You can detect the nervousness. The Royals stormed out to take a commanding series lead, but then Johnny Cueto’s own arm abandoned him, wrecking not only Game 3 but also a potential Game 7 as well. So there’s some discomfort there, some uncertainty, and now in a short while the Royals are going to throw Chris Young at the best offense in the league in the center of a homer-happy ballpark. If Young were a bad pitcher, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but I don’t think he’s perceived as a trustworthy pitcher. So the thought is the Blue Jays are in a good place to go and tie this series up.

I don’t think we can help the way we feel about Young. He’s unusual and by no means overpowering, and everything we’ve learned about pitchers gives us reason to be skeptical. He puts the ball in the air. He doesn’t pound the zone. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats. Young’s whole game is suppressing quality contact, and being skeptical of that is like Sabermetrics 101. Yet Young, for his career, has posted a better-than-average ERA. The same has held true of late, following his career revival. Young has a real chance this afternoon, our own doubts aside. As always, it’s just going to take precision.

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The people are growing accustomed to watching the Mets win, and as a side effect of that, the people are growing accustomed to watching Jeurys Familia come in to try to finish the job. Familia has yet to allow a postseason run, and even if you didn’t know anything about him before, you’d be able to tell just from observation that he’s far from a weakness. They say the biggest vulnerability on the Mets is the soft underbelly of the bullpen, and though that would be true for most teams, the Mets make it extra tricky, because the starters often work deep, meaning they can hand the ball to Familia almost directly. Which means there’s almost never any let-up.

What Familia has turned himself into is one of the true reliever elites. It hasn’t always been a smooth and easy path to the top, as Familia has previously fought his own command and struggled to retire left-handed hitters. Both of those are common problems for hard-throwing righty relievers, but Familia this year has overcome them, blossoming into a shutdown closer Terry Collins will trust to get more than three outs. And the thing about Familia is that it goes beyond just his being successful — these days, he arrives at his success on a path all his own.

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The wheels started spinning for me Friday afternoon. I was absentmindedly scrolling through numbers, looking for anything relevant to the NLCS, when I came upon something on the Baseball-Reference Cubs splits page. I’ll show you the exact thing I saw:

Go ahead and squint. You’ll make it out. You see categories, designating power and finesse pitchers. Then you see the Cubs’ hitting statistics. They’ve been much, much worse against power pitchers, and while everyone is much, much worse against power pitchers, the Cubs still look worse if you adjust for that. That’s what the last column shows. I made a note to try to write this up. See, the Cubs are playing the Mets, and a lot of the Mets happen to throw super hard.

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The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.

Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.

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If it’s a preview of Game 5 you want, here’s all that really needs to be said: Zack Greinke is good, and Jacob deGrom is good, and the rest of the Dodgers are good, and the rest of the Mets are good, and some combination of events is going to lead one good team beyond the other. Maybe the combination will be predictable; maybe a catcher will accidentally throw a return toss off of the batter’s hand in a tie game in the ninth. Maybe that counts as predictable now. We’ll keep our eyes out.

Any preview bigger than that is lying to you. If not lying, then implying this’ll be in any way foreseeable. There’s a game, and things will happen in it. What I want to do here isn’t project which team is more likely to win. Rather, I just want to point out a really neat thing about Greinke’s 2015 record. It does say more than a little something about the way that Greinke pitches, so in that way this is immediately relevant, but mostly I wanted to make sure to get this in somewhere before Greinke’s season was officially over. It might be over in a matter of hours. So, now’s the time.

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You’re in a pickle, see. The Devil wants to take your soul, and he’s pretty intent on doing it, but he’ll leave you be on one condition: in the span of one hour, you are to teach him everything there is to understand about the game of baseball. Up to this point the game’s been over his head, and he’d like to know what it’s all about, but he also has only so much patience, especially with you. If you can convey to him that special essence of the sport, you’re free to go, spared an eternal damnation. If not, you lose. You know what’s at stake. Of course you do. Your mind races.

Or, your mind would’ve raced. Before Wednesday, before Game 5 between the Rangers and the Blue Jays. You would’ve thought about explaining the rules. You would’ve thought about reviewing certain eras, and certain Hall-of-Fame players. You would’ve thought about going through the physical motions. But now — now — this is an easy situation to fix. You show the Devil Game 5’s seventh inning. He’s gotta have the Internet somewhere. You show him the entirety of the seventh inning, from start to finish. When it’s done, and the second bench-clearing incident is broken up, you’ve got six minutes to take questions.

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The Cubs won the third-most games in baseball. In the first round — a round some people don’t even consider the playoffs — they eliminated the team that won the second-most games in baseball. Just Tuesday, in the other first round, they eliminated the team that won the very most games in baseball. Very good accomplishment! Exciting times for the Cubs. It makes it worth wondering: who’s really the best at the moment?

We know that the playoffs don’t always ultimately crown the best team in baseball. There’s just way too much room for randomness, and sometimes superior teams do get toppled. Really, it’s part of the fun. But at the same time, that “best team” label is more complicated than it might appear. Because: when? If you’re trying to figure out the best team, do you mean the best team overall, or the best team at the moment, or what? The Cardinals were just the only team in baseball to win 100 games. They also went into the playoffs without, say, Carlos Martinez, or a healthy Yadier Molina. So what should one make of the playoff Cardinals, relative to the overall regular-season Cardinals?

This is at risk of going too long. I tried to rate the playoff teams. And I mean the teams as they’re built today. I tried to rate the best baseball teams, right now.

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The Blue Jays paid a lot to get David Price, even though they knew he was about to become a free agent. The Jays rightly figured the starting rotation could use a big upgrade if the team was going to go on to make some playoff noise. Of course, at that point, they didn’t yet know what to expect from Marcus Stroman. They might not have expected anything.

The American League Cy Young is going to go to Price or another guy. Price stands a perfectly fine chance, and you’d assume that when a team trades for that sort of pitcher, the same team will use him in as many important starts as possible. Sure enough, Price started Game 1 of the ALDS, but as you know by now, the ball in Game 5 is being handed to Marcus Stroman. Price just threw a lot of pitches in relief in Game 4, even though the Jays were already heavily favored. It’s surprising, and it’s complicated. It doesn’t seem like throwing Price so much out of the bullpen was a good managerial call. Yet we can at least say this much: it’s not all that clear the Jays are worse off. Stroman might even come with a certain advantage.

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Well, it happened again.

I don’t need to remind you what happened last September 30, because it was one of the more memorable playoff games of our era. And then Monday, the same thing and the same team repeated. Many of the specific details weren’t alike, but the feelings were all the same — a game that was effectively over, followed by a sense of witnessing the improbable. A year ago, the Royals rallied two times. Monday, they rallied just once. Yet the odds they faced at the lowest points were similar, and thus similar odds were overcome. It doesn’t take long to develop a reputation for this. Luke Gregerson must find the Royals unkillable.

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