The story of Game Seven was, without a doubt, the performance of Madison Bumgarner. He was the story of the whole series, essentially, allowing one run in 21 innings pitched; his teammates gave up 26 runs in the other 40 innings, for reference. No single player can win a series for his team, but Bumgarner had about as large of an impact as any one player can have. Nothing else mattered as much as Bumgarner’s dominance.

But other things did matter, even last night. Besides Bumgarner’s historic relief appearance, there were several key decisions made that helped swing the game, and the World Series, in the Giants favor. Let’s go through them in chronological order.

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There’s nothing more overrated in the postseason than an ace starting pitcher. Just ask the Dodgers. Or, if you feel like it, you could ask the Cardinals. Or the Nationals, or the Royals, kind of, or the Athletics. Or the Tigers. An ace starting pitcher is just one guy, one member of a way bigger team, and baseball’s about a lot more than the first guy on the mound. There’s nothing more underrated in the postseason than an ace starting pitcher. Just ask the team that just won the postseason.

The Giants didn’t win the World Series because of Madison Bumgarner, but to the extent that one player can be mostly responsible for a championship, Bumgarner’s way up there on the list. It isn’t just that he dominated; it’s that he dominated while throwing literally a third of all the Giants’ playoff innings. Bumgarner was No. 1 on the innings-pitched leaderboard, and he finished with more than No. 2 and No. 3 combined. He also allowed fewer playoff runs than the Pirates. The worst thing Bumgarner threw all month long was a ball that Wilson Ramos bunted. Over the course of October, Pablo Sandoval hit .366 and Hunter Pence had an .875 OPS, and people aren’t really talking about them, because Bumgarner’s almost the whole story.

He mastered the Royals, of course, in Game 1 of the Series. He was somehow even more effective in Game 5. And in Game 7, Bumgarner got to work in relief, but in a starter’s kind of relief, where Bumgarner wasn’t coming out until he got tired, and he didn’t admit to fatigue until a post-dogpile interview. After all of the conversation and hype, Bumgarner turned in an iconic five-inning appearance, an appearance that will overshadow all others, and it was an unusual appearance for Bumgarner in two ways. One, he came out of the bullpen. And two, he just didn’t let the Royals hit strikes. Bumgarner saved a season extreme for a season extreme.

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Throughout October, several narratives have run through the national media coverage of the baseball postseason. The Royals became the media darlings, and their bullpen, team speed and defense were trotted out as examples of some sort of “new way” in baseball. The season ended tonight, with the “other” team – the San Francisco Giants – prevailing, on the back of a dominant starting pitcher and some pretty darned good defense of their own.

Joe Panik turned a potential first an third, no out, situation into two outs in the 3rd inning tonight, having arguably as much effect on the eventual outcome as that tall lefty the Giants brought out of the pen. In fact, I’d argue that the World Champions’ team defense as currently constituted belongs on roughly the same level as that of their Fall Classic opponents. Read the rest of this entry »

Source: FanGraphs

Congratulations, San Francisco. Three championships in five years is pretty incredible.

Madison Bumgarner. That was amazing.

Oh boy, are we ever going to learn a lot tonight. We’re going to learn, for example, how Bruce Bochy elects to use Madison Bumgarner. We’re going to learn about Bumgarner’s effectiveness out of the bullpen on short rest! We’ll learn about Ned Yost using and stretching out his big three relievers, and we’ll see how far Bochy and Yost are willing to go with Tim Hudson and Jeremy Guthrie. We’re going to learn how many runs the Giants score, and we’re going to learn how many runs the Royals score, and we’re going to learn the winner of the World Series. There aren’t a lot of situations where you know, absolutely, that a finish line will be reached. There’s nothing after this. Whenever Game 7 ends, there will be no more baseball, at least not for a few months, at least not as a part of this postseason.

We’ll learn about the game, and therefore the series. We’re not going to learn much of anything else. We’re not going to learn, conclusively, whether the Royals are better than the Giants, or vice versa. So we’re not going to learn whether one of these teams is the best team in baseball. What we get is hype and a show, with the stakes never higher. We’re going to get the most important baseball game of the whole seven months, and no matter what happens on the field, this is the point of the playoffs.

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We’ve probably talked about this before, but Leverage Index is a pretty perfect statistic. It’s of absolutely zero use when it comes to predicting the future, but in terms of describing the stakes of a situation, it’s a godsend. Also, there’s no arguing with it. You can and probably do sometimes argue about WAR. You can’t always “feel” a high or low WAR. But Leverage Index essentially mirrors one’s heart rate. You can always tell when the leverage is high, so it’s awesome that we are able to put numbers to those feelings.

We examine Leverage Index during individual games, but you can apply the same principles to whole seasons and postseasons. The point, always, is to win the World Series, so the closer you get to such a conclusion, the higher the leverage goes. So it makes sense that never is the season leverage higher than it is in a World Series Game 7. Much like what we have in a few hours! It quite literally doesn’t get bigger than this. It can’t. There’s nowhere else for baseball to go.

World Series finales have the highest leverage, so the highest-leverage plays from World Series finales should be the true highest-leverage plays ever. In honor of Game 7s everywhere, I felt like identifying the five highest-leverage moments in baseball history, according to the above thought process. Remember than an average Leverage Index is 1.00. The high-leverage cutoff is somewhere around 1.50 or 2.00. The numbers below blow those out of the water. Data has been recovered from Baseball-Reference, after using the Play Index.

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So! Tonight, there’s going to be a Game 7 of the World Series. Your cheering allegiances aside, that’s a rare and wonderful thing. Appreciate it, because now we’ll have the most possible baseball before the long stretch of no baseball, and this isn’t an occasion that comes around all that often. We had a Game 7 three years ago between Texas and St. Louis, but it had been nine years since it’d happened before that, the longest stretch in big league history. Sometimes, you get classics like Curt Schilling & Randy Johnson against Roger Clemens & Mariano Rivera in 2001; sometimes, you get John Tudor allowing eight runners in 2.1 innings on the way to losing 11-0 in 1985. What’s important is that we’re set up for history, and often the biggest impediment to that is simply the opportunity for it to happen. Not tonight.

Jeremy Guthrie against Tim Hudson doesn’t really sound all that exciting, and maybe it won’t be. It’s difficult to imagine either pitcher going more than five innings, and perhaps it won’t even be close to that. It won’t be the worst-ever matchup of Game 7 starters — 1997’s Jaret Wright against Al Leiter probably still tops that list — but it will be the oldest, thanks to a combined 74 years of age. Or at least it will be for a few innings, since both managers are likely going to dig into their bullpens early, since it doesn’t get more “all hands on deck” than this. On the other hand, maybe that makes it more exciting. This could be baseball unlike baseball.

Obviously, any Game 7 is fascinating, but this one might just be moreso, if only because of the way the postseason has gone so far. You’ve heard in more than a few places that this is “the best postseason ever,” and while that’s probably a bit hyperbolic because of the effects of recency, you certainly understand the sentiment. To merely name a few of the lasting impressions — the AL wild card game madness, the divergent Octobers of Madison Bumgarner & Clayton Kershaw, an 18-inning NLDS game, Lorenzo Cain and the Royals defense, literally every single thing Ned Yost has done — is to unfairly neglect so many others. For a postseason like that to end with a Game 7, well, it seems like a fitting capper. Read the rest of this entry »

For the Royals, Game Six could not have gone any better. Not only did they claim the necessary win to setup a winner-take-all contest tonight, but by blowing the Giants out early, they were able to acquire an extra day of rest for their vaunted bullpen trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland. Meanwhile, while the Giants can’t be too thrilled with their performance, the lopsided loss did allow them to avoid using Madison Bumgarner, and you can be sure that Bruce Bochy will use his ace tonight.

So, with one game to decide the World Series, let’s see if we can plot out usage patterns for both team’s pitching staffs in order to give each side the best chance of winning the championship.

The Royals side of things is somewhat straight forward; Jeremy Guthrie is the de facto starter, but there really is no such thing as a traditional starting pitcher for the Royals, and Guthrie will almost certainly be on a very short leash tonight, because the Royals just don’t need a significant number of innings from their starter.

Since recording the final out of the ALCS on October 15th, Greg Holland has thrown just 24 pitches. 24 pitches in two weeks. He hasn’t taken the mound since last Friday, and even that came in an outing that only took him eight pitches to complete. During the regular season, Holland threw 25 or more pitches in a single game on six different occasions; there’s no reason why he couldn’t be asked to stretch that to 30 or 35 pitches in the final game of the season, especially given his recent workload.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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