The Cubs should win this. I know that sounds crazy from the perspective of someone who cares a lot about baseball history, but this is the greatest Cubs team in ages, and that team is the World Series favorite. Maybe you don’t think they should be favored as strongly as they are on our pages. Maybe you don’t think they should be favored as strongly as they are in various betting markets. But you’d have to put an awful lot of weight in the American League’s superiority to think the Indians are at least a coin flip here. Home-field advantage doesn’t make up for the Indians’ deficiencies. Even if you figure their odds are about the same as, say, Joey Votto’s odds of reaching base, Votto usually doesn’t reach base. In any at-bat, Votto’s the underdog. In this World Series, the Indians are the underdog.

Which is one of the reasons why August wrote up a post titled “How the Indians Can Win the World Series.” Obviously, there are paths that would lead the Indians to victory, and it’s interesting to think about how it could happen. It’s maybe less interesting to think about how the Cubs could win; “continue being the better baseball team” isn’t a satisfying answer. But still, there are things the Cubs can do. There are things for them to try to ignore or exploit. The Cubs have some keys to victory, just as the Indians do.

So this is the second half of our post-pair. How can the Cubs win the World Series? They can play like they’ve played practically all season. But what about specific little details? I can offer some of those. Here are some potential talking points.

Read the rest of this entry »

The media has presented a skewed perspective. The matchup we are going to see is the Chicago Cubs against the Cleveland Indians. The matchup we aren’t going to see is the Chicago Cubs against Andrew Miller. I mean, we’ll see that, but we won’t *only* see that, regardless of how the Indians are being discussed. And, look, I know we’re contributing to all this. We’ve been writing three Miller pieces a day. If we don’t stay above that threshold the whole website blows up.

The Cubs are going to have 25 players, and pretty much all of them are going to play. The Indians are going to have 25 of their own players, and pretty much all of them are going to play. It’s going to be fun! This is another Andrew Miller post.

Read the rest of this entry »

We overanalyze the playoffs. And, yeah — in part it’s because we overanalyze everything. It’s the whole reason this place exists. But we always dig deep into October, because we all understand that playoff baseball is a different animal, a different twist on a familiar sport, and we want to wrap our minds around it. We’ve tested theories inspired by the Royals. We’ve tested theories inspired by the Giants. We’ve tested theories inspired by winners, because we want to know if we can better identify winners, before they win. Every October, we search for the key to the tournament. We search, as if there’s anything to find.

There’s not. Oh, sure, there are subtle things, but a playoff series is a coin flip, determined by a sequence of coin flips. The key is for one team to be a better baseball team than the other. Then the coin won’t flip so perfectly even. But so much of this is random. So much of this is random, that it can be hard to believe it’s not *completely* random. We’ve become so conditioned to saying the best teams aren’t always rewarded. When you have one great team, the overall odds are against it.

The overall odds were against the Cubs. If you were trying to figure out the NL pennant, it would’ve been smarter to bet on the field. That’s the reality of having to win two series in a row. But, bless these playoffs. Bless these playoffs, because at least in one of the leagues, there’s restored faith that October can be just. The Chicago Cubs were very obviously the best team. They get to keep playing another handful of ballgames.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In Game 5, the Dodgers stole two bases against Jon Lester, out of two attempts. Stretch that over, say, a 33-start season, and you’ve got a pitcher who’s given up 66 steals in 66 chances. That pitcher, we’d say, was historically bad at controlling the running game. It would be a huge, distracting problem. The Dodgers did take a little advantage of Lester, which was a part of their plan, and though in the end it wasn’t enough, it was something worth trying.

Yet the Dodgers could’ve pushed it further. And this was a topic of much discussion. The Dodgers danced around, taking incredibly, unprecedentedly aggressive leads, but still they didn’t seize every chance to put the game in motion. Even though Lester clearly has the yips, and everyone knows it, Dodger baserunners still exercised some amount of caution. A seventh-inning screenshot I took will stick with me:

You — you might remember Enrique Hernandez.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello! Do you like baseball posts about how the playoffs are different? You have come to one of the right places.

Let’s go over some easy stuff. The playoffs, just by being what they are, select for the best baseball teams. Playoff rosters are selective for the best hitters, and they’re also selective for the best pitchers. Because of the nature of the series, and with all the off days, you see bullpens used more aggressively. We wrote about that yesterday, and everyone has written about that on every day, for the past few weeks. The Indians are in the World Series, and they mostly have their bullpen to thank, and, yeah, that’s the big story in the AL as we wait to identify the other half.

I want to talk briefly about how defense factors into this. Maybe it’ll surprise you, or maybe it won’t, but come playoff time, even batted balls themselves more often meet a negative fate. Strikeouts tend to go up, and homers tend to go down, but even when you concentrate on plays where hitters knock the ball fair, you still see things favoring run suppression.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2016 Blue Jays are finished, having been killed off by a playoff-specific mutation of a pitching staff. If it’s any consolation, 97% of all baseball team-seasons end with some sort of disappointment. But seasons end abruptly, even the good ones, and the focus has already shifted. The 2016 Blue Jays aren’t really to be discussed anymore. From this point forward, it’s all about the 2017 Blue Jays, and beyond.

There’s no possible way you’ve missed that this is going to be a challenging offseason. The resurgent Blue Jays in large part built their identity around Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion. Two of those players are about to become free agents, and both of them are likely to leave. It’s hard to picture the Blue Jays without them, and it’s a hell of a lot less fun to picture the Blue Jays without them. The Jays were pure baseball entertainment, and Bautista and Encarnacion became area icons.

With them probably gone, it makes you wonder if the Jays should rebuild. The roster isn’t particularly young, and earlier today Dave laid out the argument for why the Blue Jays should take an intentional step back. I’m here to argue *not* for that. Dave and I didn’t set out to do this on purpose, but it just so happened that we have differing perspectives. You can choose to go along with whichever one you prefer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Officially, now, the Indians are going to the World Series, representing the American League. When they get there, they’re going to be fully rested. Some will speculate that they might be too rested. That’s for then. For now, it’s another celebration in Cleveland, which is a weird thing to write.

So how did the Indians manage to pull this off, doing away with the Blue Jays in five games? Let’s be honest. You already know the answer.

The Indians aren’t going to the World Series because of Michael Brantley. The star outfielder has been of just about zero use this year, owing to a messed-up shoulder. They’re not going to the World Series because of Carlos Carrasco. He helped them plenty during the year, but then he got knocked out. They’re not going to the World Series because of Danny Salazar. Like Carrasco, he also helped plenty during the year, but he hasn’t pitched in over a month.

And this is important, in the little picture: They’re not going to the World Series because of the offense. The offense has been underrated this season, and in the playoffs it’s been fairly timely. But in the ALCS, in which the Indians outscored the Blue Jays just 12 to 8, the Indians had a .544 OPS, to the Blue Jays’ .534. By wOBA, the Blue Jays were actually better, by a margin of .237 to .231. The hitting in the whole series sucked. The Indians’ lineup was the offensive equivalent of Ryan Goins. The Blue Jays’ lineup was the offensive equivalent of J.B. Shuck. The teams didn’t hit. The Indians just hit at a few more of the good moments.

The pitching has carried the Indians. The bullpen has carried the Indians. We’ve already been over this, but it worked perfectly again on Wednesday.

Read the rest of this entry »

You might’ve noticed there hasn’t been much in the way of hitting lately. As always in the playoffs, the samples are small, but numbers are numbers, and I was thinking about putting together a post on the subject. Then Dave put together a post on the subject! He addressed a lot of what I wanted to address, so, go ahead and read that. Relative to the regular season, playoff hitting has so far come in surprisingly low. Or, maybe not so surprisingly low, if the image you have in your head when you think about the playoffs is the face of Andrew Miller.

When I was thinking about my original post, I envisioned a plot much like the one Dave included. What I did instead was dig a bit deeper. In reality, you can’t so easily just compare playoff teams to teams in the regular season, because the teams and players alive in October belong to subgroups. What if you just examine the subgroups? So, that’s what this is.

Read the rest of this entry »

A table:

Here are the 10 playoff teams, sorted by playoff OPS. You see that all the figures are fairly low — this is always the case, because hitting is tougher in the playoffs. But at the bottom, the Orioles went away after one game. The Mets went away after one game. The Rangers got swept. Then there are the Cubs! The Cubs rank seventh, and they’re by far the worst among the four teams remaining. Point being, the Cubs haven’t hit much. They’re still in a good position, all things considered, but they haven’t hit much.

So what, right? It’s literally 219 plate appearances. It’s literally six games. That’s practically nothing. I just found a six-game stretch around the turn to September where the Cubs hit equally poorly, and nobody noticed. The easiest possible answer here is to point to the size of the sample. But, these are the playoffs, which means all the details matter. And there’s another factor here, one that makes easy and absolute sense.

Read the rest of this entry »