Tomorrow night, Fox Sports 1 is going full nerd. While their mothership is showing the traditional broadcast of the game, FS1 is going to have a simulcast of the game action, but instead of the traditional play-by-play and color commentary audio, the crew from Just A Bit Outside — C.J. Nitkowski, Gabe Kapler, and Rob Neyer — will be offering their insights while the game occurs. They’ve also wrangled Bud Black into joining them, and the whole thing will be hosted by Kevin Burkhardt. You can read more about what they have planned here, or watch this video preview, or you can read below, where I talk to Rob about what it is they’re going to do tomorrow night.

Also, while those guys getting ogled on your TV screen, we’ll be making sure JABO.com is still loaded with content. Jeff Sullivan, Drew Fairservice, August Fagerstrom, and myself will be representing the FG crew, providing quick-hit analysis and commentary on the site, and expect a few other notable voices to chime in as well. If you want to be fully ensconced in analysis while you watch the game, tomorrow is the night for you.

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You probably know that MIT’s Sloan School of Management puts on a sports analytics conference in Boston every spring, but you may not know that they also maintain a blog, which does Q&As with interesting people from the sports world, and when they can’t find anyone who matches that description, me.

All-around good guy Zachary Levine and I spent some time talking yesterday, and the transcript of that discussion is now up on the SSAC blog. Here’s the first question and answer, to whet your appetite.

Q: You wrote about the Nationals’ bad bullpen decisions and it’s definitely been a theme that we’ve seen in the playoffs over and over again. Twitter has played a big part in this, but it seems like we’re questioning what the managers are doing every night. To put it (over)-simply is there a chance that we’re right? Is there a chance that the combination of probably somewhat better analytical skills and wisdom of crowds outweigh what is to be gained by being on the inside?

A: I certainly don’t want to say that the fans know more than the managers do. They have information that we don’t have that is useful in what decision to make. Certainly they know the quality of the guy’s arm if before the game he was saying his elbow was injured. If there’s some factor that the public isn’t aware of, that could be a major determining factor in whether a guy should be used or not.

At the same time, there is clearly a bias that comes with being with these guys and seeing how you used them in the regular season that carries over to the postseason. That could be detrimental. If we look at the determination of many major league managers in managing in October the same way they did in the regular season, it seems that there is a disconnect between what we as outsiders or the front office would see as being important in certain situations and what they see. I wondered if being that close to the players and seeing the success of rigid roles, which in the regular season, there’s probably a good reason for them in terms of limiting usage, but in the postseason when there’s no such thing as a low-leverage situation anymore, I wonder if the familiarity and the success that the managers had with their rigid roles during the regular season actually becomes a problem.

You can read the whole thing over at their blog.

This is the postseason of the underdog. The Angels, Dodgers, Tigers, and Nationals were all bounced in the first round. Both wild card teams advanced, combining to lose one game in the process, despite having burned their best starting pitchers in the play-in game. One of the remaining division winners won just 90 games. These are not the League Championship Series many people expected, and with the little guys advancing in each division series, we should be in for some pretty even match-ups. At least, that’s what one would think.

But if you look over at our Playoff Odds page, our depth chart forecasts don’t exactly see it that way. This is how those projections look right now, before the start of either LCS.

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Of late, Major League Baseball has been fairly aggressive in adopting new rules to attempt to improve the game. We have instant replay now, at least for some plays and some calls. Runners aren’t allowed to run over catchers at home plate anymore. The league is even experimenting with a pitch clock in the Arizona Fall League, which could eventually lead to a reduction in the amount of time that pitchers are allowed to stand around doing nothing. The game is great, but it can still be improved upon, and I’m glad to see MLB working to try and continually make it better.

And after what we’ve seen in the playoffs over the last week, I think it’s time for Major League Baseball to consider another rule change. It’s time to officially take check-swing strike calls away from the home plate umpire.

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There is so much more to managing a baseball team that what we see during the games. We only see the line-ups, the batting order, and the pitching changes; we don’t see the human interactions, the coaching, and all of the work that goes into keeping so many large personalities pointed in the right direction. Managing a baseball team is about a lot more than just in-game strategy.

But in-game strategy is part of the job, and on Tuesday night, Matt Williams failed at that part of the job in the most important game of his team’s season. And while we cannot know what would have happened if different decisions had been made, we do know that maybe the best team in baseball just got bounced in the first round in part due to a series of decisions that strain credulity.

Let’s just walk through the pivotal seventh inning. Bryce Harper had just tied the game in the top half of the inning, so the score was tied at 2-2 with the top of the Giants order coming up. The Giants #1 and #2 hitters both bat left-handed, so Williams countered with Matt Thornton, the team’s only remaining left-handed reliever. Perfectly logical.

Thornton got a groundout from Gregor Blanco, then gave up a single to Joe Panik. That put the go-ahead run on base for Buster Posey, the Giants best hitter. The Giants best right-handed hitter. Here is what Buster Posey has done against left-handed pitchers in his career.

631 at-bats, 210 hits, 53 doubles, 2 triples, 32 home runs, 61 walks, 77 strikeouts.

That’s a .333/.393/.578 batting line, which when you account for his home park, translates to a 168 wRC+, meaning that Posey’s vs LHP performance has been 68 percent better than a league average hitter. Do you want some context for that? In 2012, when Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown, he had a 166 wRC+. Posey’s performance against left-handers has basically been the equal of the game’s most feared hitter, when he’s having a great year, even by his own standards.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

With a 4-1 victory over the Giants last night, the Nationals breathed a little life into their hopes of advancing past the NDLS. Tonight, they look to win another game in San Francisco, and the pitching match-up certainly looks to be in their favor, as Gio Gonzalez takes on Ryan Vogelsong. Gonzalez, however, is not exactly known for pitching deep into ballgames, which brings up an interesting question for Matt Williams tonight: would he be willing to use Stephen Strasburg as his first option out of the bullpen?

Due to the scheduled off-days both on Sunday and tomorrow, the Nationals have the option of starting either Strasburg or Jordan Zimmermann on full rest in a potential Game Five. Zimmermann shut down the Giants on Saturday, finishing one out shy of a complete game, and was actually the team’s best starter this season, even though he doesn’t have Strasburg’s raw stuff. The availability of Zimmmermann to start Game Five creates an interesting option for the Nationals to use Strasburg out of the bullpen in order to give the team their best chance of getting to that game, and Matt Williams said yesterday that Strasburg was available in relief in an “extreme emergency” situation.

Interestingly, Kilgore also wrote this in a separate piece: Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll resume our live blog coverage a little later on in the postseason, but if you guys want to hang out and discuss the Nats-Giants and Cards-Dodgers games tonight, feel free to use this thread for that discourse.

On Saturday night, Matt Williams removed Jordan Zimmermann with one out to go, trying to preserve a 1-0 lead. Drew Storen entered immediately gave up a single to Buster Posey and a double Pablo Sandoval, tying the game at 1-1; the Giants would go on and win in 18. Williams was heavily criticized in the aftermath of the game for taking a pitcher out who was, at that, throwing a shutout, especially given that he had only thrown 100 pitches on the night.

But let’s just look at the numbers here for a second. We’ll look at career and 2014 batting against both pitchers.

On a per-batter faced, Drew Storen has been a more effective pitcher than Jordan Zimmermann. This shouldn’t be a big surprise, since good relievers are almost always the hardest guys in all of baseball to hit, and Storen is a very good reliever.

And as you’re probably sick of reading about by now, pitchers get worse the more often they face the same hitter within the same game. Here are Zimmermann’s career splits by times through the order:

The first time Zimmermann faces a hitter in a game, he’s lights out. Second time, still pretty good. Third time, he’s roughly league average. The fourth match-up has been a disaster for him.

And yes, Zimmermann was throwing the ball well on Saturday night, but you only get to face a guy a fourth time through the order if you’re pitching well, so that entire data pool is essentially comprised of performances against Zimmermann late in games in which he had already performed at a high level. 81 plate appearances is of course a small sample, but both the league-wide and Zimmermann-specific trends are clear; his performance declines the longer he stays in, and by the time a hitter has already faced him three times, they hit him pretty well.

Even if we cherry pick the numbers, we can’t come up with a scenario where the expected line against Storen would be worse than against Zimmermann. Storen’s career .273 wOBA allowed is better than Zimmermann’s career-best .280 wOBA allowed this year, so even if we give Zimmermann credit for his 2014 performance and still hold Storen’s entire career line against him, Zimmermann still loses out. Add in any kind of times-through-the-order penalty and it ceases to even be remotely close.

Storen was the right call. It didn’t work, but that doesn’t make the move a mistake.

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