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Way back in July, when the Cardinals were good but unsure how good they would be, Adam Wainwright turned in a strong start against the Angels. Edward Mujica, however, blew a save and took the loss, the Angels walking off in the bottom of the ninth. It was an uncharacteristic show of weakness from a guy who to that point had been a dominant closer, and afterward Mujica knew exactly what he’d done wrong. For the first time since joining the Cardinals, Mujica shook off Yadier Molina. The first time he shook Molina off, the Angels hit a tying homer. The second time he shook Molina off, the Angels won. Mujica swore to follow Yadier from that point forward.

One of the exciting things about pitch-framing research is that we’re able to quantify a part of catcher defense that, before, we just had to guesstimate. We might’ve had a sense of who was good and who was bad, but we didn’t know what that meant. Now, we’re closer than ever before to understanding catcher value, but we’re still dealing with a massive blind spot. We don’t know how to quantify good and bad game-calling. True, pitchers get the final say, but pitchers and catchers work together, and some catchers have better plans than others. They say Molina’s the best, that he gets in the hitters’ heads. This October, Molina has taken very good care of Wainwright. Monday night, Wainwright and Molina had one particular disagreement. Moments later, the Dodgers had the only run they’d need.

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When constructing his current roster, Dave Dombrowski (and Mike Ilitch) chose to prioritize offensive production, and were willing to sacrifice defense in several positions in order to get more thump into the line-up. Miguel Cabrera, despite being hobbled with injuries that leave him unable to run, is playing third base. He moved to third to accommodate Prince Fielder, who told the Tigers he didn’t want to DH when he signed a $214 million contract to play first base for them. And the Tigers weren’t overly interested in creating a long term logjam at the DH position, since they were already paying Victor Martinez a lot of money to serve as their DH once he returned from injury. The plan was always to fit these three guys into the same line-up, and in 2013, that’s what the Tigers have done.

In some ways, it’s not that hard to say that the plan worked. The Tigers won the AL Central again, and they’re now three wins away from reaching their second consecutive World Series. They finished second in the majors in runs scored, so the decision to give up defense in search of more offense was successful, at least in terms of maximizing run scoring.

But trade-offs work both ways, and while the Tigers reap the benefits of playing three designated hitters on offense, they also suffer the consequences of punting defense at the infield corners. For instance, I present the 9th inning of last night’s game.

After watching their bullpen blow a four run lead, Rick Porcello was trying to keep the game tied and push it into extra innings. Rick Porcello is a ground ball pitcher, and he started the inning facing Jonny Gomes. He got Gomes to hit a ground ball, but then, it all went really wrong.

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Nothing against Jarrod Saltalamacchia, but I just had to look it up to make sure that the game-winner was hit by Jarrod Saltalamacchia. It was an important hit to win Game 2, of course, and it was sharply struck, but that was a fairly obvious run-scoring situation, and more importantly, what people are really going to remember is David Ortiz. What was on people’s minds at the time was David Ortiz and his first-pitch game-tying grand slam. In the same way the US didn’t win gold by beating the Soviets in 1980, the Red Sox didn’t beat the Tigers on the strength of Ortiz’s slam, but it was the slam that provided the moment. What came after only make sure the slam didn’t go to waste.

Naturally, there’s the same issue as there was with Jose Lobaton: we don’t yet know how this will really be remembered, in the long run, because the series still has at least three more games to go, and an eventual Red Sox loss would color everything that came before the decision. The magnitude of Ortiz’s heroics will be determined over the course of the following week. But one does still get the sense this won’t be forgotten as quickly as Lobaton’s bomb, even if the Sox do lose, just considering the circumstances and the identities. The moment became an instant legend. So who do we blame? That’s how we’re supposed to do this, right? Who screwed up, to allow Ortiz to bring the Sox back? Or did no one screw up, and did Ortiz just pull some more magic out of his tuckus?

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From Advanced NFL Stats, this was the Patriots-Saints Win Expectancy graph from this afternoon.

And from us, this is the Red Sox-Tigers game from tonight.

Source: FanGraphs

Both teams bottomed out with a win expectancy of around 4%. The odds of two teams with a 4% chance of winning both winning is 0.16%. Not 16%, but 0.16%, or to put it in words, it would happen once about every 625 opportunities.

You can bet that October 13th, 2013 will go down as one of the most memorable days in Boston sports history.

Game One of the 2013 ALCS was a classic. The Detroit Tigers beat the Boston Red Sox 1-0 in a contest that featured more than its fair share of drama. It also featured plenty of strikeouts and a near no-hitter. The game ended after midnight, with 322 pitches having been thrown.

Jim Leyland said something interesting about the Red Sox offense on Friday. There was a grain of truth to his comment, yet it was off base. It said a lot about a team that is very good at getting on base.

Asked about Boston’s ability to drive up pitch counts, the Tigers manager said, “I really don’t think taking pitches and working the pitcher has much to do with it… It‘s not taking the pitches, it’s that they foul off good pitches.”

Red Sox hitters did foul off a lot of pitches this year. Most notably, they fouled off 4,065 two-strike pitches, the most in baseball. The median was just under 2,800. No team had fewer than the Royals, who fouled off just 1,693 two-strike pitches.

Those numbers don’t prove Leyland right. Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, the Cardinals and Dodgers square off in Game 1 of the NLCS. The Dodgers are throwing Zack Greinke, who you probably know as one of the best pitchers alive. The Cardinals are throwing Joe Kelly, who, if you don’t watch the Cardinals regularly, you may have never heard of. But, being the Cardinals, it is no huge surprise that they have found some moderate prospect in the third round and turned him into an ace. This is what they do. So, Joe Kelly and his 3.08 career ERA is taking the mound for the Cardinals tonight as yet another example of the Cardinals ridiculous player development success.

Except Joe Kelly is a little different than the rest of the terrific young arms the Cardinals keep pulling out of thin air. A table of the most often used 27-and-under pitchers that St. Louis has thrown over the last two years, to illustrate the difference:

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When the Tigers fell behind the A’s two games to one in the series, they knew they’d need either Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander to pitch well if they were to advance. As it turned out, they needed them both — Scherzer recorded some critical outs in Game 4, and then Verlander recorded a lot more of them in Game 5, starting in what would’ve been Scherzer’s place. For eight innings on Thursday, Verlander was virtually unhittable, removing any would-be suspense from a potentially suspenseful game. At times on Tuesday, the A’s would’ve figured this would be Scherzer’s start, if necessary. At times on Tuesday, the A’s would’ve figured they’d have Thursday off. It was in Game 4 that the A’s were in position to lock this series up. In Game 5, they never really stood a chance.

The question coming in was whether the Tigers or A’s would emerge from this triumphant. The question in the middle innings became whether the A’s would so much as get a runner on base. Nobody reached until Josh Reddick’s walk in the bottom of the sixth. Nobody got a hit until Yoenis Cespedes‘ single in the bottom of the seventh. There wasn’t suspense until the game’s final batter, and by then Verlander had been removed. On October 6, 2012, Coco Crisp led off Game 1 of the ALDS with a home run against Verlander. He hasn’t given up another postseason run to the A’s in four starts, whiffing 43. It’s an all-time record, and it’s active, pending the future.

For eight innings, Verlander mowed the A’s down. With one swing of the bat, he was given all the run support he’d need. After Verlander was gone, the A’s couldn’t seize their one final chance. This was a Game 5 decided by three separate fastballs.

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Midnight struck for baseball’s Cinderella last night, as Adam Wainwright’s curveball played the part of the wicked stepmother. Actually, I don’t know the Cinderella story well enough to know if that sentence makes sense, so let’s move on from this tortured analogy after just one sentence. The Pirates lost last night, and the season that put the city back on the map as a baseball town is now over. So now, there’s one question hanging over the franchise: was this was a one year aberration or was this was the emergence a new force to be reckoned with in the NL Central?

From one perspective, it’s impossible to answer this question right now. We have no idea what the 2014 Pirates will actually look like after an off-season of roster shuffling. They could pony up their entire farm system to land both David Price and Giancarlo Stanton, and then, yeah, they’re obviously a contender next year. Or they might decide to play it safe, wait for the next wave of prospects to hit Pittsburgh, and take a step backwards in a consolidation year. There’s no way to know what the 2014 Pirates are going to do without knowing who is going to be playing for them.

But, we know some of the players that are almost certainly going to be on the team, and we know some things about how the 2013 Pirates won 94 games, so we can look at how much of what they did this year could reasonably be expected to carry over to 2014. So let’s do that.

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Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies in the World Series in 2009, and though Lee and the Phillies didn’t win, the ace impressed armchair psychiatrists and industry officials alike with his apparent countenance and composure under stress. One of my favorite baseball anecdotes is that, the next spring, in a team meeting, a coach pointed to Lee and held him up as an example of how to stay balanced and perform when the pressure’s really on. It was then that Lee spoke up and said, paraphrased, “actually I damn near s*** my pants.”

In a postgame interview Wednesday night, Adam Wainwright admitted to having been nervous, given that he was tasked to start a do-or-die Division Series Game 5. Wainwright’s pitched in a World Series before, and he already had 14 games of playoff experience, but you could hardly blame him for being human. Experience doesn’t make you immune to feelings. It maybe gives you a better idea of how to handle them. Wainwright was chosen for the postgame interview because he threw a complete game to allow the Cardinals to advance to the NLCS. For the second time in two starts, Wainwright was dominant, and though there’s no such thing as an unwinnable game, Wainwright is the reason why you talk about avoiding aces in October. The Pirates technically had two chances to win this series, but this is why it felt like they only had one.

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Something I like to look at after every season is a chart of the locations of all the season’s intentional balls. Intentional balls, of course, are supposed to be super far away from the strike zone, but out of any such group there has to be a pitch that’s closest to being a strike, and for some reason those pitches fascinate me. This project would by no means be timely right now, in the middle of the playoffs, but something that is timely is something very similar. Along a similar vein to intentional balls, we have hit-by-pitches.

Hit-by-pitches just about have to be pitches out of the zone, in order to hit a batter, since batters stand some distance away from the plate. These pitches aren’t thrown wildly intentionally, but the locations are generally way off regardless, because pitchers aren’t perfect. But out of the pool of all hit-by-pitches, there has to be a pitch closest to having been in the zone. What follows is inspired by Shane Victorino.

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