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I want to assure you right away that what follows isn’t sour grapes. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Even if I did, I’d complain on my own time, and not on the job in front of everyone (probably). What follows is about a call, and a controversial one at that, early in Monday’s Game. But I’m not here to talk about  various implications. I’m here to talk about the call’s significance, relative to others, and about the process that contributed to the call. It was, in the end, a call most extraordinary that went Boston’s way.

The Red Sox went ahead 1-0 in the first, as you recall. The score remained the same into the bottom of the third, when David Freese led off with a single. Pete Kozma bunted Freese to second, and Adam Wainwright advanced Freese to nowhere with a strikeout. Matt Carpenter came up with two down, and he worked the count full. In that full count, Jon Lester threw a cutter inside. Carpenter started to first, assuming he’d drawn a two-out walk. Bill Miller, however, called him out, and Carpenter expressed his disagreement. That went about as well as most fairly cordial expressions of disagreement on a baseball field. That is, nothing changed, and the game moved on to the top of the fourth, with Carpenter having struck out looking.

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You’ll hear some superlatives sent in Jon Lester’s direction after a couple of strong performances in the World Series. The All-Star break — when Lester was sporting a 4.58 ERA and velocity readings that didn’t inspire hope — seems like a long time ago. Between then and now came a mechanical change, and maybe a short rest, that brought the old Jon Lester back in time for this great postseason run. Remarkable about that fact, though, is that the change has been a long time coming.

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Last night, the Red Sox won 3-1, and are headed back to Boston with two shots to win one game. They are now the heavy favorites to end the season as the World Series champs, thanks in large part to Jon Lester outdueling Adam Wainwright for the second time in this series. The Wainwright/Lester match-ups, on paper, favored St. Louis, but Boston was able to beat the Cardinals best pitcher because Jon Lester threw two brilliant outings in this series. But, for some people, the thing that they’ll remember most about last night’s game isn’t Jon Lester’s pitching, but instead, Jon Lester’s hitting.

Or, at least, Jon Lester being sent to the batter’s box with a bat in his hand; I don’t know that you can call what he does up there “hitting”. In his career, including the postseason, Jon Lester — career AL pitcher — has walked up to the plate 43 times, and in those 43 opportunities, he has made 43 outs. Back in 2009, he drew a walk, the only time he’s ever reached base successfully, but he made up for it in 2012 by hitting into a double play, bringing his totals of PAs and outs back into equalization. 21 of his 43 plate appearances have ended with a strikeout. He is, maybe, the closest thing baseball has to an automatic out.

And yet, with runners at second and third, in the 7th inning of a one run game, Jon Lester was allowed to hit. With Mike Napoli sitting on the bench. With Adam Wainwright tiring on the mound. The Red Sox had a chance to turn a close game into a pretty sure victory, but passed on the opportunity for a big inning in favor of keeping Lester in the game for a couple more innings. And that decision is essentially a microcosm of how baseball is managed.

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Without doubt, the worst question asked of Mike Matheny in his postgame press conference Monday night was whether or not he thought David Ortiz deserved the World Series MVP award. That question, presumably, came from a trained and experienced professional journalist, and Matheny responded about exactly as you’d think he would. If it used to be true that there are no stupid questions, then I think we can agree it’s true no longer. Humanity has broken new ground. But with all that said, you figure Ortiz does have the inside track at this point. In this paragraph we’re going to pretend to care about the World Series MVP award. Ortiz presently doesn’t have much in the way of competition, but perhaps some consideration could be given to Koji Uehara, and of course plenty of consideration would deserve to go to Jon Lester. For it’s Lester who has now bested Adam Wainwright twice, including once Monday in St. Louis.

In retrospect, Lester didn’t need to be as good in Game 1 as he was. He did need to be as good as he was in Game 5, and thankfully because he was so good, we don’t need to sit here talking about whether he should’ve batted in the top of the seventh. (No.) We can just focus on Lester’s performance on the mound, and he finished with a run and seven strikeouts over nearly eight innings. Ask the Cardinals and they’ll tell you Lester on Monday was the same as he was before. A few have gone on record saying as much, and twice now the Cardinals haven’t had an answer. But I think it should be pointed out things weren’t completely alike. There were plenty of similarities between Game 1 Lester and Game 5 Lester — Lester himself was genetically identical — but Game 5 Lester featured a couple twists.

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There has been no shortage of opinions regarding the Chicago White Sox’ signing of Jose Dariel Abreu.  We have seen how his statistics match up to other recent Cuban defectors before the jump, as well as heard differing scouts’ opinions regarding how those stats will translate stateside. I will not try to add to either of these discussions.  I think the stat comparisons to Puig and Cespedes are interesting enough without my additional input, and I have not actually seen Abreu in person to judge his athleticism or bat speed.  I do not know anything about his makeup besides what has already been repeated by scouts and former teammates.

What I have not heard anything about is how people view his swing.  I made a comment in Dave’s article the other day disputing the importance of bat speed in favor of efficiency, and so I felt motivated to continue that conversation here.  Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes happen to be two of the most explosive athletes in the game, so their exploits may not be very predictive.  On top of his fellow Cuban natives, Abreu has been compared to Miguel Cabrera due to his size and “lack” of athleticism (side note: too many people mistake foot speed for athleticism; rotational athletes are a completely different breed from track stars).  Pretty tall order, since even 1/4 of Cabrera’s production would result in a pretty solid value for the ChiSox.  Even with a very good swing, I think it would be ridiculous to expect the same generational types of seasons from the Cuban slugger.  The first hitter I thought of when I saw Abreu’s swing was Buster Posey.

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We begin with some acknowledgements. First, a baseball game is never entirely won or lost based on a single event, a single match-up. Certain events can be of massive importance, but they’re massive because of the context, and the context is established by other events, that would’ve led to different outcomes given different outcomes. So many different things contribute to a game result. An impossible, uncountable number of things, some of them things you’d never consider. Perhaps you’ve recognized that baseball is complicated. This isn’t checkers. Checkers is also complicated.

Second, managerial decisions tend to have their significance exaggerated. As MGL is fond of reminding us, most managerial decisions lead to very minor swings in win expectancy, which of course is the only thing that matters. Certain decisions are worse than others, and some can be relatively major in a good way or a bad way, but at the end of the day it’s still up to the players on the field, and pitchers are always going to have the advantage over hitters, save for the most extreme of circumstances. When managers get ripped to shreds, there tends to be a lot of results-based analysis, and that’s by and large worthless.

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The final play of Game 3 of the World Series has generated some very strong opinions. In the poll just below this (that includes a GIF of the play), most of you have sided with the umpires, believing that the obstruction call on Will Middlebrooks was correct. Rather than offer a strong opinion of my own, I’d like to simply offer some connected thoughts that have come from watching the play a few hundred times.

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No GIF yet, because the game just ended, but let’s assume that most of you that are viewing FanGraphs at this time of day probably watched the end of the World Series.

Posted by Twitter User @CJZero, here’s how game three ended.

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7:29

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