Playoff baseball has changed in recent years. Where managers might have once employed tactics very similar to those used in the regular season, that has increasingly not been the case. In 2011, for example, Tony LaRussa used his bullpen just as often as he did his starting pitchers en route to a championship for the St. Louis Cardinals. A few years later, the Royals shortened games with an elite collection of relief arms on their way to consecutive World Series appearances. Last year, Andrew Miller appeared for Cleveland whenever the situation demanded, frequently throwing multiple innings.

Now everybody is using their bullpen more often. Relievers are accounting for a greater share of innings and wins in the regular season. This postseason has featured at least one game during which the winning team’s starter didn’t even survive the first inning. In terms of pitching effectiveness, it seems as though clubs are approaching an optimal state; however, there are some aspects that are getting worse, particularly when it comes to inherited runners.

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No one is lifting and launching like the Yankees this postseason.

More specifically, no one is lifting and launching like the Yankees at their home park, where the club is 6-0 this postseason after enjoying a sizable home-field advantage during the regular season (51-30), as well. If they can win Friday or Saturday at Houston, New York will be guaranteed at least two more home games at Yankee Stadium II, a launching pad in the year of launch angle.

According to Baseball Savant’s “barrel” and “solid contract” metrics — figures derived from Statcast data — the Yankees have a sizable lead on the playoff field in terms of quality contact on fly balls and line drives this postseason (see table below). And while their totals are higher than some other clubs’ simply for having advanced deeper into the postseason, they still have a sizable edge on their LCS contemporaries.

Nor is it just that the Yankees are driving more balls into the air with authority, it’s where they are engaging in this work: at their home ballpark.

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A year ago, the Cubs were baseball’s most dominant team, first putting up 103 regular-season wins and then capping the achievement with their first World Series win in 108 years. (So I was told a few times along the way.) The question wasn’t whether the 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball — that was obvious — but whether the 2016 Cubs were one of the best baseball teams we’ve ever seen.

No one is going to ask that question of the 2017 Cubs.

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A few hours from now, Clayton Kershaw will take the ball in Chicago, hoping to help the Dodgers move on to the World Series. Even though the Dodgers lost last night, being able to turn now to Kershaw makes everything better, as he still deserves the benefit of the doubt, any recent struggles aside. Now, I want to take only a couple minutes of your time. Kershaw has already started once in this series. He made Javier Baez make this face.

That’s Baez’s expression after striking out looking. Did you know that it’s possible for Javier Baez to strike out looking? Kershaw made it happen for just the ninth time in 2017. And while it’s possible Baez could’ve been thinking about any number of things — or about nothing at all — maybe he was simply caught off guard. Because Kershaw showed him a little two-strike twist.

Here are two screenshots. The lower one is from the pitch you just watched. The upper one is from the pitch immediately preceding it.

Facing Baez, with the count 2-and-2, Kershaw changed his arm slot. He didn’t go completely sidearm, but considering that Kershaw is usually very much over-the-top, what you’re seeing is a drop-down ambush. Kershaw showed it to Baez. In the same game, he went to it two other times. This is the Rich Hill inspiration. Every so often, Hill will drop down, himself, and Kershaw thought it was a neat trick. So he’s folded it in, from time to time.

I wrote about this in June. Kershaw introduced the drop-down slot late in 2016, and here’s a summary of how it worked at first. When Kershaw dropped down last year, he threw exclusively fastballs. This year he’s mixed in a few breaking balls. He threw one to David Peralta in the NLDS.

But here’s what I find most interesting. We knew last year Kershaw was trying this out. We knew earlier this year he’d brought it back. Then it…it just quietly went away. It’s only recently come back again. Here are all 29 of Kershaw’s 2017 appearances, showing the number of pitches in each game thrown from the alternate angle.

There was nothing, then there was a flurry. Over a streak of seven starts, Kershaw dropped down a total of 35 times. But with the 35th attempt, Kershaw allowed a home run to Jay Bruce. And then the experiment disappeared. Nothing, for eight games in a row. Then a one-off, followed by another three games of nothing. Then the playoffs began. Kershaw dropped down twice against the Diamondbacks, and he dropped down thrice in his first game against the Cubs. It’s back, just in the nick of time. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Forget the second part. But, it’s back, anyway.

It’s still not clear if this is actually a successful tactic. When Kershaw drops down, he doesn’t become a strikeout machine. But this is Clayton Kershaw, and we’re in the playoffs, so I’d say this qualifies as automatically interesting. And it’s another thing for you to watch for tonight, as Kershaw tries to last as long as is possible. He’s already got his normal fastball, slider, and curve. He might throw in the odd second arm slot, just to keep the Cubs a little extra uncomfortable. It didn’t go so well in his last NLCS, but, this is a new playoffs, you know. Kershaw would like to forget about history.

Dallas Keuchel didn’t overwhelm the Yankees like usual on Wednesday. Rather than continuing his career domination of the New York nine — which includes 14 scoreless innings in the postseason and a 1.09 ERA in eight starts overall — he did what Joe Girardi said before the game he rarely does: lay an egg. Keuchel was chased in the fifth, having surrendered seven hits and four runs.

In the lefty’s opinion, the egg was a matter more of results than process. Following the game, he wasn’t so much self-critical as he was complimentary of his competition.

“Outside of Castro’s double in the second — it was a backup cutter and he put a good swing on it — I don’t think I can pinpoint another mistake pitch,” Keuchel told reporters. “Sanchez’s double down the line was a pretty good pitch down and in, and he hadn’t had great success on that pitch. Judge… [the] cutter was in; maybe it wasn’t in quite far enough, but it was in enough to get an out. [Greg Bird] hit a good pitch. It was inside — it was off the plate — and he just stuck his hands in enough to get it over Yuli’s head.”

Yankees hitters expressed multiple viewpoints regarding Keuchel’s performance. Todd Frazier — presumably referring to more than just Castro’s knock — opined that his teammates “hit the mistakes.” (What constitutes a mistake from Keuchel is a point on which Frazier elaborates below.)

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The Cubs staved off elimination last night through the might of Javier Baez, retaining the hope of becoming the first back-to-back World Series winner since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees. As a reward for their survival, they get to face the best pitcher of this generation in Clayton Kershaw, who has a chance to exorcise some postseason demons of his own with a decisive putaway performance.

But this isn’t about Kershaw. It’s about the man the Cubs send to the mound opposing him. Jose Quintana, whom the Cubs received for a very reasonable return, was acquired for this very reason, and the changes he made since coming to the North Side may set him up for success against the Dodgers tonight.

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Yesterday was a good day for the Yankees and the Cubs. The Yankees moved to the brink of making the World Series, while the Cubs managed to avoid NLCS elimination. From a less team-oriented perspective, yesterday was also a good day for the home run. In Chicago, Willson Contreras started the scoring with a long solo shot. Javier Baez hit two solo dingers of his own, while the Dodgers got solo shots from Cody Bellinger and Justin Turner. In New York, Gary Sanchez launched a homer out to left. There were six home runs hit, on a day in which there were just 10 total runs scored. For none of the homers were any runners on base, but even so, that means that dingers accounted for 60% of the offense.

Now, 60% is extreme. It should be considered a one-day blip. And yet it does still fit a pattern. So far in the playoffs, we’ve seen a total of 234 runs. Of those, 115 have scored on homers. That means that 119 have scored on non-homers. You’ll notice that 115 and 119 are almost identical.

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The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Last October gave us the postseason of the curveball — of the breaking ball, in general. The Indians, among others, navigated their way through the playoffs with an increasing reliance on breaking pitches. A combination of Andrew Miller’s slider and Corey Kluber’s breaking-ball combination nearly delivered a World Series title for Cleveland.

These playoffs have been different, however. This year, the fastball has been king.

The current postseason began, of course, with a Yankees club employing a fastball that averaged 98 mph against the Twins in the Wild Card game. Other pitchers, other teams have increasingly relied upon the pitch, as well. Consider, for example, that, through Tuesday, fastball usage was up seven percentage points from last postseason. While the postseason does, by nature, produce a smaller sample of data and a varying pool of teams from year to year, we haven’t seen a continuation of last year’s trend in terms of breaking-ball usage.

Yes, it helps to have Justin Verlander and Luis Severino on the mound in October to boost fastball usage.

On Saturday, Verlander — whose velocity is back — shoved 71 four-seam fastballs. The pitch averaged 96.1 mph and the 71st traveled out of his hand at 96.7 mph. Severino, for his part, has displayed an electric arm for much of the postseason and is quite possibly the best AL pitcher not named Kluber or Chris Sale.

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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