Losing is generally not a fun, enjoyable experience. Winning is better, and when you don’t win, sometimes you look for reasons why that coveted win didn’t occur. In baseball, the margin between winning and losing is often very small, and that has certainly been the case in the American League Championship Series: both of the series’ first two games were close, low-scoring affairs won by a Cleveland team that scored a total of runs. While players generally control outcomes, for a high-scoring team like the Toronto Blue Jays to score just one run in two games, the results have been unusual, a little too unusual, per Mike Vorkunov’s twitter account.

I don’t know if I’m lumped in there with “you guys,” but I’m more than happy to discuss the “circumstances” of which Bautista speaks. Bautista’s addressing the strike zone, and he believes that Cleveland pitchers have been getting borderline calls that Toronto’s pitchers haven’t. Let’s work backwards and begin with Saturday’s game. Here’s the strike-zone plot against left-handers hitters for Cleveland and Toronto pitchers care of Brooks Baseball. (View from the catcher’s perspective.)

Green is a called ball and red is a called strike, with Cleveland represented by squares and the Blue Jays represented by triangles. For our purposes here, let’s break things into categories. We can look at missed calls in and out of the strike zone and borderline calls. Based on the typical strike zone, we find two missed calls going against Blue Jays pitchers. For borderline calls, let’s say anything touching the line of the typical strike zone is borderline. By that definition, Cleveland threw three borderline pitches and got two strikes. Toronto threw two borderline pitches and got one strike.

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This morning, I wrote about Andrew Miller’s postseason dominance, and compared his current usage to how Mariano Rivera was deployed by the Yankees during their World Series runs. I noted Miller’s postseason dominance, but because I didn’t have access to postseason splits, I couldn’t put those in context, showing how well Miller has done in the postseason relative to other relievers. Thankfully, David Appelman sent me the data today, and so now I can add some context to Miller’s playoff dominance.

We currently only have this kind of postseason data going back to 2002, so I can’t compare Miller directly to pitchers before then, but we can look at how well he’s done relative to other playoff relievers in the last 15 years. And, as you’d guess, he ranks pretty highly. Here are all the relievers (or pitchers pitching in relief, anyway) who have held hitters below a .200 wOBA during the last 15 years.

Miller isn’t quite at the top, but he’s in that top-three tier separated from everyone else. And yes, given what Tim Lincecum did out of the bullpen for the Giants in 2012, he probably deserved a mention in my piece this morning. He was doing what Miller is doing now before it was cool. It’s too bad he didn’t want to stay in that role; it would have been fun to see what Lincecum could have been as a relief ace before the stuff went away.

Also, if you’re surprised to see Roberto Osuna at the top of the list, join the club. I knew he was good for Toronto last year, but didn’t realize he’d been quite at this level. Of course, the primary reason we’re talking about Miller’s dominance more than Osuna’s is the way they’re doing it; Osuna has a career 25% strikeout rate in the postseason, and has mostly gotten to this list by holding hitters to an .091 BABIP during his playoff appearances. Miller has a 49% postseason strikeout rate, and is at 61% this year; he’s not relying on weak contact or quality defense for his outs, and it’s easier to remember a guy just making his opponents look foolish.

But also, yeah, look at Rivera in that table. 62 innings of a .173 wOBA allowed, and that’s just since 2002, so we’re not even including his earlier dominant years. What Miller has done for 16 innings has been remarkable; Rivera did something similar over a much larger sample. And that’s why he’s the best reliever of all time.

I know that we tend to exaggerate the meaning of the playoffs, which means we tend to exaggerate the meaning of playoff player performance. Regular players are made out to be heroes, superstars completing their development on the national stage. The playoffs make it easy to get swept away by anything. The increased focus on every single individual event allows for one to forget that all of these sample sizes are remarkably small. Through the middle of May, the Phillies had one of the best records in baseball. The Phillies were a bad team all along.

The point is: I get it. And, you get it. We all understand the postseason booby traps. And yet I need to share that Javier Baez is taking the playoffs over. Baez, already, was opening national eyes, and he owned the NLDS against the Giants. Sunday against the Dodgers, Baez authored a new chapter for his aggressively-growing legend. Not even very long ago, Baez felt risky and almost disposable. Now it’s difficult to see the Cubs winning without him.

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Over the next several months, I’ll be releasing comprehensive reports on each major-league club’s farm system and the prospects therein. Implicit in this is that I will be ranking the prospects – both within each farm system and across baseball – based on my own evaluation of the players as well as that of industry sources. The players will be ordered by their “Future Value” grade. This Future Value methodology was brought to FanGraphs in 2014 by former Lead Prospect Analyst, Kiley McDaniel (reggaeton horn).

If you’d like to read what is essentially the Book of Genesis on Future Value, then I’ll direct you here for McDaniel’s (reggaeton horn) 2015 top-prospects list for an explanation of FV and its merits, as well as here for discussion about the 20-80 scouting scale.

In short, Future Value attempts to combine a prospect’s potential (reasonable ceiling and floor) as well as his chance of realizing it (including injury-related risks or proximity to the majors) into one tidy, value-based number.

There are some pretty obvious issues with this system, some of which are practical, others more personal, and I’ll touch on those briefly before explaining why I’m retaining the system.

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Things could be going better for the Toronto Blue Jays. The only true “must-win” games are elimination games, but trailing Cleveland two games to none in the ALCS, there’s little doubt that tonight’s Game 3 feels like a must-win game Toronto. Should they lose tonight, all anyone will be able to talk about is how only one MLB team has ever come back to win a series after being down three games to none.

Could the Blue Jays become the second team to make such a comeback? Of course. They strung together a four-game win streak as recently as the Wild Card Game through their ALDS sweep over the Rangers, after all. But, naturally, facing a best-case scenario of four straight elimination games is not the outcome Toronto will be seeking in tonight’s game.

The most obvious aspect of Toronto’s game which needs to improve if they want to win is their offense. In the 18 innings they’ve played against Cleveland thus far, they’ve scored just one run – not exactly an ideal method for winning games. Of course, scoring runs at prodigious rates is something else we just saw Toronto do,what l when they tallied up 22 runs in their three-game ALDS sweep over the Rangers. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision Josh Donaldson or Edwin Encarnacion or another key member of their lineup stepping up to the plate and delivering for Toronto. If they want to win tonight, someone is going to have to push runs across the plate and they aren’t lacking for players who can be that guy.

However, to state the obvious, a two-game stretch of inept offense does not change the fundamental realities of baseball for the Blue Jays. Hitting well isn’t their singular path to getting back into the series. Defense and pitching are just as important as ever. So far, Toronto’s pitching staff has done a tremendous job of keeping Cleveland’s offense in check, yielding just four runs over the two games. There are a multitude of paths to success in a baseball game, but among the simplest is to prevent the other team from scoring. Tonight, they’ll turn to starting pitcher Marcus Stroman in hopes that he’ll become their latest pitcher to keep Cleveland’s offense in check. One of the interesting things to watch tonight will be what Stroman looks like — aside from the diminutive bundle of energy we’ve come to know over the past few seasons — because Stroman is constantly evolving.

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Clayton Kershaw continued to chip away at the mostly misguided narrative that he’s not a postseason pitcher, throwing seven dominant shutout innings against the Cubs at Wrigley in Sunday night’s 1-0 NLCS Game 2 victory, striking out six while walking just one. Kershaw talked manager Dave Roberts into letting him face the final batter of the seventh inning with reliever Kenley Jansen ready for action in the bullpen. Having thrown just 84 pitches after the conclusion of the seventh, Kershaw certainly would have gone out for the eighth inning if this were regular-season game, and likely would have gotten a shot for a complete-game shutout in the ninth.

As his final pitch count indicates, Kershaw was incredibly efficient with his pitches against Chicago’s typically uber-patient lineup, needing just 45 pitches to get through 4.2 perfect innings before Javier Baez’s two-out single in the fifth broke up his bid for perfection. He either got ahead of or retired each of the first six batters he faced, and seven of the first nine the first time through the order.

The pitches he threw to those nine batters the first time through the order:

Even the two that missed were close. In text form, in case you couldn’t pick up the pitch types from the video, those nine first-pitches were:

1. fastball
2. fastball
3. fastball
4. fastball
5. fastball
6. fastball
7. fastball
8. fastball
9. fastball

This isn’t exactly a new development for Kershaw. We talk a lot about Kershaw’s extremes, and one of the perhaps underrated Kershaw outlier tendencies is his reliance on the first-pitch fastball. To measure this, I took every pitcher who faced at least 500 batters this year, using BaseballSavant, and I calculated their fastball rate on the first pitch of at-bats, and on the rest of the pitches in at-bats, and found the difference between the two, indicating the pitchers who most relied on the fastball to begin at-bats, relative to the rest of their arsenal.

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As the Blue Jays take the field in Toronto tonight, they’ll find themselves down two games to none in the ALCS, with Game 3 representing as close to a must-win game as you can get without actually facing elimination. Teams have come back from down 3-0 before, of course, so the Blue Jays aren’t definitively done if they can’t figure out how to win on Monday night, but having to win four straight games against any good team is a massive challenge. And the idea of winning four straight against Andrew Miller’s team seems downright impossible, because right now, Andrew Miller is basically the walking embodiment of the perfect relief pitcher.

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It’s convenient the way this worked out. In the worst-case interpretation, Javier Baez got away with something on Sunday. In the best-case interpretation, Baez might’ve taken advantage of a rule-book loophole. What Baez did provoked Dave Roberts to complain at least a little bit, but in the end, the Dodgers scored one run, and the Cubs scored less than that. Because the Dodgers won, Baez’s play doesn’t matter. So now we can talk about it a little bit without emotions threatening to take over.

In Game 2, Baez was praised for his casual on-the-fly brilliance, and it came up because of a double play he started in the top of the sixth. The play allowed for the Cubs to get out of a jam, keeping the deficit at the narrowest margin. The Dodgers wouldn’t have any real protest if Baez started a regular double play. But this double play started with Baez very much intentionally not catching a catchable baseball.

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The borderline balk move that Julio Urias used to pick off Bryce Harper on Thursday night had me thinking about a lefty reliever who has spent the past four seasons in independent ball. In 2009, Derrick Loop — pitching in high-A in the Red Sox system — picked off 17 runners in just 71-and-a-third innings. (I interviewed him about his move later that year.)

Loop no longer logs a plethora of pickoffs. Part of the reason is his reputation — runners rarely take liberties against him — and another is his approach. Once upon a time, the southpaw used his move as a primary weapon. When I caught up to him this week, Loop told me he used to “give up the count to the hitter in order to set up my pickoff.” Against a higher level of competition, that strategy was a recipe for disaster.

Loop has bounced around since his pickoff-heavy season, with stops in the Phillies and Dodgers organizations, as well as the Atlantic League. His last year in affiliated ball was 2012, when he appeared in 34 games — 13 as a starter — for Triple-A Albuquerque. Despite an 11-4 record and 101 hits allowed in 103 innings, he found himself on the outside looking in.

“With the year I had, it was devastating to have not received a spring training invite,” admitted Loop. “Not just from the Dodgers, but from any team at any level. I was playing winter ball in Venezuela that off-season, hoping and waiting for a call. From anyone. It never came.” Read the rest of this entry »