Left-hander Julio Urias starts for the Dodgers tonight in Game 4 of the NLCS against the Cubs. Here’s something you probably already know about him: he’s really young. Urias turned 20 on August 12 of this year. For the purposes of websites such as this one (which use July 1 as a cutoff), that places Urias in the midst of his age-19 season. When Urias pitched in relief during Game 5 of the NLDS, he became the fourth-youngest pitcher in major-league history (Bert Blyleven, Ken Brett, Don Gullett) to pitch in the postseason, per Baseball-Reference Play Index — and he’s already pitched more innings than Brett and as many as Blyleven. With his first pitch today, he’ll become the youngest pitcher in postseason history to record a start. By comparison, consider that most of the players on both the Cubs and Dodgers had never even appeared in a professional game at the same age Urias ascends to the spotlight.

Only seven players in history have started a playoff game at an age younger than Urias, and they were all position players. They are, in declining order of age at playoff debut: Justin Upton, Claudell Washington, Bryce Harper, Mickey Mantle, Andruw Jones, Phil Cavarretta, and Freddie Lindstrom. 

That’s one way to frame Urias’s accomplishment. Another? By means of this brief timeline concerning the distinction Urias is about to receive:

• On October 9, 1913, Bullet Joe Bush started for the Philadelphia Athletics in the third game of the World Series. he pitched a complete game as the A’s beat the New York Giants 8-2. Bush was 20 years and 316 days old. Bush would hold the record until…
• October 3, 1984, when Bret Saberhagen started for the Kansas City Royals in Game 2 of the ALCS against the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers won 5-3. Saberhagen was 20 years and 175 days old.
• Urias is 20 years and 68 days old today.

Urias’s age is not remarkable solely for how it relates to his postseason appearance and playoff start. His regular-season performance this year, even in limited innings, represents one of the better seasons in history for a player his age. In 77 innings this season, Urias put up a 3.39 ERA and 3.17 FIP, which was good enough to produce a 1.8 WAR. Over the last 40 years, only seven players, position players included, have recorded a better WAR number in a season at 19 years of age or younger: Read the rest of this entry »

Listen, we can all be adults here. We all understand what’s going on, in that none of us understand what’s going on. The Cleveland Indians are a few hours away from playing Game 5 of the ALCS, a game that could advance them to the World Series, and they’ll be handing the ball to Ryan Merritt in the first inning. Ryan Merritt, a 24-year-old who’s faced all of 37 batters in his major-league career, which began with a mop-up relief appearance against the Texas Rangers back in May of this year. Ryan Merritt, a lefty whose fastball sits at 87 mph and tops out at 90. Ryan Merritt, who has never appeared within the top 10 of an Indians prospects list.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m some Ryan Merritt expert. Who is? About 48 hours ago, I knew as much about Ryan Merritt as the rest of you. What follows is simply a collection of more or less public information compiled from data, film, and scouting reports. Let’s get to know Ryan Merritt.

The biographical information is always a good place to start. The Indians selected Merritt in the 16th round of the 2011 draft. That’s not a very high round! He was picked 488th overall. He doesn’t have a particularly imposing frame, at 6-foot-0, 180 pounds, though BaseballAmerica’s 2015 scouting report calls it an “athletic frame.” He cracked Double-A last year, and pitched well, to the tune of a 3.51 ERA and 3.25 FIP in 141 innings. In 143 Triple-A innings this year, he ran a 3.70 ERA and 3.82 FIP.

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Maybe you know who Carl Edwards Jr. is. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan, or remember him from prospect lists. Maybe you wondered who that 120-pound dude with the 95 mph fastball was one day and did some light googling. Maybe you, like me, have stared at this list of top four-seam fastball spin rates in the league so long you know by heart that he’s got the second-most spin in baseball.

Or maybe you don’t know who he is, and you’re just now getting acquainted. One of the first things you should maybe know about are his hands.

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Much has been made of Cleveland’s bullpen usage during the postseason. The attention has been focused primarily on two things: Terry Francona’s willingness to deviate from traditional relief roles, and the lights-out performances of Cody Allen and Andrew Miller.

Not much has been said about the limited looks hitters have been getting against Indians pitchers.

Through seven games, an Indians starter has yet to face an opposing hitter four times in the same game. They’ve faced a hitter three times on just 25 occasions, and 19 of those belong to Corey Kluber. Third-time-through-the-order penalties haven’t been injurious. Red Sox and Blue Jays batters are a combined 3-for-22 with a pair of walks and a hit-by-pitch in their third look. Francona has been masterful at pulling his starters at the right time.

He’s applied a similar approach with his management of Cleveland’s relievers. In Monday’s bullpen game, Francona flip-flopped what has been his postseason convention by using Cody Allen in the seventh, followed by Andrew Miller in a closing role. He had a reason. Read the rest of this entry »

A table:

Here are the 10 playoff teams, sorted by playoff OPS. You see that all the figures are fairly low — this is always the case, because hitting is tougher in the playoffs. But at the bottom, the Orioles went away after one game. The Mets went away after one game. The Rangers got swept. Then there are the Cubs! The Cubs rank seventh, and they’re by far the worst among the four teams remaining. Point being, the Cubs haven’t hit much. They’re still in a good position, all things considered, but they haven’t hit much.

So what, right? It’s literally 219 plate appearances. It’s literally six games. That’s practically nothing. I just found a six-game stretch around the turn to September where the Cubs hit equally poorly, and nobody noticed. The easiest possible answer here is to point to the size of the sample. But, these are the playoffs, which means all the details matter. And there’s another factor here, one that makes easy and absolute sense.

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A year ago, mentioning Aaron Sanchez and “save” in the same sentence might have been regarded as a commentary on the right hander’s potential future in the closer role. After excelling in the bullpen at the end of 2014, Sanchez moved to the rotation in 2015 and put up a 5.21 FIP in 11 starts, before finding himself back in the bullpen, where he was once again quite good. In 2016, the Toronto Blue Jays again put Sanchez in the rotation, unwilling to give up on a 24-year-old potential ace. Sanchez proved doubters, like myself, wrong and rewarded the Blue Jays with that confidence. Now he’s being asked to keep the Blue Jays’ season alive against former Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber.

Sanchez’s stuff jumps out. Half the time, he throws a sinker that averages 95 mph. He complements that pitch with a similarly fast four-seamer. Between the two, Sanchez brings mid- to high-90s heat on three-quarters of all his pitches. That velocity and that usage is perhaps what caused some concern about lasting as a starter. Only Bartolo Colon threw a higher percentage of fastballs this season among qualified starters. Since 2011, only Colon, Justin Masterson, Lance Lynn, and Ross Detwiler have navigated a full season of starting while also using their fastballs with such frequency. To throw a fastball that often, it has to be good — and Sanchez’s is very good.

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Yesterday, the Diamondbacks introduced Mike Hazen as their new general manager and head of baseball operations, who is taking over for Dave Stewart after a two-year failed experiment in their front office. Hazen was most recently the GM in Boston, serving as Dave Dombrowski’s second-in-command, and has been an integral part of a Red Sox front office that built one of the best young cores in baseball. The Diamondbacks are hoping Hazen will lead them in that direction now, and allow them to build a sustainable winner in Arizona.

But before he can do that, Hazen and his staff will have to determine their course of action this winter, and whether the team is going to try and retool a roster that just lost 93 games or if he’s going to pivot away from the team’s attempt to contend in the short-term in favor of acquiring assets for the long-term. When asked about this at the press conference, Hazen demurred.

“I don’t have a defined view just yet,” Hazen said. “It would be irresponsible for me at this point to sort of say exactly how we’re going to attack the roster.

“We want to bring a championship to this city and state, but we also know that there’s going to be decisions that need to be made. We’ll have more concrete answers on that as we move through the offseason. We’ll see what the landscape is in the marketplace.”

That’s a nifty non-answer, but in reality, it’s also likely the correct one. It doesn’t really make sense to be committing to a certain path on your first day on the job, for one, but also, despite the dumpster fire that was the Diamondbacks 2016 season, it isn’t actually clear what the Diamondbacks should do this winter, and they probably do need to explore both paths.

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If Canadian indigenous-rights activist Douglas Cardinal had had his way, the Cleveland Indians would have been legally prohibited from playing Games 3 through 5 of the American League Championship Series in their standard road uniforms. According to a lawsuit filed by Cardinal on Friday in Ontario Superior Court, both Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo mascot as well as the “Indians” team name itself are racially offensive and discriminatory, in violation of Canada’s Human Rights Act (which generally prohibits businesses from “differentiat[ing] adversely” between citizens on the basis of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation).

Although Judge Thomas McEwen announced on Monday afternoon that he would not be issuing an injunction blocking Cleveland from wearing its normal uniforms during the ALCS, the legal proceedings have nevertheless brought renewed attention to Cleveland’s use of what are, in the minds of many, racially insensitive team insignias.

This raises the question of whether Cleveland’s — or, for that matter, the Atlanta Braves’ — team name or logos are at risk of being successfully contested in the United States. Indeed, considering that a U.S. federal court ruled last year that several trademarks belonging to the National Football League’s Washington Redskins must be cancelled due to their disparaging nature, it is entirely possible — and perhaps even probable — that Cleveland or Atlanta could soon face a trademark challenge of its own in U.S. federal court.

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As Trevor Bauer walked off the pitching mound at the Rogers Centre and into the visiting dugout in the first inning of Monday’s ALCS Game 3, his right pinky finger bleeding and leaving a trail of blood behind him with each step — like a wounded Hansel in the forest — the home crowd in Toronto erupted into cheer and applause. Some were genuinely clapping out of the good nature of their heart, giving support to the wounded athlete who gave it his all. Some had perhaps more malicious intent, jeering at the outspoken pitcher whose jabs at the Blue Jays fanbase on Twitter have persisted for months. And some were likely just cheering as fans of the Blue Jays, believing their home team’s win expectancy had just risen now that Cleveland’s bullpen had been forced into action following just two outs and four batters.

What that last group of fans might not have realized is that, in a one-game scenario, the introduction of Cleveland’s bullpen into the game actually represented an advantage for the Indians. That the Blue Jays likely had a much better shot at putting up runs by facing Bauer two, or even three times, than enduring a barrage of well-rested Cleveland relievers in four-out spurts for the entire game. That, as far as Game 3 was concerned, Bauer’s bleeding finger was actually a blessing in disguise for the Indians.

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If you didn’t already know that Andrew Miller has a great slider, you do now. The lanky left-hander has been dominating the postseason. He’s also been garnering plenty of media attention, including here at FanGraphs. Tony Blengino wrote about him last week. Dave Cameron wrote about him yesterday. So did Eno Sarris.

On the premise that you can’t get enough of a good thing, here’s one more on Miller, this time in his own words. The subject — surprise, surprise — is his signature pitch. Where did he learn it? How did it evolve? Why didn’t he throw more sliders when he was struggling earlier in his career? I asked Miller those questions, and more, late in the regular season.

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Miller on learning to throw a slider: “I wish I knew when I first threw one. I know that’s a big thing with kids: when do you start throwing a breaking ball? I guess I was probably around 13 or so.

“It’s never really been a curveball. It’s always been a slider, because that’s kind of where my arm slot is. The best way I’ve described my breaking ball — and it still holds true — is that I basically throw a curveball from a lower arm slot.

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