Well, as improbable as it was, this game did not turn out exactly like Carson Cistulli drew it up. Roy Oswalt did not strike out fifteen batters and hold the Reds scoreless, and Scott Rolen did not hit a home run off of Jose Contreras. And instead of two homers, Chase Utley hit no homers.

The funny thing? The Phillies still won and Bronson Arroyo actually pitched as decently as was predicted. What if Sports had Arroyo going seven innings with a strikeout, a walk and three runs allowed on five hits, and he actually allowed two (unearned) runs in five and a third innings with two strikeouts, three walks and four hits allowed. I mean, that’s not bad for literally trying to predict the future down to the hit batsman. Despite the awesome leg kick, and kicking tunes, Arroyo’s stuff was not of the shut-down variety (two swinging strikes all game). He gamed through it, gritting and grission-ing his team to a lead.

Arroyo may not have been as good as the typical game story may suggest, but the task at hand is to think about this from the Phillies’ angle. And really, was Oswalt’s night deserving of so much better? I mean, yes he had better ‘stuff’ and more swinging strikes (nine of them!) and was right around the zone all night (only one walk, and no pitches that were a foot-plus out of the zone like Arroyo had), but he also grooved a few many straight down Broadway. Those home runs to Brandon Phillips and Jay Bruce happened, we can’t xFIP them away despite Oswalt having a decent groundball-to-flyball ratio (6-to-7).

Though Jimmy Rollins was oh-for-the-series, and ‘failed’ once again in a key position (one down, tying runs on base in the 7th inning, the third-highest leverage index moment of the game), his soft flyball to Jay Bruce (a +18.9 Right Fielder this year according to UZR) was muffed about a billion times, and suddenly Rollins looks like a hero to Oswalt’s zero. Seriously, Bruce missed a play he should have had 95+ times out of a 100 (or, rather, 256 in 259 times), then screwed up the throw, the relay was punted, and Rollins stands on second with the crowd roaring. Rollins gets a .352 WPA for the play, Oswalt a -.152 for his five innings, three run effort. Sometimes WPA doesn’t tell the whole story.

The Reds, the better fielding team going in, fell apart and made a division-series-record four errors in a game they should or could have won. Or: The Phillies put the ball in play against a Reds’ staff that only struck out four in nine innings – putting pressure on the defense, which lead to five unearned runs and a win. Two ways to tell the story once again, but as happy as the Phils may be, they have to know that a good amount of luck helped them along their way on Friday night.

In another universe, in another iteration of this game, Oswalt pitched a second-straight no-hitter and the Phillies beat up on Arroyo. Same result, I guess. Phillies up 2-0 and a step away from the NLCS.

Roy Halladay? Roy Halladay. Roy Halladay, Roy Halladay, Roy Halladay. Roy Halladay!

With due respect to Shane Victorino, whose two hits and two RBI helped him lead all batters with a .179 WPA, it was one of those games where you felt like the pitcher could have won it by himself, even with a lineup filled with nine Roy Halladays. In fact, Doctober’s one hit (a liner to left that Johnny Gomes misplayed) and RBI were good for a .079 WPA, second on the team, so in this case that was true. A team full of Roy Halladays would have won this game. He accounted for 80.4% of the teams WPA.

But of course it was his work on the mound that was so impressive. He showed legendary control in pitching his no-hitter, only producing 25 balls on 104 pitches. He induced weak groundball after weak groundball (12 of them, to 6 fly balls). He was efficient – using only 11.6 pitches per inning. He was dominant. He had the kind of game that will go down in history right next to Don Larsen’s perfect game. He produced a game of which everyone who watched felt unworthy. He was awe-some.

And yet, he had a tiny bit of help, including a great play by Carlos Ruiz to close out the game. Check out this game graph from Brooks Baseball, which shows that John Hirschbeck’s strikezone was a little bit generous on the sides, but nothing that Orlando Cabrera should have been whining about:

Doesn’t matter. Halladay deserves all the credit he can get. Look at the strikezone plot of his pitches, an exercise in control and command:

We wondered how hungry Halladay was in the Lincoln-Douglas Remix preview, and it seems he’s hungry enough to eat the postseason. Second no-no in postseason history? Amazing. First postseason appearance? Legendary. There are practically no adjectives that really get it all the way right.

Actually, the title is a misnomer. This is a post about what Ned Yost thinks about his catcher position, and maybe about how baseball works in general. Yesterday, Ned Yost told the Kansas City Star that he was going to try and get Brayan Pena about 15 starts between now and the end of the season. That’s 15 of the final 49 games, or just a tiny bit more than a regular backup catcher might get.

This is on a team that features Jason Kendall as the first catcher. Kendall, who has lost all of his non-existent power (.091 career ISO, .044 this year) and is putting up a stellar 71 wRC+, for his whopping sixth year in a row with a sub-100 wRC+. He’s also 36 years old (or old as dirt in catcher years), and on a team with a 47-68 record that should be looking to next year, and yet the catcher is somehow on pace for 575 plate appearances.

Who knows how much promise Pena actually has. His .241/.285/.360 career line and 68 career wRC+ don’t scream ‘play me’ and do a lot to dampen the snark storm that would normally arise on a statement like Yost’s (a storm that is doing its best to permeate this column despite our best efforts to the contrary). But Pena does have a BABIP of .231 and an ISO of .038 right now, and those two numbers take much, much longer than 59 plate appearances to stabilize. In fact, those two stats would take longer than his 373 career plate appearances to become predictive. All we really have are his minor league numbers, and a catcher that can put up 180 walks to his 239 career minor league strikeouts deserves a little more attention from these Royals than he has gotten to date.

So we have a young catcher who is under team control for the next three years, and an old catcher obviously in decline who is under control just for next year. If we take current levels of production going forward, and use the math shown by Dave Cameron here, the old catcher would cost his team 4.7 batting runs above replacement assuming 34 games and 136 plate appearances while the young guy would cost his team 11.1 runs with the same playing time. Perhaps a team trying to create a ‘winning feeling’ in the clubhouse would care about those seven runs above replacement.

But there’s Pena’s BABIP. And his ISO. And his contact rate. If those returned (even mostly) to career levels – say, if we used the ZiPs projections from here on out – then Pena would cost the team only 2.4 runs in 34 starts. Since Kendall’s production right now is so in the norm for him, he would cost the team 4.5 runs going forward – he might actually be worse than Pena.

The worst part of this whole thing is – even if Kendall wasn’t worse than the youngster, wouldn’t a good organization pay a possible win in the standings to find out what they might have at a key position? Wouldn’t a coach that would like to stick around for next year want to know if the young guy could do more than just ‘work real hard?’ The fact that it’s not Pena taking the 34 starts, and Kendall the 15, is yet another reason why the snark storm always seems to settle around Kauffman Stadium.

In the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, the San Diego Padres acquired Miguel Tejada for double-A pitcher Wynn Pelzer on Thursday night. Damn hot tub, it’s not 2004 any more, and now this is more of a back-pager in the newsrag of the 2010 trade deadline. In fact, it’s such a snoozer, you wonder why the Padres even bothered.

It’s not like San Diego gave up too much – Pelzer has a 4.54 FIP on the back of a 7.84 K/9 and 4.91 BB/9 in San Antonio this year, and that number only gets worse if you neutralize it for park and luck effects relative to the rest of the relatively pitching-friendly Texas League. Then again, his career FIP against righties is exactly a full run lower (3.54), so he may have a future as a reliever if he can’t iron out his splits. In fact, he just recently moved to relief, perhaps in order to recover some of the lost zip on his fastball. Going into the season, he was Baseball America’s #7 prospect, but as Dave Cameron just reminded us today, it’s important to remember that was before he went out and put up a 1.675 WHIP in double-A and took some of the shine off. Bryan Smith has more on Pelzer here.

The bigger question is actually if Tejada is an upgrade for the Padres. Starting with defense, the answer is unclear. His career UZR/150 at shortstop is -3.6, and that number drops further if you count only his last three attempts at the position, from 2007-2009. This year, he’s even been poor at third base, with a -7.3 UZR/150 and 15 errors in what has generally been described as lackluster-at-best defense. The current thirdbaseman for the Padres, Chase Headley, sports a 9.9 career UZR/150 at third and half the errors and really shouldn’t be pushed anywhere for the veteran.

Of course, the Padres’ current shortstop, Everth Cabrera, has a negative career UZR/150, but has shown better defense in the small sample that is this year. But do the Padres really want to go with a 36-year-old who hasn’t played shortstop in a year, and hasn’t played it well in two, probably four years? Especially since Cabrera is somewhat similar offensively (.241 wOBA, .287 ZiPS RoS wOBA) to Tejada (.296 wOBA, .324 ZiPs RoS wOBA)?

Short of playing Tejada at a completely new position – second base – and pushing Jerry Hairston, Jr to shortstop (career 2.4 UZR/150), the only other option is for Tejada to serve as a utility player, which seems like the plan. At least it’s not going to cost the Padres much long term in order to strengthen their bench for the stretch run.