The first pitch Noah Syndergaard threw Friday night sent Alcides Escobar to the ground. Syndergaard didn’t give Escobar an opportunity to swing because the instinctive priority was for him to get his head out of the way, and Syndergaard didn’t bother trying to disguise his intent after the game. He owned up to it — he wanted to give the Royals a little fright. The Royals, in turn, were furious, as they’re allowed to be, but the rest of the game spun the narrative wheel, and it ultimately settled on “Syndergaard delivered a message.” In the end he pitched pretty well and the Mets emerged victorious, so Syndergaard gets the favorable press.

But for whatever it’s worth, if Syndergaard did succeed in intimidating his opponent, it didn’t look that way early on, when the brushback was most fresh. After Escobar got knocked down, the Royals scored a run in the first. They scored another two in the second. The immediate aftermath, for Syndergaard, was troublesome, and the national broadcast speculated that he’d only succeeded in waking the Royals up. It was only after Syndergaard turned his game around that the conversation grew more sunny. And as a part of that process, Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud made a change on the fly.

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One year ago, at just 23 years old, Yordano Ventura became one of the youngest pitchers to start a World Series game in the last 30 years. The presence of a young starter in the World Series is not a completely rare phenomenon, naturally. Ventura, for his part, was the 64th pitcher in Series history to make a start before turning 24 years old, per Baseball Reference Play Index. Noah Syndergaard is set to be the 65th when the two face off this evening. Widening the criteria a little, one finds that 105 pitchers have made World Series starters before turning 25 years old. Ventura, now one year older, is set to be one of just 19 pitchers to make a start in two different World Series’ before turning 25, a list including Babe Ruth and, over the last 30 years including, only Madison Bumgarner and Steve Avery. Tonight’s encounter between Syndergaard and Ventura represents one of the better young pitching matchups in World Series history.

Over the last three decades, the only pitchers younger than the 2014 edition of Ventura to record a start in a World Series game were Avery, Bumgarner, Dwight Gooden, Livan Hernandez, Bret Saberhagen, Michael Wacha, and Jaret Wright. Noah Syndergaard, a few months younger than Ventura was last year, is set to join that list. The giant Mets right-hander has struck out 20 batters in 13 postseason innings thus far and looks to do what his counterparts could not as the Kansas City Royals have proven difficult to strike out.

While 105 pitchers under the age of 25 have made starts in the World Series, it’s quite rare to find two young hurlers pitted against each other. In the last 15 years, it has happened only twice: Madison Bumgarner against Tommy Hunter in 2010 and Cole Hamels against Scott Kazmir in 2008. In all of World Series history, there have only been 24 such matchups and only 19 if you remove repeat matchups in the same series. The chart below shows every World Series matchup sorted by average age.

World Series Matchups Featuring Pitchers Under 25

Year	Player	Age	Player	Age	Average Age
10/23/1981	Dave Righetti	22.329	Fernando Valenzuela	20.356	21.343
10/22/1991	Scott Erickson	23.262	Steve Avery	21.191	22.227
10/26/1991	Scott Erickson	23.266	Steve Avery	21.195	22.231
10/22/1997	Tony Saunders	23.176	Jaret Wright	21.297	22.237
10/31/2010	Tommy Hunter	24.120	Madison Bumgarner	21.091	22.606
10/19/1986	Roger Clemens	24.076	Dwight Gooden	21.337	22.707
10/7/1950	Bob Miller	24.113	Whitey Ford	21.351	22.732
10/12/1914	Lefty Tyler	24.302	Bullet Joe Bush	21.319	22.811
10/8/1934	Schoolboy Rowe	24.270	Paul Dean	22.055	23.163
10/14/1969	Jim Palmer	23.364	Gary Gentry	23.008	23.186
10/11/1964	Ray Sadecki	23.290	Al Downing	23.105	23.198
10/30/2015	Yordano Ventura	24.149	Noah Syndergaard	22.256	23.203
9/29/1932	Lefty Gomez	23.308	Lon Warneke	23.185	23.247
10/10/1970	Jim Palmer	24.360	Gary Nolan	22.136	23.248
10/14/1970	Jim Palmer	24.364	Gary Nolan	22.140	23.252
10/8/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.217	Smoky Joe Wood	22.349	23.283
10/11/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.220	Smoky Joe Wood	22.352	23.286
10/15/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.224	Smoky Joe Wood	22.356	23.290
10/11/1909	Ed Summers	24.310	Nick Maddox	22.336	23.323
10/21/1972	Gary Nolan	24.147	Vida Blue	23.085	23.616
10/3/1953	Whitey Ford	24.347	Billy Loes	23.294	23.821
10/9/1934	Dizzy Dean	24.266	Elden Auker	24.018	24.142
10/22/2008	Cole Hamels	24.300	Scott Kazmir	24.272	24.286
10/27/2008	Cole Hamels	24.305	Scott Kazmir	24.277	24.291

SOURCE: Baseball Reference

The encounter between Dave Righetti and Fernando Valenzuela back in 1981, when the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees, represents the youngest such matchup of all tim . Only two of the young-pitcher games have occurred in a Game Two: Jeff Tesrau’s Giants team defeated Boston’s Smokey Joe Wood in 1912 and Dizzy Dean’s St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Tigers’ Elden Auker in 1934. If the Mets and Royals get to a Game Seven and the rotation stays as is, Noah Syndergaard against Yordano Ventura would become just the third such matchup of all-time and the first in more than 80 years.

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Let’s talk about contact. It’s what everybody else is doing, right? The Royals make a lot of it. They did all season, and they still are in the playoffs, even against Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom. No team this season posted a lower strikeout rate; no team was even particularly close. Contact is the skill around which the Royals lineup is built.

Right around the end of the regular season, I wanted to try to put these Royals in some kind of historical context. I wanted to know how good they are at hitting the ball, relative to other teams over the past several decades, but it’s not as easy as just looking at the strikeouts because whiffs have increased over time, especially lately. You have to make adjustments, so I folded in yearly league averages and standard deviations. What I found: by the resulting measure, the Royals were baseball’s best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I went back no further, because I didn’t see the point.

It’s interesting, that conclusion. 1950 was a long time ago, and an awful lot of baseball has happened ever since. Mickey Mantle hadn’t debuted yet; Dave Winfield hadn’t been born yet. So it’s notable to post the most extreme anything between 1950 and 2015. In taking the top spot, the Royals just barely edged out the runner-up. The team knocked into second place was the 2002 Angels.

Immediately, that catches your eye. The Royals are the best contact-hitting team in ages. Those Angels were the second-best contact-hitting team in ages, and they won the World Series. For Royals fans, that’s encouraging, probably, and from my standpoint, now that I think about it deeper, there are a ton of parallels between these two ballclubs, even beyond putting the ball in play. Those Angels might be the best historical comparison for what the Royals currently have going on.

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Yesterday, Alex Anthopolous left the Blue Jays, turning down a contract to remain with the team because, as he said in his conference call, he didn’t think it was a good fit anymore.

“I don’t know that I’ve had to make a harder decision in my life, but I did what I felt like I needed to do,” Anthopoulos said. “I just didn’t feel like this was a right fit for me going forward.”

It’s pretty clearly not a coincidence that Anthopoulos’ exit coincides with the arrival of Mark Shapiro, who was hired in August to take over as the new team president. Shapiro was brought in to replace Paul Beeston, so while it’s not a new position in the Blue Jays organization, the fact that ownership openly courted guys with baseball operations backgrounds — first Kenny Williams, then Dan Duquette, and now Shapiro — makes it seem that they’re changing the responsibilities of the position. Beeston was a business guy, an accountant who worked his way up through the organization’s financial side, but the Blue Jays actions over the last year make it clear they wanted a baseball guy in the team president role.

This is the new trend in baseball, of course. Over the last five years, it has become en vogue to promote the General Manager to President of Baseball Operations, or some similar title. The Blue Jays, in fact, became the 12th team to employ a recently promoted GM (or manager, in one case) in that job, with the title of GM going to someone else in the baseball operations department.

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The narrative, coming into the World Series, was impossible to ignore. Boiled down to its most simple form, it went like this: the Mets are here, playing in the World Series, because they throw really good fastballs. The Royals are here, playing in the World Series, because they’re really good at hitting fastballs. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but that was the most talked-about story, the Mets’ fastballs vs. the Royals’ ability to hit them, and so something had to give. The Mets would either overpower the Royals like few other teams have been able to, or the Royals would become the first team to strike back against New York’s heat.

With the Royals now leading the series 2-0, you can guess what happened. You’d guess the latter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — you don’t outscore your opponent 12-5 and take a 2-0 lead in the World Series without hitting some heaters — but the correct answer might actually be “neither.”

Allow me to explain. The Mets, see, haven’t exactly thrown their fastball. In Game One, Matt Harvey threw a career-low rate of heaters to the Royals, throwing just 30 fastballs while going to his breaking and offspeed stuff 50 times. Granted, he also may have had his career-worst stuff, and the couple ticks he’d suddenly lost in velocity are a reasonable explanation for why he’d be more reliant on his non-fastball offerings.

Then also, there’s this:

Terry Collins said Matt Harvey throwing career-low fastball % was partly respect for Royals fastball hitting, partly lack of pitch sharpness

— Adam Rubin (@AdamRubinESPN) October 28, 2015

A line of thinking exists that if you change what it is that’s made you successful in light of your opponent’s strengths, then you’ve already lost. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the “playing not to lose, rather than playing to win” mantra. As a Mets fan, it’s probably not the thing you want to hear. On the surface, it makes it seem like the Mets had decided beforehand that their strength wasn’t as strong as the Royals strength, and so they changed courses before they had a chance to find out. Of course, there’s some give-and-take here, and it would have been silly for Harvey to not have considered a potential Plan B if he didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate. He didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate, and so he opted for Plan B. And in the end, he really didn’t pitch that poorly.

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After falling to 2-0 against the Royals and their high-contact ways, the Mets will turn to rookie Noah Syndergaard for game 3 tonight. After disappointing outings from both Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom, the Mets are hoping he’ll pitch like he has all season long, and keep his team within striking distance of a World Series title.

I last wrote about Syndergaard when he was called up back in May. Heading into the year, KATOH pegged him for 11.5 WAR through age 28, which was the second highest forecast among pitching prospects, and sixth highest overall. Although he posted an unremarkable 4.60 ERA in a full season at Triple-A in 2014, Syndergaard’s near-30% strikeout rate pushed his KATOH forecast to elite levels. A pitcher’s minor league strikeout rate is a very strong predictor of big league success, and Syndergaard’s was the highest of any Triple-A pitcher at the time of his call up. All while being one of the youngest pitchers at the level.

Thus far, Syndergaard’s lived up to KATOH’s high expectations — and then some. He maintained his near-30% strikeout rate in his rookie season, and actually improved his walk rate at the highest level. The end result was a 3.24 ERA and 3.25 FIP — both figures tops among rookies with at least 130 innings pitched. Those numbers don’t even consider the stellar job he’s done in this year’s postseason: a 1.44 FIP with a 38% strikeout rate against some of the best hitters the National League had to offer.

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During the fifth inning of Game Two, as Alcides Escobar attempted to bunt against Jacob deGrom, Harold Reynolds decried the current state of bunting in professional baseball. Even after he admitted that hard throwers are hard to bunt on, he went on a mini tirade: “I know it’s hard to get one down against a guy that throws this hard, but I’ve never seen this bad of bunting. Ever. Ever! In baseball, just across the board. I know Escobar can handle the bat, but we see this every night. They have to move the runner. Not just the Royals, but across the board.”

The moment was probably lost for a couple reasons. For one, Escobar decided to swing-away after two failed bunt attempts, and promptly tied the game with a single to center. There was too much excitement to think too deeply about the state of bunting in our game. Now we have a second to breathe, though.

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One of the many struggles of every baseball team in the major leagues is to balance the desire to win now and the desire to win in the future. That’s why we have arguments every April about reforming the arbitration system, why teams agonize over trade deadline decisions, and why we talk about pitcher workloads toward the end of each season. We want young, exciting players to be on the field as much as possible. Due to long-term team interests, that doesn’t always happen.

For the Mets, we’ve already witnessed an innings-limit battle play out during September with Matt Harvey, Scott Boras, and Harvey’s potential playoff availability in his first year back from Tommy John surgery. And, before the World Series started, Mets manager Terry Collins alluded to Jacob deGrom also feeling the possible effects of overuse:

“He’s at a stage where the ball doesn’t have the life down, even though he has the velocity,” Collins said. “It doesn’t have the life it once had. He’s been missing balls up in the zone.”

Usually, paying too much attention to word choice in manager interviews is a pointless exercise, but when the greatest strength of a team – its young, dominant starting pitching – is publicly called into question by the team’s manager, it’s at the very least something to pay attention to.

The concern over “the wall” that Collins has been voicing in relation to his young starters is merited. Harvey is coming off a Game One start in which he had some of the worst stuff of his career. And, despite deGrom’s healthy velocity during Game Two (his average fastball was 95.5 mph, not far from his regular season average of 95.8 mph), fatigue doesn’t affect every pitcher’s game in the same way. There are many indicators, as we’ll see below, that suggest deGrom hasn’t quite been himself in his past few starts.

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The other day, I received a tweet saying 72 wins is the new #6org. It was in response to a Jon Heyman article that ripped a Royals preseason 72-win projection. This is just about the best possible time to do that — the only better time, maybe, to write that article could be next week. Now, a difference: the #6org thing is ours. The 72-win Royals projection came from Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system. So, this could be their own version of #6org, but it’s not like PECOTA was all that exceptional. All the systems pretty much agreed. Our own systems projected the Royals to go 79-83. That looks better than PECOTA, but it still looks bad. The Royals have made the numbers look silly, is the point.

They were projected to go maybe .500, and they’re close to winning the World Series. A year ago, they were projected to go something like .500, and they came close to winning the World Series. The year before that, they were projected to go something like .500, and they won 86 games, up 14 from the year previous. Right now the Royals are being described every 10 seconds as relentless. They look like they’re unstoppable, and though they’ve come very close to being stopped, and though they were stopped just last October, there’s still something of a special feeling. The Royals, we’re told, do things differently. On observation, it’s hard to disagree.

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Before the World Series, Tom Verducci wrote an article about the Royals’ advance scouting. Specifically it discussed the scouting done by third base coach Mike Jirschele on Jose Bautista’s throwing habits. There was also a suggestion that the Royals had picked up on David Price tipping his changeup. They used both pieces of information to beat the Blue Jays. So it appears the Royals are pretty good at this advance scouting stuff.

Fast forward to last night’s Game Two against the Mets. Starter Jacob deGrom gave up four runs in the fifth inning on a walk and five singles. Following the game, which the Royals won 7-1, Adam Rubin of ESPN spoke to two people he identified as ex-Met players who suggested deGrom had been tipping his pitches.

From Rubin’s article:

As for deGrom, one ex-Mets player speculated he may have been tipping pitches.“I can’t figure it out yet, but they have something on deGrom out of the stretch,” the retired player indicated. “They better figure it out or they can’t win this series.” Another ex-Met saw the first ex-player’s comment and added: “He must speed up on his heater and a tad slower with other stuff. But I think it’s in his facial expressions — seriously.”

Interesting! The conspiratorial answer often is, after all. The fact that the Royals just did this to Toronto — and to such good effect, too — adds plausibility to the discussion. Even so, I’m not sure I agree. I went back and re-watched the inning to see.

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