Relative to the rest of the league, Ned Yost’s bunting isn’t exactly out of control. However, he does seem rather fond of the strategy, so he pulls it out pretty often, and it’s a big part of how he’s labeled online. The Royals bunted and ran like crazy people in the wild-card playoff against Oakland, and in Wednesday’s Game 4 against the Orioles, Lorenzo Cain sac bunted in the first inning, with nobody out, as the third hitter in the Kansas City lineup, facing Miguel Gonzalez. The Royals did score twice in the inning, but it was taken to be another bit of good Royals luck, and the bunt predictably drew its critics. If nothing else, it looked weird. Cain, again, was batted third, by his own manager.

But there’s a funny thing about Ned Yost’s sacrifice bunts. This goes beyond just the wild-card playoff bunts mostly being defensible. In theory, a sacrifice bunt is either successful or unsuccessful. Even if successful, it trades an out for a base or two. But bunts, as you know, have a whole range of potential outcomes. The Giants, just Tuesday, won on a walk-off sac bunt attempt. 2014 Ned Yost has called for a bunch of sacrifice bunt attempts, and overall, they’ve actually been good for the team.

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I’m writing this underneath a framed ESPN magazine cover from the 2010 baseball preview. The cover features Cliff Lee, Felix Hernandez, and Ichiro Suzuki, and right up top are these words: “Outs are in — and so are the Mariners”. It’s funny now, and it was given to me half as a joke, because of course the 2010 Seattle Mariners were a total catastrophe. But I remember the feeling, the state of things back then. The 2009 Mariners had set a UZR record, and then the front office brought in Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman. The goal was to win by prevention, and the prevention was there, but what happened was the Mariners prevented their own scoring too and lost 101 times. Things changed rapidly for the organization. There was a missed opportunity to have defense front and center on a national stage.

We’ve never been real shy about WAR, and as such, we’ve never been real shy about the more advanced defensive metrics. FanGraphs didn’t exactly invent the concept of baseball players with good gloves, but statheads have argued for years that defensive players deserve more respect, that a guy can be incredibly valuable because of what he does in the field, instead of the box. Naturally, there’s been resistance, because hitting is a lot more visible, and nothing in the field is as valuable as a home run. And, absolutely, offensive value does have a higher ceiling than defensive value, just because of the limited opportunities. But defense, as a concept, needed a mascot. It needed a representation that would allow more people to understand how significant it can really be. Defense needed a team like the Royals.

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When the Royals and Orioles resume their rain-interrupted ALCS tonight in Kansas City, the Royals are going to use their fifth-best starting pitcher, and on the surface this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not that Yordano Ventura was going to pitch on two days rest, or that James Shields was likely to go on three days rest, but with Jason Vargas and Danny Duffy around, Ned Yost has options. Instead, he’s going with Jeremy Guthrie, who hasn’t pitched since Sept. 26, a full 17 days of rest. Though he’s 35 years old, Guthrie has never thrown a pitch in a postseason game, so the often-seen “but playoff-tested” excuse doesn’t work here.

When we say “fifth starter,” that’s based entirely on performance. Of the five regular Kansas City starters, Guthrie’s ERA this year was the worst. His FIP was the worst. His WAR, despite throwing the second-most innings, was the worst. Over the last five years, his FIP is 215th of 228 qualified pitchers, basically making him Randy Wolf with fewer injuries. Just two seasons ago, he was getting traded straight-up for Jonathan Sanchez after a brutal half-season in Colorado. Now, he’s starting a playoff game, one of the most important games for his franchise in years.

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Three and a half months ago, I wrote about Alex Gordon’s arm. Among regular outfielders, Gordon has one of the very best throwing arms in baseball, and that’s allowed him to pile up valuable runner-killing assists. Toward the end of June, I noticed that Gordon’s assists were down, but that his arm rating was still up high. The reason: deterrence. To that point, nobody had really been willing to challenge Gordon. While he was creating fewer outs, he was saving a ton of bases, and the value there is very much real.

Now, deterrence is a difficult thing to observe in real-time. Good speed, you can observe on a lot of plays. The same goes for good instincts and route-running, and on a decently frequent basis you can see a guy’s throwing arm at work. But deterrence requires certain circumstances, and you have to be looking for it. At the end of the season, I don’t think you have a “feel” for which outfielders deter runners the most, like you might have a feel for other things. But if you want to talk about Gordon, then we can just talk about Saturday. Because Alex Gordon stopped a runner from attempting to score, late in a 4-4 game.

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If you were to ask yourself, “Who are the two most dominant bullpen weapons – that aren’t closers – in the MLB?” the next logical step would be to ask yourself, “Well, how could I find out?”

One way you could find out is to head over to the FanGraphs leaderboards and export a custom leaderboard to Excel with the saves, FIP-WAR and RA9-WAR totals of all the qualified relievers in baseball this season. Then, you could remove all the players with more than 10 saves and sort the ones that are left by a 50/50 split of the two WAR totals.

Guess what? You don’t have to think or do any of that because that’s exactly what I already did. Here’s the top 10:
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Alex Gordon, as we know him now, is a top-five outfielder on a team surging in the playoffs. We can’t forget the Alex Gordons who came before, though. Because it was those struggles that minted the current version. In terms of mindset and mechanics, we wouldn’t have today’s Gordon without yesterday’s. And we might be seeing some of the lessons Gordon learned in play with his younger teammates, too.

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Over 162 games, which is the full season, the Royals were the best base-stealing team in baseball, and it was all worth to them about a dozen runs. That is not very many runs, unless they were to all happen in one or two games, and there’s a reason we don’t talk about stolen bases much during the year. They’re just such a minor factor, of far less significance than, say, playing good defense, or hitting for power. So maybe now you think the Royals’ running game is getting too much attention. They went nuts in one game, but that’s it. I’ve personally never before devoted this much attention to a running game, but here I am, putting together another post. I’m deeply interested in the way the Orioles’ ALCS roster matches up against how the Royals intend to score runs.

The matchups are a little thing, but we’re so bad at predicting the big things in a short series I might as well try something else. The Orioles released their 25-man roster, and while nothing came as a shocker, there is one notable swap — Ubaldo Jimenez will not participate. Brian Matusz will particpate, or at least he’ll be available to do so. The simple explanation is that Matusz is left-handed, and the Royals’ lineup is fairly left-handed, so Matusz fills a greater need. That’s all true, but there’s also a little more. The Royals want to get on base and run. They could have some difficulty doing both.

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If there is one thing we have learned from the American League teams this postseason, it’s that defense and baserunning really are very important. No one person has better exemplified this than Royals outfielder Jarrod Dyson. You’ve already read Jeff’s article on how Dyson stole perhaps the biggest base since Dave Roberts in 2004. Eventually though, this postseason run for the Royals is going to end. Whether that is in four games or 14 games is not yet certain, but when it does end, the Royals will need to make a decision as to what they are going to do with Dyson next season. They should let him play.

Over the past two seasons, there have only been 29 outfielders in baseball more valuable than Dyson. Of those 29, only one of them had as few plate appearances as did Dyson. Most of them have double the plate appearances, and some have 2.5 times Dyson’s 529 PAs. Dyson is particularly adept afield. Over the past two seasons, only three outfielders have been worth more defensively per our Def statistic, and only 15 position players in general.

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Billy Butler’s nickname is Country Breakfast. You know that — you’ve known that for years — but at this point, the connection’s automatic, and you probably don’t really think about it. This time, think about it. I don’t actually know why he’s nicknamed Country Breakfast, but it seems to be ever so fitting. If you think about whatever a country breakfast is, and if you think about the people likely to be eating it, you imagine a guy who looks like Billy Butler, a guy who doesn’t have plans to be active the rest of the day. Billy Butler’s all gravy and pig with a .300 average, and that’s an easy sort of player to fall in love with as long as you’ve got pinch-runners at the ready.

Billy Butler is slow. Not just relatively slow, among professional athletes — he is a slow man, when he’s running. The good news is he’s not supposed to be fast. The bad news is he’s slow. Since 2009, Butler’s posted six of the 80 worst baserunning seasons in baseball. This year he was on first base for 31 singles, and one time did he make it to third. About 10% of the time he took an extra base, against a league average of 40%. Current Fan Scouting Report results give Butler a 17/100 in sprint speed. This is consistent with his 18 from previous years. Jesus Montero also received a sprint rating of 18, and the Mariners hired a man to spend the offseason teaching him how to move his legs and arms. According to you guys, Billy Butler runs as fast as a player who didn’t know how to run. I could go on longer than this, but, this paragraph is your background.

And so on Sunday, in Game 3 of the ALDS, Billy Butler stole second base in the playoffs. It wasn’t the play that did the Angels in — truthfully, it wasn’t a play that really mattered — but it spoke to the confidence with which the Royals were plowing forward. The man on the mound, by the way, was a lefty.

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Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. You might damn well be sick of reading about this. I couldn’t even blame you, but you have to understand the nugget that we’re sitting on, here. It’s unusual that we know about such a stark vulnerability. It also happens to belong to the best player in baseball, a player we’ve written so many thousands of words about here before, and that player is in the playoffs now, looking to lead his team to a World Series. Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. The report’s been known for months, but to me it’s still endlessly fascinating to see how pitchers and teams make use of the information. This trend is pretty clear — the table below shows Trout’s month-by-month rates of high fastballs seen:

If we’ve been able to identify something, you’d better believe Major League Baseball has been able to identify that something, so Trout in the second half saw more high fastballs than anybody else, by a few percentage points. And what happened? Well, Trout remained pretty great, but after leading baseball in the first half with a 186 wRC+, second-half Trout dropped to 141, even with Jose Altuve. His walks went down and his strikeouts went up, and while he was seeing about 41% high fastballs, that means he was seeing 59% non-high-fastballs. That’s where Trout feasted. He’s going to win the league MVP, and he deserves it.

Thursday night, Trout played in the playoffs, as the Angels and Royals kicked off their ALDS. Starting for Kansas City was Jason Vargas, and that raised an interesting question. All right, pitch Trout high and hard. But what if you don’t have good high, hard stuff? What if you’re, say, Jason Vargas? One wondered how the Royals would approach Trout, and, now that we look back, the Royals approached Trout like the numbers say you should approach Trout. I have to note that Sam Miller has already written about this, very well, but he cheated by writing at night like some kind of hard and disciplined worker. It’s like, work during work hours, right? Let’s pretend like Miller didn’t beat me to the punch, and review Trout’s five trips to the plate. He finished 0-for-4 with a walk, by the way. The Royals won!

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