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Let’s just get this out of the way now: That sucked. I mean, the game between the Astros and Red Sox was great, and it couldn’t have ended in a more dramatic fashion, but ultimately, the Red Sox won by two runs. And, in the bottom of the first inning, a controversial call and replay review might well have cost the Astros two runs. Yes, you’re right, the game would’ve played out differently had that call been made differently. We have no idea what that alternate game would’ve looked like. But the Astros have been pushed to the brink now, and a two-run homer would’ve been a pretty big deal. No one ever wants to think a game and season were damaged by umpires. It’s a very unsatisfying kind of disappointment, when the outcomes aren’t solely determined by the players themselves.

I don’t think we’re ever going to know for sure whether the right call was made. As such, it’s the sort of thing that’s going to linger, at least if the Astros fail to advance. Immediately, this has turned into a great What If?, and a target of Astros fan rage. Yet having reviewed all the evidence, I’ve come to the conclusion the call was good. And by that I mean, I think it was more good than bad. In the absence of anything conclusive, some amount of mystery is everlasting. But if you are to render judgment, you go whichever way you’re leaning. I’m leaning toward fan interference.

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The story on the field is that we’ve got a couple of excellent league championship series. The story off the field has been different from that. Yesterday’s headline, from Danny Picard:

Metro Exclusive: Astros may have been cheating in Game 1 against Red Sox

This isn’t about a sunscreen or pine-tar thing. Teams don’t care about that, because their own players partake. This is about a sign-stealing thing. The Indians tipped off the Red Sox about an Astros employee with a camera by the dugout. It seems super suspicious. The Astros, for their part, have insisted the guy was there to make sure the opponent wasn’t cheating. It’s a weird and complicated story. There are other elements, as well, but I’m not going to get into them. Major League Baseball considers the matter closed. The league says it’s taken steps in the playoffs to try to make sure teams aren’t cheating via technology. You can believe they’re doing enough, or you can not believe it. I can’t pretend to have all the necessary information.

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Last night, Manny Machado scored the decisive run in an extra-inning walkoff victory to tie the NLCS at two games a piece and put the Dodgers within two wins of the World Series. When discussing Machado and last night’s game, we’d ideally be focusing on his key hit, his smart and aggressive take of second base on a wild pitch, and his impressive dash from second to home on a single to right field that barely beat a strong throw from Christian Yelich.

We aren’t talking about that, though. We’re talking instead about a play in the 10th inning of last night’s game on which Manny Machado made contact with Brewers first baseman Jesus Aguilar:

In real time, it looked really awkward, but not necessarily malicious. After the game, the Brewers said the play was dirty or insinuated as such by questioning Machado’s general attitude about playing hard. From the MLB.com story:

“It’s a dirty play by a dirty player,” Brewers right fielder Christian Yelich said.

“It looked like it,” Aguilar said. “I’ve known Manny for many years and I don’t know why he would act like that.”

Brewers manager Craig Counsell threw shade at Machado when asked if the play went beyond the grounds of hard play.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess they got tangled up at first base. I don’t think he’s playing all that hard.”

Machado didn’t really back down either:

“If that’s dirty, that’s dirty,” Machado said. “I don’t know, call it what you want. I play baseball. I try to go out there and win for my team. If that’s their comments, that’s their comments. I can’t do nothing about that.”

Let’s start by giving Machado the benefit of the doubt and assume, for sake of argument, that it was just a weird play. In that spirit, let’s take a few closer looks at it to see what kind of determinations we might be able to make. Here’s another angle from directly behind Machado.

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Known primarily for his work as the former executive director of the MLBPA, Marvin Miller was an NYU-educated economist by training. His efforts as union head eventually led to the elimination of the reserve clause and start of free agency for MLB players. It was Miller who negotiated the players’ very first collective bargaining agreement, brought arbitration to professional sports, and did all of this despite contending with anti-semitism from the team owners on the other side of the bargaining table and a disability leaving him with limited use of his right arm. Miller was called by Hank Aaron “as important to the history of baseball as Jackie Robinson.”

In light of Miller’s relevance to the livelihoods of its members, it’s not surprising that the MLBPA makes some effort not only to preserve his legacy but also to honor those who continue it. To that end, the union gives an award every year for off-field service and community leadership. The Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award, started in 1997 and rebooted in 2000, is considered “one of baseball’s top honors[.]” The award is based on popular vote by the players, with the recipient being the teammate whom the voters “most respect based on his leadership on the field and in the community.” Each team has its own top vote-getter honored by the MLBPA.

In 2017, the list of top vote-getters contained an impressive collection of players notable not just for their exploits on the field, but for their charity work off of it, as well.

Among [2017]’s nominees are players involved in providing clean water and other necessities to poverty-stricken villages in remote parts of the world, supporting the needs of servicemen and women and their families, building schools, ensuring clothing and meals for inner-city poor,  raising funds for research and respite to cancer victims and their families,  rescuing abandoned and mistreated animals,  and sending truckloads of emergency supplies to victims of natural disasters.

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Postseason baseball has not come easily to Cody Bellinger. After setting an NL rookie record with 39 home runs in 2017, the then-22-year-old endured ups and downs last October, coming up big in the Dodgers’ Division and League Championship clinchers but going 4-for-28 with a record setting 17 strikeouts in the World Series. Those struggles had continued this fall, in the form of a 1-for-21 skid through Game Four of the NLCS and a spot on the bench for Game Four, as lefty Gio Gonzalez started for the Brewers. Nonetheless, in a five-hour, 15-minute slog that he didn’t even enter until the sixth inning, Bellinger played the hero, first with a diving catch on a potential extra-base hit off the bat of Lorenzo Cain in the 10th inning and then a walk-off RBI single in the 13th, giving the Dodgers a 2-1 victory.

The hit was actually Bellinger’s second of the night. His first came in the eighth inning, when he countered the Brewers’ defensive shift with an opposite-field single off the nearly unhittable Josh Hader, a Nice Piece of Hitting.

Bellinger, despite his pull tendencies, ranked ninth in the majors on grounders against the shift during the regular season, with a 98 wRC+. His 111 wRC+ overall on balls in play against the shift ranked 24th among the 123 hitters with at least 100 PA under such circumstances, which is to say that he’s fared well in this capacity — among the many other ways he’s fared well — despite this October slump.

Paired with Max Muncy’s leadoff single earlier in the inning, it was the first time all year that the Brewers’ fireman yielded multiple hits to left-handed batters in the same outing. The Dodgers couldn’t convert there — more on which momentarily — but Bellinger would only come up bigger.

Here’s Bellinger’s catch off Cain’s liner, which led off the 10th inning against Kenley Jansen. According to Statcast, it had a hit probability of 94%:

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Five years from now, when we think about Game One of the NLCS between the Dodgers and Brewers, I’m guessing we’ll probably think about the ninth inning: taut, suspenseful, and fundamentally baseball-y in the best way. If the Brewers go on to win the World Series, completing the job the 2008-11 versions of the club never could and exorcising some of the demons still haunting the area formerly occupied by County Stadium (which is actually just the parking lot right outside Miller Park), that ninth inning will be remembered as a key step along the way. I hope it is. The ninth inning was The One Where the Brewers Hung On. But I hope that fond memory is not eclipsed, at least today, by our shared memory of the third inning: The One Where Clayton Kershaw Couldn’t Hit His Target.

For the sake of narrative appeal, it would have been ideal for Kershaw to have entered the inning all youth and innocence, grown in stature by vanquishing a series of increasingly insalubrious foes, and then fallen to an antagonist at the dramatic climax of the tale.

That is not what happened, however. What happened instead is that Kershaw just began the inning by allowing a home run to Brandon Woodruff. Here is a picture of where Yasmani Grandal wanted the pitch that Woodruff ended up hitting out:

And here is a picture of where the ball ended up right before Woodruff blasted it into Toyota Territory™:

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There’s been a tiny little surge of pitch-tipping content. Ben Harris identified credible evidence that Luis Severino was tipping some of his pitches. And Fabian Ardaya wrote about Ross Stripling tipping his pitches. Now, within the Stripling article, there’s also a brief point made about Rich Hill. Chase Utley is apparently a wizard at looking for pitch signals. Utley saw that Stripling was doing something, but Utley also saw that Hill was doing something. Being a good teammate, Utley let the pitchers know. Hill already folded in a quick fix. One you’re probably able to spot, and spot easily.

Here’s Hill throwing a pitch on September 22:

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This is a simple game.

You throw the ball.

You hit the ball.

You catch the ball.

You got it?

I didn’t have to look far and wide for the clips above. Every single one of them is from the first few games of the League Championship Series. Every team is represented, and the collection is hardly exhaustive. I’ve omitted many wild pitches and all of the postseason’s passed balls. So far, during the 2018 playoffs, there have been 24 of the former and six of the latter. Among postseasons since 2002, the current one has already produced the fourth-most wild pitches — with 10 or more games to go. Only once since 2004 have there been more passed balls than during this postseason.

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Every year since 2005, the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association (MLBPAA) has selected one player for what’s known as the Heart & Hustle Award. The distinction is intended to honor “an active player who demonstrates a passion for the game of baseball and best embodies the values, spirit and traditions of the game.” The idea is to recognize traits such as “determination” and “desire” and other qualities one appreciates in ballplayers but abhors in friends.

These considerations are, of course, typically absent from the pages of FanGraphs dot com. That’s the case for a number of reasons, but mostly because — as critics of the site have long suspected — our mothers never loved us. Indeed, certain employees of FanGraphs never even had mothers, but instead emerged fully formed from an algorithm devised by Billy Beane and Bill James when they co-wrote Moneyball. The author of this post can admit to shrinking merely at the thought of human touch.

No, it is typically the province of FanGraphs not to celebrate baseball’s humanity but to snuff it out wherever it emerges, like a game of compassion whack-a-mole. If a certain corner of the media landscape is to be believed, we have conducted our work with great success. Baseball, in the opinion of some, has been rendered an almost entirely joyless husk of its former self.

But the job isn’t yet complete. Some people appear still to be deriving pleasure from the game. And so, in this publication’s great tradition of joylessness, I present the current document — one in which I endeavor to answer a question that nobody has asked. That question, specifically? Something along these lines: “What if, instead of honoring the most passionate of ballplayers, the Heart & Hustle Award were presented based on the literal size of one’s heart and also a very obscure, technical definition of hustle?”

Let us go then, you and I… to a tedious summary of the author’s process for answering that question.

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