Periodically, I’ll be posting notes from in-person observations at Fall Instructional League and Arizona Fall League play. Each are essentially the scouting calendar’s dessert course, both in their timing and sometimes dubious value. I take bad fall looks with a large grain of salt as players are sometimes fatigued, disinterested, put in difficult situations purposefully so that they’ll fail, or some combination of these or other bits of important context. With that in mind here are links to past notes followed by this edition’s.

Previously: 9/20 (TEX, SD), 9/21-9/23 (SD, CHW, MIL, TEX).

9/25

Cincinnati hosted Texas in the Reds’ instructional-league opener, and the game featured several pitchers with position-player backgrounds. The headliner was Hunter Greene, who sat 99-101 with a fastball spinning at a rate between 2200 and 2300 over two innings. He used both of his breaking balls quite frequently, first leaning on an inconsistent curveball in the low 80s and, later on, an upper-80s slider. The curveball flashed above average but its depth and bite varied. Greene’s slider was short and fringey, though he threw both breakers for strikes multiple times. His fastball command was less consistent, however, and Greene was hit hard (twice quite literally, by two second-inning comebackers), surrendering six runs.

Greene was followed by righty Wyatt Strahan, a 24-year-old reliever who hasn’t gotten out of A-ball yet, mostly due to injury. He was up to 96 on Monday with a plus slider and violent delivery. If he can stay healthy, he’s a potential bullpen contributor.

Among those on the mound for Texas were former position players James Jones and Jairo Beras. Jones was a two-way player on his high-school team in Brooklyn and again at Long Island University. The Mariners drafted him in the 2009 draft’s fourth round and he made the majors as a speed-first outfielder in 2014, stealing 27 bases in 28 attempts that year. Sent to Texas as part of the 2015 Leonys Martin trade, Jones continued toiling away at Triple-A through much of 2016 without offensive success and began to transition to pitching late last year. He blew out after a few pitching appearances late in 2016 and needed Tommy John surgery.

Jones is now back on the mound and pitching with interesting stuff, sitting 92-94 with a bit of late wiggle and a fringey curveball and changeup. His lower arm slot allows right-handed hitters to see the ball early and they have teed off on Jones in two looks I’ve had at him this fall.

Though it may not be Jones himself, this is what I think a realistic two-way player looks like, someone who can competently play a niche role on both sides of the ball. In Jones’ case, that means getting lefties out as a bullpen arm while also acting as a defensive replacement and pinch-runner. The chances of such a creature existing at all would be aided by roster expansion, something December’s CBA negotiations nearly yielded.

Beras sat 94-96 with an average slider. He isn’t as athletic as Jones but throws hard and is new to pitching. Both conversion arms are longshots but have major-league-caliber arms that need late-career refinement.

9/26

Tuesday, the Dodgers and White Sox had simultaneous home instructional-league games at Camelback Ranch for the only time this fall. Their fields are close enough to one another that one can stroll back and forth between games. I began on the Dodgers’ side, where they took on Cincinnati.

Reds third-rounder Jacob Heatherly sat 90-92 and commanded that pitch as well as his average curveball and changeup. He lacks any physical projection and, except for perhaps a bit of breaking-ball and changeup progression from pro reps and instruction, the cement is largely dry on his stuff. Realistically, Heatherly projects as a No. 4 or 5 starter, but his ceiling will be dictated by the level of command he’s able to develop. He’s advanced in that regard and could move quickly. Heatherly, who turned 19 in May, signed for $1 million.

SS Jeter Downs, the Reds’ comp-round pick from June, has also been impressive. Downs sprays hard contact to all fields and has shown enough arm strength to stay on the left side of the infield. I’ve yet to see his range and athleticism challenged, but what I’ve seen is pretty good.

Dodgers 17-year-old LHP Robinson Ortiz was 90-93 with bat-missing life and feel for a breaking ball that flashed above average. He’s listed at 6-foot-4 on the instructional-league roster but he’s closer to an even 6-foot. Though short, Ortiz is well built and has a strong, voluptuous lower half. His arm action is a bit long, but I generally like his delivery and athleticism enough to project him as a starter. Well-built 17-year-olds with good fastballs and breaking-ball feel are typically being talked about as top-50 draft picks, even if they’re a little short.

Want more height/weight fun? RHP Alfredo Tavarez was listed at 6-foot-5, 190 this year but is listed close to 250 on the instructional-league roster and he’s every bit of that. He put up big numbers in the AZL, striking out 47 hitters in 30 innings, but only sits in the upper 80s with his fastball. Tavarez does have a potential plus breaking ball but will need to drastically improve his command if he’s to survive with this kind of velocity.

On the White Sox side, Chicago first-round 3B Jake Burger had issues with throwing accuracy but took good at-bats and made some loud contact. I remain skeptical of his chances of staying at third base but do think he’ll hit. I recorded multiple below-average pop times from C Zack Collins, all in the 2.05-2.10 range. Like Burger, though, he takes great at-bats, rarely offering at pitches off the plate and showing easy pull power.

Over the last year or so, I’ve pestered Zack Greinke about his slider because I was sure it was the source of his difficult first season in Arizona. He’s resisted that characterization, telling me at times that his command was just a little off, but that he couldn’t blame anything about his slider on Arizona’s thin air and lack of humidity. Maybe he’s right — this year’s slider is a little different, but not enough to explain the overall difference between the two seasons. Instead, it might be a simplification of his approach that has really helped tonight’s Wild Card starter return to form.

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CLEVELAND — While a lot of talk here and elsewhere has focused on bullpen-ing (not such a bad idea, right, Yankees?) and creatively leveraging pitching staffs early in the postseason, the Indians appear to be pursuing a different kind of unconventional strategy.

The club announced yesterday that, while staff ace and AL Cy Young candidate Corey Kluber will be fully rested for Game 1, he will not pitch Thursday against the Yankees. Trevor Bauer, one of the game’s best starters in the second half, will get the ball instead.

In this unexpected scenario, Kluber will start Game 2 and, if necessary, Game 5. Carlos Carrasco will start Game 3 in New York. Carrasco has been a significantly better road pitcher than home pitcher for his career (3.13 road ERA vs. 4.45 home ERA, 3.86 home FIP vs. 2.98 road FIP). He could face Luis Severino in that game, with Severino on regular rest. Or, since Sevenrino didn’t make it through an inning Tuesday, he could perhaps be available in Game 2. Josh Tomlin is penciled in as the tentative starter in Game 4 for Cleveland

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The MLB playoffs select for the best teams, and the rosters of those teams additionally select for the best players. As a consequence, nearly every playoff team is likely to feature an above-average offense, and an above-average pitching staff. In reality, the pitchers tend to be better than the hitters, and this leads to people believing statements like “good pitching beats good hitting.” It’s certainly true that, in October, run-scoring output is reduced, relative to the regular season. Every run is important, and not only because every game is important.

With the first game of the 2017 playoffs just a short while away, I thought I’d quickly review what playoff offense has looked like. I say “review” because I’m sure we’ve covered this ground before, but there’s no harm in going back to the same points every 12 months. This time of year, at the plate, should you be hoping for contact, or should you be hoping for power? Both approaches have managed to win championships, yet one has seemed more helpful than the other.

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Pretty soon, there are going to be nine playoff teams remaining. Pretty soon after that, the field will narrow to eight. In time, there will be four, then two, then one, the one remaining team being the champion. Say what you will about the MLB playoffs, but they never fail to select someone. There will be nine losers and one winner, and the winner will write the story. In some way or ways, the winner will have been the best team of the month.

Who *looks like* the best team of the month? That, we can try to answer today. The playoffs begin only a few hours from now. A few hours after that, either the Twins or the Yankees will be eliminated. Before that happens, I thought we’d do some rating. Some rating that goes beyond just basic regular-season records — some rating that considers how playoff rosters are constructed. I did this a year ago, and I’m doing it again.

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For fans of 10 (and soon to be eight) teams, finding a club for which to root in the playoffs presents little difficulty: just keep doing what you’ve been doing for the last six months. For the rest of us, though, manufacturing some interest in a team or two can be a useful device for cultivating drama in the postseason.

There are a few ways to go about this, of course. For some, the solution is just as simple as rooting against a rival. For others, supporting a team with lengthy curse or championship drought — like the Red Sox or Cubs in recent years or Cleveland, still, this season — might make sense. Backing an underdog is always popular, obviously, as is pulling for all the small-market teams to beat the larger-market ones. There’s no wrong way to do this. What I’d like to discuss here is another alternative, though — namely, rooting for a specific player.

Perhaps you’ve been already been doing this in some capacity. There’s a player who maybe used to play for your favorite team or one whom you always wished would wear your team’s uniform. For me, the easy answer in year’s past has been Adrian Beltre. He’s a future Hall of Famer and a joy to watch. Add in that he was oh-so-close to a title in 2011, and it’s easy to actively support a scenario in which Beltre finally gets a ring. The Rangers failed to qualify for the playoffs this year, though, so rooting for Beltre isn’t an option.

While the Rangers third baseman will be absent from the postseason, there are a handful of other future Hall of Famers who have yet to win a World Series title and will be playing games that count this October.

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Tonight, the postseason kicks off with the Yankees hosting the Twins in the AL Wild Card game. And there may not be another game this year where one team is as strongly favored to win as New York is today. Our Game Odds have the Yankees as 67/33 favorites, FiveThirtyEight has it 63/37 for the Yankees, and depending on the sports book you’re looking at, the Yankees might be as high as 70% favorites to win tonight.

It’s not too hard to see why the odds are so slanted in New York’s favor. For one, they’re pretty clearly the better team. Their 91-71 record might only be six games better than Minnesota’s, but their BaseRuns expected record of 102-60 was actually the second-best in baseball, and 21 wins better than the Twins 81-81 expected record.

And the advantage is only amplified by eliminating the depth pieces in a winner-take-all affair. Luis Severino (2.98 ERA/3.07 FIP/3.04 xFIP) is a significantly better pitcher than Ervin Santana (3.28 ERA/4.46 FIP/4.77 xFIP), and the gap will only grow once the bullpens get involved; the Yankees had the game’s best bullpen this year, while the Twins checked in at #22. With Chad Green, David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, and Dellin Betances all around to bridge the gap to Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees can afford to get Severino out of the game at almost any point, rather than let him bury them with early struggles. The Twins, though, don’t have enough good arms to get through six or seven shutdown innings if Santana gets in trouble in the first few innings.

Toss in that the Twins won’t have their best hitter, Miguel Sano, even as a pinch-hitter, and well, the Yankees should be heavily favored tonight, especially given that they also have home field advantage. The fact that the Yankees have dominated the Twins over the last decade is irrelevant, but it’s still correct to think New York is in a significantly better position to win tonight than Minnesota is.

But this is baseball, and at the risk of relying on cliché, any team can beat any other team in a single-game matchup. The Twins might be underdogs, but they’re about as likely to win tonight as Jose Altuve is to get a base hit in any given at-bat, and no one is surprised when that happens. So, let’s look at how the Twins might have to do in order to pull off the upset.

These Twins aren’t the slap-hitters of years past; this team surged to the playoffs on the backs of a strong offense led by a bunch of guys hitting homers. And while Severino didn’t have a home run problem this year, it was his primary undoing the last two years, so it’s not impossible for the Twins to take him deep a couple of times before the bullpen arms can get warm. Hoping to string a bunch of singles together to put together a rally not only has a lower chance of success, but the time it takes to start that kind of rally also gives Joe Girardi a chance to get one of his army of relievers warm, so the Twins best chance to put up runs tonight is to score quickly. And that means home runs.

So forget everything you hear about bunting, small ball, and playing for one run tonight. The Twins need to put up five or six runs to have a real good chance to win tonight, and they’re probably not going to little-ball their way to that kind of total. The Twins’ best chance to win tonight is to hammer a couple of mistakes and hope that they can get some kinds on base before putting the ball in the seats.

While Santana was the team’s best starter this year, Berrios might be their x-factor tonight. On a staff full of pitch-to-contact types — they ranked 29th in K% — he’s the one guy who has legitimate swing-and-miss stuff. He didn’t blow hitters away as a starter, but given a few innings in a winner-take-all situation, his stuff might play up a few ticks, and if he’s sitting 95 and throwing his wipeout curveball, it’s not that hard to imagine him going all Andrew Miller on the Yankees for a few innings.

Using Berrios in relief tonight will put the Twins at a big disadvantage in the ALDS, given that they’d have burned their top two starters just to try and get there, but they don’t have any better options. If Santana has to hand the ball to Taylor Rogers or Tyler Duffey, things probably won’t go that well for the Twins. If they can go Santana and Berrios for the first seven innings, then hand the ball to Trevor Hildenberger and Matt Belisle, then they might be able to hold the Yankees to just a few runs. The Twins should be aggressive in trying to avoid a middle reliever fight, because that’s the one they are least equipped to win.

Gary Sanchez has one of the best arms in baseball, but he struggles to keep the ball in front of him on pitches that bounce; no catcher in baseball allowed more than the 69 wild pitches and passed balls he allowed this year. He also led the league in catcher throwing errors, so while his arm is very strong, it’s not always particularly accurate.

The Twins probably won’t get a lot of baserunners against New York, so they need to convert a high percentage of them the ones they do get into runs. So if they get guys on first base, and there is a pitch in the dirt, don’t be afraid to go. If they can steal a run or two through aggressive exploitation of Sanchez’s biggest weakness, then maybe they can also steal a game in which they are decided underdogs.

CLEVELAND — If you’ve found your way to this article, it likely means that you’re an educated baseball fan and aware of how certain elements of the game have trended toward the extremes in recent years — in particular, as marked by the home-run and strikeout records of 2017. Much hand-wringing has occurred over the lack of balls in play this season.

But there’s another extreme that’s developed, as well, one that’s received a bit less attention perhaps: the share of innings absorbed by bullpens.

Bullpens have never accounted for as much work as they did in 2017. Relievers combined to throw 16,496.2 innings this year, bettering the previous mark of 15,893.0 set way back in… 2016. Relievers combined to throw over 1,000 innings more than just two years earlier in 2015 (15,184.1) and nearly 3,000 more than in the first year of the 30-team era in 1998 (13,968.2).

To look at it another way, bullpens accounted for a record 38.1% of innings this season — and that rate has continued to inch up in the modern era. In 1959, just 21.3% of innings were pitched in a relief capacity. In 1969, that figure increased to 26.4%, to 28.9% in 1979, and then 33.7% in 1999. It’s a trend myself and others have documented in recent years.

The workhorse starting pitcher is endangered. Only 15 starters reached the 200-inning threshold this season, matching last year’s mark, which is the lowest on record.

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The first of two Wild Card games is scheduled for tonight. In addition to must-win baseball, this time of year is also typically marked by the appearance of a Dave Cameron piece on the merits of “bullpen-ing” a game — that is, the practice of using nothing but relievers in a single contest, of attempting to exploit matchups in order to maximize the chances of winning.

While the logic of “bullpen-ing” is sound in theory, it also fails to account for the comfort of pitchers who’ve potentially become attached to their roles. To get a better idea of how they might adapt to such an approach and how it might be handled in practice, I asked some actual players about it. Turns out, there’s a particular type of reliever who’s best suited to take the ball in the first few innings of a win-or-go-home game. And a particular type of pitcher who should follow him.

The first thing revealed by my inquiries is that relievers love the idea. “I’m down for whatever,” said Giants reliever Hunter Strickland with a smile. Nationals closer Sean Doolittle just laughed for a while. “Would I get paid like a starting pitcher?” he finally asked after the laughter had subsided.

Relievers would be fine with it because they’re accustomed to answering the call whenever. “We’re used to throwing in whatever inning, [if] not usually the first,” said Strickland. Added Miami’s Brad Ziegler: “I don’t think it would be very different for me, as much as it would be for the starter coming into the game [in the later innings]. His whole routine would have to change.”

And a starter probably would have to throw a couple innings in such a game — in order to reach a full complement of nine and still leave some arms for extras, that is. So the question is probably which kind of starter would adapt effectively to an otherwise unusual arrangement.

The answer? Probably a young one. Older starters are more married to their routines. “It’s very hard for me personally,” said Brandon McCarthy regarding the idea of starting a game in any other inning but the first. “My routine as a starter is fixed to the minute and a lot of guys are like that. It’s certainly not something impossible to deal with but could make a team nervous.”

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This time of year excites me for two reasons. One, of course, we’ve got the playoffs coming up, and no matter what you think about how the tournament is designed, this month is as exciting as baseball can get. Today and tomorrow, teams will be eliminated! Everything ends, ever so suddenly! It’s a gas. The other thing I love, though, is that all the season statistics are final. For the first time, I get to stop worrying about projections or extrapolations. What happened has happened. There is no more of the regular season, so the numbers on the leaderboards are as they will be forever.

It makes the writing easier, and more matter-of-fact. For example, here is a matter of certain fact: The 2017 Houston Astros had baseball’s most improved lineup. How can I say that? No one else improved by nearly so much in wRC+.

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