Here’s a post that probably doesn’t need to exist, but then, what post about baseball analysis does need to exist? If everything’s pointless, nothing is pointless, so let’s get to the subject! The Royals are shortly going to host the Giants for Game 6 of the World Series, and Kansas City is hoping to play again tomorrow, probably. If you imagine the whole baseball season as a baseball game, then we’re at the very end with an uncertain conclusion, meaning the leverage is enormous. If the purpose of every event is to help win a championship, well, now a championship hangs directly in the balance.

The Giants are up 3-2, but however much baseball remains will be played in Kauffman Stadium. And if you’ve been poking around today, you’ve probably seen some mentions of how that puts the Royals in a pretty decent position, all things considered. Not only do the Royals get to play at home — they get to play super-important games at home, with a super-frenzied atmosphere, and recent history might be on their side. I could cite any number of examples, but I will just cite this one:

And it’s the Jake they’d love to ride to a Game 6 victory, because a Game 7 would give the Royals a distinct home-field edge. (Giants fans can blame All-Star Game MVP Mike Trout for that possibility.) The home team has won each of the last nine World Series Game 7s. The last road team to win a Game 7 was the 1979 Pirates.

The Giants’ best bet, then, is to wrap this up in six.

What’s implied is that home-field advantage might get more significant as the stakes get higher and higher. Think of it as kind of a clutch home-field advantage factor. So can the Royals at least look forward to an extraordinary lift? No. I mean, no, probably.

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When Game Six of the World Series kicks of tonight, Jake Peavy will be on the mound for the Giants. Perhaps the biggest question of the night, however, will be how long he stays out there. Because if you’ve read FanGraphs for any length of time, you’ve probably heard us harp on the times-through-the-order penalty. By the time a line-up rolls over a few times against a starting pitcher, there are almost always more effective relief options than letting that starting pitcher remain on the mound.

More than any other strategy suggestion, the go-to-your-bullpen-early theory is probably the biggest area where the numbers and the traditional way of managing differ. Teams generally ride their starting pitchers until they get in trouble, removing them for a reliever after a rally has started. The data suggests that managers would do better to remove starting pitchers before the rally ever starts, though this would require managers to replace pitchers who haven’t yet failed. And for the most part, they don’t yet seem willing to do that.

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The last travel day of the season is behind us, and regardless of what lies ahead, we can be sure that a champion will be crowned in Kansas City. It’s been an entertaining, largely well-played series to date, with both teams’ respective strengths and weaknesses on display. I’m not here today to predict how this matchup is going to turn out — I picked the Giants in five last week — instead, let’s take this opportunity to look at the best and worst Game 6 and Game 7 tandems among the 25 World Series of that length since the advent of divisional play in 1969. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been consuming baseball analysis for any meaningful length of time, TTO comes as a particularly familiar acronym. It stands for Three True Outcomes — walks, strikeouts, and dingers — and for me, personally, it makes me think of Adam Dunn. And it makes me think of baseball writing eight or ten years ago, when at least I was starting to come into my own. But TTO can and does also stand for something else, something we’ve been talking and reading about a lot over the past several weeks — Times Through the Order. As in, the times-through-the-order penalty, that describes how starting pitchers become less effective over the course of a game. All those things you’ve read about how Starter X was left in too long by his manager? The criticisms are mostly founded upon the idea that pitchers get tired and over-exposed.

Those are tricky things to separate. It stands to reason pitchers get worse because they get more tired. It also stands to reason pitchers get worse because their opponents get more and more familiar with the pitches being thrown. You think about “looks”, and whatnot. We know there’s a TTO penalty during a game. And if any of it has to do with familiarity, then it seems like there ought also be a TTO penalty within a series.

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On Sunday, the Giants and the Royals played Game 5 of the World Series, and an unusual thing happened. We’ll get to that. On Saturday, the same teams played Game 4, and in the bottom of the fourth inning, Yusmeiro Petit batted for some reason against Jason Vargas. Petit swung at the first pitch, maybe trying to catch the Royals off guard, as if the Royals even had a plan for effectively pitching to Yusmeiro Petit, who is a reliever. The bat hit the baseball and the baseball found the outfield grass. Remarked Andy McCullough:

Baseball!

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) October 26, 2014

“Baseball!” is the exclamation of those who understand that they’ll never understand the game. It’s an acknowledgment and an appreciation of the random by the learned, and classic Baseball! moments serve to underscore that there’s always a chance of anything, and baseball has a lot of repetitions. Weird things don’t usually happen, but there are enough events that the next one might be right around the corner. I mentioned that something strange happened yesterday, too. Madison Bumgarner didn’t need the help, but in the bottom of the eighth, Juan Perez faced Wade Davis and drilled a ball off the very top of the center-field fence for an RBI double. Perez is a player well-known for nothing and best-known for running better outfield routes than Michael Morse and Travis Ishikawa. Responded one David Cameron:

That was the most @cantpredictball play in history, maybe. — David Cameron (@DCameronFG) October 27, 2014

Basically, Cameron was calling it a Baseball! moment. So, which was the better Baseball! moment?

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If you missed the American League edition of this post from Friday, you can check it out right here.

I’m not going to bog this section down with a bunch of new words, I’d rather just get right into it. But first, if you want to gloss over the methodology really quick, I’ll re-publish it from Friday’s post:

First, our player pool. For catchers and infielders, I’m simply going with qualified batters. This is pretty standard. For outfielders, I’ve lowered the innings threshold to 600 innings, because outfielders move around more than infielders, and I don’t think an everyday outfielder should be discounted because he had to split his time between left field and center field.

Now, for the numbers. We’ve got Defensive Runs Saved and we’ve got Ultimate Zone Rating. Neither are perfect, and sometimes they disagree with each other, but when put together, I think we can all agree they do a pretty good job. I’ve prorated each to 1,000 innings and simply used a 50/50 split to determine each player’s total defensive value, per 1000 innings (tDEF/1000). In the tables, I’ve also decided to include each player’s Revised Zone Rating and Fielding Percentage, just because.

Catchers, as we know, are a whole other beast. We’ve got three main components of catcher defense that we can measure: controlling the running game, blocking pitches and receiving pitches. Only two of them are included in the advanced defensive metrics we use, and the one we’re leaving out (receiving) appears to be the most important skill. To make up for that, I simply added up the run values of each of these three components, using StatCorner’s catcher framing report for my framing numbers. Some people don’t agree with how much weight is given to catchers in framing data, and I kind of agree with that, but as the National League results will show, the top spot doesn’t simply go to the best framer.

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We’ve talked about James Shields a lot this postseason, and most of it hasn’t been all that positive. “Big Game” James had been lousy throughout this magical Kansas City run, and he was particularly bad in Game 1 of the World Series, getting pounded with line drives left and right and leaving after three innings. In Game 5, he went up against Madison Bumgarner again, and again he lost, mainly because Bumgarner was outstanding, to the point that we’re now talking about him in a historic context.

The big picture view there is that Shields has started two World Series games against Bumgarner and lost both, likely ending his Royals career and helping to put his team in a 3-2 hole headed back to Kansas City. That’s a factual statement, but it also misses something that was largely overshadowed by Bumgarner’s dominance and more confounding Ned Yost decisions: Shields was actually pretty good last night. As the indispensable Daren Willman of Baseball Savant noted, Shields’ 21.2% swinging strike rate in Game 5 was the best any starter had this postseason, topping Zack Greinke’s NLDS start.

It’s fair to note that Lorenzo Cain’s fantastic catch on a Hunter Pence ball in right field saved Shields at least one run and perhaps two, but there were also some questionable plays by Alcides Escobar and Jarrod Dyson that didn’t go down as errors, so, noted and moving on. Shields can’t control his defense, so let’s focus on what he could control.

Here’s what that meant: Shields pitched differently than we’d seen him pitch as a Royal, and perhaps differently than he ever has. It’s actually a little terrifying to think that a pitcher who has been very good for many years would change his approach in Game 5 of the World Series. Fortunately for him, it worked.

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If you feel like the games this postseason have dragged a bit, congratulations, you’re not just turning into an old grump who wants to get to bed earlier. You could be, I guess, but that wouldn’t be the sole factor in why you’re annoyed at the length of these playoff games, even the exciting ones. Because in October, the game really has slowed down to a crawl.

On our leaderboards, we feature a stat called pace, which measures the time between pitches as recorded by PITCHF/x. During the regular season, the average length of time between pitches was 23.0 seconds; in the postseason, that has ballooned to 25.4 seconds.

2.4 extra seconds between pitches might not sound like a lot, but in the 30 postseason games that have been played so far, there have been 8,802 pitches thrown, or an average of 293 pitches per game. At 2.4 extra seconds between pitches, this has added an extra 11 minutes and 43 seconds to the length of the average game. In just these 30 postseason games, we’re closing in on almost six hours being added to the total time of games through the lengthening of the least interesting part of the sport.

So, who are the primary culprits in slowing the 2014 postseason down? To find out, I looked at the difference in regular season and postseason pace for every pitcher who has appeared in a game in the playoffs, and then multiplied that per-pitch difference by the number of pitches thrown. Here are the top 10 pitchers who most slowed the game down on a total time basis:

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Eric Hosmer looks the part. If you wonder why guys like Hosmer are extended impossibly long lengths of rope at the big league level, you don’t have do much more than look at him. Watch him play first base and listen to a batting practice session and it becomes very easy to understand the hype behind the Royals starting first baseman.

The back of Hosmer’s baseball card betrays his “top of the class” eye test scores. When that tantalizing talent finally starts to deliver, it’s a big moment for fans of the club. When that blue chip talent starts fulfilling his destiny during the first playoff run in 29 years, it’s a dream come true.

Such is the euphoric state of the Kansas City Royals and Eric Hosmer. While it isn’t the first time in his career that he started both looking and producing like a cornerstone infielder, it comes at the most opportune time imaginable. The Royals are dangerously close to winning the World Series and the former third overall draft pick is instrumental in their progress.

He’s drawn more walks in October than any single month during the regular season. He’s hitting the ball with power, counting two homers, two doubles, and a triple in 12 postseason games. The high-leverage nature of these extra base knocks helps muddle the “he turned a corner!” picture. This follows a September in which he knocked another 12 extra base hits after missing most of August with a hand injury.

The problem with putting too much stock in this tiny stretch of great play all is the not insignificant memory of 2200 league average plate appearances. Swing changes and adjustments to approach are well and good, but there is a very large pile of evidence that suggests we already know what kind of production we can expect from the big left-handed hitter.

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Coming into this spring, Yusmeiro Petit didn’t have a roster spot locked down with the Giants. David Huff was ready to be the long man, and he started the spring off better than Petit. Manager Bruce Bochy showed confidence in his righty and eventually the team made what looks to be the right decision. Though only a little has changed about Petit since his early days in terms of his fastball command and four-seam/curve/change arsenal, perhaps Bochy saw what the hitters weren’t seeing so well: Petit has an invisiball.

“He knows how to pitch. He’s really hitting his spots and hits both sides of the plate with all his pitches,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “He’s a guy we can count on.” — Alex Pavlovic

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