Every year, up until this one when he retired, Carlos Quentin was my guy. You know the one. “This is it, guys! This is the year Carlos Quentin stays healthy for a full season and hits 40 bombs!” I’d say in March. That never happened, of course, because Carlos Quentin never stopped getting hit by pitches and injuring himself in other ways, but Quentin was one of the classic “when/if” players. “When he plays a full season… If he could just stay healthy…” Quentin was always productive on the field, it’s just he was never actually on the field.

To some extent, Troy Tulowitzki has had a similar career. Tulowitzki’s injury history isn’t quite as extensive as Quentin’s, but his on-field production, when healthy, has always lent itself to a similar “when/if” discussion each offseason. Point is, with Tulowitzki comes some manner of certainty, due to his obvious talent, but also seemingly endless untapped potential.

This year, though, for the first time since his age-23 season, Tulowitzki’s season-end numbers were just average, as indicated by his season-end wRC+ of exactly 100. Add in the shoulder injury that Tulowitzki’s currently playing through, and the Blue Jays have been left playing the “when/if” game that’s typically reserved for the offseason.

So right now, with Tulowitzki, you’re looking for clues. Clues that the perennial preseason when/if MVP candidate is still in there, lurking underneath the cracked shoulder blade and the underwhelmingly average season. It’s a never-ending upside game with Tulowitzki, and clues are the currency for upside. As long as the Blue Jays have a couple clues, they know that, while the consistency may not be there, Tulowitzki still owns the potential to be a game-changer on any given trip to the plate. Last night, the Blue Jays received a clue:
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11:43

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Once upon a time, this was a post about how the Cubs lineup was a good matchup for the Mets pitchers. It’s what I’d planned to write if/when the Mets knocked out the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS, but then Corey Seager forgot to cover third base and Andre Ethier caught a foul ball so that became a thing instead.

Now, here we are. The Mets-Cubs series was billed as a battle between New York’s young pitching and Chicago’s young hitting. There were a couple things in the numbers that initially led me to believe the Cubs might have a neutralizer but, so far, it’s been all Mets.

That neutralizer was fastballs. The Mets pitchers, see, throw a lot of fastballs. Correction: the Mets pitchers don’t throw an unusually high number of fastballs; the fastballs they do throw, though, you notice. Think Jacob deGrom, and you think fastball. Think Noah Syndergaard, think fastball. Matt Harvey pops into your head, you probably think “pitch count” or some similarly annoying storyline, but after that, you think fastball. That’s not to say the Mets’ fantastic young rotation doesn’t have other good pitches, too, but, if you’re like me, it’s the fastballs that stand out.

They all throw them hard, and they all throw them well. Theoretically, a team that stands the best chance against the trio of deGrom, Syndergaard and Harvey is one that can hit the hard fastball. Harvey and deGrom throw 95. Syndergaard throws 97. The Cubs, this year, had the second-best slugging percentage in the league against fastballs 96+. An arbitrary cutoff, sure, but the point is: high heat hasn’t crippled the Cubs. Guys like Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber — can’t just blow it by them. There’s got to be other ways to get them out.

Let’s now turn our attention to Schwarber in particular. Until Daniel Murphy started happening, maybe no other player did more in the postseason to make a name for himself than Schwarber. When he’s hit the ball, mostly, it’s gone a long way. He hit one into a river, and rivers don’t happen inside baseball stadiums. He hit one onto a roof, and that roof now has a shrine on it. Anyone who didn’t know about Kyle Schwarber before, knows about him now.

Same goes for pitchers. You hear about the league adjusting to young players who come up and experience immediate success. The book getting out. Weaknesses in a hitter can reveal themselves by the way the league begins pitching to them.

And now, Kyle Schwarber’s rate of pitch types seen, by month, since entering the league:

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For an athlete, a constant struggle in decision-making exists between the body and mind. When presented with a choice, there are two routes a person can take. The most informed route, typically, is to hand over the keys to the mind. The mind can think logically and, with ample time and preparation — sometimes just a few extra seconds — the mind can parse out a number of options, choose what it believes to the best one, and send the correct signal to the body.

But the body reacts faster. Under pressure, when an instantaneous decision is required, the decision-making process defaults to the body’s reaction, because it gets to skip the step of the mind parsing information and sending a signal. This is an involuntary response. The mind still parses, and still sends its signal, it’s just, sometimes, the body beats it to the punch. So it’s hard to fault someone when they choose the body’s reaction over the mind’s conclusion, because all that means is that the mind didn’t have enough time, in the moment, to trump the body’s reaction. Yet, here we are.

Before you can question Andre Ethier for his choices in Thursday’s fourth-inning sacrifice fly that scored Daniel Murphy and tied Game 5 of the Dodgers-Mets NLDS at 2-2, you’ve got to take a step back and examine how we got there.
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For the first time in more than two months, the Royals again saw the capital-J Johnny Cueto for whom they traded at the deadline, the capital-A Ace they needed to front their rotation following the departure of James Shields on their journey towards a second consecutive World Series appearance – this time with the hopes of capturing that final, elusive victory.

Cueto, when healthy, has been among the most consistently effective pitchers in baseball for the past half-decade. Though you can’t count on what his delivery may look like on any given pitch, you could always count on an ERA that began with a 2, which is precisely what the Royals acquired when they shipped Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb and Cody Reed to Cincinnati for the 29-year-old Dominican hurler in late July.

The guy they wanted was exactly the guy they got, until he wasn’t. After three initial Cueto-like performances in Royal blue, he gave up six earned runs to Boston. Then six to Baltimore, and four to Detroit, and five to the White Sox, and seven more to Baltimore.

Thoughts were, maybe Cueto was hurt. Or he was tipping his pitches. Or his catcher wasn’t setting up low enough in the zone. Or he was just running into some bad luck.

Fact is, no one outside the organization knew quite what was happening to Cueto. But that all feels like a distant memory after he shoved against the Astros on Wednesday night, allowing just two baserunners and striking out eight in eight dominant innings to clinch an ALCS berth.

Cueto’s average fastball, typically, sits around 93 mph. During the height of his struggles in Kansas City, it had dipped to 92. There were others factors to Cueto’s slump, certainly, but there’s usually a correlation between a drop in velocity and a drop in performance, and Cueto suffered both. Three weeks ago, Cueto’s average fastball dropped to 91. Two weeks ago, just in time for the playoffs, it had fallen to 90.

During Wednesday’s start against Houston, facing elimination, Cueto’s fastball sat at 93, touching 96. He came out throwing hard, and held it throughout the game. There wasn’t an obvious move on the rubber. His release point doesn’t appear to have changed. Just like Cueto’s early Kansas City struggles, there didn’t appear to be a clear explanation. So I went back and watched some film from the Twins game, when Cueto sat 90, and I rewatched some film from last night. Before we get into things, I’d like to just show you some first-inning fastballs.
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The stories were silly to begin with. That the best pitcher in the world was somehow hardwired to falter when the calendar flipped from September to October. That the same hitters who floundered against Clayton Kershaw throughout the regular season would feast come playoff time.

The seven dominant innings Kershaw hurled against the Mets on Tuesday shouldn’t go a long way in changing anyone’s opinion of what Kershaw can do under the bright lights, only because the 50 innings prior shouldn’t have, either.

I probably haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know. Clayton Kershaw is incredible. At times, in the postseason, he’s appeared as something less than incredible, but lately, he’s looked more like himself. Even in his Game 1 loss to New York, which oddly seemed to fuel the anti-Kershaw postseason narrative, he was great, making what amounted to one real mistake to his apparent-kryptonite, Daniel Murphy.

Though the outcome of Game 1 was the opposite of what Kershaw desired, he pitched well, and so on the surface, it didn’t appear that much needed to change. Of course, that’s just the surface, and Kershaw goes well beyond the surface. Kershaw and catcher A.J. Ellis, that is.

Ellis contributed an enlightening article to the Player’s Tribune last month, concerning the act of catching Kershaw and Zack Greinke and the way each prepares for their starts. Pulling from that article:

“Before each of Clayton’s starts, he and I, with pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, sit down together two hours before the game. Clayton dictates that entire meeting, running through the starting lineup in detail. ‘Here’s what I want to do … ‘ Hitter after hitter.

Usually he’s spot-on with his approach and it matches with my scouting and game plan. Occasionally, I’ll throw in my two cents, but I’d better make damn sure my two cents fits with what he wants to do, because otherwise he’ll snap at me. ‘I’m not doing that. That makes no sense.'”

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One of the great intrigues of the postseason is that when the final page turns on the regular season, the book slams shut. Anything that happened in the previous 162 games is firmly in the past, and anyone lucky enough to play more than that is granted a second chance to change something about the way his season is ultimately remembered, whether for good or for bad.

Forget what happened in the regular season; right now, Jorge Soler looks like a star. Carlos Correa is the clear-cut Rookie of the Year, and why would anyone question that Dallas Keuchel deserves the Cy Young Award? Haven’t you been paying attention?

Never mind that just 72 hours ago, Soler was still coming off a disappointing rookie season, Correa still trailed Francisco Lindor by more than a win on our WAR leaderboard, and Keuchel’s season-end line was still about indecipherable from David Price’s. By being on a playoff roster, every player is afforded the opportunity to write a new chapter of their history; those three happen to be taking advantage.

Jorge Soler, specifically, is having himself quite a time. There’s a problem, though, with trying to analyze a three-game stretch that covers nine plate appearances. The problem is that sometimes you end up with slash lines like 1.000/1.000/2.750, and those are just three silly numbers with slashes between. With nine plate appearances worth analyzing, it feels far more instructive to isolate them. That’s the only way you’re going to get anything out of it, at least. Rather than try to make too much out of Soler’s last nine plate appearances, let’s just find the best part about each one.

Plate appearance #1: walk

Best thing: Jorge Soler drew a walk!

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The scientific method begins by asking a question. Ask a question, do some research, and form a hypothesis. Once you’ve got your hypothesis, it’s time to do a little testing. Or, to employ a more lively word, experimenting. Once the test, ahem, experiment is underway, data is collected and analyzed, leading to new questions, new hypotheses and new experiments.

Over in Toronto, a season’s worth of question-asking, researching, hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing, refining and retesting has been taking place, slowly building up to a grand experiment that will take place on the national stage when the Blue Jays have no room left for error with everything on the line. More likely than not, the experiment will go over just fine and Toronto’s hypothesis will be confirmed. Even if the experiment doesn’t go over fine, the hypothesis could hold water. There still exists the chance, though, that the test tubes suddenly begin to boil over, sending the experiment awry and the laboratory into a frenzy with no time left for reevaluating and retesting.
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Did you hear the news? Last postseason, the Royals made quite a name for themselves. In the midst of their first playoff run in 30 years, Kansas City carved out their own brand of baseball. For the first time in a long time, “Royals baseball” meant something positive, something exciting, something worth watching. The Royals captured our hearts until the final out of Game 7, with their unique blend of speed, defense and a dominant bullpen — a postseason formula that had long lurked in the shadows of the traditional power pitching and power hitting approaches.

Did you hear the news? What’s written above still holds true, but there’s a new Royals in town. You might not have heard about them, because they haven’t yet made their feel-good World Series run that still only has something like a 1-in-3 chance of actually materializing. Also, the Old Royals are still here and they’re still quite good, and these New Royals don’t quite feel like the Old Royals, but that’s just on the surface. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that the Houston Astros are the New Royals.

Speed

The Astros are the New Royals because of their speed. Did you know the Astros had speed? I’m not even talking about Triples King, Evan Gattis. No, I’m talking about real speed. Did you know the Astros stole 121 bases this year? Most in the American League and 17 more than the Old Royals?

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