Archive for Daily Graphings

Let’s over-analyze. It’s why we’re here, right? We’ve got one baseball game to talk about, and we have a few more hours until we have another one baseball game to talk about. This is when we’re supposed to make a lot of a little, so let’s do just that, focusing on Game 1’s ninth inning. More specifically, let’s focus on Jeurys Familia facing Alex Gordon, with a one-run lead.

Gordon and Familia had never before faced off. So Gordon was trying to figure out his opponent, and after three pitches, you could say he did his job, tying the game with a homer to straightaway center field. It wasn’t a homer that won the ballgame, but it was a homer that later allowed the ballgame to be won, a stunning blast against an otherwise incredible closer. The Mets don’t expect Familia to fail. If anything, they’ve come to take him for granted. But the Royals went all Royals on him, and you know the rest. Familia would later admit that he made a mistake.

It’s easy enough to leave it there. Familia threw a bad fastball, and Gordon punished him for it. But why not go deeper? Why go deeper, you might ask? Because we can. Because the numbers are there for us to look at. This is the best time to be alive, so far.

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In something of a surprise move, the Kansas City Royals added 20-year-old Raul Mondesi — the son of the former Dodgers outfielder — to their World Series roster to replace pinch-runner Terrance Gore. Since Mondesi can play shortstop and second base, he gives the team a bit more roster flexibility, especially for the games that will be played under NL rules. Interestingly, Mondesi has never played in a major league game, or even a Triple-A game for that matter. So if Ned Yost decides to use him off the bench this series, he’ll make his big league debut in the World Series — something no one’s done before. As I noted in my write-up of Matt Reynolds, who was on the Mets’ NLDS and NLCS rosters despite having zero big league experience, this sort of thing is super unusual.

Mondesi’s most notable attribute is his infield defense. Kiley McDaniel, our erstwhile lead prospect analyst, gave his fielding and throwing tools future grades of 60. Yet, despite his defensive savvy, Mondesi’s hitting — or lack thereof — makes him a something of a polarizing prospect. Baseball Prospectus ranked him 12th on their mid-season list, while Keith Law had him down at 38th. Others put him somewhere in-between. There’s not a ton of consensus on Mondesi’s future.

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The title is a little alarmist, yes. Matt Harvey’s career has not been that long, and stuff usually just fades as you age. It’s a sad fact. Given all of that, though, his Game 1 performance was still noteworthy, in a bad way. In a lot of ways, he showed the worst stuff he’s ever shown.

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Lorenzo Cain didn’t know Alex Gordon was going to homer in the bottom of the ninth. The Royals still needed a run. They were trailing, 4-3, with six outs to spare and the dominant never-gonna-give-up-a-game-tying-homer Jeurys Familia looming in the Mets’ bullpen.

Forty-six seconds after Ben Zobrist stepped on second base, having led off the eighth with a first-pitch double against Tyler Clippard, Cain stepped into the batter’s box. Forty-six seconds was all the time he needed. Presumably, by then, he’d considered the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and made up his mind. “I’m gonna bunt.”

Sixteen seconds later, he squared around.

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There are a few phrases in baseball that come up from time to time which have no real evidence behind them, but generally inject a little enjoyment to the game as a bit of harmless trivia. One of my favorites is “As so often happens,” employed to describe that sequence when a player makes a great defensive play to close out one half-inning only to begin the next half-inning as the leadoff batter. One hears another such phrase when a defensive player has been going through struggles, perhaps has a bad reputation as a fielder, or might be nursing an injury. On those occasions when the relevant fielder is involved in a play, announcers are quick to note that “The ball will find you.” Last night, the ball found Yoenis Cespedes.

Cespedes, though turning 30 years old earlier this month, is in just his fourth year of professional baseball in the United States after defecting from Cuba. The Oakland Athletics signed Cespedes to a four-year, $36 million contract and installed him as the team’s center fielder. That particular experiment didn’t last. The A’s, perhaps trying to ease Cespedes’ transition to the majors, moved Coco Crisp from center field to left field so Cespedes could play his preferred center field. By the end of the season, the two outfielders had switched places; Cespedes, in the end, had started just 46 games in center. Until his trade to the Mets, Cespedes had recorded just 19 more starts in center field over two-and-a-half seasons. With Curtis Granderson in right, Michael Conforto in left and no designated hitter, Cespedes took over in center field as his hot bat helped the Mets to a division title.

Whether Cespedes is a more ideal fit for center field or left field is not set in stone, but the evidence we do have suggests left field is better suited to his skills. Cespedes struggled in the field in his initial transition to the majors, in both center and left field, but he adjusted to left field and quickly became one of the better left fielders in Major League Baseball.

Best Left Fielders 2013-2015

	Pos	Inn	ARM	RngR	ErrR	UZR	UZR/150
Yoenis Cespedes	LF	2914.1	21.4	17.3	-1.7	36.9	17.6
Alex Gordon	LF	3601.2	19.1	17.5	3.8	40.4	14.2
Starling Marte	LF	3168.1	3.8	19.0	-3.2	19.6	12.0
Christian Yelich	LF	2474	-3.9	11.6	2.9	10.6	5.2
Brett Gardner	LF	2010	-2.6	2.6	1.4	1.3	1.5

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When Eric Hosmer misplayed an eighth inning chopper down the line, giving the Mets a 4-3 lead, the Mets had exactly what they wanted; the chance to watch Jeurys Familia finish off the final three outs of the game to preserve a lead. Given what they’ve seen from their closer over the last few months, having him hold a lead seemed like just about the surest thing in baseball.

As Jeff Sullivan noted two weeks ago, the recent version of Familia has been even better than his season numbers suggest. In mid-August, Familia added a split-finger to his repertoire after basically not throwing the pitch at all for the first four months of the year.

Familia didn’t throw a single splitter from May 21st through August 7th, then started working the pitch in pretty regularly starting with his August 10th appearance. His numbers since that date, including the postseason:

Familia Since August 10th

IP	H	HR	BB	K	ERA
34	21	1	8	39	1.06

In the equivalent of about half a season’s worth of work, Familia had been as good as any reliever in baseball, racking up five strikeouts for every walk while also inducing groundballs on 60% of his batted balls. With the splitter, he’d been the Mets version of Wade Davis, the kind of guy you just expect to blow every hitter away as soon as he steps on the mound. And after Salvador Perez grounded weakly to shortstop, a Mets victory felt inevitable.

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Alcides Escobar is not a good hitter. I don’t say that to be mean — I say that to be honest. Even the Royals don’t really know how to explain Esky Magic. There’s no getting around his regular-season numbers, and when you mix in what he’s done in the playoffs, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. He’s the kind of hitter that, if you saw him in a community park, you’d think, that guy ought to play in the majors. But he’s the kind of hitter that, when he’s in the majors, you think, that guy plays a hell of a shortstop. In his best year, Escobar was a bit below average. He followed that year with a year where he hit like a good-hitting pitcher.

Escobar doesn’t walk, and Escobar doesn’t hit for power. The thing he has going for him is he’s tremendously difficult to strike out. In that sense he blends in with the Royals, although even on that roster he’s one of the standouts. Escobar, in short, is good at taking the bat to the baseball. From there, things will sort themselves out. The most charitable way to describe Escobar’s offense is that, with his speed and his contact ability, he’s usually capable of making something happen. Better a ball in play than a whiff, right? You never know, with a ball in play.

In the World Series opener, Escobar’s contact allowed for things to happen. After days of talking about the Royals’ ability to avoid the whiff, Escobar put contact to good use. Two examples were and are obvious. A third was subtle, but without it, Escobar doesn’t score the winning run on the Eric Hosmer sac fly.

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You can’t always feel original, even when you want to. Yesterday I wrote about the Royals going up against the Mets’ power pitching. I wrote about it because I think it’s interesting, but then, everyone thinks it’s interesting, so everyone has been writing about it. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fastballs well. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fast fastballs well. It’s been demonstrated now that good contact hitters have a slight advantage against power pitchers, relative to worse contact hitters. So much, coming from the Royals’ perspective. It’s all over the place.

A frequent counter-point: the Royals won’t just be facing hard-throwers. They’ll be facing Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz. These are hard-throwers with other pitches; these are hard-throwers with instincts and command. They’re not just 98-mile-per-hour fastball machines, so maybe it’s not fair to mix them in with everyone else. I think that’s totally valid. So it’s worth running through these exercises from the Mets’ perspective. We’ve looked at the Royals against power pitchers. How about the Mets against contact hitters?

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