Archive for Daily Graphings

The Mets just made the formula look pretty simple. You want to win in the playoffs? You have to hit, especially at the right times. You have to be good in the field, and you have to be aware on the basepaths. And you have to have good pitching, and you want to give the ball almost exclusively to the good pitchers. Baseball looks pretty simple when a team does literally everything well, and while you don’t want to just project the Mets’ NLCS performance ahead into the World Series, there’s no denying the fact that the Mets didn’t just beat the Cubs — they clobbered them. They outplayed the Cubs everywhere, and the Cubs would probably be the first to tell you that.

There’s obvious consolation for the Cubs and their fans. If there are any teams set up better for the future, you’re talking about maybe just the Dodgers, and this was a Cubs team that arguably arrived a little ahead of time. There are going to be more opportunities, and there are very likely going to be some NLCS wins. This pain will fade; the future’s too beautiful. One year ago, the Royals felt worse. Now they’re on the verge of getting back to the Series. You know all this stuff. Four losses aside, the Cubs are doing fine.

Yet before we all start to look ahead, to next week and to next season, I want to take a quick chance to reflect on the NLCS that just wrapped up. I don’t do this to rub anyone’s noses in it. I do it just because I think it’s interesting. Within a historical context, just how noncompetitive was this series?

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Minor league players scored an important victory in their minimum wage lawsuit against Major League Baseball on Tuesday, with a federal court agreeing to allow the players’ case to proceed as a class action lawsuit. As a result, Tuesday’s decision paves the way for potentially hundreds of additional current and former minor league players to join the lawsuit, dramatically increasing the scope of MLB’s possible liability in the case.

MLB’s minor league pay practices have been the subject of several different lawsuits over the past two years. One of those cases – asserting that MLB’s league-wide, uniform minor league wage scale violates federal antitrust law – was dismissed by the trial court last month.

Tuesday’s decision came in an earlier and more promising lawsuit, one that challenges MLB’s minor league pay practices under federal and state minimum wage and overtime laws. In Senne v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a number of former minor league players contend that MLB routinely violates these legal requirements by paying minor league players as little as $3,300 per year – without overtime – for what is, in many respects, a year-round job.

Although the plaintiffs in the Senne suit had always hoped that their case would eventually be expanded to cover most current and former minor league players, until Tuesday the suit technically involved only the 50 or so players who had been formally named as a plaintiff in the case. Now, anyone who played in the minor leagues between 2011 and 2015, without being promoted to the major leagues, is eligible to join the lawsuit.

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It’s right there in the name. Change-up.

It’s right there in all the names, really. The best fastballs, usually, go the fastest. The best curveballs, usually, curve the most. The best changeups, then, would change the most. That property — change — isn’t quite as intuitive as the first two, but really, in a good changeup, you just want difference. You want separation from the primary pitch.

As my colleague Eno Sarris wisely pointed out on Twitter last night, measuring the characteristics of a changeup, on its own, is a mostly useless endeavor. If the main purpose of a changeup is to give hitters a different look off the fastball, don’t you also need the characteristics of that fastball to give context to the change?

On the surface, Marco Estrada’s repertoire might not be eye-popping. He doesn’t throw hard. He doesn’t have great movement. But what he does have, is this:

On average, Estrada drops nearly 11 mph off his four-seam fastball with every changeup, giving him the largest difference of any right-handed starter in baseball. But we can take this a step further! There can be more to getting separation than just speed. There’s movement, too.

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Baseball really is something else. Coming into this postseason, there was no shortage of potential playoff narratives. You had the teams with the three best records in baseball, all hailing from the same division. There was the Toronto offensive juggernaut, and the Royals proving they weren’t a one-year phenomenon. There was phoenix-like rise of the Astros, America’s introduction to Rougned Odor, the two-headed Kershaw/Greinke monster from Los Angeles, the Cubs’ young bats, and the Mets’ young arms.

Enter, against this backdrop, Mets’ second baseman Daniel Murphy, who prior to this October drew attention only for arguably being baseball’s most average regular, the game’s equivalent of vanilla ice cream, suddenly deciding to morph into a latter-day version of Babe Ruth.

While the effect of Murphy’s sudden power explosion on the Mets’ postseason run has taken center stage, the near-term future of both player and club has become an enduring secondary plot line. Will the Mets extend a qualifying offer to free-agent-to-be Murphy? Until yesterday, the answer appeared to be no, though the rumor mill is now listing in the opposite direction. Might Murphy accept? The odds of that appear to be declining, in inverse proportion to the possibility that at least one club could lob a lucrative four- or five-year deal in his direction.

Most observers tend to agree on one thing, however: Murphy’s power surge just has to be a fluke. While I’m not going to be the guy suggesting that Murphy has 30-homer seasons in his future, I am going to go out on a limb and state that Murphy is a better player than the 2.5 WAR guy we’ve grown to know and, well, like. It’s just not for the reason playoff observers might guess.

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The manager of the Royals was his typical Yostian self heading into Game Five of the American League Championship Series. He went into the game with a 3-1 lead, needing just one victory out of four games to advance to a second straight World Series. He joked about the possibility of “watching 35 drunk guys try to get through customs” if the Royals clinched in Toronto. He put Alcides Escobar in leadoff spot so Escobar could work his magic. He sent 32-year-old Edinson Volquez to the mound against the Toronto Blue Jays to try and clinch the American League crown, and for a time he got nearly the best performance he could ask for from the right-hander.

Volquez, pitching for his fifth team in five years, had his best season in half a dozen years after the Royals signed him to a two-year, $20 million contract with an option for a third season. From 2009 to 2014, Volquez pitched nearly 800 innings, putting up a mediocre 4.46 ERA (121 ERA-) and 4.35 FIP (114 FIP-) and amassing just four wins above replacement in six seasons. He put up a good 3.04 ERA in 2014, aided by a low .263 BABIP and a very good Pittsburgh Pirates defense as his 4.15 FIP indicated not much had changed. Despite high velocity, Volquez struck out players at a below average rate, although he had dropped his walk rate in recent seasons. He pitched well in two postseason games entering yesterday, with 13 strikeouts and just 3 runs conceded in 11.2 innings over two starts, but spread out eight walks and was the clear third option behind Yordano Ventura and Johnny Cueto.

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Coming into game four of the NLCS, Lucas Duda was having the worst postseason of any hitter on any team who qualified for the postseason. During the playoffs, he had come to the plate 27 times and made 22 outs, 13 of them via the strikeout. All three of his hits were singles, and the only run he had knocked in came on a groundout. Things were going so poorly for Duda that, in game three, he attempted a bunt after Yoenis Cespedes led off the sixth inning with a single to right field. When your slugging first baseman is just trying to beat the shift to get himself on when the go-ahead run is already standing on first base, you know he’s not exactly abounding in confidence in his own abilities.

So when Jason Hammel watched Curtis Granderson steal second base during Cespedes’ first inning at-bat tonight, part of him had to be okay with that; it opened up first base, and with two outs and a slumping Duda on deck, pitching around Cespedes become the obvious course of action. It wasn’t officially an intentional walk, but Hammel wasn’t pound the strike zone, and seemed quite content to face Duda with men on rather than letting Cespedes get a real shot at driving Granderson in.

So, after four balls to Cespedes, up stepped Duda. Hammel, struggling with his command, fell behind 2-0, but then challenged him with a fastball right down the middle; Duda fouled it off. Of course he did. Hammel then came back with a curveball on the inner half, and Duda swung through that, pushing the count to 2-2. Hammel was just one strike away from getting out of the inning unscathed, and one strike away against a guy with a 49% strikeout rate in October.

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The consolation you hope for is that these uncertainties don’t end up making a difference. That way, you can talk about them, and you can investigate them, but you don’t have to worry about the results hinging on a decision one way or the other. It worked a little like that with the Rangers’ weird go-ahead run in Game 5 of the ALDS — as strange as that was, the Blue Jays still won, so it didn’t really matter in the end. Of course, that wasn’t true uncertainty, because the rules weren’t ambiguous. It was an unfamiliar play, but a legitimate run. With Edinson Volquez’s last full-count pitch to Jose Bautista in Wednesday’s sixth inning, there’s no getting to that point. You can see in the pitch whatever you want.

And you can say, all right, but the Blue Jays won by six. You can say, even as the pitch was being delivered, the Jays were heavy in-game favorites. You can try to claim the call didn’t end up too significant. But the call, in the moment, was huge. It was the difference between bases loaded and nobody out, and two on with one out. The score, you’ll recall, was 1-0. If the Royals get the call their way, maybe the inning is completely different. Maybe the Jays score, but not too much, and they have to turn to David Price out of the bullpen. The game and series didn’t turn because of one pitch, but that one pitch did some of the pushing. That one pitch was also the very definition of borderline. The only thing we know is Volquez’s breaking ball was perfect. What happened? Unfortunately, it’s a mess, in a very baseball way.

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Ask Joe Maddon, and he’ll tell you what’s wrong. To this point, the Cubs have simply been out-played. The Cubs have been out-pitched, they’ve been out-hit, and they’ve been out-executed in between. The Mets have played quality baseball, not giving the Cubs very many openings of any significance, and that’s a sure-fire way to end up with a 3-0 series standing. When a team like the Mets blends ability with smarts, that makes for a hell of a foe.

Quietly, over the course of the year, the Mets were an above-average baserunning team, but they weren’t much of a stolen-base team. In the playoffs, and especially against the Cubs, the Mets have turned their aggressiveness up, responding to worse hitting conditions by trying to squeeze everything they can out of being on base. Tuesday night, a pivotal play was Yoenis Cespedes stealing third base in the sixth inning of a tie game. The Mets didn’t used to do much stealing of third, but Cespedes would come in to score on a wild third strike, and his would be the winning run. It was an important event, and somewhat stunning for the ease with which Cespedes advanced.

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Cliff Pennington is known to possess many things. First, his name, a mix of post-war American automobile repair man and British countryside retreat; second, a yearly salary of no small consequence which allows him a large home and garage outfitted with fine automobiles, if he so chooses; and third, a slightly above replacement-level bat and glove that have afforded him between 200 and 300 plate appearances for each of the past three seasons.

After yesterday’s ALCS Game Four, Pennington is now known to possess a few other things, chief among them a 91 mph fastball and a 79 mph curveball. We know this, of course, because Pennington was the first-ever position player to pitch in the playoffs, the direct result of a 14-2 rout of the Toronto Blue Jays by the Kansas City Royals. It was certainly not the hope of Blue Jays manager John Gibbons to call upon Pennington as a pitcher when laying out his bullpen for the semifinals of baseball’s biggest tournament, but here we are, and the results of the forced experiment were, at the very least, interesting and entertaining for the neutral fan.

Allow us to begin with Pennington’s first pitch:

Surprising? Surprising. 91 with sinking action from a position player will do that, and it caused quite a reaction from a section of Jays players who were paying attention to the game:

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To think, we got to do this just over a week ago, after a Jason Heyward home run. Now we’re in a similar situation. Tuesday night, the Cubs lost a tough one to the Mets, falling behind three games to none in the NLCS. So the Cubs find themselves in the worst position possible, and they’re fully aware of the history, but for whatever it’s worth, Kyle Schwarber just became the Cubs’ all-time leader in postseason dingers, and he got there by going deep against a really outside pitch from Jacob deGrom. It’s not really much consolation. How do you feel about your accomplishment, Kyle Schwarber?

“I’m not really looking at that right now,” Schwarber said.

Right. The last thing Schwarber wants to focus on is a dinger in a loss. The last thing the Cubs overall want to focus on is a dinger in a loss. The last thing Cubs fans want to focus on is a dinger in a loss. But, look. I’m not invested in this. I don’t play for the Cubs, and while I’ve rooted for the Cubs before, they’ve never been my favorite team. I get paid to obsess over stupid little details. So, following: a whole bunch of them. Though the Cubs ultimately lost, Schwarber’s home run was remarkable, and that’s right in my wheelhouse.

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