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The eleven-pitch plate appearance with two outs in the sixth inning Friday night ended with the deciding run for the Royals, and so it was a work of beauty for those supporting the team in blue. But in practice, it was a workmanlike effort and a mistake that finally ended the battle between Eric Hosmer and Javier Lopez.

The first pitch was a mistake from Lopez. High in the zone is something that he’s mostly gone away from since his career renaissance. Look at his heat maps from early in his career and his heat maps from the last three years, when he said that he needed to concentrate on “being able to work down in the zone.”

But Hosmer only swung at about a quarter of the first pitches he saw this year, just barely less than league average, and so Lopez stole a strike.

The second pitch was a nastier pitch, on the outside corner, low and away, from an arm slot that should give Hosmer fits. Hosmer, after the game said that he was just looking to “stay the other way and put the ball in play.” The first foul went straight down.

The third pitch was probably supposed to finish off Hosmer one-two-three. A 71 mile per hour breaking pitch that just caught the bottom of the zone… against a guy that has slowly seen more slow curve balls and had his worst year against them this year. But Hosmer managed another foul ball. Hosmer said he was just trying to “shorten up.” The second foul ball went down the first base line.

The fourth pitch was probably another mistake. A bit of a hanging slider in the middle of the zone, Hosmer still didn’t quite square it up, but it looked close. Another foul ball, this time straight back.

Pitch five was more than a foot outside, relatively easy to lay off of.

Pitch six found the outside corner, but Hosmer was ready for it and again fouled off the pitch, this time down the third-base line. At this point, he felt that he had “fought off some good pitches” and that “the more balls you see off a guy, it really does lock you in there.” Normally it’s because you walk, but outcomes (and slugging percentage) do usually get better as the at-bat lengthens.

Pitch seven was a fastball in the dirt. Hosmer laid off. Despite having one of his worst years with respect to reaching, he was able to identify that pitch as in the dirt early enough to avoid swinging.

Pitch eight was a slider low. This time, Hosmer swung and was lucky to foul the ball off. Early on the pitch, though, he fouled towards his own dugout on the first base side.

Lopez walked off the mound and sighed often. Pitch nine was a slider, six inches off the outside corner. But Lopez hadn’t once ventured to the inner half of the plate, and so now Hosmer could hang off the outside corner. You could see from the earlier foul that he was ready to go the other way. He reached for the ball and fouled it off. Straight down.

Pitch ten was a fastball, in about the same location as pitch nine. Hosmer didn’t swing.

Pitch eleven was probably a mistake. A fastball, a couple inches off the bottom of the zone, and an inch in from the corner, with Hosmer looking in that direction, and “just trying to put the ball in play,” that was probably meant to be a little further outside. But by early results on command f/x, it seems that pitchers probably miss their spots by 13.8 inches on average.

And so, Hosmer, who was hoping to put his hands “in the load position as early as possible” and go the other way, put this swing on the ball.

Looks a little different from the swing he used to homer in the ALDS.

Javier Lopez made some mistakes. Throw eleven pitches to one batter, and you’re likely to make a mistake or two or three. But Eric Hosmer tailored his approach and his swing to best take advantage of that mistake, and deserves all the credit for his (game-winning?) run-producing single in Game Three of the World Series Friday night.

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The World Series is headed to San Francisco, which means Bruce Bochy has a decision to make. The games in Kansas City allowed him to start Michael Morse at DH, getting another power hitter into the line-up without forcing Morse to run around the outfield, but under NL rules, Morse will either have to play left field or come off the bench as a pinch-hitter. Morse is a terrible defender when healthy, and it’s not clear that he’s recovered enough from his oblique strain to live up to even his own low standards with the glove, but then again, the competition is converted first baseman Travis Ishikawa, who isn’t exactly a defensive standout himself.

If you’re going to have a defensively challenged left fielder, might as well pick the one with the better bat, right? Well, I’m not sure that those should really be the two choices being debated here. I’d like to suggest that maybe the best option isn’t either Ishikawa or Morse; instead, maybe the Giants best chance to win would come from starting Juan Perez.

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The finalists for the 2014 Rawlings’ Gold Glove Awards were announced on Thursday afternoon, and if you’re here on the internet with me, you know how much people hate the Gold Glove Awards.

Part of that is for good reason. For a long time, the Gold Glove Awards were pretty much a joke. Rafael Palmeiro has three. Derek Jeter has five. There have also been tons of worthy defenders to earn Gold Gloves, but throughout history it’s seemed to be more of an award that valued good hitters who weren’t terrible at defense, rather than the game’s best actual defenders.

But! Things appear to be getting better. Last season, the MLB introduced a “sabermetric component” to the decision making process. Advanced defensive metrics are still a hotly debated topic, but I think we can mostly agree that they do a better job than the “errors and the eye test” method that has been used for decades. There were still some questionable choices last year, sure, there are questionable choices this year and there will continue to be questionable choices in the future, because awards are subjective and people are never going to see eye-to-eye.

I think the eye test has its merits, but since this is FanGraphs, let’s imagine a world where the Gold Glove Awards are decided strictly by the numbers. I did a similar post last year when I was still a wee Community Blog writer, and I’m going to use a similar method this year.
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Much has been made of the supposed mediocrity of the two teams currently battling for the World Series championship. Not only are the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals both wild card teams, they’re the first pair of Fall Classic combatants to both win fewer than 90 games in the regular season. That said, there are a number of reasons why these clubs are worthy title competitors. The core of this Giants team, after all, has won two of the past four titles. The Royals, while a very poor offensive club by postseason standards, are clearly a strong run-prevention unit — riding defense and speed and a stellar bullpen into October. Very quietly, though, there is something else that truly stands about this Royals team: the durability of their core nine position players whose names are written into the lineup almost every day. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Giants beat the Royals 7-1 last night, and in any game that lopsided, it’s going to nearly impossible to say that any one play was the cause of the outcome. The Giants just did too many things well, and the Royals too many things poorly, to pin the loss on a single play. But if we were going to isolate one mistake by Kansas City that might have had more of a difference on the outcome than any other, it may very well have been Alcides Escobar’s trip to the plate in the third inning.

Already down 3-0, the Royals entered the bottom of the third with just a 21% chance of winning, by Win Probability, and likely a bit less than that in real life, given that Madison Bumgarner is better than the average starting pitcher. But thanks to a Brandon Crawford error and a Mike Moustakas double, KC got their first two batters into scoring position, bringing up the top of the batting order with three shots to get on the board. Those two players reaching base moved the Royals win expectancy all the way up to 36.5%, so the change in WPA (.155) from the start of the inning was nearly as large as the change in WPA (-.169) on Hunter Pence’s first inning home run.

With runners at second and third with nobody out, the Royals run expectancy for that third inning was 1.91 runs. Both runners should have been expecting to score, and even great pitching by Bumgarner would probably result in at least one run. The hallmark of the Royals offense is making contact, and that’s all they really needed to do in that situation. Hit the ball up the middle or to the outfield and you get a run, most likely. Do it twice and you might get two, even without needing another base hit.

Alcides Escobar stepped to the plate. Escobar’s not a great hitter by any stretch of the imagination — he probably shouldn’t be hitting leadoff in the World Series, but the Royals offense is bad, so there aren’t many better alternatives — but he more than held his own against lefties this year, posting a .319/.342/.442 line against them that was good for a 119 wRC+. His career splits aren’t as dramatic (83 wRC+ vs LHPs, 73 vs RHPs), but Escobar isn’t totally helpless against southpaws, and his primary offensive skill is the one the Royals needed the most; make contact.

Of course, Bumgarner would be trying to counter Escobar’s contact skills, because a strikeout (or an infield fly) was the best possible result he could get in that situation. And with a runner on third base, there’s a bit of an incentive to avoid breaking balls in the dirt, lest one get away from Buster Posey and allow the run to score without the Giants even needing to swing. As Jeff noted last week, Bumgarner has lately been leaning very heavily on his fastball, and his pitch location charts note that he strongly favors throwing high fastballs, because high fastballs get a lot of swinging strikes.

Alcides Escobar, though, is very good at making contact at pitches at the top of the strike zone. Here’s his Contact% vs LHP heatmap from 2014.

Up-and-in, Escobar almost never swings and misses. Up-and-away, it happens, but still not a lot, unless you get it to the very outer edge of the zone. For reference, here’s Bumgarner’s Contact% vs RHB heatmap for 2014.

Very high contact rates up-and-in, much lower up-and-away. Bumgarner certainly knows these trends, and the approach was pretty obvious; go up-and-away with high fastballs.

First pitch

94 mph fastball in the up-and-in corner, but still in the zone. Almost a perfect pitch, really, and Escobar was only able to foul it off. Tip your hat to Bumgarner; he didn’t hit the spot where Posey was setting up, but he missed into a very tough location to hit. If you’re going to miss your spots, miss them like this.

Second pitch

88 mph cutter at the very top of the strike zone. This pitch is probably not called a strike, and Escobar probably shouldn’t have swung at it, but it was in that very tempting slice of the zone that hitters have a tough time laying off. This was just another tough location for Escobar, especially since it had some appearance of a hanging breaking ball, but never really dropped enough for him square up.

Third pitch

94 mph fastball about as high as a pitch can be thrown and not end up at the backstop. PITCHF/x recorded the height of this pitch at 4.5 feet off the ground, or about a foot higher than the the top of the strike zone. Let’s put this in some context.

This year, Escobar was thrown 51 pitches with a recorded height of at least 4.0 feet, by PITCHF/x via Baseball Savant. Two of those hit him, three of them were pitchouts, and two more were thrown when a pitcher was issuing an intentional walk, so we can throw those seven out as non-swing-chances. That leaves 44 pitches where Escobar had to decide whether to swing or not. 37 of those times, he chose not to, and on all 37 of those takes, the pitch was called a ball.

Seven times, he swung at a pitch of that was at least 4.0 feet off the ground. Here’s how those swings went for him:

April 15th: Whiff (4.17 feet)
April 16th: Foul (4.06 feet)
April 17th: Foul (4.00 feet)
April 26th: Foul (4.56 feet)
May 2nd: Foul (4.12 feet)
July 5th: Whiff (4.15 feet)
July 18th: Foul (4.28 feet)

Seven swings, seven bad outcomes. I don’t know what his deal was in mid-April, but after some reckless swings in the first part of the season, Escobar hadn’t gone after one up here since right after the All-Star break. There was improvement at this particular weakness, at least, even if he didn’t get better overall in the second half.

But he picked a pretty lousy time to pull that old trick out of his hat. Yeah, he managed to make contact and foul it off, but a take there pushes the count to 1-2, and at least begins to move things a little bit in his direction. For his career, Escobar has a .400 OPS after 0-2 counts, but a .503 OPS after 1-2 counts. Not swinging at that pitch doesn’t make it likely he’d get a hit, but it makes it a little tougher for Bumgarner to go out of the zone again, and increases the likelihood that he could at least avoid the strikeout. But he swung, and it remained 0-2. Credit to Bumgarner for testing the limits of Escobar’s aggressiveness, but this was just an awful swing decision by the Royals leadoff hitter.

Fourth pitch

93 mph fastball, just slightly lower than the previous pitch.

If he swung at the last one, might as well try again until he proves he won’t swing, right? This one wasn’t quite as high — only 4.3 feet off the ground this time — but was just as definitely not a strike, and just as definitely not a pitch Escobar should have swung at. He hadn’t swung at a pitch this high in three months, and then he did it on back-to-back pitches in an 0-2 count when a strikeout was the absolute worst outcome he could muster.

Here’s the plot of pitches in the entire at-bat.

Yuck.

We can’t lay all the blame on Escobar here, because Nori Aoki also struck out, and then after a walk to Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer bounced weakly to second base. Escobar wasn’t the only one who failed that inning, and even if he had driven in two runs, there’s still a strong chance they lose anyway. Plenty of things went wrong for the Royals besides Alcides Escobar’s atrocious third inning strikeout.

But that was one really awful at-bat. This postseason has had plenty of bad process/good result plays, but Escobar’s approach in that match-up was so bad that the possibility of a good outcome was almost non-existent. Bumgarner deserves a ton of credit for pitching out of that inning, but the Royals certainly didn’t have to help him as much as they did.

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Hello there, Royals pitchers! Congratulations on reaching this point — you’ve done many proud. No matter what happens, your 2014 season has been a screaming success. The Royals are back on the baseball map nationally and, more importantly, locally. But of course you’re not done yet, as there’s one remaining step in the staircase: Looming in front of you are the San Francisco Giants. You’ll face many different Giants hitters; among them will be Pablo Sandoval. In case you’ve never seen him before, you’re in for an experience. I’d like to show you something. Actually, I’d like to show you two somethings. Here’s one of them:

• Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
• Matt Carpenter: 46.8% in-zone swing rate

You’re going to face Sandoval; it could’ve been you would’ve faced Carpenter. Sandoval swings at about as many balls as Carpenter does strikes. For the sake of some perspective:

• Pablo Sandoval: 45% out-of-zone swing rate
• Salvador Perez: 44.1% out-of-zone swing rate

So that’s how aggressive this Sandoval character is. Now, you might be wondering, “Does that mean he’s as easy to get out sometimes as Salvy?” No, this Sandoval guy is a unique sort of challenge. To prepare you for the challenge to come, I’m going to provide you with some strategy tips. How should you pitch to Pablo Sandoval, if you want to get him out? Pay careful attention to my advice.

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The World Series starts tonight, and if you’ve spent any time reading the internet over the last 24 hours, you’ve probably been inundated with preview articles. If you haven’t been, I’m particularly fond of this one from Jonah Keri and Ben Lindbergh at Grantland, mostly because it includes this fantastic image.

The rest of the preview is great too, which isn’t surprising, because Jonah and Ben do fantastic work on a regular basis. That preview is also annoying, as they stole a number of ideas I was going to spotlight in this post, which is why I stole their awesome outfield defense graph and put it in this one. But rather than cry over they-beat-me-to-it milk, we’ll just pivot and tackle the two World Series teams position by position. Forecasts are based on the 2015 Steamer projections found here on the site, and are based on an entire season’s worth of production.

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