One year ago, at just 23 years old, Yordano Ventura became one of the youngest pitchers to start a World Series game in the last 30 years. The presence of a young starter in the World Series is not a completely rare phenomenon, naturally. Ventura, for his part, was the 64th pitcher in Series history to make a start before turning 24 years old, per Baseball Reference Play Index. Noah Syndergaard is set to be the 65th when the two face off this evening. Widening the criteria a little, one finds that 105 pitchers have made World Series starters before turning 25 years old. Ventura, now one year older, is set to be one of just 19 pitchers to make a start in two different World Series’ before turning 25, a list including Babe Ruth and, over the last 30 years including, only Madison Bumgarner and Steve Avery. Tonight’s encounter between Syndergaard and Ventura represents one of the better young pitching matchups in World Series history.

Over the last three decades, the only pitchers younger than the 2014 edition of Ventura to record a start in a World Series game were Avery, Bumgarner, Dwight Gooden, Livan Hernandez, Bret Saberhagen, Michael Wacha, and Jaret Wright. Noah Syndergaard, a few months younger than Ventura was last year, is set to join that list. The giant Mets right-hander has struck out 20 batters in 13 postseason innings thus far and looks to do what his counterparts could not as the Kansas City Royals have proven difficult to strike out.

While 105 pitchers under the age of 25 have made starts in the World Series, it’s quite rare to find two young hurlers pitted against each other. In the last 15 years, it has happened only twice: Madison Bumgarner against Tommy Hunter in 2010 and Cole Hamels against Scott Kazmir in 2008. In all of World Series history, there have only been 24 such matchups and only 19 if you remove repeat matchups in the same series. The chart below shows every World Series matchup sorted by average age.

World Series Matchups Featuring Pitchers Under 25

Year	Player	Age	Player	Age	Average Age
10/23/1981	Dave Righetti	22.329	Fernando Valenzuela	20.356	21.343
10/22/1991	Scott Erickson	23.262	Steve Avery	21.191	22.227
10/26/1991	Scott Erickson	23.266	Steve Avery	21.195	22.231
10/22/1997	Tony Saunders	23.176	Jaret Wright	21.297	22.237
10/31/2010	Tommy Hunter	24.120	Madison Bumgarner	21.091	22.606
10/19/1986	Roger Clemens	24.076	Dwight Gooden	21.337	22.707
10/7/1950	Bob Miller	24.113	Whitey Ford	21.351	22.732
10/12/1914	Lefty Tyler	24.302	Bullet Joe Bush	21.319	22.811
10/8/1934	Schoolboy Rowe	24.270	Paul Dean	22.055	23.163
10/14/1969	Jim Palmer	23.364	Gary Gentry	23.008	23.186
10/11/1964	Ray Sadecki	23.290	Al Downing	23.105	23.198
10/30/2015	Yordano Ventura	24.149	Noah Syndergaard	22.256	23.203
9/29/1932	Lefty Gomez	23.308	Lon Warneke	23.185	23.247
10/10/1970	Jim Palmer	24.360	Gary Nolan	22.136	23.248
10/14/1970	Jim Palmer	24.364	Gary Nolan	22.140	23.252
10/8/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.217	Smoky Joe Wood	22.349	23.283
10/11/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.220	Smoky Joe Wood	22.352	23.286
10/15/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.224	Smoky Joe Wood	22.356	23.290
10/11/1909	Ed Summers	24.310	Nick Maddox	22.336	23.323
10/21/1972	Gary Nolan	24.147	Vida Blue	23.085	23.616
10/3/1953	Whitey Ford	24.347	Billy Loes	23.294	23.821
10/9/1934	Dizzy Dean	24.266	Elden Auker	24.018	24.142
10/22/2008	Cole Hamels	24.300	Scott Kazmir	24.272	24.286
10/27/2008	Cole Hamels	24.305	Scott Kazmir	24.277	24.291

SOURCE: Baseball Reference

The encounter between Dave Righetti and Fernando Valenzuela back in 1981, when the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees, represents the youngest such matchup of all tim . Only two of the young-pitcher games have occurred in a Game Two: Jeff Tesrau’s Giants team defeated Boston’s Smokey Joe Wood in 1912 and Dizzy Dean’s St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Tigers’ Elden Auker in 1934. If the Mets and Royals get to a Game Seven and the rotation stays as is, Noah Syndergaard against Yordano Ventura would become just the third such matchup of all-time and the first in more than 80 years.

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Let’s talk about contact. It’s what everybody else is doing, right? The Royals make a lot of it. They did all season, and they still are in the playoffs, even against Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom. No team this season posted a lower strikeout rate; no team was even particularly close. Contact is the skill around which the Royals lineup is built.

Right around the end of the regular season, I wanted to try to put these Royals in some kind of historical context. I wanted to know how good they are at hitting the ball, relative to other teams over the past several decades, but it’s not as easy as just looking at the strikeouts because whiffs have increased over time, especially lately. You have to make adjustments, so I folded in yearly league averages and standard deviations. What I found: by the resulting measure, the Royals were baseball’s best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I went back no further, because I didn’t see the point.

It’s interesting, that conclusion. 1950 was a long time ago, and an awful lot of baseball has happened ever since. Mickey Mantle hadn’t debuted yet; Dave Winfield hadn’t been born yet. So it’s notable to post the most extreme anything between 1950 and 2015. In taking the top spot, the Royals just barely edged out the runner-up. The team knocked into second place was the 2002 Angels.

Immediately, that catches your eye. The Royals are the best contact-hitting team in ages. Those Angels were the second-best contact-hitting team in ages, and they won the World Series. For Royals fans, that’s encouraging, probably, and from my standpoint, now that I think about it deeper, there are a ton of parallels between these two ballclubs, even beyond putting the ball in play. Those Angels might be the best historical comparison for what the Royals currently have going on.

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The narrative, coming into the World Series, was impossible to ignore. Boiled down to its most simple form, it went like this: the Mets are here, playing in the World Series, because they throw really good fastballs. The Royals are here, playing in the World Series, because they’re really good at hitting fastballs. There’s much more to it than that, of course, but that was the most talked-about story, the Mets’ fastballs vs. the Royals’ ability to hit them, and so something had to give. The Mets would either overpower the Royals like few other teams have been able to, or the Royals would become the first team to strike back against New York’s heat.

With the Royals now leading the series 2-0, you can guess what happened. You’d guess the latter, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — you don’t outscore your opponent 12-5 and take a 2-0 lead in the World Series without hitting some heaters — but the correct answer might actually be “neither.”

Allow me to explain. The Mets, see, haven’t exactly thrown their fastball. In Game One, Matt Harvey threw a career-low rate of heaters to the Royals, throwing just 30 fastballs while going to his breaking and offspeed stuff 50 times. Granted, he also may have had his career-worst stuff, and the couple ticks he’d suddenly lost in velocity are a reasonable explanation for why he’d be more reliant on his non-fastball offerings.

Then also, there’s this:

Terry Collins said Matt Harvey throwing career-low fastball % was partly respect for Royals fastball hitting, partly lack of pitch sharpness

— Adam Rubin (@AdamRubinESPN) October 28, 2015

A line of thinking exists that if you change what it is that’s made you successful in light of your opponent’s strengths, then you’ve already lost. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the “playing not to lose, rather than playing to win” mantra. As a Mets fan, it’s probably not the thing you want to hear. On the surface, it makes it seem like the Mets had decided beforehand that their strength wasn’t as strong as the Royals strength, and so they changed courses before they had a chance to find out. Of course, there’s some give-and-take here, and it would have been silly for Harvey to not have considered a potential Plan B if he didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate. He didn’t like what he saw coming out of the gate, and so he opted for Plan B. And in the end, he really didn’t pitch that poorly.

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During the fifth inning of Game Two, as Alcides Escobar attempted to bunt against Jacob deGrom, Harold Reynolds decried the current state of bunting in professional baseball. Even after he admitted that hard throwers are hard to bunt on, he went on a mini tirade: “I know it’s hard to get one down against a guy that throws this hard, but I’ve never seen this bad of bunting. Ever. Ever! In baseball, just across the board. I know Escobar can handle the bat, but we see this every night. They have to move the runner. Not just the Royals, but across the board.”

The moment was probably lost for a couple reasons. For one, Escobar decided to swing-away after two failed bunt attempts, and promptly tied the game with a single to center. There was too much excitement to think too deeply about the state of bunting in our game. Now we have a second to breathe, though.

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The other day, I received a tweet saying 72 wins is the new #6org. It was in response to a Jon Heyman article that ripped a Royals preseason 72-win projection. This is just about the best possible time to do that — the only better time, maybe, to write that article could be next week. Now, a difference: the #6org thing is ours. The 72-win Royals projection came from Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system. So, this could be their own version of #6org, but it’s not like PECOTA was all that exceptional. All the systems pretty much agreed. Our own systems projected the Royals to go 79-83. That looks better than PECOTA, but it still looks bad. The Royals have made the numbers look silly, is the point.

They were projected to go maybe .500, and they’re close to winning the World Series. A year ago, they were projected to go something like .500, and they came close to winning the World Series. The year before that, they were projected to go something like .500, and they won 86 games, up 14 from the year previous. Right now the Royals are being described every 10 seconds as relentless. They look like they’re unstoppable, and though they’ve come very close to being stopped, and though they were stopped just last October, there’s still something of a special feeling. The Royals, we’re told, do things differently. On observation, it’s hard to disagree.

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Before the World Series, Tom Verducci wrote an article about the Royals’ advance scouting. Specifically it discussed the scouting done by third base coach Mike Jirschele on Jose Bautista’s throwing habits. There was also a suggestion that the Royals had picked up on David Price tipping his changeup. They used both pieces of information to beat the Blue Jays. So it appears the Royals are pretty good at this advance scouting stuff.

Fast forward to last night’s Game Two against the Mets. Starter Jacob deGrom gave up four runs in the fifth inning on a walk and five singles. Following the game, which the Royals won 7-1, Adam Rubin of ESPN spoke to two people he identified as ex-Met players who suggested deGrom had been tipping his pitches.

From Rubin’s article:

As for deGrom, one ex-Mets player speculated he may have been tipping pitches.“I can’t figure it out yet, but they have something on deGrom out of the stretch,” the retired player indicated. “They better figure it out or they can’t win this series.” Another ex-Met saw the first ex-player’s comment and added: “He must speed up on his heater and a tad slower with other stuff. But I think it’s in his facial expressions — seriously.”

Interesting! The conspiratorial answer often is, after all. The fact that the Royals just did this to Toronto — and to such good effect, too — adds plausibility to the discussion. Even so, I’m not sure I agree. I went back and re-watched the inning to see.

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The World Series is delivering its thrills, but one can still feel a residual tingle from Lorenzo Cain‘s first-to-home dash on Eric Hosmer’s single in the deciding game of the ALCS. Part of that thrill is due to this being a repeat performance by Cain. In the fifth and deciding game of Kansas City’s ALDS, he went first-to-home on a Hosmer single, chipping away at Houston’s 2-0 lead on the way to a 7-2 triumph. Not as dramatic as plating the go-ahead run in the eighth, but it loomed pretty large at the time.

What hasn’t gotten so much attention is the parallel to one of the most fabled plays in baseball history: Enos Slaughter’s Mad Dash Home. In Game Seven of the 1946 World Series, the Red Sox scored two in the top of the eighth to tie the Cardinals 3-3. (Sound familiar?) In the home half, Slaughter got on first for St. Louis, and when Harry “The Hat” Walker laced a two-out hit, Slaughter never slowed down, racing home ahead of the throw to score the decisive run.

The similarities, and differences, between the plays are enlightening. The greatest apparent difference is that Walker was credited with a double. This is widely regarded as a scorekeeper’s mistake. Walker took second on the throw home, and should have had a single, thus making Slaughter’s basepath aggression much clearer. Hosmer left no room for doubt both of his times by staying at first base.

For other matters, it will probably help to look at the plays in question. First, Slaughter in 1946. The quality of the footage is not at all great — you can hear the rattle of the film projector from which it’s taken — but given the age of the play, we are probably a little fortunate to have something this good.

The footage shows Slaughter running with the pitch. We see a close angle on him breaking from first, then cut to a shot behind the plate for Walker’s hit, so it’s not seamless, but it’s clear from how fast Slaughter enters the second shot that he was indeed going.

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This being primarily a numbers site and all, we tend to try our hardest to deal with objective truths around these parts. If it’s not backed by, y’know, evidence, why say it? That’s one of the primary reasons this whole sabermetrics thing got off the ground in the first place. But, hey. We’re human beings. We’ve all got a little hot take in us, whether we care to admit it or not. Inside all of us, there’s a little pool of hot take magma, bubbling up over time until we can’t hold it down anymore and we’ve got no choice but to let it spew out and suffer the consequences. Anyway, it’s been a while since I fired one off, and I can’t hold it down anymore. Here it comes!

Johnny Cueto Is the Most Entertaining Player in Baseball.

Whew! That felt good. Johnny Cueto, yep. Most entertaining player in baseball. Try and stop me. I’ve even got a list of four subjective reasons as to why Johnny Cueto is the Most Entertaining Player in baseball, and, yes, I’d put them in a slideshow if I could.

Reason number one: dreadlocks. They’re awesome and baseball needs more of them. Let Cueto’s brothers play too. Number two: he yells on the mound a lot. Yells at himself, yells at the umpire, yells at opposing batters after he strikes them out. If I can go against the hot take grain for a second, I’d like to put forth that the more emotion in baseball, the better. Number three: the unpredictability of his performance. Never know what you’re gonna get from Cueto! All-time postseason clunker, or all-time World Series great? How about both, in back-to-back starts? I’ll tell you who the most boring pitcher in baseball is — that Clayton Kershaw. Yawn. Where’s the fun in watching a guy who’s just awesome every time out? (Crosses “Call Clayton Kershaw boring” off outline.) Last, but certainly not least: he has four different deliveries! Four! And one of them is called “The Rocking Chair”! If anybody else strays from their typical mechanics by even a hair, they have to sit down with their pitching coach the next day to fix it and someone on the internet writes 1,000 words on how that pitcher is now broken. Cueto does this on purpose!

And it’s awesome. So, of course it needs to be broken down. It’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and I figure there’s no better time than now, after Cueto just threw the first World Series complete game by an AL pitcher since Jack Morris in ’91, and might not even pitch again this year, what with the Royals already being up 2-0 in the series.

So, after the conclusion of last night’s game, I went back and charted all of Cueto’s deliveries in a spreadsheet alongside the PITCHf/x data provided by BrooksBaseball. Jeff Passan has named the deliveries: the Tiant, the Quick Pitch, the Rocking Chair and the Traditional (this essentially just means he’s in the stretch).

First, the most basic numbers. Usage:

• Quick Pitch: 48%
• Tiant: 25%
• Rocking Chair: 7%
• Traditional: 20%

The Johnny Cueto motion you’re used to is the Tiant. That’s the one he came up using in Cincinnati, where he turns his back to the hitter before delivering. Seems that’s been usurped as the go-to delivery by the Quick Pitch. The pitches, themselves, don’t seem to change much, between the two. The fastball went 93.4 with the Quick Pitch, and 93.7 with the Tiant. With the Quick Pitch, the four-seam had a bit more rise, and the sinker a bit more sink. The changeup was more fade-heavy out of the Quick Pitch, and more drop-heavy out of the Tiant. Surely, in such small samples, the differences could be a product of noise. It’s also not hard to imagine the different deliveries resulting in differently shaped pitches.

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The last week of October is here; the clocks are about to be turned back, autumn is in full swing, and there are two teams left standing in pursuit of the World Series title. This week, we’re taking a look at the defining characteristics that have delivered the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals to the brink of the game’s ultimate goals. Earlier this week, we discussed the Mets. Today, it’s the American League champion Royals.

In 2014, the Royals snuck up on a lot of people, including myself. This year, not so much. They have once again ridden their own unique formula — a combination of contact hitting, speed, defense and a deep, flame-throwing bullpen — to the Fall Classic. While the Mets were a second-half phenomenon, the Royals sat at the front of the AL Central pack all season. The only doubt was whether they would earn home-field advantage throughout the AL playoffs, which they did with a productive final weekend of the regular season.

The postseason has been a little dicier. The Astros appeared to have them pinned in the ALDS, only to watch the Royals escape with a late Game Four rally. The ALCS versus the Blue Jays wasn’t quite as eventful, though the Royals needed to survive a classic Game Six at home to finally put away the Blue Jays. They unleashed a bit more of their blue magic in Game One of the World Series, winning an instant classic that featured everything from leadoff inside-the-park homers to Bartolo Colon–Chris Young relief pitching duels, to you name it. What are some of the distinguishing characteristics that have the delivered the Royals to this moment?

Their Position Players Show Up for Work
About a year ago, in this space, and a couple months back at ESPN Insider, I examined the continuity and dependability of the Royals’ position player corps. In 2014, they became only the sixth AL playoff team in the divisional era to return eight or nine of their position player regulars from the previous season. Last season, 84.9% of the Royals’ total plate appearances were recorded by their nine regulars, fourth highest among that group of six clubs.

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I don’t blame you if you’re getting tired of the the-Royals-make-a-lot-of-contact stuff. It’s the core of most of the analysis being done right now, but in fairness, it’s the core because the Royals make a lot of contact. It’s arguably their most outstanding skill, which is what makes them such an intriguing match-up for the Mets. And they were up to their usual business again Wednesday. You knew about it, because it was all over Twitter, and it was all over the broadcast, and also you have eyes. Jacob deGrom is the ace of the Mets, and in some other years he’d be the ace of the National League. He tends to be a strikeout machine, yet in Game 2 he assembled but two strikeouts before getting shut off. Mets relievers combined for one more. All the Mets, total, generated six swings and misses, and if you look just at deGrom, here’s his 2015 postseason swinging-strike log:

• October 9: 21 whiffs
• October 15: 14
• October 20: 18
• October 28: 3

You don’t need to conduct any deep level of analysis to know that last point stands out. Given just those bullet points, you’d figure something happened on October 28. With three swinging strikes, deGrom equaled his career low, and in no other starts did he finish with fewer than six. Based on the evidence, the Royals royaled. This is precisely why the Royals have been viewed as a legitimate threat. They could negate the Mets’ greatest strength.

So, as far as the contact, there was a question during and after the game — was it the pitchers, or was it the hitters? Were the Royals doing a particularly good job of taking the bat to the ball, or were the Mets doing something a little sloppy? Let me let you cheat: both. The answer is both. The answer is pretty much always both. But, for sure, the Mets weren’t executing. Beginning — but not ending — with deGrom, the Mets weren’t actually throwing the Royals swing-and-miss pitches.

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