There was no baseball last night. There will be no baseball tonight. This is the fault of a great many people, too many to list here. The cynical might say some blame falls at the feet of Don Mattingly and Matt Williams. Others insist the entirety of the blame belongs there.

Mattingly tried his best and Clayton Kershaw turned in two starts (or parts of two starts) unbecoming of a presumptive MVP and Cy Young winner. But if you’re looking for the true catalyst of the Dodgers’ demise and the author of a short series win, look no further than Matt Carpenter.

The Cardinals’ third baseman was unconscious during the division series, clubbing a home run and double apiece in the first three games of the series. In the deciding Game Four, he went 0-4 but his mark on this series remains indelible.

All that extra base pop is slightly out of character for Carpenter, who claimed the same high-OBP as his 7 WAR campaign of 2013 only without the extra base power. He hit just eight home runs during the regular season, only one player hit for less power while still producing more than 10% better than league average.

None of this makes Dodgers fans feel any better. How could L.A. let off-brand Joe Mauer beat them so soundly during the Division Series? Carpenter bested the Dodgers in three key ways.

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Statistical analysts have long been fascinated with the idea of clutch hitting. Often times, those who who have provided memorable hits have been assigned an ineffable quality, with the idea that they can raise their game when runners are in scoring position, with two outs, or late in games. The reality is most great clutch hitters are simply good hitters, and over time hitters put up roughly the same numbers regardless of the situation.

For pitchers, the situation is slightly more complicated. Hitting is reactive – one can only take what they are given. Pitchers have more control in big spots, and often their pitch usage with runners on base or in high leverage situations varies from their normal pitch sequencing.

It’s a matter of bearing down. We hear often that a pitcher “needs” a strikeout in a given situation, and often pitchers attack batters with that very outcome in mind.

For some hitters, this is the most important part of an opposing pitcher’s scouting report. Miguel Cabrera is a born hitter, the kind of guy who can rope doubles and hit opposite field home runs while falling out of bed. His unique skills and seemingly innate ability to put the bat on the ball allow him to spend less time in the video room than most players. In fact, he barely studies opposing pitchers much at all.

In a profile of Cabrera’s approach I wrote in 2013, he explained that most of his video work comes from just watching pitchers with runners on base or looking at what they throw from the stretch. It’s the only information he wants because he feels it gives him an edge when his team needs him most.

Some players don’t want that kind of information, but a hitter like Cabrera — the rare talent that can sit on one pitch and still react to others — it can make all the difference during the game’s most dramatic moments as many pitchers make specific and deliberate adjustments when confronted with runners in scoring position.

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What do you know about the Los Angeles Dodgers? We know they’re the glamor franchise in baseball right now. They have the enormous TV deal and the largest payroll in the league. They just won their second straight National League West crown. They’re good, as one expects such an expensive club to be.

Expensive teams tend to employ well-known players, and the Dodgers don’t want for names. But the way they go about their business is, in my mind, something of a mystery.

The Dodgers have a great rotation and sort of a terrible bullpen. Their offense is good but is it best in baseball good? According to wRC+, that is exactly where it ranks. Their non-pitching offensive players put up a 116 wRC+, tied with the Pirates for best in baseball.

Despite playing a ballpark that is actually favorable to home runs, the high-output Dodgers offense didn’t hit many bombs. They don’t have a prototypical power bat in the middle of their order, until you remember Adrian Gonzalez slugged 27 home runs this year and Matt Kemp put up a 140 wRC+ this season. As a team, they hit 134 home runs, fewer than the Mariners and just two more than the Giants, a team they outscored by almost 50 runs.

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It doesn’t feel like corny sentiment to say the Kansas City Royals stole the American League Wild Card from the Oakland A’s. The Royals lineup does not inspire much in the way of fear but this ragtag bunch hung nine runs on the A’s best starter and its (rightly) maligned bullpen.

They did so while hitting just two extra base hits, both of which came in the 12th inning. Eric Hosmer tripled and Salvador Perez yanked the walkoff double down the line compared to 13 singles and three walks. Without the benefit of big bats, the Royals instead did what the Royals do – they swiped and stole and small ball’d their way to victory, just as our fearless leader suggested they should mere hours before the game began.

They stole seven bases on the night, equalling the record for a postseason game. While none of these steals are likely to reach “Dave Roberts Game 4” levels of notoriety, five of the seven thefts came around to score. Let’s look at each steal, ranking them by win probability added to see which was truly the biggest steal of the night.

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As far as very good Major League outfielders go, Matt Holliday is probably among the most anonymous. Despite owning a career 139 wRC+ and signing a $120 million dollar contract in 2010, he’s probably best known for getting hit in the beans that one time and not touching home plate with the winning run that other time.

But year after year, Holliday methodically bangs out .300/.390/.500 seasons. He hits enough home runs to be a power threat but not enough to elicit “oohs” and/or “ahhhs” from visiting fans. He looks enough like The Thing to keep from holding the casual fan’s gaze for too long. He just sort of exists, a very productive presence on the outside of the collective unconscious.

In his own way, Holliday is the physical embodiment of the team he plays for, the St. Louis Cardinals. Unsettlingly consistent, easy to overlook but difficult to beat, and extremely annoying for opposing fans and players. Like the villain in a really boring horror film.

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Because this is an internet baseball column in the year 2014, Derek Jeter was its original subject. The world doesn’t really need another Jeter column, especially one that smugly notes the uncanny similarities between Jeter’s season as a 40-year old shortstop and the 2007 season of Omar Vizquel, the last man to qualify for the batting title as a quadragenarian in the middle of the diamond.

Nobody needs to read that column. The Jeter farewell tour is almost over, and those who want it go to away will be happy and those who appreciate the generation of superlative play Jeter provided will be sad. My opinion on the matter doesn’t really matter. The exercise did bear fruit in one way, however. Looking that the Yankee Captain’s age-40 season (poor, even by 40-year old infielder standards) got me thinking about Jeter’s age-35 season, which was truly one for the ages.

It was 2009 and the Yankees won the World Series, thanks to Jeter’s heroics and a host of very pricey teammates all contributing in significant ways. But Jeter was incredible that year, posting a 130 wRC+ and just under 7 WAR* – it works out to be one of the ten best age-35 seasons since World War II.

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Unlike the previous iteration of the “Where Do The _____ Go From Here”, the immediate future of this week’s focus, the Atlanta Braves, remains very much unwritten. The Braves are 5.5 games out of a National League Wild Card spot with one team to leap frog. Should a litany of things break their way, they’ll play at least one game of significant significance.

That said, the Braves finding themselves in that pivotal play-in game would represent a serious reversal of fortune. Right now, and for much of the last month, the Braves look bad. Their offense is abysmal, one of the worst in baseball in the second half of the season, and they just watched their main rival celebrate a division title in their own soil. Their ongoing presence in the playoff race is more a testament of the rather putrid NL Wild Card class, currently featuring a Giants team that opted not to win a single game during the summer months and the Milwaukee Brewers, currently showing the Braves what a real slump looks like.

The problems with the Braves are relatively minor. They won 96 games last year, which we know to be extremely good. They hung in the Wild Card race and at the top of the NL East all season despite losing 40% of their starting rotation before the year even started, and then losing their lottery ticket starter before they even got to scratch it. But the issues the Braves currently face are largely issues they might have addressed in the offseason.

After their surprisingly terrific 2013 season, Braves GM Frank Wren balanced a need to improve a club that perhaps misrepresented its true talent one year against very real budgetary concerns in the next. Other than nabbing Ervin Santana on a one year desperation deal and acquiring Ryan Doumit for mildly inexplicable reasons, they stood pat and are now paying the price.

“Why mess with a 96 win team?” you might wonder. The Braves did indeed post 96 wins in 2013, but the talent they had on hand at the start of 2014 projected to win 82-86 games. Right now, the problem for Atlanta is this team is about as good as it should be. They came into the year with a question marks at a few spots in the lineup and did nothing to address them. The Braves needed underperformers like B.J. Upton to rediscover their old form while the upstarts such as Chris Johnson needed to repeat their production of the previous season. Or they could make a push to improve their team and push themselves into 90 win territory, It didn’t happen.

So now we’re left to take stock of the Atlanta Braves, now and in the future.

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There are a few things that most people reading this know about 3-0 counts, or at least there some things we think we know about what happens when the count runs 3-0. We know the strike zone gets very big and we know batters take the vast, vast majority of the time. We also know only the best hitters get the green light in this count.

While bat still stay largely on shoulders with the count 3-0, more and more hitters do offer at these pitches – the 3-0 swing rate increased every year since 2009. If you’re going to get a good pitch to hit, why not swing? Since only the best hitters get to unload, the ones understood to be the best judges of the strike zone, the chances of a positive outcome increases. As a rough measure, consider the drop off in slugging from 3-0 to 3-1 is slight compared to the drop from 3-1 to a full count.

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Who is the best reliever in baseball over the last two years? If we made a list, the usual suspects would shoot straight to the top. Craig Kimbrel is a given, Koji Uehara was essentially unhittable for one calendar year, Kenley Jansen skews “untouchable” and Aroldis Chapman is in his own world. Greg Holland and Wade Davis surely jump to mind without much searching, Sean Doolittle and David Robertson deserve attention for their high-leverage work.

There is one reliever that is conspicuously absent from that list (because I excluded him!) but since the start of the 2013 season, this closer boasts some unbelievable numbers. Pitching to 41 ERA- (fifth best among qualified relievers) and a 51 FIP- (third) while posting roughly 5 RA9-WAR and 4 fWAR, both of which place him among the elite stoppers in baseball.

The reliever in question is Mark Melancon, the setup guy-come-closer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Melancon went from being well-traveled to a brief sting in AAA to become the very best of a stout group of relievers holding the Pirates in the playoff race for the second straight season.

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Nobody could ever accuse Kevin Towers of being anything less than bold. Few teams have been as interesting as the Arizona Diamondbacks over the last few years. Setting aside the quality of his moves, the sheer volume and often puzzling circumstances surrounding them garnered Arizona more headlines than such a middling team typically deserves.

His moves cut against the grain of prizing young, cheap talent and instead focused on a loose set of criteria, most of which was derived from the ability to play above one’s tools. It didn’t make the team better but it sure spilled a lot of ink. The problem is a simple one: a general manager’s job is to win and make money for the club, not generate think-pieces and schadenfreude. The Diamondbacks didn’t win and now Towers is out as the general manager, with the search for his replacement beginning in earnest (the list of candidates is as long as your arm.)

The Diamondbacks team  Towers inherited wasn’t a world beater, though it did claim the 2011 National League West crown. One could convincingly argue that the franchise is actually in worse shape now compared to Towers’ first day on the job. What exactly has the outgoing general manager left the next person to fill his chair? More than you might think.

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