If you somehow missed the seventh inning of Wednesday’s ALDS Game 5 and now somehow find yourself here at this website, do yourself a favor: go watch it. On the days following games like that, after we’ve been through something as grand, troubling, exultant, and trying as that seventh inning, we spend most of our time trying to make sense of it all: not only the fact that what we witnessed could only happen in this singular game of baseball, but that we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just think: there are more games like that in the future. How crazy is that knowledge? How will we possibly survive all of them?

Even though many of you, like me, are probably still dealing with the fallout of increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and psychological trauma, we all have a job to do, and mine is to somehow analyze a piece of what went on Wednesday. We already had Jeff breaking it down with his usual aplomb. We had Eno looking into the rules associated with the plays in question. And, perhaps most pertinent to this article, Dave weighed in on the line between emotion and sportsmanship.

There’s a part of that final subject that we’re going to key in on: emotion. We try, in many ways, to capture how players perform in different situations. We can look at dozens of splits on our player pages. Leverage is the situation that immediately comes to mind when we’re talking about intangible forces that can impact performance. The closest we get to measuring an emotional response is how players perform under pressure — how clutch they are.

But what about anger? We don’t measure that, and it’s understandable why we don’t — measuring anger is impossible or impractical with the tools we have right now. It would also be a pretty strange thing to measure, but we also measure plenty of strange things.

That brings us to what happened on Wednesday in the bottom of the seventh inning. By this point, the top half of the inning had already included the go-ahead run scoring on a deflected ball being thrown back to the pitcher, multiple instances of fans throwing objects onto the field, and the Blue Jays playing the game under protest. To say that tensions were running high would be a gross understatement, especially for the Blue Jays.

So, when Bautista stepped to the plate in the bottom of the inning during a tie game that hung in the balance, it’s not a stretch to say he was probably feeling a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. Then he did this:

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For an athlete, a constant struggle in decision-making exists between the body and mind. When presented with a choice, there are two routes a person can take. The most informed route, typically, is to hand over the keys to the mind. The mind can think logically and, with ample time and preparation — sometimes just a few extra seconds — the mind can parse out a number of options, choose what it believes to the best one, and send the correct signal to the body.

But the body reacts faster. Under pressure, when an instantaneous decision is required, the decision-making process defaults to the body’s reaction, because it gets to skip the step of the mind parsing information and sending a signal. This is an involuntary response. The mind still parses, and still sends its signal, it’s just, sometimes, the body beats it to the punch. So it’s hard to fault someone when they choose the body’s reaction over the mind’s conclusion, because all that means is that the mind didn’t have enough time, in the moment, to trump the body’s reaction. Yet, here we are.

Before you can question Andre Ethier for his choices in Thursday’s fourth-inning sacrifice fly that scored Daniel Murphy and tied Game 5 of the Dodgers-Mets NLDS at 2-2, you’ve got to take a step back and examine how we got there.
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During the postseason, Win Expectancy charts become ubiquitous, because each play, misplay, decision and comeback is magnified in its importance in front of a national TV audience. While Win Expectancy (WE) and Win Probability Added (WPA) aren’t great stats to evaluate players, they are a tool to understand how the dynamics of how a game changes from the first pitch to the last out.

For those not all too familiar with Win Expectancy, our library has a good entry and the interpretation can be boiled down to

If a team is losing and has a 24% win expectancy, only 24% of teams in similar situations in the past have ever come back to win.

So using historical data and the current inning, score, outs and runners on base, WE tells you what percentage of teams have won given those circumstances. These numbers aren’t a prognostication, since anything can still happen, but they give an estimate of what you might expect from the situation.

Win Probability Added is derived from Win Expectancy — being the difference from one play to the next. For example, The batter/runner is given credit for a hit, while the pitcher on the mound will be debited an equal amount for that hit. Plays that dramatically swing the score late in the game with two outs in the inning generally have the highest WPA. WPA is written out like batting average (.000), but it should be interpreted in the same way as win expectancy (0.0%). A play with a .360 WPA increases the WE +36.0%.

Below is our standard WE chart combined with the signed* WPA chart. The WE chart is the running total of the WPA chart. The top chart shows the sum of all the plays until a certain point in the game, and the bottom chart shows the change in WE for each play, which is also the signed WPA.

Top Players

Batters

Now with the basics out of the way, we can make some WPA leaderboards for this postseason. First, batters through the end of the LDS.

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That a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball gains velocity as he heads to the bullpen is not a new phenomenon. At this point, it is a strategy. When a pitcher cannot last five innings consistently or fails to develop a necessary off-speed pitch, the pitcher is sent to the bullpen to see if his stuff will “play up” in shorter outings, allowing him to air out the fastball. It is rare, however, to see a pitcher who can go five innings, who has the off-speed stuff to stick as a starter, and already has elite bullpen-ready velocity as a starter. With Noah Syndergaard last night, we were able to witness exactly what that is like. For one night, Syndergaard turned himself into Aroldis Chapman.

There were few doubts that Syndergaard could hit 100 mph as a reliever. Syndergaard’s velocity has been with him all season. He throws two fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer, and both of them have averaged close to 98 mph this season, according to Brooks Baseball. He hit 100 mph twice during the season as a starter, joining only Gerrit Cole, Nathan Eovaldi, Carlos Martinez, and Rubby de la Rosa as starters to reach that mark, per Baseball Savant. Also according to Baseball Savant, only 24 pitchers total in the majors this season have hit 100 mph. Only a few days ago, Syndergaard hit 100 mph at the end of his outing in Game 2 of the National League Division Series against the Dodgers.

If throwing fast gained a pitcher sainthood, Aroldis Chapman would have been canonized a while ago. The Reds left-hander threw more balls over 100 mph than the rest of MLB combined this year. Nearly 30% of all of Chapman’s pitches this season reached triple digits and, for one night, Syndergaard was Chapman’s equal.

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A few minutes ago, we announced that Dan Farnsworth was going to be taking over as our new Lead Prospect Analyst. Because I know he wouldn’t, I brought up some of his previous excellent work published here as a part-time contributor, and explained why we are excited to offer Dan this opportunity. If you haven’t already, go read that post. Now, we’ll allow him to introduce himself.

As Dave noted this morning, today is my first official day as the Lead Prospect Analyst for FanGraphs. It is an unbelievable honor, and I cannot wait to start discussing a wide range of players with you, our readers. Though you may have read some of my previous work, this is a new role for me, and I know the site has grown tremendously over the last few years. In that light, I wanted to introduce myself more fully, as well as provide you with some ideas I have for projecting players and how I will be presenting that information. Kiley McDaniel really stepped up the game for publicly available scouting data, and I hope to continue that standard of quality going forward.

First, a little about me personally and professionally. I graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 2008 with a Bachelor or Arts in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History — I’m coming for your title of weirdest baseball writing background, Cistulli — where I played Division III baseball as a catcher. At the time, I was interested in the medical field, and I applied and was accepted to Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York City. While I enjoyed the coursework, it became clear that becoming a doctor was not for me. I left school in 2011 to dedicate myself to working in baseball, and started coaching and teaching lessons at a baseball facility in Pennsylvania. Since then, I moved to Los Angeles to work with hitters in one of the best baseball regions in the country. At the beginning of the 2015 season, I moved back to New York City and worked as a Remote Scout for Inside Edge, mainly focusing on pitch charting and sequencing. Along the ride, I have met and learned from a lot of great baseball people.

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On Monday, Kiley McDaniel announced that he was leaving his position as FanGraphs Lead Prospect Analyst, having been offered a job as Assistant Director of Baseball Operations by the Atlanta Braves. When Kiley called me a few weeks ago to give me the news, I wasn’t surprised; this isn’t the first time a team had shown interest in him, and we knew it was inevitable that he was going to get offered a job he couldn’t pass up. The quality and quantity of work he did was simply too strong of a resume to ignore, and it was clear that this point would eventually come.

Kiley leaves a big void in our staff, and we’re certainly aware of the fact that it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to step in and simply pick up where he left off. Between his time working for three previous organizations and almost every media outlet that covers prospects, Kiley was about as connected to people in and around the game as anyone I’ve ever been around. He traveled extensively, seeing as many players in person as he could, and ended up doing things like having lunch with Yoan Moncada.

But beyond just traveling to see players, shooting video, writing up reports, and gathering valuable information from people in the game, he also helped push the creation of some back-end tools that led to things like the scouting grades that now appear on the player pages, as well as sortable pages with four years’ worth of information on the draft and the international players of interest who signed in July. He didn’t just produce content; he overhauled what prospect coverage at FanGraphs looked like.

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If it’s a preview of Game 5 you want, here’s all that really needs to be said: Zack Greinke is good, and Jacob deGrom is good, and the rest of the Dodgers are good, and the rest of the Mets are good, and some combination of events is going to lead one good team beyond the other. Maybe the combination will be predictable; maybe a catcher will accidentally throw a return toss off of the batter’s hand in a tie game in the ninth. Maybe that counts as predictable now. We’ll keep our eyes out.

Any preview bigger than that is lying to you. If not lying, then implying this’ll be in any way foreseeable. There’s a game, and things will happen in it. What I want to do here isn’t project which team is more likely to win. Rather, I just want to point out a really neat thing about Greinke’s 2015 record. It does say more than a little something about the way that Greinke pitches, so in that way this is immediately relevant, but mostly I wanted to make sure to get this in somewhere before Greinke’s season was officially over. It might be over in a matter of hours. So, now’s the time.

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It would be an understatement to say that these are pretty heady days to be a Cubs’ fan. In the last two games of the NLDS alone, an age-24-or-under phenom who will be under team control for the next five years or so seemingly drilled a ball into the stands or onto a scoreboard every five minutes or so. The present is extremely bright, and the near-term future potential seems nearly limitless. At this point, it might be prudent to take a step back and pay a little respect to the player who made it all possible, whose incredible second half cemented the Cubs’ wild card spot and then propelled them past the Pirates in the wild card game, ace starter Jake Arrieta.

These Cubs have been built quickly, and have excelled in many talent procurement areas. Hitting on high-end position player draft picks? Check, thanks to the likes of Javier Baez, Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber. Attacking the international market? Check, thanks to NLDS wunderkind Jorge Soler. Don’t forget the trade market, either. Anthony Rizzo was stolen from the Padres, but the biggest theft of all was the acquisition of Arrieta, along with key bullpen cog Pedro Strop, from the Orioles for Scott Feldman and Steve Clevenger.

Like our AL Contact Manager of the Year, Marco Estrada, who turned 32 in July, Arrieta wins NL honors in the very first season in which he qualified for an ERA title, at a fairly advanced age (29). Unlike the Blue Jay righty, Arrieta excelled in every way a pitcher can be measured, by missing bats, minimizing free passes — you name it — and is a leading contender for NL Cy Young Award honors.

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For the first time in more than two months, the Royals again saw the capital-J Johnny Cueto for whom they traded at the deadline, the capital-A Ace they needed to front their rotation following the departure of James Shields on their journey towards a second consecutive World Series appearance – this time with the hopes of capturing that final, elusive victory.

Cueto, when healthy, has been among the most consistently effective pitchers in baseball for the past half-decade. Though you can’t count on what his delivery may look like on any given pitch, you could always count on an ERA that began with a 2, which is precisely what the Royals acquired when they shipped Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb and Cody Reed to Cincinnati for the 29-year-old Dominican hurler in late July.

The guy they wanted was exactly the guy they got, until he wasn’t. After three initial Cueto-like performances in Royal blue, he gave up six earned runs to Boston. Then six to Baltimore, and four to Detroit, and five to the White Sox, and seven more to Baltimore.

Thoughts were, maybe Cueto was hurt. Or he was tipping his pitches. Or his catcher wasn’t setting up low enough in the zone. Or he was just running into some bad luck.

Fact is, no one outside the organization knew quite what was happening to Cueto. But that all feels like a distant memory after he shoved against the Astros on Wednesday night, allowing just two baserunners and striking out eight in eight dominant innings to clinch an ALCS berth.

Cueto’s average fastball, typically, sits around 93 mph. During the height of his struggles in Kansas City, it had dipped to 92. There were others factors to Cueto’s slump, certainly, but there’s usually a correlation between a drop in velocity and a drop in performance, and Cueto suffered both. Three weeks ago, Cueto’s average fastball dropped to 91. Two weeks ago, just in time for the playoffs, it had fallen to 90.

During Wednesday’s start against Houston, facing elimination, Cueto’s fastball sat at 93, touching 96. He came out throwing hard, and held it throughout the game. There wasn’t an obvious move on the rubber. His release point doesn’t appear to have changed. Just like Cueto’s early Kansas City struggles, there didn’t appear to be a clear explanation. So I went back and watched some film from the Twins game, when Cueto sat 90, and I rewatched some film from last night. Before we get into things, I’d like to just show you some first-inning fastballs.
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The Kansas City Royals succeeded last season in the face of low expectations — and, among many who appreciate advanced statistics, at least slight derision regarding the way Dayton Moore assembled his team. Contracts to middling pitchers like Jeremy Guthrie and Jason Vargas seemed unlikely to get the Royals from also-ran status. Trading away top prospect Wil Myers, even for a talented pitcher like James Shields, did not look to be enough to take the Royals over the top. So it was with this backdrop that Shields, along with the talented and young Yordano Ventura, stabilized the rotation; Wade Davis and Greg Holland anchored an incredible bullpen; and a slew of former top position prospects whose luster had worn off came together to win the Wild Card and make a run to the World Series.

Fast-forward to spring training — the Royals lost Shields and Billy Butler to free agency, and the improbable run of 2014 seemed even more unlikely to repeat itself this season. Not a single FanGraphs writer picked the Royals to make it back to the postseason. Nobody picked the Houston Astros or Texas Rangers, either, in an American League race that ran counter to predictions everywhere. The Royals had not done a whole lot to make themselves better and expecting their good fortune to continue for another year did not make for a good bet.

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