

Berríos wasn’t so lucky. The Yankees scratched runs across in un-Yankee-like ways. Edwin Encarnación doubled home DJ LeMahieu, who had reached on a pop-up Luis Arraez couldn’t track down. Gleyber Torres plated two when the Twins booted a double play ball that would have ended the inning. Berríos was hardly sharp — he allowed four hits and three walks in just four innings of work. Still, he kept the ball in the park, something rarely seen in modern baseball, and got three runs for his troubles.

After the Twins managed a small-ball run against Paxton (Polanco again, singling home Arraez), Rocco Baldelli went new school. He pulled Berríos, who needed 88 pitches for his four innings, and went to the aforementioned lethal bullpen. Zack Littell had a 2.68 ERA this year — surely he would be up to the task.

Yeah, not so much. Littell walked Aaron Judge and hit Brett Gardner, with a wild pitch sprinkled in for good measure. Baldelli had seen enough, and he went to the big guns; Tyler Duffey, he of the 34% strikeout rate, 54 ERA-, and 67 FIP-. His strikeout prowess was as advertised, as he recorded all three of his outs via strikeout. His run prevention prowess, on the other hand, was worse; he allowed a walk and a double in the midst of those strikeouts, and the Yankees retook the lead.

Aaron Boone is no stranger to the reliever carousel — Paxton was out of the game in the top of the fifth, and a parade of relievers followed. Tommy Kahnle surrendered a home run, but the Yankees bullpen mostly did what the Twins’ equally excellent bullpen could not; it managed to keep the hits and walks from clustering together, as five walks and two hits, including the aforementioned home run, led to only a single run for Minnesota.

The Twins bullpen couldn’t keep up their end of the bargain. From 5-4, where the game stood after Duffey’s up-and-down inning and the home run Kahnle allowed, they couldn’t hold the line. There were two solo home runs, difficult to avoid in this day and age, but the clustering abandoned them too. But now I’m getting ahead of myself again. Let’s get back to the seventh and Kyle Gibson.

Back on the mound, Gibson regrouped and took a deep breath. He struck out Gary Sanchez on four pitches. Didi Gregorius was next, and it took eight pitches and five minutes and 51 seconds for Gibson to walk him. Gio Urshela didn’t get the message; he put the second pitch in play, a fly ball too shallow to score Maybin from third. It was all for naught, though. DJ LeMahieu lined a hanging slider into left field, plating all three runners, to turn the game from not very suspenseful to not suspenseful at all.

The rest of the game, of course, took nearly an hour anyway. There was no suspense left; no runs were scored. Brusdar Graterol poured 100 mph gasoline past Yankees hitters for two strikeouts in a perfect inning, and the odd couple of J.A. Happ and Aroldis Chapman closed things out for the Yankees. In some sense, the last part of the game was a breeze.

But in another sense, the end of the game matched the overall tenor of the evening. In the real world, time is linear. One minute it’s 6:01, and the next it’s 6:02, on and on until the day is over. In Yankee Stadium, however, it’s not like that. It’s a full count, forever and always, and time never passes. There are runners on, leads to protect at any cost, tension felt deep in a pitcher’s bones.

Aroldis Chapman walked a batter in the ninth, a play that could hardly have been less meaningful — the Yankees had a 99.9% win expectancy before the walk and a 99.7% expectancy afterwards. Even still, the cameras caught Aaron Boone in the dugout, unsubtly swearing. Chapman threw a few pitches to the next pitcher, stepped off the mound for a deep breath, and regrouped. He looked in for the sign, shook his head, and looked in again.

The game ended not long after that, with an uncharacteristic first-pitch pop up. It was hardly an unexpected conclusion, what with the Yankees having been up six runs for nearly an hour, but it still felt like a great accomplishment. The stands were half-empty, the Bronx faithful streaming out to the 4 train in a vain attempt to beat the rush, but the game went on unabated, and felt like it might never end. The natural state of playoff baseball in Yankee Stadium is to beat on, borne ceaselessly from stressor to stressor, and it felt shocking when the game was suddenly finished. Time of game: four hours, 17 minutes.