After several days hiatus due to the brevity of the two League Championship Series, baseball returns on Tuesday night with Game One of the World Series. This won’t be the first Series matchup of wild card teams, but it will be the first showdown between non division winners who both won fewer than 90 regular season games. While this Series might lack team and individual excellence compared to many past matchups, it does promise to be quite competitive. Instead of breaking down individual player matchups, let’s take a different tack and examine the venues in which the games will be played – Kauffman Stadium and AT&T Park – to get a feel for the context that will surround the Royals and Giants over the next week or so. Read the rest of this entry »

We — and I suppose by “we,” I do mean “the people I enjoy on Twitter” — have gotten a lot of joke mileage this postseason thanks just to a few never-ending items that have been pounded into the ground by baseball media and observers. I’m talking about things like Ernie Johnson’s complete lack of emotion, the eternal Viagra ad, TBS insisting on trying to make “shutdown innings” a thing, and so on.

Included among that has been that every single time James Shields‘ name is mentioned, he’s referred to as “Big Game James,” as though it’s his legal name. Shields is a very good pitcher, but he’s picked up a certain reputation for doing well in big spots entirely because of a rhyming sound his name makes. If only he’d gone with “Jim Shields,” right?

The gag there is obvious. “Big Game James” hasn’t actually come up that big at all in the postseason. For his career, he’s got a 5.19 ERA in nine starts. Five times, he’s allowed four runs or fewer, which is great, but four of those times came way back during Tampa Bay’s 2008 run to the World Series, which is not. Between 2008 and 2014, his postseason experience consisted of being hit hard by Texas twice, allowing a combined 11 earned runs across an ALDS start in 2010 and another in 2011.

This year, he’s made three starts, and while the Royals have of course won all three, it hasn’t necessarily been thanks to him. In the wild card game, he allowed four runs and nine baserunners in five innings, including leaving a meatball of a changeup for Brandon Moss to drive out of the park. (Though Ned Yost was later crushed for his decisions in that game, the mistake was bringing in Yordano Ventura, not deciding that Shields was done.) Against the Angels in the ALDS, he was better, allowing two earned runs in six innings, though he again allowed nine baserunners, along with solo homers to Mike Trout & Albert Pujols. And in Game 1 of the ALCS against Baltimore, he allowed 11 baserunners and four runs, helping to turn what had been a 4-0 lead into a game the Royals had to win on 10th inning Alex Gordon & Mike Moustakas homers.

The Royals have been winning in ways we might not have expected, but “having your best starter underperform” isn’t exactly a welcome part of that menu. So, as Shields prepares to throw the first pitch of the World Series against Gregor Blanco and the Giants tonight, is there anything we can draw from his postseason struggles? Anything the Giants might want to keep in mind? Read the rest of this entry »

Hello there, Royals pitchers! Congratulations on reaching this point — you’ve done many proud. No matter what happens, your 2014 season has been a screaming success. The Royals are back on the baseball map nationally and, more importantly, locally. But of course you’re not done yet, as there’s one remaining step in the staircase: Looming in front of you are the San Francisco Giants. You’ll face many different Giants hitters; among them will be Pablo Sandoval. In case you’ve never seen him before, you’re in for an experience. I’d like to show you something. Actually, I’d like to show you two somethings. Here’s one of them:

• Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
• Matt Carpenter: 46.8% in-zone swing rate

You’re going to face Sandoval; it could’ve been you would’ve faced Carpenter. Sandoval swings at about as many balls as Carpenter does strikes. For the sake of some perspective:

• Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
• Salvador Perez: 44.1% out-of-zone swing rate

So that’s how aggressive this Sandoval character is. Now, you might be wondering, “Does that mean he’s as easy to get out sometimes as Salvy?” No, this Sandoval guy is a unique sort of challenge. To prepare you for the challenge to come, I’m going to provide you with some strategy tips. How should you pitch to Pablo Sandoval, if you want to get him out? Pay careful attention to my advice.

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The World Series starts tonight, and if you’ve spent any time reading the internet over the last 24 hours, you’ve probably been inundated with preview articles. If you haven’t been, I’m particularly fond of this one from Jonah Keri and Ben Lindbergh at Grantland, mostly because it includes this fantastic image.

The rest of the preview is great too, which isn’t surprising, because Jonah and Ben do fantastic work on a regular basis. That preview is also annoying, as they stole a number of ideas I was going to spotlight in this post, which is why I stole their awesome outfield defense graph and put it in this one. But rather than cry over they-beat-me-to-it milk, we’ll just pivot and tackle the two World Series teams position by position. Forecasts are based on the 2015 Steamer projections found here on the site, and are based on an entire season’s worth of production.

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This October, there’s been a lot of talk about the Royals’ offense, which is a very unexpected sentence. By now everyone should be pretty familiar with the Royals’ approach: they try to hit the ball and make things happen, as opposed to sitting back and waiting for dingers. At a few points, you might’ve read remarks along these lines from Royals officials: if the team played in a different ballpark, they’d hit a lot more homers. This year the Royals were actually last in the American League in road home runs, so it’s not like dimensions have conspired to suffocate a juggernaut, but the bigger message is that the Royals have a big stadium. And Kauffman Stadium, indeed, is statistically tough on the longball.

Let’s play an assumption game for some reason. Say you’re given only one piece of information about a stadium, and from there you have to guess how the stadium plays overall. By our numbers, Kauffman Stadium has baseball’s seventh-lowest home-run factor. That means it’s probably pitcher-friendly, right? AT&T Park is pitcher-friendly. PNC Park is pitcher-friendly. Safeco, historically, has been pitcher-friendly. But this is the interesting twist, at least as far as park factors go: Kansas City’s ballpark is overall hitter-friendly. It’s just not so in the ordinary way.

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Only three teams threw the ball faster, on average, than the Royals this year. Not surprising when you’ve got youth like Yordano Ventura, Greg Holland and Kelvin Herrera throwing fire on the regular.

Only one team threw the ball slower, on average, than the Giants this year. Not surprising when you have distinguished gentlemen like Tim Hudson, Ryan Vogelsong, and Jake Peavy stepping on the rubber three out of every five games.

This difference in velocities has ramifications for pitch mix, of course. The Royals threw fastballs more often than the Giants. The Giants threw breaking pitches more often than the Royals. In fact, the Giants threw more breaking pitches than anyone in baseball.

Is one team better equipped to handle the strength of the opposing team?

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Not all bullpens are created equal. This postseason, the Kansas City Royals are putting on a show with their backend arms, blowing the doors off any and all competition with their unsubtle charms. What they lack in nuance they make up for in pure, unadulterated filth.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Giants feature a bullpen that couldn’t be more different than the high-powered Royals relief corps. Where the Royals are young, the Giants are old. Where Kansas City is cheap, the Giants relievers are lavishly paid.

It’s a study in contrasts, right up until the moment when you get around to studying their results. Because this October, the way the Giants pen racks up outs is second to none. Consider the postseason results of these two groups, both forced to run the full Wild Card gauntlet.

The manner in which they conduct their business might be different but they are getting spotless results. The Giants benefit from their wizened manager deploying them expertly, eschewing set inning roles and instead using whichever of his four main guys is better suited to the situation at hand.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

I had slightly higher hopes for this post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the final result. But when I first cooked this idea up, my plan was to utilize the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to pull velocity, horizontal movement, vertical movement, whiff rate and groundball rate to determine the nastiest pitches we’ll see in the World Series. But, there were a few problems.

While more velocity generally makes a pitch nastier, that’s not always true, especially in the case of offspeed pitches. More movement definitely makes a pitch nastier, but movement is hard to compare across a PITCHf/x leaderboard because a lot of it is dependent on arm slot and you get some funky values from guys who throw with funky motions.

So then, I was left with just whiff rate and groundball rate, but I actually kind of like that. Those are two of the best outcomes, and they’re the direct result of some of the things we weren’t able to capture, such as velocity, horizontal movement and vertical movement. The most dominant outcome of a pitch, for a pitcher, is a swing and miss. But not all guys dominate by getting whiffs, and so they don’t all pitch that way. Some guys dominate by getting weak contact, and ground balls yield the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types (grounders, flies and line drives). But the guys who really dominate are the ones who get the best of both worlds: whiffs and grounders.
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There’s no shortage of reasons why the Giants find themselves in the World Series for the third time in five years, really, and you can start anywhere. Maybe that’s Jake Peavy, a disappointment in Boston and now a revelation in San Francisco. Or rookie Joe Panik, filling a hole that was so bad it had led to Dan Uggla desperation, or the hilarious story that is Travis Ishikawa. There’s help from outsiders like Mike Matheny & Randy Choate, not to mention the Pirates deciding they’d rather have Edinson Volquez on the mound for the wild card game rather than Gerrit Cole. There’s been 18-inning playoff games, and the complete disappearance of Tim Lincecum, and the much more explainable absences of Matt Cain, Angel Pagan and Marco Scutaro, and 12 October runs that came in without the benefit of hits.

For an 88-win team to get to the World Series, a lot has to go their way. Much of it is going to be of their own doing, and some of it is going to be the usual insanity that comes in short-series baseball, which is less about crowning the “best” team and more about rewarding the right team, the one that did what needed to be done at the appropriate times.

This Giants team has all of that and more, and certainly Bruce Bochy and his staff have earned the credit they’ve been given. But in our rush to try to identify all the unusual ways that a team that always seems to be more good than great keeps getting this far in the playoffs, it’s easy to look past some of the more obvious reasons, like the fact that the Giants have two of the best players in baseball. Ace Madison Bumgarner is really, really good. So, of course, is Buster Posey.

* * * Read the rest of this entry »

Bunts were more topical before the Royals discovered how to hit home runs in the playoffs. But bunt fever can never be cured, only controlled. Hopefully people have a more nuanced view of bunts. Jeff Sullivan recently discussed how the Royals’ bunts this year actually have not been so bad according to Win Probability Added, a tool I also use in my annual Best and Worst Bunts posts (the anticipation is building!).

While much of the positive value of bunts comes from the chances of the defense making errors. A WPA analysis takes into account the game state — at some point things like one-run strategies are pretty good ideas. Moreover some players are better bunters than others, and some players are such poor hitters that bunting might be more advisable for them than others.

Looking back at the 2014 regular season, which players were better off bunting?

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