Johnny Cueto may have had the better 2016 regular season, but when the calendar flips to October, Madison Bumgarner becomes the unquestioned ace of the San Francisco Giants — their most important player. The postseason legend of Bumgarner grew last night, thanks to a complete game shutout in a 3-0 victory against the New York Mets at Citi Field in the National League’s Wild Card play-in game.

No Met hit better than Yoenis Cespedes this season, and Neil Walker, the only position player who accrued more value according to WAR, has been out since the end of August with a back injury that required surgery. Cespedes was the Mets’ most important position player last night, and he also had a team-worst -.101 Win Probability Added, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts, helping to strand two of the only six batters Bumgarner allowed to reach base.

In a showdown between the Giants’ best pitcher and the Mets’ best position player, the most important showdown, Bumgarner won by KO in four rounds. And he did it by putting his hand on the “approach” lever and pushing it all the way toward the extreme.

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Any story of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 5-2 Wild Card victory over the Baltimore Orioles at the Rogers Centre on Tuesday night will start and end with Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter’s refusal to allow ERA leader, Cy Young candidate, and flawless closer, Zach Britton, into the game. Britton watched from afar as Ubaldo Jimenez threw the final five pitches of the their team’s season, and considering how baffling Showalter’s decision-making was, it’s only right the stories should start and end there.

But a start and an end leave room in the middle, and the ending we got couldn’t have happened without everything that led up to it. Showalter’s decision was key to the final outcome of the game, as was Jimenez’s failure to execute. But we never get there without Jose Bautista’s first-inning home run, or the five innings of scoreless relief by Toronto’s bullpen, or Edwin Encarnacion hopping all over that fat Jimenez fastball in the 11th and raising his hands in triumph. And while those were the most obvious keys to success for Toronto last night, Bautista and Encarnacion have crushed hittable pitches hundreds of times in their career prior, and bullpens have thrown countless scoreless innings. What Kevin Pillar did in the fifth inning is something he’s never done. What Pillar did in the fifth was something most have never done.

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Yesterday, we ran the American League edition of this post, where interested parties can locate the methodology used to inform all of what’s to follow. Let us now begin the National League edition of this annual exercise.

It actually happened. Back in July, I wrote a post on how Colon had been baseball’s best-fielding pitcher. Now we’re here in October, and the numbers have held up. While Colon used to fall off the mound in his power-pitching days, he now finishes his delivery in a perfect fielding position, square to home plate, and displayed a combination of incredible reaction time, soft hands, and instincts that allowed him to capitalize on so many balls in play hit right back at him this year. And, believe it or not, this isn’t just a fluke. Dating back to 2014, Colon ranks top-10 among all pitchers in Defensive Runs Saved. He fields his position well, he controls the run game, and this year, he leads all major league pitchers in both Defensive Runs Saved and Fielding Runs Above Average. Now let’s get the old man a Gold Glove for it.

Iron Gloves: Jorge de la Rosa (-4), Tom Koehler (-4), Jimmy Nelson (-3).
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It’s possible, if not probable, that the BBWAA will fail to elect Mike Trout next month as the American League’s Most Valuable Player for the fourth time in five years, a near half-decade-long stretch of what’s difficult to be viewed as anything other than illogical thinking or misguided debate mongering that, if continued, will likely be looked upon decades from now by the baseball community with a sense of regret and confusion.

This marks the third consecutive year (2014, 2015) in which I’ve updated the historical context of Trout’s current run, and each season, the already obvious becomes even more apparent: Mike Trout isn’t just the best player in baseball; he’s one of the greatest ever to walk the earth. He is Mickey Mantle. He is Willie Mays. He is Barry Bonds, before the steroids. Steroid-era Bonds aside, Trout’s probably the best baseball player most people reading this post have ever seen.

Every position player in MLB history with more bWAR than Mike Trout (47.7) over any 5-year stretch, ever:

 

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustFG_) October 4, 2016

The back and forth over the finer points of the subjectivity of the word “valuable” has grown tired, as has the common refrain of those who suggest “It isn’t the Most Outstanding Player Award.” And, it’s true — that’s not the name of the award. But, at a certain point, doesn’t “outstanding” win out? When the “outstanding” stands for “as or more outstanding than Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, Carl Yastrzemski and Joe DiMaggio ever were,” can’t that make up for whatever arbitrary standard one has set in order to create a universe in which all-time great season after all-time great season can be met with a second-place finish and a pat on the back at the end of the year?

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Today is the day without baseball, and without the ability to watch baseball to pass the time, we turn to something even more frivolous: discussing baseball awards to pass the time. MVP and Cy Young thinkpieces have been flying across my Twitter timeline all afternoon, while our own Eno Sarris ponders evaluating managers statistically for his award vote. And, while Gold Glove finalists won’t be announced for another few weeks, the data is all there, so I might as well continue my annual tradition of objectively crowning the year’s best defenders, according to the publicly available metrics on hand.

Regarding eligibility, I used the same qualification rules used by Rawlings for the official award. If you’d like, you can find those here. Only players who qualify for the actual award qualify here. Once having my player pool, I pulled three advanced defensive metrics for consideration: Defensive Runs Saved, calculated by Baseball Info Solutions, Ultimate Zone Rating, calculated by Mitchel Lichtman and used as the in-house FanGraphs metric, and Fielding Runs Above Average, calculated by Baseball Prospectus and used as their in-house defensive metric. I summed the three, then averaged them together to figure a “total” defensive runs saved number.

You already know this, but the numbers don’t always agree. Sometimes, people don’t like that, but it is what it is. That’s why I prefer to look at them all. I’ll always be confident in the defender who’s rated as positive by all three, moreso than the guy rated positive by two and average or below average by another. By the same token, I’ll always be confident in the defender with one excellent grade and two average grades, moreso than the guy with three average grades, because the numbers see something excellent in the first guy that isn’t apparent in the other. That excellent grade isn’t coming from nowhere. The numbers are subject to noise, but they’re not liars, and I think we can all agree that, generally speaking, they pass the eye test.

For catchers, things are a bit trickier, and the model used by Baseball Prospectus is the only one that adjusts for things like the pitcher (on throwing and blocking) and the umpire and batter (on framing), so I’ve just pulled straight from BP’s leaderboards there. UZR doesn’t exist for pitchers, so only DRS and FRAA are used.

Enough of the methodology mumbo-jumbo. Awards time.

While Masahiro Tanaka wasn’t recognized as a finalist in the official voting last year, he did place third in this study, and this year, he ought to take home the hardware. Since entering the league in 2014, only Dallas Keuchel and Zack Greinke have more Defensive Runs Saved than Tanaka, who is both efficient at controlling the run game, and also fields his position well, due in part to good fielding stance, quick hands, and athleticism, all of which are on display above. Apparently it’s also beneficial to pitch in Canada with a two-letter first name that ends in “A.”

Iron Gloves: Carlos Rodon (-4), Jered Weaver (-4), Ivan Nova (-4).
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Matt Carpenter did something special last night, on the final day of baseball’s 2016 regular season. I’ll get the anticlimactic part of this all out of the way right now: it didn’t matter. Of course, none of this actually matters, but through the lens of the St. Louis Cardinals’ year and postseason implications, what Carpenter did wound up not meaning a thing. It could’ve meant a thing; Carpenter and the Cardinals had everything to play for. Their only shot at a playoff berth came through a win, and what Carpenter did helped the Cardinals win one of their biggest game of the year, 10-4, over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But the Cardinals needed some help alongside their win to potentially clinch that playoff berth, and with a loss to the San Francisco Giants, the Los Angeles Dodgers did not provide the necessary help. The win over the Pirates was for nought; the Cardinals were eliminated from postseason contention. Carpenter, though, did all he could — including pulling a trick out of his bag that he’d been waiting more than six years to use.

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There’s a danger in waiting to write a post about how the narrative surrounding a particular statistic, because the statistics are always changing. I’ve been meaning to write a post about the Atlanta Braves for a while, and specifically, the Atlanta Braves’ offense. I got the inspiration to write about the Braves offense last week, when some sorting of leaderboards for an entirely differnet topic led me to the realization that the Braves had had baseball’s best second-half offense, up until that point. “The Braves Have Had Baseball’s Best Something” would be the headline, and I would take a look at all the young, exciting players that have fueled this second-half surge for the Braves, and how it bodes well for the future of their rebuild.

Well, things change. The Braves no longer have had baseball’s best anything, because they no longer have baseball’s best second-half offense. That honor goes to the Dodgers. The Braves have now had baseball’s second-best second-half offense, and that’s not nearly as compelling a title. And the more I looked into it, my hypothesis for a narrative just didn’t hold up anyway. Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, this second-half offensive surge by Atlanta isn’t all that interesting. The part that’s interesting is that Freddie Freeman has been so damn good, he’s tricked an entire team into appearing compelling.

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If the New York Mets finish the 2016 season as world champions, they’ll have done it with a drastically different approach than the one with which they began the year. See, the Mets are something like a bat-first team now. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, and now Steven Matz won’t pitch again until 2017, and while they’ve still got Noah Syndergaard and a suddenly impressive bullpen, it’s the offense that’s really carried their second-half resurgence. Since the All-Star break, the Mets have baseball’s seventh-best wRC+, among non-pitchers. Over the last month, they’ve had baseball’s third-best offense by that same measure.

And so, barring some unforeseen heroics from the likes of Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, it seems that the World Series aspirations in New York that began with the starting rotation now fall heavily on the starting lineup. If the Mets want to win this thing, they might have to slug their way there, the way Daniel Murphy nearly did for them last postseason. The Mets probably don’t love the fact that they opted not to go the extra year on Murphy in free agency and saw him not only go to a division rival in Washington, but go on to build off last postseason’s success and become potentially the best hitter in the National League. But even though the super-charged Murphy will now play for the Nationals in the postseason, the Mets suddenly have a super-charged middle infielder of their own in Asdrubal Cabrera.

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On Sunday evening, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Colorado Rockies in what was legendary announcer Vin Scully’s last home game at Dodger Stadium after 67 years of calling the team. The Dodgers won, in walk-off fashion, scoring in the ninth on a Corey Seager home run that tied the score at 3-3, and again in the 10th on a home run by Charlie Culberson that clinched the National League West Division and ensured Scully’s final call in Los Angeles would come on a high note.

But Seager and Culberson only had the opportunity for their theatrics because of a home run hit in the top of the ninth inning by a Rockies player. With the Rockies down to their final strike of the ninth inning and with rookie outfielder David Dahl in a 1-2 count with two outs, this happened:

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