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The Royals put me in a weird position. It’s not because their two consecutive pennants make skeptical and critical analysts look stupid — we went over that a year ago, and previously, we went over the same stuff with the Giants. If anything, that part of this is just funny. No, the Royals put me in a weird position, because they make it tempting to believe in ideas that run contrary to what I’ve been taught. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s vibe. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s unkillability. I’m not really supposed to believe in powerful and particular things, because baseball is intensely competitive, and it doesn’t make sense that one team would ever have a secret. I’m not supposed to believe the Royals are more special than any other team. Than, say, the Blue Jays. And I’m not saying I do believe in the Royals’ magic. They’re just pretty good at sucking me in. It’s a baseball team that makes me think twice about assumptions I have about baseball teams.

The ALCS isn’t going to have a Game 7. Would’ve been fun, but this was a plenty good way to wrap up. The ALDS between the Rangers and the Blue Jays came to an unforgettable conclusion, a very wild and unpredictable conclusion, but aside from the tie-breaking home run, that memorable inning turned on a series of defensive mistakes. Just before the homer, the whole inning was sloppy. That might’ve been baseball around its most entertaining. What we just saw in Game 6 was baseball in the vicinity of its best. The Royals and Blue Jays competed in a classic, and, of course, the Royals won. They’re the Royals, after all. I don’t know exactly how we got here, but I can tell where we are on the map.

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The consolation you hope for is that these uncertainties don’t end up making a difference. That way, you can talk about them, and you can investigate them, but you don’t have to worry about the results hinging on a decision one way or the other. It worked a little like that with the Rangers’ weird go-ahead run in Game 5 of the ALDS — as strange as that was, the Blue Jays still won, so it didn’t really matter in the end. Of course, that wasn’t true uncertainty, because the rules weren’t ambiguous. It was an unfamiliar play, but a legitimate run. With Edinson Volquez’s last full-count pitch to Jose Bautista in Wednesday’s sixth inning, there’s no getting to that point. You can see in the pitch whatever you want.

And you can say, all right, but the Blue Jays won by six. You can say, even as the pitch was being delivered, the Jays were heavy in-game favorites. You can try to claim the call didn’t end up too significant. But the call, in the moment, was huge. It was the difference between bases loaded and nobody out, and two on with one out. The score, you’ll recall, was 1-0. If the Royals get the call their way, maybe the inning is completely different. Maybe the Jays score, but not too much, and they have to turn to David Price out of the bullpen. The game and series didn’t turn because of one pitch, but that one pitch did some of the pushing. That one pitch was also the very definition of borderline. The only thing we know is Volquez’s breaking ball was perfect. What happened? Unfortunately, it’s a mess, in a very baseball way.

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Listen up, people. It’s time to face facts. #EskyMagic is real.

Alcides Escobar has swung at the first pitch to lead off the last five games, and eight of nine games this postseason. In every game of the ALCS, he’s led off with a first-pitch swing and reached on a hit. In the last two, that hit resulted in a run, and the Royals won the ballgame. The Royals are now 47-19 when Escobar swings at the first pitch this season, regardless the outcome of that swing. #EskyMagic is happening, and there is nothing we can do about it.

There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the part that got me thinking, because there has to be something someone can do about it.

This post is going to go like this. First, I’ll look up all the facts I can think of, deemed pertinent to #EskyMagic. Then, I’ll just dump them all onto this page and put some words around them. You’ll read them, I won’t have a conclusion, we’ll all leave confused and afraid, and the Royals will never lose another game with Alcides Escobar leading off. Cool? Cool.

Here comes the first one. This one’s the easy one, and it’s the obvious place to start.

For some reason, Alcides Escobar was the Royals’ leadoff hitter for the first 125 games he played this season. During that time, he wasn’t a good hitter, because he isn’t a good hitter, and so Ned Yost bumped him down to the nine-hole in favor of good hitters Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist for most of September. With good hitters Gordon and Zobrist leading off, the Royals lost a few, and so Yost got not good hitter Escobar back to the top of the lineup for the last five games of the regular season, and, bam! #EskyMagic.

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There are things that are different about R.A. Dickey, of course. No one pitch was thrown as often as the 2,840 regular season knuckleballs that Dickey threw this year. No other qualified pitcher threw any knuckle balls this year by PITCHf/x. The starter who threw the fewest fastballs other than Dickey threw three times as many. No pitch gets equal swinging strike results in and out of the zone like the knuckleball. Dickey can throw with injuries that would fell other pitchers, mostly because he throws at about 75% effort. He has no Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

And yet, despite the fact that Dickey is a one-pitch pitcher who throws a unique pitch that people seemingly can’t figure out no matter where he throws it, there are also conventional aspects to his craft. And to a certain extent, they’ve come to the fore this year.

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Last night, John Hirschbeck ejected Troy Tulowitzki from game three of the ALCS after Tulowitzki complained about Hirschbeck’s called strikes against him in his previous at-bat as he took the field for the top of the eighth inning.

It was a strange ejection, as you don’t usually see a guy on the field thrown out when he’s 50 feet away from the umpire who tosses him, and while we obviously don’t know what was said, there didn’t appear to be any kind of emotional reaction from the Blue Jays shortstop that necessitated an ejection. In his post-game comments, Tulowitzki asserted that the ejection was premature:

“I think it was obvious I didn’t agree with the called third strike,” Tulowitzki said. “And there were other pitches that were questionable. I’m walking out to the field, and he’s looking at me. And I told him that wasn’t a strike. And it was a quick trigger. Obviously he was either holding on to something or something was going on. But I didn’t think what I did was going to eject me from the game.

“Obviously, you don’t want to get ejected right there. Unfortunately, I was. But it will be interesting to see what he has to say.”

Clearly, the bar for what constitutes an ejection should be higher in the postseason; the stakes are so high, the last thing the league should want is a game being decided by backups forced into the game because an umpire had a short fuse. So it would be interesting to hear Hirschbeck’s side, and his rationale for why he had to eject Toronto’s shortstop from the game. Unless he provides a compelling alternate version of events, this event won’t help his reputation as an umpire with too quick of a hook.

But, without defending the ejection, it should be noted that Tulowitzki was wrong about the pitch that ultimately got him ejected. In fact, the Blue Jays complaints about the strike zone seem pretty weak when you actually look at the balls and strikes Hirschbeck called last night.

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So here’s something weird. I’ve noticed on Twitter that when Blue Jays fans refer to last night’s ALCS Game Three, they seem to give the credit to the Jays. They say things like, “The Jays were crushing the ball.” But when Royals fans talk about the game, they do it in a Royals-centric context, taking credit away from the Royals, as in, “Cueto sucked.” This isn’t to knock on either fan base. We all do this. I sure do. The truth though, as is often the case, lies in the middle somewhere. The Royals, Cueto especially, pitched badly. The Blue Jays, Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Goins especially, hit well. But, when parcelling out the blame and/or credit, one can’t be binary about it. Unlike pooping the bed, it’s not an all or nothing thing.

Cueto ended up with a final line of two innings pitched and eight runs allowed. To my eye he struggled, and I doubt your eye would say much different, but based solely on his stuff I wouldn’t have guessed he was eight-runs-in-two-innings bad. Partially because that’s reeeeeeally bad (that’s an ERA of 36.00!), but partially because he just didn’t appear all that awful. So maybe more of the credit/blame for the outcome should fall on the Blue Jays. But then again, I’m not a scout, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.* I was curious to see if I could figure out who should get the credit and how much.

*Maybe?

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The people are growing accustomed to watching the Mets win, and as a side effect of that, the people are growing accustomed to watching Jeurys Familia come in to try to finish the job. Familia has yet to allow a postseason run, and even if you didn’t know anything about him before, you’d be able to tell just from observation that he’s far from a weakness. They say the biggest vulnerability on the Mets is the soft underbelly of the bullpen, and though that would be true for most teams, the Mets make it extra tricky, because the starters often work deep, meaning they can hand the ball to Familia almost directly. Which means there’s almost never any let-up.

What Familia has turned himself into is one of the true reliever elites. It hasn’t always been a smooth and easy path to the top, as Familia has previously fought his own command and struggled to retire left-handed hitters. Both of those are common problems for hard-throwing righty relievers, but Familia this year has overcome them, blossoming into a shutdown closer Terry Collins will trust to get more than three outs. And the thing about Familia is that it goes beyond just his being successful — these days, he arrives at his success on a path all his own.

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Last night, the Cubs saw their ace, Jake Arrieta, give up four runs in five innings in their Game Two loss to the Mets. Given how recently he seemed completely impossible to hit, it was bit jarring to see Arrieta struggle, and multiple observers noted during the game that his velocity appeared to be down from what he was throwing during the regular season. Jesse Rogers post-game recap on ESPN was even headlined “Jake Arrieta’s velocity dip spelled doom for Cubs…”

In discussing the issue with various Cubs after the game, Rogers noted that Joe Maddon saw it as well.

“In the game there, if that [radar] gun was correct on the field, he might have been down a mile an hour or two, that’s what I saw,” Cubs skipper Joe Maddon said. “And when that happens, the breaker, the commitment to the breaking ball is not as definite from the hitter’s perspective, because they’re able to see everything better.”

Arrieta himself noted that he knew his stuff wasn’t as good.

“I knew the high-end velocity wasn’t necessarily there tonight,” he said. “Threw quite a few changeups to offset that.”

He’s not kidding. After throwing just one change-up total in his previous two postseason starts, Arrieta fired off 10 change-ups against the Mets last night. The change-up isn’t a pitch he features much, as only about 5% of his total pitches this year were changeups. The fact that 11% of the pitches he threw were change-ups last night does suggest he didn’t trust his normal repertoire as much, and was looking for ways to get outs without his best stuff.

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A few minutes ago, we announced that Dan Farnsworth was going to be taking over as our new Lead Prospect Analyst. Because I know he wouldn’t, I brought up some of his previous excellent work published here as a part-time contributor, and explained why we are excited to offer Dan this opportunity. If you haven’t already, go read that post. Now, we’ll allow him to introduce himself.

As Dave noted this morning, today is my first official day as the Lead Prospect Analyst for FanGraphs. It is an unbelievable honor, and I cannot wait to start discussing a wide range of players with you, our readers. Though you may have read some of my previous work, this is a new role for me, and I know the site has grown tremendously over the last few years. In that light, I wanted to introduce myself more fully, as well as provide you with some ideas I have for projecting players and how I will be presenting that information. Kiley McDaniel really stepped up the game for publicly available scouting data, and I hope to continue that standard of quality going forward.

First, a little about me personally and professionally. I graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 2008 with a Bachelor or Arts in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History — I’m coming for your title of weirdest baseball writing background, Cistulli — where I played Division III baseball as a catcher. At the time, I was interested in the medical field, and I applied and was accepted to Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York City. While I enjoyed the coursework, it became clear that becoming a doctor was not for me. I left school in 2011 to dedicate myself to working in baseball, and started coaching and teaching lessons at a baseball facility in Pennsylvania. Since then, I moved to Los Angeles to work with hitters in one of the best baseball regions in the country. At the beginning of the 2015 season, I moved back to New York City and worked as a Remote Scout for Inside Edge, mainly focusing on pitch charting and sequencing. Along the ride, I have met and learned from a lot of great baseball people.

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On Monday, Kiley McDaniel announced that he was leaving his position as FanGraphs Lead Prospect Analyst, having been offered a job as Assistant Director of Baseball Operations by the Atlanta Braves. When Kiley called me a few weeks ago to give me the news, I wasn’t surprised; this isn’t the first time a team had shown interest in him, and we knew it was inevitable that he was going to get offered a job he couldn’t pass up. The quality and quantity of work he did was simply too strong of a resume to ignore, and it was clear that this point would eventually come.

Kiley leaves a big void in our staff, and we’re certainly aware of the fact that it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to step in and simply pick up where he left off. Between his time working for three previous organizations and almost every media outlet that covers prospects, Kiley was about as connected to people in and around the game as anyone I’ve ever been around. He traveled extensively, seeing as many players in person as he could, and ended up doing things like having lunch with Yoan Moncada.

But beyond just traveling to see players, shooting video, writing up reports, and gathering valuable information from people in the game, he also helped push the creation of some back-end tools that led to things like the scouting grades that now appear on the player pages, as well as sortable pages with four years’ worth of information on the draft and the international players of interest who signed in July. He didn’t just produce content; he overhauled what prospect coverage at FanGraphs looked like.

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