The first pitch Noah Syndergaard threw Friday night sent Alcides Escobar to the ground. Syndergaard didn’t give Escobar an opportunity to swing because the instinctive priority was for him to get his head out of the way, and Syndergaard didn’t bother trying to disguise his intent after the game. He owned up to it — he wanted to give the Royals a little fright. The Royals, in turn, were furious, as they’re allowed to be, but the rest of the game spun the narrative wheel, and it ultimately settled on “Syndergaard delivered a message.” In the end he pitched pretty well and the Mets emerged victorious, so Syndergaard gets the favorable press.

But for whatever it’s worth, if Syndergaard did succeed in intimidating his opponent, it didn’t look that way early on, when the brushback was most fresh. After Escobar got knocked down, the Royals scored a run in the first. They scored another two in the second. The immediate aftermath, for Syndergaard, was troublesome, and the national broadcast speculated that he’d only succeeded in waking the Royals up. It was only after Syndergaard turned his game around that the conversation grew more sunny. And as a part of that process, Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud made a change on the fly.

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Let’s talk about contact. It’s what everybody else is doing, right? The Royals make a lot of it. They did all season, and they still are in the playoffs, even against Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom. No team this season posted a lower strikeout rate; no team was even particularly close. Contact is the skill around which the Royals lineup is built.

Right around the end of the regular season, I wanted to try to put these Royals in some kind of historical context. I wanted to know how good they are at hitting the ball, relative to other teams over the past several decades, but it’s not as easy as just looking at the strikeouts because whiffs have increased over time, especially lately. You have to make adjustments, so I folded in yearly league averages and standard deviations. What I found: by the resulting measure, the Royals were baseball’s best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I went back no further, because I didn’t see the point.

It’s interesting, that conclusion. 1950 was a long time ago, and an awful lot of baseball has happened ever since. Mickey Mantle hadn’t debuted yet; Dave Winfield hadn’t been born yet. So it’s notable to post the most extreme anything between 1950 and 2015. In taking the top spot, the Royals just barely edged out the runner-up. The team knocked into second place was the 2002 Angels.

Immediately, that catches your eye. The Royals are the best contact-hitting team in ages. Those Angels were the second-best contact-hitting team in ages, and they won the World Series. For Royals fans, that’s encouraging, probably, and from my standpoint, now that I think about it deeper, there are a ton of parallels between these two ballclubs, even beyond putting the ball in play. Those Angels might be the best historical comparison for what the Royals currently have going on.

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The other day, I received a tweet saying 72 wins is the new #6org. It was in response to a Jon Heyman article that ripped a Royals preseason 72-win projection. This is just about the best possible time to do that — the only better time, maybe, to write that article could be next week. Now, a difference: the #6org thing is ours. The 72-win Royals projection came from Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system. So, this could be their own version of #6org, but it’s not like PECOTA was all that exceptional. All the systems pretty much agreed. Our own systems projected the Royals to go 79-83. That looks better than PECOTA, but it still looks bad. The Royals have made the numbers look silly, is the point.

They were projected to go maybe .500, and they’re close to winning the World Series. A year ago, they were projected to go something like .500, and they came close to winning the World Series. The year before that, they were projected to go something like .500, and they won 86 games, up 14 from the year previous. Right now the Royals are being described every 10 seconds as relentless. They look like they’re unstoppable, and though they’ve come very close to being stopped, and though they were stopped just last October, there’s still something of a special feeling. The Royals, we’re told, do things differently. On observation, it’s hard to disagree.

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I don’t blame you if you’re getting tired of the the-Royals-make-a-lot-of-contact stuff. It’s the core of most of the analysis being done right now, but in fairness, it’s the core because the Royals make a lot of contact. It’s arguably their most outstanding skill, which is what makes them such an intriguing match-up for the Mets. And they were up to their usual business again Wednesday. You knew about it, because it was all over Twitter, and it was all over the broadcast, and also you have eyes. Jacob deGrom is the ace of the Mets, and in some other years he’d be the ace of the National League. He tends to be a strikeout machine, yet in Game 2 he assembled but two strikeouts before getting shut off. Mets relievers combined for one more. All the Mets, total, generated six swings and misses, and if you look just at deGrom, here’s his 2015 postseason swinging-strike log:

• October 9: 21 whiffs
• October 15: 14
• October 20: 18
• October 28: 3

You don’t need to conduct any deep level of analysis to know that last point stands out. Given just those bullet points, you’d figure something happened on October 28. With three swinging strikes, deGrom equaled his career low, and in no other starts did he finish with fewer than six. Based on the evidence, the Royals royaled. This is precisely why the Royals have been viewed as a legitimate threat. They could negate the Mets’ greatest strength.

So, as far as the contact, there was a question during and after the game — was it the pitchers, or was it the hitters? Were the Royals doing a particularly good job of taking the bat to the ball, or were the Mets doing something a little sloppy? Let me let you cheat: both. The answer is both. The answer is pretty much always both. But, for sure, the Mets weren’t executing. Beginning — but not ending — with deGrom, the Mets weren’t actually throwing the Royals swing-and-miss pitches.

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Let’s over-analyze. It’s why we’re here, right? We’ve got one baseball game to talk about, and we have a few more hours until we have another one baseball game to talk about. This is when we’re supposed to make a lot of a little, so let’s do just that, focusing on Game 1’s ninth inning. More specifically, let’s focus on Jeurys Familia facing Alex Gordon, with a one-run lead.

Gordon and Familia had never before faced off. So Gordon was trying to figure out his opponent, and after three pitches, you could say he did his job, tying the game with a homer to straightaway center field. It wasn’t a homer that won the ballgame, but it was a homer that later allowed the ballgame to be won, a stunning blast against an otherwise incredible closer. The Mets don’t expect Familia to fail. If anything, they’ve come to take him for granted. But the Royals went all Royals on him, and you know the rest. Familia would later admit that he made a mistake.

It’s easy enough to leave it there. Familia threw a bad fastball, and Gordon punished him for it. But why not go deeper? Why go deeper, you might ask? Because we can. Because the numbers are there for us to look at. This is the best time to be alive, so far.

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Alcides Escobar is not a good hitter. I don’t say that to be mean — I say that to be honest. Even the Royals don’t really know how to explain Esky Magic. There’s no getting around his regular-season numbers, and when you mix in what he’s done in the playoffs, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. He’s the kind of hitter that, if you saw him in a community park, you’d think, that guy ought to play in the majors. But he’s the kind of hitter that, when he’s in the majors, you think, that guy plays a hell of a shortstop. In his best year, Escobar was a bit below average. He followed that year with a year where he hit like a good-hitting pitcher.

Escobar doesn’t walk, and Escobar doesn’t hit for power. The thing he has going for him is he’s tremendously difficult to strike out. In that sense he blends in with the Royals, although even on that roster he’s one of the standouts. Escobar, in short, is good at taking the bat to the baseball. From there, things will sort themselves out. The most charitable way to describe Escobar’s offense is that, with his speed and his contact ability, he’s usually capable of making something happen. Better a ball in play than a whiff, right? You never know, with a ball in play.

In the World Series opener, Escobar’s contact allowed for things to happen. After days of talking about the Royals’ ability to avoid the whiff, Escobar put contact to good use. Two examples were and are obvious. A third was subtle, but without it, Escobar doesn’t score the winning run on the Eric Hosmer sac fly.

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You can’t always feel original, even when you want to. Yesterday I wrote about the Royals going up against the Mets’ power pitching. I wrote about it because I think it’s interesting, but then, everyone thinks it’s interesting, so everyone has been writing about it. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fastballs well. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fast fastballs well. It’s been demonstrated now that good contact hitters have a slight advantage against power pitchers, relative to worse contact hitters. So much, coming from the Royals’ perspective. It’s all over the place.

A frequent counter-point: the Royals won’t just be facing hard-throwers. They’ll be facing Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz. These are hard-throwers with other pitches; these are hard-throwers with instincts and command. They’re not just 98-mile-per-hour fastball machines, so maybe it’s not fair to mix them in with everyone else. I think that’s totally valid. So it’s worth running through these exercises from the Mets’ perspective. We’ve looked at the Royals against power pitchers. How about the Mets against contact hitters?

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There’s this thing about the World Series: It’s the only baseball left. There are two teams, and they need to finish before the offseason can begin. This is the most meaningful baseball on the calendar. After all, the World Series is the whole point. So you’ve got everyone focused on at least four games — and maybe as many as seven. There are days off in the lead-up, and there are days off in the middle. During that time, almost every single thing is analyzed. Every stone in the stony field gets turned in the World Series, which is also funny because it’s one series — and it’s baseball — which means we might as well not do any analysis at all. The long and short of this paragraph is this: There’s no harm in talking about how Salvador Perez and Travis d’Arnaud receive pitches.

By the numbers at StatCorner, and by the numbers at Baseball Prospectus, d’Arnaud is a better receiver than Perez. Perez seems to be somewhere in the area of average, while d’Arnaud is one of the better receivers. I could just leave the point here, but what might be more interesting are the juicier, more granular details. Like, with hitters, you could stop at wOBA, but why not look at sub-components like walks and power? I’m going to borrow from an excellent post-ALCS article by Tom Verducci. There’s a lot in there that’s worth your time, but I’m drawing from just one section.

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