A year ago, Chris Sale and Clayton Kershaw took the mound in the opening game of the World Series. As far as pitching matchups go, those names might have made for the greatest Game 1 of all time. Sale was coming off another great season, with a FIP and ERA both around two, having amassed roughly 14 WAR over the previous two seasons combined. Kershaw has been the most dominating pitcher of his era, winning three Cy Young Awards with another three top-three finishes plus an MVP. Of course, that version of Kershaw wasn’t pitching last season, dimming the true battle of aces wattage and putting it more in the middle tier of World Series opener pitching matchups. That’s not the case tonight, as Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer make for what is arguably the greatest Game 1 pitching matchup in World Series history.

Max Scherzer has won two of the last three Cy Young awards and finished in second place last season. He was a favorite for the award in the first half as his 5.7 WAR essentially lapped the field, but injury trouble forced him to take some time off and he wasn’t as sharp on return. He still finished the season with a 35% strikeout rate, a 5% walk rate, a 2.92 ERA, 2.45 FIP, and 6.5 WAR, the last of which was second to only Jacob deGrom in the NL and fourth in baseball behind Gerrit Cole and Lance Lynn. Scherzer has begun to shrug off the late-season donwturn and in the last two rounds of the playoffs, he has pitched 15 innings, struck out 21, walked just five and given up just a single run. His velocity has trended up in the postseason and he’s pitching with eight days rest.

As for Gerrit Cole, he topped all pitchers with 7.4 WAR this season; since the start of 2018, only deGrom and Scherzer have more than Cole’s 13.4 WAR. He’s returned to ace status after a great 2015 season, with injuries slowing him down in 2016 and ’17. He deserves to win the Cy Young award as he heads to free agency, and he has had a brilliant postseason up to this point with 22.2 innings, 32 strikeouts, and just one run in three starts. We have arguably the best pitcher in baseball right now going up against the best pitcher in baseball over the last three (and maybe up to eight) years.

Looking only at single-season WAR, the duo is impressive for the first game of the World Series. Look at the scatter plot below, which shows all matchups for World Series openers since 1947:

Cole has the highest WAR for an American League starter in Game 1 of the World Series since at least 1947. Before that, Smoky Joe Wood put up 7.6 WAR for the Red Sox in 1912, while Lefty Grove had 8.3 WAR for the A’s in 1930, and Hal Newhouser’s 8.2 WAR paced the Tigers in 1945. Those are the only pitchers with better seasons in the American League to start Game 1 of the World Series. Scherzer’s 6.5 WAR ranks eighth among the 72 NL Game 1 starting pitchers since 1947. On average, or using geometric mean to avoid one really good starting pitcher skewing the matchup, tonight’s game is very close to the top, but not quite the best:

The Year of the Pitcher back in 1968 wasn’t just some clever name. It really was a year of incredible pitching. Nobody doubts Gibson’s greatness. He averaged more than 5 WAR per season before 1968 and then put up another 18.6 WAR in the two seasons following that historic 1968 campaign. Denny McLain, on the other hand, had put up a total of two wins the previous two seasons, and after a seven-win 1969 season was replacement level as a gambling suspension and arm trouble caused his lackluster rest-of-career.

As for the second-highest matchup, Schilling hadn’t been as good in his last few years with the Phillies but his time with the Diamondbacks coincided with a resurgence. Mussina’s 2001 season was the high point in a nine-year run that saw the Hall of Famer average 5.6 WAR per season. Just below Scherzer and Cole are Koufax and Ford, two Hall of Famers in the middle of their great careers. To provide some balance to the numbers above and find great seasons with some notion of staying power, I weighted the World Series season at 50% and the previous two seasons at 25% each:

Tonight’s game narrowly edges the Koufax-Ford matchup from 1963 as well as the Cliff Lee-Tim Lincecum battle, as the latter was coming off back-to-back Cy Youngs in 2008 and 2009 before a solid 2010 season. If in-season WAR is the sole determining factor in the matchup, then the Gibson-McLain battle is still number one with Schilling and Mussina in 2001 second, and tonight’s game coming in third. If you want to consider what happened in-season most, but provide a little more weight to fairly recent performances, there hasn’t been a better Game 1 matchup in at least 70 years.

The connection between past and present is more durable in baseball than in other sports, and the link is particularly apparent during the World Series. We’ve had nearly 120 of these now, and the classics are a constant presence in contemporary broadcasts. Seemingly every inning, we hear about great games from earlier eras or learn how X is the first player to do Y in the World Series since 1950-something.

If there’s any problem in this connection with the past, it’s that so much of the discourse focuses on the games from the so-called Golden Era at the expense of more recent history. To an extent, that’s a function of time; however great the 2016 World Series may have been, it’s difficult to place those games into historical perspective. Sometimes, memories must marinate.

But that shouldn’t stop us from trying. Below, I recounted each of the World Series’ from the 21st century, and attempted to rank them from least to most compelling. It’s a subjective list — could it be anything else? — but however you order it, it’s clear that we’ve had our share of great matchups lately. More than anything though, at the dawn of the 2019 World Series, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at the previous 19 matchups. After all, we had a lot of fun back then. It’d be a shame if we forgot the details.

19. 2007: Red Sox over Rockies in Four

Entering the series, Colorado was the best story in sports. With a record of 77-72, the Rockies were 6 1/2 games out of first with barely two weeks to play in the regular season. From there, they took 12 of 13 down the stretch, won a one-game playoff, and swept consecutive series to reach their first championship.

Reality struck immediately. Dustin Pedroia led off the bottom half of Game 1 with a homer over the Green Monster and the Sawx boat-raced their guests 13-1. Games 2 and 4 were one-run contests, but this was ultimately a matchup between the best team in the American League and a .500ish squad no longer riding a historical hot streak, and it felt like it.

Series Minutiae: Bobby Kielty only hit one homer during the regular season and had just one at-bat in the series, but it was a big one: His solo shot in Game 4 proved to be both the winning run in the game and the last at-bat in his big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Rodney signed his first professional baseball contract before Juan Soto was born. He has been pitching in the major leagues longer than Switzerland has been a member of the United Nations. He has appeared in more games than Cy Young.

Clearly, Rodney has been around the game of baseball for a while. His first postseason appearance came on October 10, 2006. It was Game 1 of the ALCS between the Rodney-having Tigers and the not-Rodney-having Athletics. He faced eight hitters that night, including now-Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, later-to-be NLCS MVP Marco Scutaro, and good-but-never-elite Nick Swisher.

On Tuesday night, Rodney will be in uniform for his 16th different playoff series. He’ll likely pitch in a game before the World Series is over, which will add yet another interesting factoid to his legacy. If — or likely, when — Rodney appears in the 2019 Fall Classic, he will have pitched in an AL and NL Wild Card Game, plus the ALDS, NLDS, ALCS, NLCS, and World Series for both an AL and an NL team. Read the rest of this entry »

It will come as no surprise to you that the Nationals are underdogs in the World Series. Projection systems might vary in their exact view of the series (ZiPS has the Astros as around 60% favorites, while our top-down model has them closer to 70% and betting odds tab them somewhere in between), but every system agrees that Houston is out in front.

It’s simple logic, when you’re an underdog, that increased variance is good for you. You probably can’t beat Magnus Carlsen at chess; he’s the best player in the world, and you’re someone reading this baseball blog. You have a far better chance of beating whoever the best poker player in the world is in a single hand — there’s far more variance involved.

So to maximize their chances of winning the World Series, the Nationals should be looking for ways to increase variance. Some of that will be straightforward — they should be more willing to play the infield in to prevent runs, more willing to issue intentional walks that risk a big inning but come with a higher chance of escaping unscathed, and more willing to play for the win in the ninth inning, even if it means increasing the chances of losing on the spot.

For the most part, baseball doesn’t offer many ways to increase variance. You can’t tell your pitcher to go out there and throw in a way that will either allow six or zero runs, and you can’t tell your batters to either score in bunches or not at all. While I was brainstorming variance-increasing ideas, though, a friend suggested something interesting. What if the Nationals could tinker with their projected starters to create more lopsided matchups? Read the rest of this entry »

Between Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin on the Nationals and Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, and Zack Greinke on the Astros, six of the top 13 pitchers by WAR will be starting in the first three games of the World Series.

That’s a staggering amount of good pitching packed into just one series. Even if both teams use a fourth starter, 75%-87% of all starters in the World Series will come from the list above. That has to be the best collection of present pitching talent in a World Series, right? Let’s test it out. Read the rest of this entry »

With one swing of his bat on a hanging slider from Aroldis Chapman, José Altuve untied Game 6 of the ALCS and sent the Astros to their second World Series in three years. In doing so, he joined some select company, becoming the fifth player in 50 years worth of League Championship Series to hit a pennant-winning walk-off home run, after current Yankees manager Aaron Boone (2003 against the Red Sox) as well as the Yankees’ Chris Chambliss (1976 against the Royals), the Tigers’ Magglio Ordonez (2006 against the A’s), and the Giants’ Travis Ishikawa (2014 against the Cardinals).

Altuve’s shot had an air of inevitability about it. While he has been surpassed by Alex Bregman as the team’s top position player — the two-year WAR totals for the pair are 16.1 for Bregman, 8.4 for Altuve — even at just 29 years old, he’s become something an elder statesman as well as a leader. He’s the longest-tenured Astro, having debuted in 2011, when the team was still in the National League and before Jeff Luhnow was general manager. His first three seasons featured a combined total of 324 losses, and while he was spared the first half of 2011 (he debuted on July 20), that’s a lot of losing for one person to endure, regardless of how one feels about the team’s choice of rebuilding strategies. Now he’s been part of teams that have won a combined total of 311 games over the past three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Scott is currently one of four people running Boston’s baseball operations department. Along with Raquel Ferreira, Brian O’Halloran, and Eddie Romero Jr, the 16-year member of the team’s front office is keeping a chair warm while the search for Dave Dombrowski’s replacement continues. His core responsibilities remain largely the same. Scott’s title is Senior Vice President/Assistant General Manager, and per the Red Sox media guide, he “oversees the club’s Baseball Analytics and Baseball Systems departments.”

What is the current state of Boston’s analytics department, and how much has it changed since the University of Vermont graduate (B.S. in Mathematics) joined the organization in 2004? I addressed those questions with Scott following the completion of the Red Sox season.

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David Laurila: How much has the Red Sox analytics department grown over the years?

Zack Scott: “There’s been a lot of growth, not just with us, but in the industry. As you know, there’s been an explosion of data. Throwing out round-number estimates, when I started there were around 10,000 data points, and now it’s more like 10 billion data points. And a lot of that has been the last five years. So the need to grow is apparent; there’s only so much you can do with a short staff.”

Laurila: How many people are currently in the department?

Scott: “We added five new employees last offseason. Overall, our R&D team is 15 people. It’s around half analysts, half software developers/technology-implementation.”

Laurila: There’s a perception that the Red Sox went from one of the top analytics teams in baseball to one that is below the top tier. Is that accurate? Read the rest of this entry »

After what was otherwise a fairly quiet affair punctuated by the occasional home run, the Houston Astros won Game 6 of the American League Championship Series 6-4 on a walkoff home run from José Altuve. Houston takes the series four games to two, and avoids a high-stakes Game 7 that would have left Gerrit Cole unavailable in the World Series until the third game.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start for the Yankees as Houston’s first entrant in the bullpen battle, Brad Peacock, quickly dispatched DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge, and Gleyber Torres with seven pitches. Chad Green opened for New York and didn’t perform as well in his half of the inning as Peacock did in his. Green was perhaps fortunate to escape a rather pedestrian slider to Altuve with only a double, but he was less lucky with a high, very inside fastball to Yuli Gurriel, which the first baseman turned on for a home run to give the Astros an early 3-0 lead. That high, inside fastball isn’t usually that dangerous for a pitcher; there were only 13 home runs hit this year by right-handed hitters swinging at a four-seamer in Statcast’s inside and high-inside “chase” zones. Coincidentally enough, Gurriel had one of those home runs, comfortably turning on a sorta-fastball from Trevor Williams. This might have been one of the highest-leverage of those since Kit Keller’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the lowdown on Tyler Rogers: A 6-foot-5 right-hander from Littleton, Colorado, he’s the twin brother of a left-hander closer, he made his MLB debut this past August, and he’s a submariner. Moreover, he kills a lot of worms. The 1.02 ERA that Rogers put up in 17 games out of the San Francisco Giants bullpen was augmented with a 69.4% ground ball rate.

Unlike his traditional-arm-slot sibling, he’s not a power pitcher. Taylor Rogers — fittingly, a Minnesota Twin — features a 95-mph fastball and an 83-mph slider. Tyler features an 82-mph sinker and a 73-mph slider. The latter pitch, which the atypical hurler throws roughly a third of the time, is atypical in itself.

“I call it a slider, but it’s almost a curveball,” Rogers said in September. “I kind of curl it like people do when they throw a curveball overhand. It’s the same thing, I’m just bent over doing it. So yeah, basically it’s just a normal curveball grip that I throw from underneath.”

Rogers began dropping down his freshman year of junior college. He did so at the suggestion of a coach, and from there progressively got lower and lower. The transformation to an actual submarine-style delivery came after the Giants took him in the 10th round of the 2013 draft. Irony being what it is, the genesis of the more-extreme verticality was horizontal in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — The Yankees may not win this year’s American League Championship Series. They may not become the 14th team to rally from a three-games-to-one deficit in a best-of seven, or the eighth to do so by finishing the job on the road — particularly against an Astros team with the majors’ best record and an historically powerful offense. But in the wake of a demoralizing Game 4 loss full of missed opportunities, sloppy defense, and the sudden end of CC Sabathia’s career, they met manager Aaron Boone’s immediate goal of sending the series back to Minute Maid Park with a 4-1 victory that featured strong work by starter James Paxton and a four-run first inning against Justin Verlander, featuring a pair of homers by DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks.

“He’s got to go out and pitch well and set the tone for us,” Boone said of Paxton prior to the game, “because we’ve got to get on that plane and go back to Houston.”

The tone early on Friday evening was all too reminiscent of Thursday’s late-inning sloppiness. Second baseman Gleyber Torres, who made errors in each of the final two innings of Game 4, mishandled leadoff hitter George Springer‘s grounder, which had slipped under Paxton’s glove, though the ball was scored a single. Springer then took second on a passed ball by Gary Sánchez, advanced to third on Jose Altuve’s grounder, and scored on a wild pitch. It was an all-too-familiar story for Paxton, whose 29 first-inning runs allowed in 29 starts tied for the major league lead.

That was all the Astros would get from him, however. Both Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel scorched line drives to the outfield —  98.4 mph for the former to left, with Brett Gardner chasing it down, and 96.8 for the latter to center, but right at Hicks — and so Paxton escaped by allowing just one run. He’d failed to get ahead of any of the five batters he faced, gotten just one swinging strike on a total of 23 pitches, and his defense looked anything but sharp. With the Yankees desperately needing length given their plans for an all-bullpen Game 6, it was not an encouraging beginning. Read the rest of this entry »