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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 »

An injury only hurts a team as much as the replacement lets it. The Dodgers were able to withstand their record-setting number of injuries because of what they had behind the guys who got hurt. Not every team has the luxury of being able to simply plug a Julio Urias or a Brandon McCarthy into the rotation when their top starters go down. And so when Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar each suffered season-ending injuries for the Cleveland Indians in the final month of the season, it was Josh Tomlin who was forced back into the postseason rotation picture, casting doubt on Cleveland’s chances of a deep October run. It’s also been Josh Tomlin who’s held two of baseball’s most imposing lineups — Boston and now Toronto — to three runs in two starts and helped the Indians come within two games of their first World Series appearance in 20 years.

It’s difficult to completely fault Tomlin’s doubters. By the end of August, he’d pitched himself out of Cleveland’s rotation, with a 4.89 ERA and a 5.24 FIP over 25 starts, and even during his best stretches, Tomlin’s rarely looked like much more than a home run-prone, back-end innings eater. Despite that, he’s held the Red Sox and Blue Jays at bay, and now has a 1.98 ERA in six starts since returning to the rotation. The secret, at least in the postseason? Pitching nothing like himself:
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It’s safe to say that Dusty Baker is not exactly the most progressive manager in baseball. Baker has always been an old school guy, and relative to what is becoming the new normal, he’s definitely a traditionalist. So as we live-blogged game five of the NLDS last night, one of the common questions in the early innings is what mistake Baker would make that would cost his team the game. The expectation was set in advance; if the Nationals lost, Baker’s old-school philosophies would be part of the reason why.

Of course, the Nationals did lose, 4-3, in one of the most intense playoff games you’ll ever see. And as is the case in any one run loss, there’s always second guessing of decisions the next morning, wondering if things would have turned out differently if other choices would have been made. But in reality, Dusty Baker’s big expected mistake last night never came, and we shouldn’t blame him for last night’s loss.

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Let’s pick it up in the bottom of the sixth, shall we? In a decisive Game 5, the Nationals held a 1-0 lead, and they were looking to stretch it. With two outs and someone on first who can run faster than you can, Ryan Zimmerman knocked a double to the left-field corner, and the Nationals’ third-base coach got aggressive. He waved Jayson Werth around, figuring that an insurance run would be absolutely massive. An out and, well, you tried, and you’ve still got the late lead. Werth gave it what he could.

That’s Werth at the bottom, running his tail off. Coach Bob Henley isn’t even looking anymore, now that the matter would be out of his hands. By this point he must’ve had a suspicion. Based on my calculations, the break-even rate here was 35%. That is, it made sense to send Werth around third if you thought he’d be safe at home at least 35% of the time. With the throw coming from just past third base, it looked like Werth would be safe at home about 0% of the time.

The camera has panned, and you don’t see the baseball. That’s because the baseball is in the glove of the catcher, and Werth is maybe, what, two-thirds of the way to the plate? Less than that? Werth is out. He’s so out. Baserunners are practically never this out. Werth is so out he might’ve given brief consideration to turning around. Until just a few years ago, a play that developed like this might’ve at least resulted in an exciting collision. Collisions are easy sells to the members of an average audience. Runners used to have one way out. That way was dangerous, and sometimes electrifying.

Werth stopped. He didn’t stay stopped — he went to the trouble of closing the distance. But Werth gave up. He was out, and he knew it, and he accepted it, and the Nationals still had the lead. So concluded a thrilling baseball sequence, by which a casual baseball viewer might not have been thrilled.

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That chart doesn’t do this game justice. That was incredible. From Rich Hill to Julio Urias to Chris Heisey to Kenley Jansen throwing 50 pitches… and then the best pitcher of his time finally getting his legendary October moment.

For the Nationals, another tough loss ending a great season, losing by the thinnest of margins to another great team. They should have nothing to be ashamed of, even though this isn’t how they wanted it all to go.

What a spectacle. What a sport. Baseball is really just the best.

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In a few hours, the Dodgers and Nationals are going to play for their seasons; one team will advance, one will go home. The Nationals are in a pretty good position, hosting the game in Washington while throwing their ace, Max Scherzer; it’s hard to ask for much more than that if you’re in an elimination game. The Dodgers used their ace in Game 4, however, so they’re going to be mixing and matching in order to try win this one.

While they haven’t officially announced anything, the team is expected to start Rich Hill. Given his health track record, however, and the fact that he’s going on three days rest, they’re probably not going to have him work too deep into the game. In fact, reading the tea leaves from Andy McCullough’s game preview, it sounds like the Dodgers are going into this game planning for something of a tandem start.

“We talked about Rich as an option, obviously,” Manager Dave Roberts said after the Dodgers’ 6-5 win on Tuesday. “But so is Julio, and how we want to strategize to win Game 5, we’re going to talk through it.”

…

The combination of Hill and Julio Urias is unorthodox, but it would reduce the chances of Washington’s top four hitters — Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, Jayson Werth and Daniel Murphy — from getting comfortable at the plate against either. Hitters tend to perform better when they have seen a pitcher more than once in a game. The Dodgers will try not to allow that to happen on Thursday.

If the Dodgers are serious about limiting Hill and Urias to one trip through the order, that would be something indeed; they’d be limiting themselves to getting likely six or seven outs from each pitcher, and would be relying on the rest of their bullpen to get the other ~13 outs, despite being worked pretty heavily in both games in Los Angeles. It would be the most aggressive kind of bullpen game we’ve been expecting so far in the playoffs, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, I’m not sure how well set up they are to actually pull it off.

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