Last night represented the sixth game of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ postseason run. Over the club’s first five playoff games, the left-handed trio of Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Chase Utley recorded one start combined — specifically, Chase Utley’s in Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the Diamondbacks. That arrangement appeared to work: Roberts and company entered Tuesday with five consecutive wins. That’s what made the manager’s decision on Tuesday slightly unusual. Against Kyle Hendricks in Chicago, Roberts started all three players.

The gambit worked. All together, the trio went 3-for-10 with a double and home run. At one level, the decision was simple, logical. Because of the stage, however, it would have been easy for Roberts to go in a different direction. We often talk about how the postseason is different from the regular season, that it requires a different style of management. That’s no doubt true, particularly when it comes to the bullpen. There are instances, however, in which it’s also important to keep managing like the regular season. Roberts did that last night.

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The Cubs didn’t lose to the Dodgers last night because Carl Edwards Jr. walked Yu Darvish with the bases loaded. The Cubs aren’t on the verge of getting swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS because Carl Edwards Jr. walked Yu Darvish with the bases loaded. The Cubs are losing because their series OBP is .202, while the Dodgers are up at .360. They’re losing because their series SLG is .266, while the Dodgers are up at .484. They’re losing because their pitchers have 18 walks and 20 strikeouts, while the Dodgers’ pitchers have 4 and 32. The Dodgers have been, by far, the better team. It’s the simplest possible explanation.

The Cubs are losing because they’ve been worse. That’s not Edwards’ fault. And you never know when things could flip; in last year’s NLCS, the Cubs were blanked in back-to-back games. They’re still the reigning champs until they’re gone. But the Cubs are losing because they’ve been worse. Edwards’ walk of Darvish didn’t turn the series on its head. It’s more about the symbolism. It captures the story of how the series has gone. Have I mentioned that Darvish walked on four pitches? With the bases loaded and two out in a two-run game, Darvish took four balls in a row.

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Unlike their ALCS opponents, the New York Yankees aren’t widely known for being at the forefront of analytics. According to their longtime general manager, they should be. When I asked Brian Cashman about the team’s not-as-geeky-as-the-Astros reputation, his response was, “I would put our analytics in the top five in all sports.”

Regardless of where they rank, any suggestion that Cashman’s club isn’t cutting edge would qualify as folly. Under the direction of assistant general manager Mike Fishman — his previous title was director of quantitative analytics — their reliance on data has grown exponentially over the last decade.

“It started as a department of one — Mike was the director and the staff — and now it’s a major part of our operation,” said Cashman. “And it should be. This is the New York Yankees, and we want to use every tool in the toolbox. One of those important tools is analytics.”

Joe Girardi doesn’t disagree. As a a matter of fact, the Yankees skipper seemed almost taken aback when I asked the following question at Tuesday’s pre-game press conference:

The Astros are known as a team that incorporates analytics in their decision-making process pretty heavily. Your team isn’t really seen that way. Should you be?

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A little later today, Jeff will have a post about the most amazing play we’ve seen all postseason: Yu Darvish drawing a bases-loaded walk — on four pitches — from Carl Edwards Jr. last night. How did a quality reliever throw four consecutive balls to a career AL pitcher who had zero intention of ever swinging? In the NLCS? For the defending champs?

But in this post, I’m going to ask a different question about that at-bat: why did we ever see it in the first place?

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When Charlie Morton was a Pirate and this author a beat reporter covering Pittsburgh’s ball club, I became familiar with Morton through a number of conversations.

He was one of the first players I encountered who discussed having employed PITCHf/x data to better understand his performance, to move away from the box score as a means of evaluation. He would have phone calls with his father during which they discussed the velocity and movement from his appearances as recorded by pitch-tracking technology. Morton struggled mightily at times early in his career with Pittsburgh and Atlanta before that, but not all of it was his fault. He was one of the first pitchers with whom I spoke who wanted to better understand how to separate his own performance from those other variables that lead to run-prevention and -allowance. He wanted to know how he could better control what he could control. Data helped keep Morton sane.

This is pertinent today, because we might not see a better performance lead to a poorer pitching line this postseason than the performance and line produced by Morton on Monday night.

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Less than a week ago, in Game 5 of the NLDS, the Cubs and the Nationals played one of the more strange nine-inning games that I can remember. I don’t need to go back over the details; Nationals fans don’t want to revisit them, and Cubs fans currently have more pressing matters on the mind. But in the end, Wade Davis struck out Bryce Harper to wrap up the bottom of the ninth. The game was never dull, as the Cubs escaped by only one run. Yet it became the longest nine-inning game in baseball’s postseason history. The first pitch was thrown at 8:08pm local time. The last one was thrown 277 minutes later.

Clearly, no conclusion can be reached based just on one extreme. It’s not like nine innings of playoff baseball always take four and a half hours. But, you might have a gut feeling that playoff games have been taking a while. They have been! Because they almost always do. For a variety of reasons, when it comes to planning your day around a playoff baseball game, you should carve out a bigger chunk of free time. By roughly half an hour or so.

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Last month, I wrote about a new t-shirt inspired by Daniel Murphy that we had put up for sale. It looks like this:

Here’s some more info on it, in case you don’t want to click through.

Like our other recent t-shirt creations, this shirt is a Canvas Jersey T-shirt, and as you can see, it comes in black. The black, to me, is notable, as we’ve never made a black t-shirt before. The shirt, also like our other recent t-shirt creations, was designed by Aaron Gershman of Creative Sentencing. You should definitely hire Aaron for your next design project.

In short order, the shirt sold out in several sizes. I am here to tell you that those shirts have been re-stocked, and are available for purchase in sizes from small to 2X. So, go forth and order!

Well, OK, this has been a pretty short post, so let me leave you with this nugget of info. Did you know that of the 139 players who have accumulated at least 500 plate appearances with the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals franchise, that Murphy is tied for first with Rusty Staub in terms of wRC+? Well, it’s true. They both have a 146 wRC+ in an Expos/Nationals uniform. Now, you know. And knowing is half the battle.

In closing, please buy our t-shirts. Thank you.

The Astros announced last night that Lance McCullers will take the ball in today’s Game 4 of the ALCS. When asked why he chose McCullers over Brad Peacock, A.J. Hinch responded with a simple answer: “He’s really good.”

McCullers certainly has been really good at times, and he was one of the AL’s best pitchers in the first half of the season, running a 3.05 ERA/2.74 FIP/2.74 xFIP before the All-Star break. But back problems put him on the DL a few times in the second half, and when he did pitch, he wasn’t particularly effective, running an 8.23 ERA/4.29 FIP/4.58 xFIP. At the end of July, I noted that the Astros had a Lance McCullers problem, and they never really got it fixed.

If the Astros were convinced that McCullers was healthy and back to his first-half form, they would have started him in the ALDS. Instead, they went with Peacock as their 4th starter in that series, and used McCullers in relief when that didn’t go well. So why are they showing confidence today in a guy who hasn’t gotten hitters out regularly in several months?

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I have a handful of rules I try to abide as an everyday writer. For example, I try not to pick favorites. My job isn’t to have any favorites. My job is to try to be as objective as possible. I also think it’s vitally important to not tell people how they ought to feel. This is sports. You’re in it for your own reasons. It’s not my business to dictate how you consume your chosen form of entertainment. You should get from baseball whatever you want to get. You should feel about baseball however you want to feel.

That being said, now I’m going to cross myself. I’m going to violate one of my own rules. Let’s focus on Todd Frazier’s early three-run homer in Monday’s Game 3. The internet response was fairly consistent: joke of a stadium, and/or the ball is juiced. The response was uniformly derisive. I get it, because I felt the same way! But I’ve come all the way around, and I’d like to encourage you to do the same, if you can. That wasn’t a home run to be mocked. That was a home run to be celebrated. For Todd Frazier, it was a good piece of hitting.

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The narrative of this postseason has been the ubiquity of the reliever, the increased tendency of teams to use their bullpens early and often. To a certain extent, that narrative is grounded in reality. We saw it right away in the American League Wild Card Game, for example, when the Yankees’ Luis Severino recorded only a single out and then a quartet of New York relievers pitched what was essentially an impromptu bullpen game. Combine that with the paltry two innings that Ervin Santana procured for the Twins and just 13.5% of the innings in that game were completed by starting pitchers.

The next night played out similarly, as Jon Gray and Zack Greinke survived just five half-innings between them, or 29.4% of the game’s total.

So, yes, relief pitchers have played a major role in the postseason. The use of bullpens, however, might not represent the greatest break from tradition. To quote a powerful sorcerer, things aren’t always what they seem.

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