The story of Game Seven was, without a doubt, the performance of Madison Bumgarner. He was the story of the whole series, essentially, allowing one run in 21 innings pitched; his teammates gave up 26 runs in the other 40 innings, for reference. No single player can win a series for his team, but Bumgarner had about as large of an impact as any one player can have. Nothing else mattered as much as Bumgarner’s dominance.

But other things did matter, even last night. Besides Bumgarner’s historic relief appearance, there were several key decisions made that helped swing the game, and the World Series, in the Giants favor. Let’s go through them in chronological order.

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Source: FanGraphs

Congratulations, San Francisco. Three championships in five years is pretty incredible.

Madison Bumgarner. That was amazing.

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For the Royals, Game Six could not have gone any better. Not only did they claim the necessary win to setup a winner-take-all contest tonight, but by blowing the Giants out early, they were able to acquire an extra day of rest for their vaunted bullpen trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland. Meanwhile, while the Giants can’t be too thrilled with their performance, the lopsided loss did allow them to avoid using Madison Bumgarner, and you can be sure that Bruce Bochy will use his ace tonight.

So, with one game to decide the World Series, let’s see if we can plot out usage patterns for both team’s pitching staffs in order to give each side the best chance of winning the championship.

The Royals side of things is somewhat straight forward; Jeremy Guthrie is the de facto starter, but there really is no such thing as a traditional starting pitcher for the Royals, and Guthrie will almost certainly be on a very short leash tonight, because the Royals just don’t need a significant number of innings from their starter.

Since recording the final out of the ALCS on October 15th, Greg Holland has thrown just 24 pitches. 24 pitches in two weeks. He hasn’t taken the mound since last Friday, and even that came in an outing that only took him eight pitches to complete. During the regular season, Holland threw 25 or more pitches in a single game on six different occasions; there’s no reason why he couldn’t be asked to stretch that to 30 or 35 pitches in the final game of the season, especially given his recent workload.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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When Game Six of the World Series kicks of tonight, Jake Peavy will be on the mound for the Giants. Perhaps the biggest question of the night, however, will be how long he stays out there. Because if you’ve read FanGraphs for any length of time, you’ve probably heard us harp on the times-through-the-order penalty. By the time a line-up rolls over a few times against a starting pitcher, there are almost always more effective relief options than letting that starting pitcher remain on the mound.

More than any other strategy suggestion, the go-to-your-bullpen-early theory is probably the biggest area where the numbers and the traditional way of managing differ. Teams generally ride their starting pitchers until they get in trouble, removing them for a reliever after a rally has started. The data suggests that managers would do better to remove starting pitchers before the rally ever starts, though this would require managers to replace pitchers who haven’t yet failed. And for the most part, they don’t yet seem willing to do that.

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If you feel like the games this postseason have dragged a bit, congratulations, you’re not just turning into an old grump who wants to get to bed earlier. You could be, I guess, but that wouldn’t be the sole factor in why you’re annoyed at the length of these playoff games, even the exciting ones. Because in October, the game really has slowed down to a crawl.

On our leaderboards, we feature a stat called pace, which measures the time between pitches as recorded by PITCHF/x. During the regular season, the average length of time between pitches was 23.0 seconds; in the postseason, that has ballooned to 25.4 seconds.

2.4 extra seconds between pitches might not sound like a lot, but in the 30 postseason games that have been played so far, there have been 8,802 pitches thrown, or an average of 293 pitches per game. At 2.4 extra seconds between pitches, this has added an extra 11 minutes and 43 seconds to the length of the average game. In just these 30 postseason games, we’re closing in on almost six hours being added to the total time of games through the lengthening of the least interesting part of the sport.

So, who are the primary culprits in slowing the 2014 postseason down? To find out, I looked at the difference in regular season and postseason pace for every pitcher who has appeared in a game in the playoffs, and then multiplied that per-pitch difference by the number of pitches thrown. Here are the top 10 pitchers who most slowed the game down on a total time basis:

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Last Wednesday, following his terrific performance in Game 1 of the World Series, I wrote a piece for Just a Bit Outside putting Bumgarner’s 2014 playoff run into some historical perspective. One of the primary takeaways from that piece was just so amazing Curt Schilling’s 2001 performance was, as it clearly stood at the top of the heap as the best postseason a pitcher has ever had.

Here’s the table that ran in last week’s column, listing both the ERA- and FIP- of the starters who had at least five starts of seven or more innings pitched in the same postseason.

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