Clayton Kershaw continued to chip away at the mostly misguided narrative that he’s not a postseason pitcher, throwing seven dominant shutout innings against the Cubs at Wrigley in Sunday night’s 1-0 NLCS Game 2 victory, striking out six while walking just one. Kershaw talked manager Dave Roberts into letting him face the final batter of the seventh inning with reliever Kenley Jansen ready for action in the bullpen. Having thrown just 84 pitches after the conclusion of the seventh, Kershaw certainly would have gone out for the eighth inning if this were regular-season game, and likely would have gotten a shot for a complete-game shutout in the ninth.

As his final pitch count indicates, Kershaw was incredibly efficient with his pitches against Chicago’s typically uber-patient lineup, needing just 45 pitches to get through 4.2 perfect innings before Javier Baez’s two-out single in the fifth broke up his bid for perfection. He either got ahead of or retired each of the first six batters he faced, and seven of the first nine the first time through the order.

The pitches he threw to those nine batters the first time through the order:

Even the two that missed were close. In text form, in case you couldn’t pick up the pitch types from the video, those nine first-pitches were:

1. fastball
2. fastball
3. fastball
4. fastball
5. fastball
6. fastball
7. fastball
8. fastball
9. fastball

This isn’t exactly a new development for Kershaw. We talk a lot about Kershaw’s extremes, and one of the perhaps underrated Kershaw outlier tendencies is his reliance on the first-pitch fastball. To measure this, I took every pitcher who faced at least 500 batters this year, using BaseballSavant, and I calculated their fastball rate on the first pitch of at-bats, and on the rest of the pitches in at-bats, and found the difference between the two, indicating the pitchers who most relied on the fastball to begin at-bats, relative to the rest of their arsenal.

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An injury only hurts a team as much as the replacement lets it. The Dodgers were able to withstand their record-setting number of injuries because of what they had behind the guys who got hurt. Not every team has the luxury of being able to simply plug a Julio Urias or a Brandon McCarthy into the rotation when their top starters go down. And so when Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar each suffered season-ending injuries for the Cleveland Indians in the final month of the season, it was Josh Tomlin who was forced back into the postseason rotation picture, casting doubt on Cleveland’s chances of a deep October run. It’s also been Josh Tomlin who’s held two of baseball’s most imposing lineups — Boston and now Toronto — to three runs in two starts and helped the Indians come within two games of their first World Series appearance in 20 years.

It’s difficult to completely fault Tomlin’s doubters. By the end of August, he’d pitched himself out of Cleveland’s rotation, with a 4.89 ERA and a 5.24 FIP over 25 starts, and even during his best stretches, Tomlin’s rarely looked like much more than a home run-prone, back-end innings eater. Despite that, he’s held the Red Sox and Blue Jays at bay, and now has a 1.98 ERA in six starts since returning to the rotation. The secret, at least in the postseason? Pitching nothing like himself:
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Baseball can be such a complex game. We’ve got radars and cameras that track every movement on the field and spit out massive data sets at the conclusion of each contest. We’ve got run-expectancy simulators and lineup optimizers and a tool that allows one to search any combination of season, game, split, event, and streak stats from any player in any number of years dating back more than a century. We love baseball due in part to its layers of intricacies; there’s something for everyone, and no two fans share an identical relationship with the sport. At its core, baseball, to the observer, serves as nothing more than a distraction, and the complexity of the game affords those observers a seemingly infinite supply of secondary distractions when the primary one is insufficient.

Baseball can be such a simple game. Sometimes, even with all the information at the disposal of the coaches and players, it can be best not to overthink things. Important moment? Bring in the best pitcher. Bring in the best pitcher, the way Dave Roberts did with Kenley Jansen with two men on and no outs in the bottom of the seventh of an NLDS Game 5, facing elimination. Got a good pitch? Throw that pitch. Throw that pitch 39 out of 47 times, the way Jansen did with his cutter to carve up the Nationals for 2.1 erratic but effective innings.

Jansen’s decisions with the cutter were nothing out of the ordinary — he threw his cutter 83% of the time last night, he threw his cutter 88% of the time during the regular season — but there was something about his outing, something about the way that he works in a near-state of perpetual motion, that brought a sort of calming beauty to an otherwise hectic and turbulent affair. A 4-hour, 32-minute game which featured a 66-minute seventh inning, a 13-pitch walk, 11 pitching changes, and, eventually, a moment of triumph. And in the middle of all that was a 29-year-old former catcher from Curaçao, standing on the pitcher’s mound in the middle of a whirlwind in perhaps the biggest moment of his career, just throwing cutter after cutter.

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Earlier this morning, I wrote about the exploitable advantage the Indians’ offense ought to have against Blue Jays pitching in the ALCS, in that Toronto’s been notoriously susceptible to allowing stolen bases this season, while Cleveland’s notoriously successful in stealing bases themselves. And, while it’s not always true that good base-stealers are also good baserunners, it’s the logical line of thinking, and in this particular instance, it’s true.

We host a stat here on FanGraphs called Ultimate Base Running (UBR), which filters out stolen base attempts and focuses just on a player’s ability and efficiency in taking the extra base on hits and tagging up on fly balls. As a team, the Indians rank second in baseball in this measure, behind only the historic Padres. On an individual level, Jose Ramirez was baseball’s best baserunner. Rajai Davis ranked seventh, among 268 batters with at least 300 plate appearances. Jason Kipnis, Tyler Naquin, and Carlos Santana were all soundly above-average, and in fact, Mike Napoli and Chris Gimenez are the only members of Cleveland’s postseason roster that were soundly below-average at taking the extra base.

For more context, the league-average in taking the extra base on a hit is 40%. Cleveland ranked second, successfully taking the extra base on 45% of their hits, when possible. They led baseball in scoring from second on a single, doing so 129 times in 184 opportunities. Ramirez did this 18 times, while taking the extra base in 60% of his opportunities. Francisco Lindor scored from second on a single 17 times. There’s either speed, baserunning instincts, or a combination of both, all throughout Cleveland’s lineup.

This is simply one of the tents of this Cleveland team. Been that way all season. Nothing new here. Like the stolen bases, it only becomes interesting in the context of the upcoming series when you consider the opponent.

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The starting pitching staff of the Toronto Blue Jays possesses an inherent advantage over the lineup of the Cleveland Indians in the ALCS, in that Indians hitters do the brunt of their damage on offspeed and breaking pitches, while Blue Jays pitchers rely on the fastball moreso than any other team, as our own Eno Sarris wrote about earlier this morning. Both teams know this, and both teams will attempt to adjust accordingly in order to maximize or limit the effect of this matchup in their favor. That’s what happens in the postseason, when every little piece of information becomes that much more valuable.

Along those same lines, but on the flip side, there’s also a weakness shared by many of those same fastballing Blue Jays pitchers that perhaps no team other than the Indians is better suited to exploit. Whatever inherent disadvantage Indians hitters may have at the plate, they may make up for on the bases.

We saw what kind of an effect controlling the running game can have in the postseason when the Royals ran wild on Jon Lester and the A’s in the Wild Card game two years ago. And while none of the Blue Jays pitchers are quite at Lester-level mediocrity in this facet of the game, only three of Kansas City’s seven stolen bases in that game came against Lester. Part of it was Lester. Part of it were the relievers who replaced Lester. Part of it was the catcher, Derek Norris.

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Clayton Kershaw looked on from the dugout while the inning he started lived on. It was the seventh inning of Tuesday night’s Game 4 of the NLDS between the Dodgers and the Nationals in Los Angeles, and Kershaw was responsible for all three of the men on base in a three-run game. Pedro Baez took the mound in an attempt to preserve the lead. Baez threw one pitch, it hit Jayson Werth’s elbow, a run scored, and out went Baez. Kershaw might not have flashbacks, but he’s seen this situation before. The camera panned to the dugout.

In came Luis Avilan. He threw two pitches, the latter of which hit Daniel Murphy’s bat, landed in the outfield grass, and two runs scored. Game tied. The camera panned to the dugout.

The Dodgers went on to win the game, 6-5, forcing a Game 5, so in hindsight, what happened in this inning doesn’t much matter. But Kershaw’s pitching line won’t change: 6.2 IP, 7 H, 5 ER, 2 BB, 11 K, 0 HR. I’m not alone in saying Kershaw pitched much better than that line might indicate. In fact, all things considered — pitching on three days rest, throwing a 27-pitch first inning, being asked to throw 110 pitches and face Bryce Harper three times, despite those two preceding points — I’m guessing I wouldn’t be alone in saying Kershaw pitched brilliantly. And yet, he’s been charged with five earned runs. His ERA for the day was 6.75.

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Here on FanGraphs, we host live, interactive win-expectancy graphs for every game, and they usually don’t look like this:

It’s rare for any one of these graphs to stretch 13 innings. It’s rare for the team in complete control for innings six through eight to wind up losing the game. It’s rare for the biggest play in regulation to read “J Arrieta Home Run.” It’s rare for there to be such a large and sudden spike at the end. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that parabolic shape in the middle before.

Game 2 of the National League Division Series between the Giants and Cubs was bonkers. Let’s address all 10 times it looked like it might be over.

No. 1 – First inning

If you’re an extremist, this thing might’ve looked over before it started. Sure, the Cubs were up two games to none in the series and had clearly looked like the better team thus far, but this is Madison Bumgarner we’re talking about, whose soul exits the body and watches over its human figure pitching from above during the postseason. I don’t know why that little box is showing regular-season stats over on the right. The more compelling graphic would’ve been the postseason version, which just consists of “as many as there are” in the games and innings columns and a bunch of zeros in the rest.

Actual win expectancy: 54%, Giants

Perceived win expectancy: EvenYearBumgarner%, Giants
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Seeing as this is an article about Aroldis Chapman, I might be letting down my audience if I didn’t at least briefly discuss the most recent pitch Aroldis Chapman threw, considering what that most recent pitch was. The last pitch Aroldis Chapman threw in a game was a fastball, for a swinging strike — which, on its own, given our subject, is entirely unremarkable. The pitch went 103.3 mph, which is less remarkable for our subject than any other pitcher in baseball, but is fast even for Chapman’s standards. Most remarkable of all, the pitch moved like this:

To quickly play the role of Party Pooper, I have to point out that the way a catcher receives a pitch can sometimes play a trick on our eyes, deceiving us into believing a pitch had more movement than it actually did, and I think that’s at least somewhat at play here with Willson Contreras‘ stabbing motion, in concert with the pitch’s natural arm-side tail, creating an exaggerated illusion of how much this pitch actually broke.

That’s not to say the pitch wasn’t exceptional, even for Chapman. Despite my poo-pooing just a second ago, you might be able to make the case this is the most exceptional fastball Chapman’s ever thrown. The Cubs’ closer threw 15 fastballs in his save during Saturday’s 5-2 win over the Giants, and the 14 fastballs preceding the one depicted above averaged 4.6 inches of horizontal break. Chapman’s fastball, for the entire season, averaged 4.8 inches of horizontal break. This particular fastball, that final fastball, broke 9.3 inches to the arm side. It moved about twice as much as the average Chapman fastball.

Using BaseballSavant, I compiled a spreadsheet of every fastball Chapman’s thrown in his career — 5,161 pitches. I sorted them by horizontal movement. This one ranked 63rd. That’s not as sexy a result as first or second or even 10th, but it’s still in the 99th percentile. Also: at 103.3 mph, only two of the 62 fastballs with more horizontal break were also thrown as hard. Also also: those two pitches were both in the dirt. This one went for a swinging strike to end a playoff game. That’s how you make the argument this was the most exceptional fastball Aroldis Chapman has ever thrown.

For fun, I wanted to create an image. This image shows every fastball thrown by a left-handed pitcher in 2016, plotting velocity against horizontal movement, with all of Chapman’s pitches removed except the one in question. I find humor in this:

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The bullpen revolution was televised in Cleveland. While Buck Showalter was reaching for a short iron to lay up on a par five within reach of the green from the fairway of a golf course somewhere in Florida, Terry Francona was walking out to the pitcher’s mound at Progressive Field in the fifth inning of a one-run playoff game to summon the world’s best relief pitcher and make the bullpen of the future a reality in the present.

Andrew Miller pitched a fifth inning for the first time since 2013, and then he pitched a sixth inning, too, and a seventh inning for good measure. The Indians’ go-to high-leverage relief weapon — that’s the closest thing you’ll find to a properly titled relief role in Cleveland — struck out four Red Sox batters in two scoreless innings of work while throwing a season-high 40 pitches. Miller faced eight batters, though Terry Francona was reportedly willing to let Miller face as many as 12, a strategy that would have allowed him to face David Ortiz twice.

“He didn’t put a number on it,” Miller said when asked of his pregame discussions with Francona regarding what inning he would enter. “But I knew to be ready early.”

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