Billy Butler’s nickname is Country Breakfast. You know that — you’ve known that for years — but at this point, the connection’s automatic, and you probably don’t really think about it. This time, think about it. I don’t actually know why he’s nicknamed Country Breakfast, but it seems to be ever so fitting. If you think about whatever a country breakfast is, and if you think about the people likely to be eating it, you imagine a guy who looks like Billy Butler, a guy who doesn’t have plans to be active the rest of the day. Billy Butler’s all gravy and pig with a .300 average, and that’s an easy sort of player to fall in love with as long as you’ve got pinch-runners at the ready.

Billy Butler is slow. Not just relatively slow, among professional athletes — he is a slow man, when he’s running. The good news is he’s not supposed to be fast. The bad news is he’s slow. Since 2009, Butler’s posted six of the 80 worst baserunning seasons in baseball. This year he was on first base for 31 singles, and one time did he make it to third. About 10% of the time he took an extra base, against a league average of 40%. Current Fan Scouting Report results give Butler a 17/100 in sprint speed. This is consistent with his 18 from previous years. Jesus Montero also received a sprint rating of 18, and the Mariners hired a man to spend the offseason teaching him how to move his legs and arms. According to you guys, Billy Butler runs as fast as a player who didn’t know how to run. I could go on longer than this, but, this paragraph is your background.

And so on Sunday, in Game 3 of the ALDS, Billy Butler stole second base in the playoffs. It wasn’t the play that did the Angels in — truthfully, it wasn’t a play that really mattered — but it spoke to the confidence with which the Royals were plowing forward. The man on the mound, by the way, was a lefty.

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Clayton Kershaw seems like a virtual lock to win the 2014 National League Most Valuable Player award. Even though he missed a handful of starts at the beginning of the year, he more than made up for that over the remainder, and below, observe a plot of how Kershaw has distributed his runs allowed.

Kershaw’s made 28 starts, and in seven of them, he didn’t allow a run. In another ten, he allowed but a single run, so you can see why Kershaw’s MVP case has so much support. But I should note that Kershaw made 27 regular-season starts, and he’s made one postseason start. The postseason start is included in the plot above, and it’s something that kind of needs to be explained.

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Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. You might damn well be sick of reading about this. I couldn’t even blame you, but you have to understand the nugget that we’re sitting on, here. It’s unusual that we know about such a stark vulnerability. It also happens to belong to the best player in baseball, a player we’ve written so many thousands of words about here before, and that player is in the playoffs now, looking to lead his team to a World Series. Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. The report’s been known for months, but to me it’s still endlessly fascinating to see how pitchers and teams make use of the information. This trend is pretty clear — the table below shows Trout’s month-by-month rates of high fastballs seen:

If we’ve been able to identify something, you’d better believe Major League Baseball has been able to identify that something, so Trout in the second half saw more high fastballs than anybody else, by a few percentage points. And what happened? Well, Trout remained pretty great, but after leading baseball in the first half with a 186 wRC+, second-half Trout dropped to 141, even with Jose Altuve. His walks went down and his strikeouts went up, and while he was seeing about 41% high fastballs, that means he was seeing 59% non-high-fastballs. That’s where Trout feasted. He’s going to win the league MVP, and he deserves it.

Thursday night, Trout played in the playoffs, as the Angels and Royals kicked off their ALDS. Starting for Kansas City was Jason Vargas, and that raised an interesting question. All right, pitch Trout high and hard. But what if you don’t have good high, hard stuff? What if you’re, say, Jason Vargas? One wondered how the Royals would approach Trout, and, now that we look back, the Royals approached Trout like the numbers say you should approach Trout. I have to note that Sam Miller has already written about this, very well, but he cheated by writing at night like some kind of hard and disciplined worker. It’s like, work during work hours, right? Let’s pretend like Miller didn’t beat me to the punch, and review Trout’s five trips to the plate. He finished 0-for-4 with a walk, by the way. The Royals won!

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Stephen Strasburg was hyped from before he was ever drafted, and when he made his big-league debut, he captured the national interest like few other prospects ever have or ever will. But a hyped Strasburg meant there would be a post-hyped Strasburg, and while people still recognize that he has electric, occasionally unhittable stuff, it’s felt before like something’s been missing. Maybe it’s on us for setting our expectations too high, or maybe it’s on us for not being patient enough, but Strasburg felt incomplete, and it wasn’t only the fans who felt so.

Last spring, a big-league pitcher remarked that his teammates would rather face Strasburg than Jordan Zimmermann. Against Strasburg, they were more comfortable, and while his numbers were clearly good, the point is that Strasburg didn’t feel like a whole pitcher.

And now? Now he feels a lot more like a whole pitcher. Some of it is just clearing 200 innings, but this year’s version of Strasburg has taken a step forward. This year’s version of Strasburg is maybe the ace of a staff full of aces, as he’s crossed more tasks off a shrinking to-do list.

Here’s the simplest way to put it: Strasburg, in 2014, threw more strikes. In 2012 and 2013, he threw strikes about 63% of the time. The average for a National League starter was about 64%. This season, Strasburg threw strikes about 67% of the time, one of the higher figures in the league. So, where Strasburg used to walk 7-8% of opposing hitters, this year he walked 5%, which is particularly low given his frequency of getting into deep counts.

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Do you guys know Jaack? That’s not a very good introduction. We’ve run live game chats during the wild-card playoffs the previous two nights, and Jaack is the screen name of at least one participating commenter. This is Wednesday’s live chat, and this is Jaack, at 11:05pm EDT:

Comment From Jaack
There needs to be an article about how much better last night’s game was. Like inning by inning breakdown.

Jaack’s the best. Thank you, Jaack! Following is such a breakdown.

Tuesday’s game, of course, set an impossible standard. It feels like it’s an all-time kind of playoff game, and while I’m fully aware of recency bias, I felt the same way after Rangers/Cardinals Game 6 in 2011, and that one’s stood up. We can debate how amazing it was to watch the A’s and the Royals, but there’s no debate that it was some kind of amazing. So there was no chance at all that the Giants and Pirates would follow that show with at least an equivalent show of their own, but Wednesday was a total dud. The saving grace was that Madison Bumgarner pitched and was awesome, but for the most part he was awesome without any danger, and when the outcome feels decided, the entertainment value plummets.

This isn’t about the quality of the baseball. This is about the quality of the show. We already know that Tuesday’s show was several times better, but now let’s put some actual data to it because what else do you have to do for the next few minutes? If you started reading this, you can finish reading this.

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It’s too bad that the playoffs have to continue uninterrupted, because I’d be content to think about and write about Tuesday night’s wild-card game for the next month and a half. While it wasn’t actually a demonstration of smallball vs. Moneyball, the Royals resembled a team from the 80s, or more accurately, the Royals resembled themselves, beating the A’s with exactly their own brand of offense. The Royals this past season were the best base-stealing team in the league, and while it’s easy to downplay baserunning as a significant overall factor in determining wins and losses, the small picture doesn’t always work like the big picture, and Tuesday night, stolen bases were very much a huge reason behind the Royals’ stunning advance.

That was a key we all thought to watch for. Aggressiveness was part of the Royals’ game plan, as they tied a playoff record with seven steals. There’s blame going the way of Derek Norris, who replaced an injured Geovany Soto, and to be sure, Norris could’ve had a better game. But something we’ve really come to understand in the past few years is that steals are more off of pitchers than catchers, and this wasn’t so much the Royals taking advantage of Norris as it was the Royals taking advantage of the batteries. The Royals read and the Royals ran, and there was no bigger stolen base than Jarrod Dyson’s arrival at third in the bottom of the ninth.

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A little over two years ago, shortly before I joined FanGraphs, Yoenis Cespedes faced Tyler Robertson, who is a pitcher, and got ahead in the count 3-and-0. There is no more favorable count than 3-and-0, which meant Cespedes was in the position of power, and then he went and completed what for my money is one of the most memorable plate appearances in recent baseball history. Memorable to me, if to nobody else.

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The Royals made a trade for James Shields and evaluators had things to say about it. The Royals, for their part, were confident in their belief that Shields could help push the team to its intended destination, and on Tuesday, before a partisan audience, Shields will start the Royals’ biggest game in decades. It’s fitting for a man nicknamed Big Game James, and though a big part of the reason for that is the convenience of his first name rhyming with Game, this is how the Royals drew it up. They wanted to get to games that matter, and then they wanted to give the baseballs that matter to James Shields.

Good pitchers aren’t defined by any single quality, unless you grant the quality of being good. There’s a lot that goes into being a top-of-the-rotation starter, and while, say, Clayton Kershaw has an incredible slider, he’s not incredible because of his slider. Jon Lester has an incredible cutter, but he’s not incredible because of his cutter. Good pitchers, like all things, are complicated to understand, but there are most certainly standout skills. Kershaw does have a standout slider. Lester does have a standout cutter. And James Shields? Shields is good at a lot of things, but he’s known for having a standout changeup. Or, he was. And now he is again, but there was a time that the pitch went missing. It’s been an interesting year for the best pitch in Shields’ arsenal.

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You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this to happen. Sure, probably nobody else noticed that it happened, and Henderson Alvarez himself probably didn’t notice that it happened, but, let’s not be judgmental. You have your things, and I have mine. This is one of my things.

Let’s break hitting down to a level that’s so simple it barely even applies to real hitting in the first place. As a hitter, you want to hit the ball hard. To hit the ball hard, you want to maximize your swings at hittable pitches, and minimize your swings at less hittable pitches. The strike zone mostly captures the hittable pitches, and a pitch taken in the strike zone will count against you for a strike. So to make things excessively simple: you want hitters to swing at strikes, and you don’t want hitters to swing at balls. Generally, a swing at a strike is a good decision. Generally, a swing at a ball is a bad decision. The most disciplined hitters in baseball will swing at a lot more strikes than balls.

Conveniently, we can establish a discipline baseline. What’s the worst discipline one might ever expect? That would be an even blend of swings at strikes and swings at balls. That would suggest zero discipline at all, and that’s the approach we’d expect if swings were determined by flipping a coin. If everything were 50/50, a hitter would have an O-Swing% of 50% and a Z-Swing% of 50%. To somehow perform worse than that would hint at the existence of anti-discipline, which I don’t even know how I would explain.

Henderson Alvarez is best known for being a baseball pitcher. Because his employer’s in the National League, he also sometimes has to be a baseball hitter. This past season he came to the plate 67 times. Henderson Alvarez’s discipline was worse than a coin’s.

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