I know this isn’t going to help, Mets fans. And I know this might seem like I’m picking on Daniel Murphy which isn’t fair because Daniel Murphy, by himself, has never lost the Mets a game and Daniel Murphy, by himself, has never lost the Mets a World Series. Players don’t lose games, teams do, and the World Series isn’t over yet.

But Daniel Murphy is a human being, and human beings are prone to mistakes. Some mistakes carry greater consequence than others, and on Saturday night, Daniel Murphy made a very costly mistake. Murphy’s mistake is the one that will be remembered, but it was just one of several made by the Mets in the late innings of Game Four that led to them blow a 3-2 lead in the eighth inning.

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The narrative, coming into the World Series, was impossible to ignore. Boiled down to its most simple form, it went like this: the Mets are here, playing in the World Series, because they throw really good fastballs. The Royals are here, playing in the World Series, because they’re really good at hitting fastballs. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but that was the most talked-about story, the Mets’ fastballs vs. the Royals’ ability to hit them, and so something had to give. The Mets would either overpower the Royals like few other teams have been able to, or the Royals would become the first team to strike back against New York’s heat.

With the Royals now leading the series 2-0, you can guess what happened. You’d guess the latter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — you don’t outscore your opponent 12-5 and take a 2-0 lead in the World Series without hitting some heaters — but the correct answer might actually be “neither.”

Allow me to explain. The Mets, see, haven’t exactly thrown their fastball. In Game One, Matt Harvey threw a career-low rate of heaters to the Royals, throwing just 30 fastballs while going to his breaking and offspeed stuff 50 times. Granted, he also may have had his career-worst stuff, and the couple ticks he’d suddenly lost in velocity are a reasonable explanation for why he’d be more reliant on his non-fastball offerings.

Then also, there’s this:

Terry Collins said Matt Harvey throwing career-low fastball % was partly respect for Royals fastball hitting, partly lack of pitch sharpness

— Adam Rubin (@AdamRubinESPN) October 28, 2015

A line of thinking exists that if you change what it is that’s made you successful in light of your opponent’s strengths, then you’ve already lost. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the “playing not to lose, rather than playing to win” mantra. As a Mets fan, it’s probably not the thing you want to hear. On the surface, it makes it seem like the Mets had decided beforehand that their strength wasn’t as strong as the Royals strength, and so they changed courses before they had a chance to find out. Of course, there’s some give-and-take here, and it would have been silly for Harvey to not have considered a potential Plan B if he didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate. He didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate, and so he opted for Plan B. And in the end, he really didn’t pitch that poorly.

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This being primarily a numbers site and all, we tend to try our hardest to deal with objective truths around these parts. If it’s not backed by, y’know, evidence, why say it? That’s one of the primary reasons this whole sabermetrics thing got off the ground in the first place. But, hey. We’re human beings. We’ve all got a little hot take in us, whether we care to admit it or not. Inside all of us, there’s a little pool of hot take magma, bubbling up over time until we can’t hold it down anymore and we’ve got no choice but to let it spew out and suffer the consequences. Anyway, it’s been a while since I fired one off, and I can’t hold it down anymore. Here it comes!

Johnny Cueto Is the Most Entertaining Player in Baseball.

Whew! That felt good. Johnny Cueto, yep. Most entertaining player in baseball. Try and stop me. I’ve even got a list of four subjective reasons as to why Johnny Cueto is the Most Entertaining Player in baseball, and, yes, I’d put them in a slideshow if I could.

Reason number one: dreadlocks. They’re awesome and baseball needs more of them. Let Cueto’s brothers play too. Number two: he yells on the mound a lot. Yells at himself, yells at the umpire, yells at opposing batters after he strikes them out. If I can go against the hot take grain for a second, I’d like to put forth that the more emotion in baseball, the better. Number three: the unpredictability of his performance. Never know what you’re gonna get from Cueto! All-time postseason clunker, or all-time World Series great? How about both, in back-to-back starts? I’ll tell you who the most boring pitcher in baseball is — that Clayton Kershaw. Yawn. Where’s the fun in watching a guy who’s just awesome every time out? (Crosses “Call Clayton Kershaw boring” off outline.) Last, but certainly not least: he has four different deliveries! Four! And one of them is called “The Rocking Chair”! If anybody else strays from their typical mechanics by even a hair, they have to sit down with their pitching coach the next day to fix it and someone on the internet writes 1,000 words on how that pitcher is now broken. Cueto does this on purpose!

And it’s awesome. So, of course it needs to be broken down. It’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and I figure there’s no better time than now, after Cueto just threw the first World Series complete game by an AL pitcher since Jack Morris in ’91, and might not even pitch again this year, what with the Royals already being up 2-0 in the series.

So, after the conclusion of last night’s game, I went back and charted all of Cueto’s deliveries in a spreadsheet alongside the PITCHf/x data provided by BrooksBaseball. Jeff Passan has named the deliveries: the Tiant, the Quick Pitch, the Rocking Chair and the Traditional (this essentially just means he’s in the stretch).

First, the most basic numbers. Usage:

• Quick Pitch: 48%
• Tiant: 25%
• Rocking Chair: 7%
• Traditional: 20%

The Johnny Cueto motion you’re used to is the Tiant. That’s the one he came up using in Cincinnati, where he turns his back to the hitter before delivering. Seems that’s been usurped as the go-to delivery by the Quick Pitch. The pitches, themselves, don’t seem to change much, between the two. The fastball went 93.4 with the Quick Pitch, and 93.7 with the Tiant. With the Quick Pitch, the four-seam had a bit more rise, and the sinker a bit more sink. The changeup was more fade-heavy out of the Quick Pitch, and more drop-heavy out of the Tiant. Surely, in such small samples, the differences could be a product of noise. It’s also not hard to imagine the different deliveries resulting in differently shaped pitches.

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Lorenzo Cain didn’t know Alex Gordon was going to homer in the bottom of the ninth. The Royals still needed a run. They were trailing, 4-3, with six outs to spare and the dominant never-gonna-give-up-a-game-tying-homer Jeurys Familia looming in the Mets’ bullpen.

Forty-six seconds after Ben Zobrist stepped on second base, having led off the eighth with a first-pitch double against Tyler Clippard, Cain stepped into the batter’s box. Forty-six seconds was all the time he needed. Presumably, by then, he’d considered the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and made up his mind. “I’m gonna bunt.”

Sixteen seconds later, he squared around.

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We all learned something about Mike Trout last year. If you didn’t, that means you weren’t reading enough Jeff Sullivan, and that’s your first mistake. Trout’s natural swing plane carries through the bottom of the zone, making him one of the game’s best low-ball hitters. No swing is without holes, though, and so what we learned is that Trout had something of a vulnerability against the high heat. When the league began to figure this out, the league began to adjust, as it’s wont to do. Sullivan covered this league-wide adjustment to Trout at length last season. The nuts and bolts are as follows: at the beginning of 2014, Trout was getting high fastballs about 29% percent of the time — an entirely unexceptional rate. By the end of the season, he was seeing them around 40% of the time, by far the highest in the league. First came the information, and then came the subsequent approach. Pitchers were able to gain a bit of an edge against Trout, and any edge against the best player in the world is welcome, from the pitcher’s standpoint.

Here is a heatmap similar to one Sullivan used in the original Trout piece, from 2014:

Now here’s a heatmap of Yoenis Cespedes, from this season:

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In any given nine-inning baseball game, there are upward of 250 pitches thrown. More than half of those pitches, more often than not, are going to be thrown somewhere in the range of 90-97 mph. They’re all going to move somewhere between two and 12 inches, and most of them will travel through the same theoretical three-square-foot box. It’s easy for these pitches to begin blending together. That’s why we appreciate the ones that truly set themselves apart. These ones are easy to spot.

This is similar to a post I did last year around this time. The mission: find the 10 individual pitches deemed nastiest by my subjective criteria, hopefully learn something about those pitches and what it is that makes them so effective, and then see them in action so we have a reference point and something extra to keep an eye out for the in World Series.

How it’s done: I expanded a bit on last year’s criteria. Last year’s criteria, it was just whiff rate and ground ball rate, per individual pitch. Those are the two best common results-based outcomes a pitch can have. A complete swing-and-miss, or the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types. This year, I folded in two process-based characteristics along with the results, adding velocity and spin rate, with spin data coming from Statcast. Two big things that make a pitch aesthetically pleasing, to us, are speed and movement. Velocity and spin rate should capture that. Two big things that make a pitch effective, to pitchers, are whiffs and grounders. We’ve got that down. Oh, also, an executive decision I made and forgot to mention: for four-seam fastballs, I substituted pop-up rate for ground ball rate. Felt like the right thing to do, given four-seams are the one pitch, more than any other, thrown up in the zone with no intention of getting grounders. Anyway, I calculated z-scores for each of the four selected characteristics, for each pitch type, added them up, and found 10 pitches that stood above the rest. These are those 10 pitches.

No. 10: Wade Davis – Knuckle Curve

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Sitting on the desk of nearly every manager in baseball before any given game are several large packets of information, compiled by that team’s analytics department about that day’s opponent. The packets are thick, and the front pages typically contain images with which you’re likely familiar simply from reading FanGraphs every day. Red and blue heat maps, sometimes varying by handedness, pitch type or count. Spray charts, usually with lines as the visual component rather than dots, and almost always split up by ground balls, fly balls and line drives. The middle and back pages, presumably, get more and more detailed, and the most interesting thing I’ve seen is command data for each opposing pitcher, split up by pitch type.

Condensed versions of these packets are placed in players’ lockers several hours before first pitch, met with varying levels of reception. Some can be seen rigorously studying them, others will give them one quick glance over before crumpling them up and throwing them in the trash.

Information is a good thing, but sports are still physical and reactionary by nature, and for some players, information overload certainly exists as a con. In all reality, for a middle-of-the-season noon game against the Phillies on getaway day, it probably doesn’t matter too much. We’re past that point in the season, now. The scouting reports are to be read. The packets are to be studied.

Over the next week, one American League team will be learning everything there is to know about the New York Metropolitans. Their unique individual tendencies, strategies, weaknesses and strengths. Where they hit the ball, where they pitch the ball, where they stand in the field, how they react to different situations and more. In the grand scheme of things, the advantages to be gained from this information are small, sure, but every little advantage in the World Series is an advantage in the World Series.

Somewhere in the middle of that packet in the manager’s office may exist a page about a team’s tendencies, at the plate, by count. It’s a page that might be skipped over in July. It’s not a page that gets skipped in October. No pages get skipped in October.

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It’s right there in the name. Change-up.

It’s right there in all the names, really. The best fastballs, usually, go the fastest. The best curveballs, usually, curve the most. The best changeups, then, would change the most. That property — change — isn’t quite as intuitive as the first two, but really, in a good changeup, you just want difference. You want separation from the primary pitch.

As my colleague Eno Sarris wisely pointed out on Twitter last night, measuring the characteristics of a changeup, on its own, is a mostly useless endeavor. If the main purpose of a changeup is to give hitters a different look off the fastball, don’t you also need the characteristics of that fastball to give context to the change?

On the surface, Marco Estrada’s repertoire might not be eye-popping. He doesn’t throw hard. He doesn’t have great movement. But what he does have, is this:

On average, Estrada drops nearly 11 mph off his four-seam fastball with every changeup, giving him the largest difference of any right-handed starter in baseball. But we can take this a step further! There can be more to getting separation than just speed. There’s movement, too.

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Listen up, people. It’s time to face facts. #EskyMagic is real.

Alcides Escobar has swung at the first pitch to lead off the last five games, and eight of nine games this postseason. In every game of the ALCS, he’s led off with a first-pitch swing and reached on a hit. In the last two, that hit resulted in a run, and the Royals won the ballgame. The Royals are now 47-19 when Escobar swings at the first pitch this season, regardless the outcome of that swing. #EskyMagic is happening, and there is nothing we can do about it.

There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the part that got me thinking, because there has to be something someone can do about it.

This post is going to go like this. First, I’ll look up all the facts I can think of, deemed pertinent to #EskyMagic. Then, I’ll just dump them all onto this page and put some words around them. You’ll read them, I won’t have a conclusion, we’ll all leave confused and afraid, and the Royals will never lose another game with Alcides Escobar leading off. Cool? Cool.

Here comes the first one. This one’s the easy one, and it’s the obvious place to start.

For some reason, Alcides Escobar was the Royals’ leadoff hitter for the first 125 games he played this season. During that time, he wasn’t a good hitter, because he isn’t a good hitter, and so Ned Yost bumped him down to the nine-hole in favor of good hitters Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist for most of September. With good hitters Gordon and Zobrist leading off, the Royals lost a few, and so Yost got not good hitter Escobar back to the top of the lineup for the last five games of the regular season, and, bam! #EskyMagic.

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