Coming into the NLDS, Dusty Baker took a good number of questions about the shortstop position. Danny Espinosa finished the year in a hell of a slump, but as Baker said to the media, he didn’t really have any other options. Espinosa was and is the best shortstop on the roster, and you have to give him one thing: for all of his flaws, there might be no one better at getting hit by a pitch.

So, actually, nevermind, there is still a Brandon Guyer floating around out there. But Espinosa is a hit-by-pitch machine, and he’s already been struck three times in the series, which is incredible. Even more incredible is the most recent HBP, because, see, Espinosa was granted first base, even though he got hit by a strike.

A strike!

Danny Espinosa got hit by a strike.

A strike, is what Danny Espinosa got hit by.

A borderline strike — sure, I’ll grant that. Espinosa didn’t get hit by a pitch that was literally down the middle, because that would be a physical impossibility. But what we’re dealing with here is insane. I went to Baseball Savant and pulled all the 2016 hit-by-pitches. You can basically see the bodies of righties and lefties in the plot below, and the overwhelming majority of these pitches make total sense. With a few, you see the profiles of elbows. The pitch to Espinosa is the only one that would’ve otherwise counted as a strike for the pitcher.

There’s a rule about this.

(6.08) The batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out (provided he advances to and touches first base) when:
[…]
He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (A) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (B) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball;

If the ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a strike, whether or not the batter tries to avoid the ball. If the ball is outside the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a ball if he makes no attempt to avoid being touched.

Usually, when people complain about HBPs, they complain that umpires don’t enforce the make-an-effort part of this rule. That whole thing about making an attempt to avoid being touched by the ball — umpires almost literally never use that. So, the precedent has essentially been established. The rule is a non-rule. But here people can complain twice over. Espinosa made no attempt to move, and the pitch was a strike. So that’s two reasons why he shouldn’t have been granted first base, two reasons right there in the rule book. Dave Roberts, though, came out to make his case, and Espinosa still remained at first. He was never called back, and he was never going to be. The rules take care to detail what ought to count as a hit-by-pitch, but it seems that that part of the book was never assigned in umpiring school.

As I was preparing this little post, the Dodgers scored a first-inning run against the Nationals. Interestingly, while the run was driven in by an extra-base hit, it was not driven in by a homer. So far in the playoffs, that’s been slightly unusual!

I think it was Joe Sheehan who came up with the “Guillen Number.” You take all the runs scored directly off homers, and then you divide by the total number of runs. I’ve taken care to calculate playoff Guillen Numbers during the wild-card era, stretching back to 1995. Here you are:

Now, this is coming into today, so this doesn’t include the Dodgers’ one run so far. And, yes, I know, it’s early, so very early, and the numbers still have time to sort themselves out. But in the playoffs to this point, more than half of all the runs have been driven in by dingers. We’re at 32 of 59, to be exact, even though the average before this year was 39%. Over the preceding decade, 37%. It’s easy to tell that this year stands out, and if you’ve been following the playoffs yourself, you’ve presumably noticed. It feels like the winners have been determined by who hits the long ball, or the biggest long ball, and that feeling is supported.

It’s not like home runs are necessarily out of control. Hitters in the playoffs are slugging just .378, which isn’t unusual. We aren’t really seeing an offensive resurgence. Rather, sort of the opposite?

Home runs are more responsible for offense right now because it’s less easy than it’s been to generate other kinds of offense. Batters have reached less than 27% of the time, and though that makes it more difficult to hit a multi-run homer, that also means there have been fewer opportunities to drive a run home with a single or a double. One interesting indicator: we’ve so far seen just two sac bunts. The sac-bunt rate is way down, and maybe that’s a coincidence, or maybe managers aren’t trying to play smallball because outs are already coming in such droves.

There are many games left to play. Importantly, so far we’ve mostly just seen the best starting pitchers. The numbers will change, to some degree. But if you’ve felt like offenses have leaned on homers — yeah. Yeah, that’s basically what’s been happening.

In a few hours, the Red Sox play their first win-or-go-home game of the season. And with their season on the line, they’re handing the ball to Clay Buchholz.

Yes, the same Clay Buchholz who posted a 4.78 ERA, 5.06 FIP, and 5.32 xFIP this season while getting bounced from the rotation. Buchholz is getting the ball in large part because of how he finished the season, as he ran a 2.86 ERA over his final 10 appearances. But despite some talk of changes in his approach, the Red Sox should not fall victim to overweighting recent performance; most of the evidence suggests that Buchholz is still not a very good pitcher, and shouldn’t be allowed to dig the team any kind of hole this afternoon.

Even if we accept the arbitrary endpoints that allow a focus on just his 10 most recent appearances, Buchholz actually wasn’t even that good down the stretch. Here’s his line from those 10 outings, compared to his 27 appearances prior to that stretch.

The walks are down a little bit, the strikeouts are up a little bit, and overall, Buchholz did pitch better in the last 10 games than he did at the start of the year. But really, there’s one column there driving almost all of the difference: his home run rate got cut in half, which led to him stranding a bunch of runners. John Farrell even states this, without using numbers, in his assessment of Buchholz’s improvement.

“Where he was burnt earlier in the season by the big inning, he’s avoided the big inning by virtue of not allowing multiple runners inside of a given inning then a big blow, a three-run homer or something like that, has followed.

The argument for Buchholz as a pitcher worthy of starting an elimination game relies on buying into six weeks of home-run suppression; outside of the 7% HR/FB ratio he put up in those last 10 outings, he still didn’t really pitch all that well. And it’s not like Buchholz has a long history of running very low HR/FB rates; his career mark is 10%, just a tick below the league average over those years. His career FIP and xFIP are almost identical, so there just isn’t any real reason to think that Buchholz is now a guy who give up long fly-ball outs without giving up home runs.

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There’s no such thing as a good way to lose in the playoffs, but the worst way might be getting swept in the first round. It also might not, I don’t know, but it can feel so unfairly abrupt. The Rangers spent six months working on building the best record in the entire American League. It all came to an end in three games. That quickly, the mental calendar flips, and after another year spent entertaining dreams of the World Series, it’s time now for the Rangers to think about the season to come.

And this promises to be a difficult offseason for them. In fairness, it’s always some kind of difficult offseason for everyone, every time. But the Rangers need to identify exactly where they stand. And there are going to be several holes for them to fill, with limited financial flexibility. Nothing about next year’s Rangers is guaranteed, and there’s work to be done if they want to even contend.

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The appeal of lists and rankings, whatever its cause, is very real. That thing you like? Sure, it’s good, but is it better than this other thing?! We’ve seen this carry over into baseball presumably since the sport began. Williams or DiMaggio? Aaron or Mays? Garciaparra or Jeter or Rodriguez? We’ve even clung to “Trout or Harper?” for as long as we possibly can. Whether this urge to create a clear hierarchy is good, that’s not for me to say, but it’s a tendency into which I’ve found myself constantly falling when thinking about one particular playoff team: the San Francisco Giants.

It goes without saying that the Giants are not in an enviable position. They’re down two games to none to the Cubs in the Division Series and their opponent is widely regarded as the best team in baseball on paper. But the Giants have been in a similar position before and come out alright, so it would be disingenuous to say they’re hopeless. Perhaps the biggest reason to maintain even a shred of hope that the Giants will fight back in the series is related to this fact: by at least one metric, the two best games pitched by a starter so far this postseason have been by Giants pitchers Madison Bumgarner and Johnny Cueto.

Having two elite starting pitchers doesn’t guarantee postseason success for any team – one only needs look at the Texas Rangers for confirmation of that fact – but it’s also unequivocally beneficial. It may or may not be enough to help the Giants claw their way back in this series, especially considering Bumgarner and Cueto can only start two of the remaining three wins the Giants need. But it’s a situation that lends itself to an intriguing debate that I personally am incapable of avoiding — namely, the question of who’s better, Bumgarner or Cueto?

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On Saturday night, Javier Baez crushed a fastball from Santiago Casilla, hitting it to almost exactly the same spot he hit his game-winning home run on Friday night. Having hit the ball 102 mph at a 26 degree launch angle — balls with those characteristics were home runs 65% of the time this year — Baez dropped his head and started to jog towards first base. He didn’t really put it in top gear until he rounded first base and saw that the ball had hit the wall, and that there was going to be a play at second base. Once at full speed, he covered enough ground to beat the throw pretty easily, and dove in to second base before Joe Panik could apply the tag. He was easily called safe, and attention turned to his health, as he appeared to dive into Panik’s knee, and was suffering the consequences of the collision.

Two minutes and 49 seconds after the play had ended, however, Baez was called out. The Giants had challenged the call, as has become a custom for nearly every close tag play at second base, because it was possible that Baez not maintained contact with the bag during every millisecond of his slide into the base. So, the review umpires in New York re-evaluated the play, and saw this.

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Seeing as this is an article about Aroldis Chapman, I might be letting down my audience if I didn’t at least briefly discuss the most recent pitch Aroldis Chapman threw, considering what that most recent pitch was. The last pitch Aroldis Chapman threw in a game was a fastball, for a swinging strike — which, on its own, given our subject, is entirely unremarkable. The pitch went 103.3 mph, which is less remarkable for our subject than any other pitcher in baseball, but is fast even for Chapman’s standards. Most remarkable of all, the pitch moved like this:

To quickly play the role of Party Pooper, I have to point out that the way a catcher receives a pitch can sometimes play a trick on our eyes, deceiving us into believing a pitch had more movement than it actually did, and I think that’s at least somewhat at play here with Willson Contreras‘ stabbing motion, in concert with the pitch’s natural arm-side tail, creating an exaggerated illusion of how much this pitch actually broke.

That’s not to say the pitch wasn’t exceptional, even for Chapman. Despite my poo-pooing just a second ago, you might be able to make the case this is the most exceptional fastball Chapman’s ever thrown. The Cubs’ closer threw 15 fastballs in his save during Saturday’s 5-2 win over the Giants, and the 14 fastballs preceding the one depicted above averaged 4.6 inches of horizontal break. Chapman’s fastball, for the entire season, averaged 4.8 inches of horizontal break. This particular fastball, that final fastball, broke 9.3 inches to the arm side. It moved about twice as much as the average Chapman fastball.

Using BaseballSavant, I compiled a spreadsheet of every fastball Chapman’s thrown in his career — 5,161 pitches. I sorted them by horizontal movement. This one ranked 63rd. That’s not as sexy a result as first or second or even 10th, but it’s still in the 99th percentile. Also: at 103.3 mph, only two of the 62 fastballs with more horizontal break were also thrown as hard. Also also: those two pitches were both in the dirt. This one went for a swinging strike to end a playoff game. That’s how you make the argument this was the most exceptional fastball Aroldis Chapman has ever thrown.

For fun, I wanted to create an image. This image shows every fastball thrown by a left-handed pitcher in 2016, plotting velocity against horizontal movement, with all of Chapman’s pitches removed except the one in question. I find humor in this:

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Adam Eaton had an excellent defensive season in right field for the White Sox. The 27-year-old former centerfielder had 20 Defensive Runs Saved, the third most of any outfielder. His 22.1 UZR was second to none. He gives his teammates a lot of credit for those for those numbers.

“Metrics see it as individual effort, but it’s not,” opined Eaton. “The addition of Austin Jackson early in the season really helped. When he was in the outfield with me, I had complete confidence that my back was covered. I could be more aggressive to the gap. Same thing with (JB) Shuck. His speed and defensive ability allows me to make plays I wouldn’t otherwise make.

“Same thing with assists,” added Eaton, whose arm rating ranked as best in both leagues. “I can throw the ball as well as I want to, but if the guy cutting it off doesn’t make a perfect throw on the relay, I don’t get an assist. If the catcher doesn’t make a perfect catch, and make the tag on time, I don’t get an assist. Stats can’t see that. I’m happy that I look great in the metrics, but without the guys around me, I’m just another average ballplayer.” Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, the Indians lead the Red Sox 4-0, thanks primarily to a three-run homer from Lonnie Chisenhall. The home run from Chisenhall, off David Price, was his first home run off a left-hander this season. That would be notable, except that the first few days of this postseason have been filled with home runs from guys you don’t expect home runs from.

At this point, 15 different players have hit a home run in the postseason, Wild Card games included. Here are those 15 players, along with their regular season HR and wRC+ numbers.

Eight of the 15 players to hit one out so far this year had single-digit home run totals on the season; seven of the 15 had a wRC+ below 100. Besides Trumbo, Encarnacion, and Bautista, this is just not a group that you think of as big time sluggers. But facing some of the best pitchers in baseball, these are the guys muscling up and hitting the ball over the wall.

Of course, we’re talking about a half dozen games, so this isn’t really meaningful data. But it is a bit of a continuation of the trend we saw this year, where low-power guys started hitting for more power, and a reminder that the home run spike of 2016 has been led by the middle class of hitters.