The 2012 World Series begins in just some hours, with the Tigers trotting out their ace in Justin Verlander. The Giants will respond by trotting out a guy who might have been an ace once many years ago in Barry Zito. I was tasked with the project of writing up a Barry Zito Game 1 game plan, and to me it couldn’t be more simple. Zito’s Wednesday night strategy:

1. do what Justin Verlander does
2. maybe do it better?

All right, so that is a physical impossibility, unless Verlander suffers a crippling injury between now and then and still somehow is allowed to start. A more realistic Barry Zito Game 1 game plan:

1. hit all of the spots
2. do not miss any of the spots

See how easy this is? Barry Zito might well win tonight just so long as he pitches perfectly. If he doesn’t make any mistakes, at all, then surely he’ll have the Tigers’ hitters off balance and maybe the Giants will score a run against Verlander or the bullpen and, presto, there’s a World Series advantage! I guess my work here is done, sooner than I expected it to be.

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The Washington Nationals had under contract one of the very best starting pitchers in baseball, and they decided against using him in the playoffs, where they lost. The decision was talked about for weeks and months in advance. It’s probably still being talked about somewhere, and it’ll be a topic for years. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants have under contract one of the better hitting outfielders in baseball, and they’ve decided against using him in the playoffs, where they’ve advanced to the World Series. With the stakes at their absolute highest, the Giants are still committed to going forward without Melky Cabrera. The Cabrera situation and the Stephen Strasburg situation are very different, with little to do with one another, but I needed an intro and I feel like this served the purpose.

So here’s where we are: the Giants are in the Series, and while they have home-field advantage — in part thanks to Melky Cabrera’s performance in the All-Star Game! — they need to identify a designated hitter for Games 3 through 5 in Detroit. Were Cabrera on the active roster, this decision would be pretty easy. He’s not, so it isn’t, because the Giants’ bench is bad. Still, there has to be a best of the worst, so let us discuss in some depth.

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Generally speaking, players not named Carlos Beltran don’t turn into different players come playoff time. That wouldn’t make any sense — it’s still regular baseball, and the things that apply in September still apply in October. Players might become slightly less effective in the playoffs, due to the increased quality of competition, but a strike-thrower will probably stay a strike-thrower and a power hitter will probably stay a power hitter. So maybe it doesn’t need to be written that Marco Scutaro has been doing an incredible job of making contact in this year’s postseason. But, aw, what the heck, we’re all here. What follows is an incomplete list of players who have one strikeout in the 2012 MLB playoffs:

• Mitch Moreland
• Jason Motte
• Sergio Romo
• Endy Chavez
• Marco Scutaro

What a carefully-selected list of players who have barely batted, and Marco Scutaro! Indeed, Scutaro’s up to 48 postseason plate appearances, tying him for seventh-most in baseball. He’s got just the one strikeout to his name, against Edward Mujica in Game 1 of the NLCS. As a Giant in the regular season, Scutaro was an extreme contact hitter. As a Giant in the playoffs, Scutaro has been an extreme contact hitter.

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The way people talked about him, Chris Carpenter was supposed to be unbeatable in the playoffs, and Ryan Vogelsong was supposed to be a little more beatable. Yet the NLCS between the Cardinals and the Giants has advanced to a Monday Game 7 in large part because, on two occasions now, Vogelsong and San Francisco have bested Carpenter and St. Louis. In Game 2, Vogelsong allowed one run in seven innings, while Carpenter went four innings and allowed five runs, two of which were earned. In Sunday’s Game 6, Vogelsong allowed one run in seven innings, while Carpenter went four innings and allowed five runs, two of which were earned. Ryan Vogelsong isn’t the only reason the Giants are still alive, but he might be the biggest one, and he’s earned this post.

Vogelsong was outstanding on Sunday, and he didn’t allow his first hit until there were two out in the fifth. He came out amped up, throwing his fastball harder than usual in the early innings, and he struck out six of the first nine batters he faced. He wound up with a career-high nine strikeouts, and while he acknowledged later that he got away with some mistakes, all good pitching performances require that a pitcher get away with some mistakes. Vogelsong made mistakes, but he didn’t make many of them.

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Not very long ago, I published a post titled Getting and Not Getting the Calls: Final 2012 Results. The post examined the differences between actual strikes and expected strikes for individual pitchers and teams, based on the PITCHf/x plate-discipline data available right here. The results were interesting, to me, and hopefully some of you. It makes sense that some pitchers might be more able to get bigger strike zones. It also makes sense that some catchers might be more and less able to get bigger strike zones. It wasn’t a huge surprise that the Brewers came out looking good, and that the Pirates and Mariners came out looking bad.

Well, as it happens, that same methodology can be applied to both pitchers and hitters, so we might as well check to see how the data looks for individual batsmen and groups of batsmen. It’s less obvious how a batter might end up with a bigger or smaller strike zone, relative to the expected strike zone, but that doesn’t mean there might not be anything there, and it only takes a few minutes to make all the calculations so why not just proceed, that’s what I say. Below there are tables of names and numbers.

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Recently, in the American League Championship Series, the Detroit Tigers played against the New York Yankees. The Tigers played the Yankees four times, and now, the Tigers will play the Yankees no more times, having achieved the necessary four conquests. The Tigers now are just four more victories away from winning everything and nothing, while the Yankees are faced with a bleak winter existence of being privileged millionaires. These are important times in sports.

Prior to the beginning of the ALCS, many people examined the matchup between the Tigers and the Yankees and attempted to identify potential keys that might lead one team to triumph. Given that this was a playoff series, many of those keys were unoriginal, having been applied to other playoff series before. People have ideas about the playoffs, see, ideas that the playoffs are meaningfully different from the regular season. Over the course of this series, some of those ideas were validated, and some of those ideas were contradicted. Let us take this opportunity to review, thoroughly yet incompletely.

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It began when Alex Rodriguez was pinch-hit for by Raul Ibanez, with Ibanez instantly turning into a hero. Then Rodriguez was left out of the lineup. Then Rodriguez allegedly flirted with female fans in the middle of a game, then Rodriguez was left out of the lineup again. Then people started talking about Alex Rodriguez getting traded to the Marlins and Bob Nightengale went so far as to say:

This will be the last time you’ll ever see Alex Rodriguez in a New York Yankees uniform.

In a series in which the Yankees trail the Tigers three games to zero, somehow it’s still Rodriguez who’s the story, it’s Rodriguez who seems to be getting the lion’s share of the blame. It was a big deal when Rodriguez was benched for Wednesday’s Game 4 against Max Scherzer. After the game was rained out, it was again a big deal when Rodriguez was benched for Thursday’s Game 4 against Max Scherzer, as if anything had changed, or ought to have changed. It is, without question, an unusual thing to see a player like Alex Rodriguez on the bench.

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There’s a thing about rain-outs. Actually, there are two things.

1. They suck.
2. In theory, they should offer neither team an advantage.

The first one’s pretty evident. Where once there was supposed to be baseball, now there is no baseball, thanks to the rain, and that sucks. The second one seems pretty evident as well. Instead of there being baseball between two teams on one day, there will be baseball between the two teams the next day, with each team having been identically inconvenienced. But the reality is that the inconveniences aren’t always identical, and that’s what we observe in the ALCS between the Tigers and the Yankees. Rain delayed Game 4 by a day — so far, at least — and this has without question worked out in the Tigers’ favor.

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In the ninth inning Tuesday night, Eduardo Nunez of all people put together a good at-bat and took Justin Verlander deep over the left-field fence. What the home run meant was that the Yankees had narrowed the deficit from 2-0 to 2-1. What the home run also meant was that a Tigers starting pitcher allowed a run in the ALCS. It was the first run charged to a Tigers starter in the series, and Tuesday night was Game 3. And for funsies, in the last game of the ALDS, the Tigers’ starter threw a shutout.

This is the big story at the moment. That the Tigers are running out some amazing pitching, or, because of the media being the media, that the Yankees are running out some ice-cold hitters. Those are different ways of saying the same thing, and in fairness, we have to assume that it’s both. The Tigers’ pitchers have been good, and the Yankees’ hitters have been bad, and that’s weird because this regular season the Yankees had the best team offense in baseball. They’re not scoring, but they ought to be scoring, and now they have to win four games in a row if they want to avoid elimination.

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