I know some of you are disappointed not to be seeing The Hottest Pitcher in the Game (Justin Verlander) face perhaps The Best Pitcher in the Game (Clayton Kershaw) in tonight’s World Series opener.

We’ll have to settle instead for the 2015 AL Cy Young winner, Dallas Keuchel, against the Dodgers’ three-time Cy Young winner.

Many eyes will be trained on Kershaw to see if he can improve the one blemish on his resume — postseason performance — and produce a legacy-building outing on the game’s greatest stage.

But the Game 1 undercard, Keuchel versus the Dodgers, is fascinating matchup in its own right.

For starters, it will largely represent a meeting of strangers. Keuchel has never faced Los Angeles. Of the Dodgers most likely to appear on the club’s World Series roster, only three have ever faced Keuchel, for a total of just 27 career regular-season at-bats versus Keuchel. Logan Forsythe is responsible for 20 of those due to his experience with Tampa Bay. He’s recorded seven hits. Chris Taylor has faced him three times (0-for-3), though as a different player with a different swing, and Chase Utley has one hit in four career at-bats versus the left-hander. (The current Astros squad has 81 collective at-bats against Kershaw.)

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This should be a great World Series in large part because it’s so hard to separate the two pennant winners. The Dodgers won 104 games, but the Astros won 101. The Astros outscored their opponents by 196 runs, but the Dodgers outscored theirs by 190. The Dodgers have the possible advantage of rest, but the Astros have the possible advantage of momentum. The Astros got a midseason bump from adding Justin Verlander, but the Dodgers got a midseason bump from adding Yu Darvish. Say, the Astros might have found something by using Lance McCullers out of the bullpen. But the Dodgers have also found something by doing the same with Kenta Maeda.

When I rated all the playoff teams three weeks ago, I found the Dodgers looked the best, but the Astros were right on their heels. There’s just not much of a gap, no matter where you look. As such, I don’t think one could pick a clear favorite. Maybe you give the edge to the Dodgers, just because they could play one extra game at home. Or maybe you give the edge to the Dodgers, just because they could get the better strike zone. That’s one of the only real differences here. Technically, such a difference shouldn’t even exist, but we know that zones aren’t perfectly called or consistent, and the Dodgers have a history.

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The Astros are going to the World Series for a number of reasons.

Saturday night marked the culmination of a lengthy, creative, bottoming-out rebuild gone right, a rebuild so extreme it had earned the club the “Disastros” moniker. No one is laughing now.

The Astros are going to the World Series because of the accumulation of hirings, signings, draft decisions, development and strategies executed well. Not everything went perfectly, but this is a game of probabilities, not certainties, and a lot of things went right.

That’s the big picture view. The smaller-sample truth is they needed a Game 7 to win Saturday night to have such a happy narrative be written, to advance to a second World Series appearances in franchise history. The Astros needed to match the moment and they did. Read the rest of this entry »

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Astros, Yankees, Game 7. This should be fun. This has been a pretty terrific ALCS already, and with a winner-take-all contest to decide it tonight, this could end up being one of the best league championship series we’ve seen in a while.

For the Yankees, the plan seems pretty obvious. CC Sabathia is going to start the game, and given how he’s pitched so far this postseason, Joe Girardi will probably ride his veteran until he gets in real trouble. And then the Astros will deal with Tommy Kahnle and Aroldis Chapman, probably for at least a couple of innings each, with David Robertson around to try and redeem his disastrous Game 6 performance if Sabathia-Kahnle-Chapman isn’t enough to get through nine innings. If anyone besides one of those four take the mound for the Yankees, it will probably be because one of the two teams turned it into an early blowout.

The Astros, though, head into a potential season finale without as much clarity.

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If we know anything about Dallas Keuchel it’s that he possesses some of the best command in the game. No starting pitcher more often targets and hits the lower third of the zone — and the borderline, 50-50 area at the bottom of the zone — according to Baseball Savant’s pitch data. Keuchel located 29.4% of his total pitches in these zones this season, tops among MLB starting pitchers.

The following graphic shows what and where Keuchel threw pitches in his stellar Game 1 start against the Yankees.

Below are the results of the Yankee plate appearances. Not surprisingly for a pitcher who’s recorded a 1.41 career ERA against New York in the regular season, they were basically all good for Keuchel:

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Dallas Keuchel didn’t overwhelm the Yankees like usual on Wednesday. Rather than continuing his career domination of the New York nine — which includes 14 scoreless innings in the postseason and a 1.09 ERA in eight starts overall — he did what Joe Girardi said before the game he rarely does: lay an egg. Keuchel was chased in the fifth, having surrendered seven hits and four runs.

In the lefty’s opinion, the egg was a matter more of results than process. Following the game, he wasn’t so much self-critical as he was complimentary of his competition.

“Outside of Castro’s double in the second — it was a backup cutter and he put a good swing on it — I don’t think I can pinpoint another mistake pitch,” Keuchel told reporters. “Sanchez’s double down the line was a pretty good pitch down and in, and he hadn’t had great success on that pitch. Judge… [the] cutter was in; maybe it wasn’t in quite far enough, but it was in enough to get an out. [Greg Bird] hit a good pitch. It was inside — it was off the plate — and he just stuck his hands in enough to get it over Yuli’s head.”

Yankees hitters expressed multiple viewpoints regarding Keuchel’s performance. Todd Frazier — presumably referring to more than just Castro’s knock — opined that his teammates “hit the mistakes.” (What constitutes a mistake from Keuchel is a point on which Frazier elaborates below.)

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The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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Unlike their ALCS opponents, the New York Yankees aren’t widely known for being at the forefront of analytics. According to their longtime general manager, they should be. When I asked Brian Cashman about the team’s not-as-geeky-as-the-Astros reputation, his response was, “I would put our analytics in the top five in all sports.”

Regardless of where they rank, any suggestion that Cashman’s club isn’t cutting edge would qualify as folly. Under the direction of assistant general manager Mike Fishman — his previous title was director of quantitative analytics — their reliance on data has grown exponentially over the last decade.

“It started as a department of one — Mike was the director and the staff — and now it’s a major part of our operation,” said Cashman. “And it should be. This is the New York Yankees, and we want to use every tool in the toolbox. One of those important tools is analytics.”

Joe Girardi doesn’t disagree. As a a matter of fact, the Yankees skipper seemed almost taken aback when I asked the following question at Tuesday’s pre-game press conference:

The Astros are known as a team that incorporates analytics in their decision-making process pretty heavily. Your team isn’t really seen that way. Should you be?

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