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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Junichi Tazawa is satisfied with his current role. Sort of. The 28-year-old set-up specialist would rather start or close, but he’s comforted by the knowledge that outs in the seventh and eighth innings can be every bit as valuable as outs in the ninth. And he gets a lot of them. Tazawa made 71 appearances for the Red Sox this season and logged a 2.86 ERA over 63 innings.

His job isn’t simple. Along with frequently facing high-leverage situations, he doesn’t have one designated inning. Tazawa pitched in the eighth inning 45 times this year, and 16 times in the seventh. He also made appearances in the sixth, the ninth, and in extra frames.

Further impacting Tazawa’s preparation has been his usage relative to the scoreboard. He entered 29 games with the Red Sox trailing. On 28 occasions he entered with a lead.

“My job doesn’t really depend on whether we’re winning or losing,” acknowledged Tazawa, through translator C.J. Matsumoto. “There is the possibility I will get into either situation, so I’m looking at the pitch count and trying to get my blood flow going. I need to be able to step right in there.”

One of the questions I asked Tazawa at season’s end was whether his ready-at-any-time role is more challenging mentally or physically. Read the rest of this entry »

So we’re all set, then, for a weekend without any baseball. The Royals did away with the Orioles in the minimum number of games, and the Giants almost did that same thing to the Cardinals. So out of a possible 14 LCS contests, we got nine of them, and now we’re set up for a showdown that isn’t exactly improbable, but that wasn’t predicted by (m)any. The Royals are in the World Series, after winning 89 games and after having once been 48-50. The Giants are in the World Series, after winning 88 games and after having once been 63-57. It’s going to be a World Series between two wild-card teams, and that’s absolutely terrific.

Major League Baseball is getting what it wanted from this postseason. And I don’t just mean in terms of the drama, although I think we’ve all been aware of that. The series haven’t been long, but the games have just about all been close. As one example, during the regular season, 19 percent of all plate appearances occurred with a score deficit of at least four runs. In the playoffs, that’s dropped all the way to 9 percent, and there were only three such plate appearances in the whole ALCS. It’s absurd how suspenseful and electrifying this has all been, but then that’s something more particular to this postseason. The wild-card thing is a bigger-picture issue.

It’s … I don’t know, what’s a good word? Controversial? The argument against being, wild-card berths dilute the level of talent in the playoffs. So perhaps the wild-card teams are undeserving, and then what does that tell you if you get a pair of them in the championship? What does a World Series title tell you about a team, if it’s a series between two teams who failed to win their divisions?

It tells you that a team beat another team in a baseball tournament. It tells you nothing more, and it’s not designed to tell you anything more. Tournaments thrive on drama and unpredictability. What baseball’s got set up is a hell of a tournament, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of wild-card teams surviving to the end. In another sport, we’d call them Cinderellas.

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Not long ago, a prominent national baseball writer declared that Madison Bumgarner is the one pitcher you’d want starting a must-win game for your team in the playoffs. The statement’s certainly debatable, but at the same time the feeling is understandable — Bumgarner’s tough as nails, and he’s been on a hell of a run. He’s been on the radar for years, having spent plenty of time pitching in the postseason, and there’s something that comes to mind when you think about Bumgarner: his signature cutter. Or slider. Whichever. No matter the name, they describe the same weapon, and it’s something Bumgarner has thrown before almost 40% of the time. Madison Bumgarner? Awesome cutter. Yeah. The association’s automatic.

Regarding that, I want to show you a table. You know our pitch values? You know our pitch values. Positive numbers are good. Bigger positive numbers are more good. Here are Bumgarner’s year-to-year pitch values, from his player page:

Based on that, a year ago, Bumgarner really improved his fastball. And this year, his cutter wasn’t much of a weapon. Let’s do more! Here are 2014 season splits:

All that fastball value came in the second half. As a matter of fact, after the All-Star break, Madison Bumgarner’s fastball was the most valuable pitch in baseball. The cutter? It was fine, and it’s still fine, but it’s not what it has been. And Bumgarner doesn’t seem to mind. Despite the cutter association, the Madison Bumgarner we’ve been seeing for months is, more than anything else, an elite fastball pitcher.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Carlos Martinez was the 22nd-best prospect in the game, according to ESPN, and the 27th-best according to Baseball America. He was ranked in everyone else’s top 100 as well, including here. A year later, he was 38th, and 39th. Despite this, the Cardinals have never given him a real shot to prove that he can be anything other than a middle reliever. It’s time someone gave him that chance.

Armed with what has been referred to as two pitches near the top of the 20-80 scale, Martinez has talent that all scouts dream of. And when he reached the majors at age 21 last season, he put it on display. He didn’t get the chance to start, but with the Cardinals in the thick of the playoff hunt, this wasn’t a major surprise. He got one spot start at the beginning of August, didn’t fare very well, and was moved back to the ‘pen. Plenty of hot shot prospects have broken in via the bullpen, and then gone back to being starters when the season starts anew in April. But between the Cardinals’ seemingly crowded rotation and some excellent work as a reliever in last year’s National League Championship Series, Martinez found himself back in the bullpen to start 2014.

This time, he didn’t take to the bullpen as well. Perhaps that is because his manager, Mike Matheny, couldn’t figure out what to do with him. In one stretch in April, Martinez had consecutive gmLI’s of 3.02, 0.52, 0.75, 1.46, 0.14, 2.13 and 0.03. We rail against rote bullpen roles frequently, and with just cause — managers should try to put their teams in the best position possible to win games. But even this approach has its limits. In case gmLI’s are a little foreign to you, here’s what the situation was when Martinez entered the game in those seven appearances:

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Probably my favorite sub-plot of this manic Royals conquest is the team’s 25th man, Terrance Gore, who had played in 11 major league regular season games before this most iconic of winning streaks. In fact, including his postseason appearances, Gore has played only 33 games above single-A, and is now a World Series contestant.

One way to easily identify Gore on the field is his uniform number 0, an under-utilized quirk that is an easy way to gain my affection. (Much respect also to Adam Ottavino.) There are other easy ways to identify him: he’s by far the smallest person on the field, somewhere around 5’7”, and he is only summoned off the bench in order to pinch-run in late-inning situations, and almost always for designated hitter Billy Butler. The substitution for Butler is doubly brilliant on the Royals’ part: slow Billy is taken off of the basepaths, and inexperienced Terrance does not have to play high-leverage innings of defense. In his sixteen games as a Royal, Gore has only been allowed two plate appearances, neither of them in the postseason.

Gore’s inclusion on the roster is a brilliant example of an entire Major League organization working in orchestration. Anticipating his usefulness as a playoff bench weapon, the Royals promoted Gore from High-A Wilmington to Triple-A Omaha at the beginning of August, and then from Omaha to Kansas City at the end of the month. Come playoff time, and Gore effectively replaced Raul Ibanez on the 25-man roster, with the hoodied Ibanez looking more and more like a coach as he watches and encourages from the dugout.

It has been easy to compare Gore to Herb Washington, a track champion and an Oakland A from 1974-75. In his two years in the big leagues, Washington appeared in 110 games, stole 31 bases, and ended up with more World Series rings (1) than career plate appearances (0).

To compare these two players is actually disrespectful to Gore. For Washington’s career, he successfully stole on 31 of his 50 attempts — an unremarkable 62% — and went 0 for 2 in the playoffs. To wit:

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Over the last few years, I’ve been pretty down on the Royals as a contender, most notably writing a pretty harsh review of their side of the James Shields trade. Then, before the season began, I stated that I didn’t see the Royals as legitimate contenders this year, even though they were becoming a trendy pick in the national media. And finally, on July 21st, I suggested that the Royals punt on 2014 and trade Shields before he gets to free agency, given that they had fallen into third place and were seven games behind the Tigers in the AL Central.

Since that last piece was published, the Royals have gone 49-24, including their current 8-0 postseason run that has let them to the World Series. A moribund franchise has been rejuvenated, and the Royals have achieved the exact result they were hoping for when they made the Shields trade in order to speed up their timeline. If the Royals had listened to me at any point along the way, they probably wouldn’t be in the World Series right now, so it’s time for some self-examination. What did I miss? Is there a lesson to be learned here?

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Tampa Bay Rays pitching coach Jim Hickey is looking forward to next year. He should be. Erstwhile “ace” – a term Hickey hates, BTW – David Price is no longer part of the equation, but an enviable array of pitchers are. Better still, all of next year’s projected starters are heading into their primes. The sextet of Chris Archer, Alex Cobb, Jeremy Hellickson, Matt Moore, Jake Odorizzi and Drew Smyly will be between the ages of 25 and 27 on opening day.

The 2014 campaign offered a number of challenges. Moore’s season-ending elbow injury in April was the biggest blow, while Hellickson scuffled mightily after a mid-season return from an elbow injury of his own. Cobb missed six weeks with a strained oblique. Archer and Odorizzi had good years but suffered growing pains along the way. As for Smyly, he sparkled after coming over from Detroit in the trade-deadline deal for Price.

Hickey broke down the 2014 progress of his starting staff following the conclusion of the regular season.

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Hickey on Odorizzi’s emergence: “I think the greatest example [of a Rays pitcher making adjustments] would be what happened with Odorizzi this year. He was fastball, curveball, slider, chanegeup, with not a very good changeup. He was very conventional. Then he started to experiment with the pitch Alex Cobb was throwing, which is kind of a hybrid changeup/split finger.

“It started in spring training with those two playing catch and kind of critiquing it. Coming into the season, it wasn’t a huge weapon for [Odorizzi] and he didn’t pitch particularly well for probably the first eight outings or so. Then, all of a sudden, he began to make some transformations. If you want to say he added that pitch, I guess you could say he added that pitch. It really started to come together for him.

“He also started tweaking his slider into a cutter when he wanted to, versus just a slider. So, we’re talking about two pretty big adjustments for a first-year guy who struggled at the beginning. At that point, most guys are just trying to keep their heads above water. He was experimenting and tnkering with new pitches.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals need to win Thursday night, and in theory there’s no one they’d rather have on the mound than Adam Wainwright. But, for one thing, they actually need to win three in a row, so it wouldn’t matter which of those three games Wainwright were to start. And more relevantly, Wainwright hasn’t exactly been himself, which maybe doesn’t come as a surprise given that he’s eaten innings like the Royals outfield eats fly balls. During the season, Wainwright went through and then seemingly emerged from what he termed a dead-arm phase, but his playoff struggles leave the Cardinals in an uncertain situation.

After Wainwright was bad against Los Angeles, the talk was that he had something of an elbow issue, and that was causing him discomfort. That also, in turn, caused fans of the Cardinals discomfort. After Wainwright was a little less bad against San Francisco, people wondered about the elbow thing, but Wainwright swore it was more mechanical, and that his elbow was fine. So what ought we believe, going into Game 5? We should establish here that, no matter what, Wainwright needs to get over something if the Cardinals are to survive. But must he conquer discomfort, or must he conquer a mechanical problem? Let’s investigate, inconclusively.

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Anybody in baseball could have had these guys. Gregor Blanco, Yusmeiro Petit, Javier Lopez. Sure, the Giants spent a little to get them, but that little has meant a lot to them in return. All three came up huge in Wednesday’s Game Four victory. And the tweaks those players made to get where they are today weren’t big tweaks. The Giants just saw the talent underneath some iffy results.

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