After the way that Game 5 played out, I knew I had to give this some breathing room. There are things you want to talk and read about right after a game is finished, and there are things you want to talk and read about much later on. This is hardly the most important content about the Astros’ tie-breaking victory in their final home game of the season. I just have a question, and I’d love to see how you respond. I’ve been thinking about this since before I fell asleep.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, Sunday night, Carlos Correa faced Brandon Morrow and knocked a two-run homer out to left field. The Astros went ahead 11-8. In the top of the ninth inning, Yasiel Puig faced Chris Devenski and knocked a two-run homer out to left field. The Dodgers tightened the gap to 12-11. By the rules, both home runs were legitimate. There’s no question that the balls left the yard on the fly. Live by the Crawford Boxes, and die by the Crawford Boxes. Correa and Puig both hit two-run home runs. They were significant. But, in your own personal opinion, which home run was worse?

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No one ever wants to have to talk about the strike zone. If the zone is called well, there’s nothing to discuss; if it isn’t, that’s a problem, but it’s all deeply unfulfilling. Fans don’t want to be helped by the strike zone, because it takes something away from a team’s own achievements. And fans don’t want to be hurt by the strike zone, because it leaves them feeling cheated. Every baseball fan everywhere acknowledges that the game involves a certain human element, but we all prefer to think the games are decided by the players, and by the players alone. Introducing a third party tends to make people upset.

Among the great reliefs of Game 5 is that it won’t be remembered for home-plate umpire Bill Miller. The game packed in enough astonishing action that there are more interesting and important points to make besides the zone having been so weird. Miller made some strange calls, but every pitcher was also entirely gassed, and balls were flying over the fence. Alex Bregman won the game with a walk-off single. Although the zone was pitcher-friendly, there were still 11 total walks and 25 total runs. The lingering image isn’t one of a hitter shaking his head.

Yet the obnoxious reality is that the zone was a factor. The zone is always a factor, because every game changes with every individual pitch. On Sunday, some pitches were called unlike how they usually are. The zone is woven in, inextricable, a part of the larger game story. We’d prefer not to think about it, but blissful ignorance doesn’t acknowledge all that went on.

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The ball is going faster in both directions these days. Velocities are up, exit velocities are up, and the players are openly discussing the changed nature of the ball. Slippery balls are maybe flattening out sliders this World Series. Are they, though? We can look at what’s happening now, and then we can also compare movement across different times in baseball’s rapidly changing environment as a comparison.

Turns out, movement is the product of a complicated relationship between the pitcher’s mechanics, the seams on the baseball, and how fast the ball is going. (Who would’ve guessed? Pitching is complicated.) Every ball is also slightly different — it’s put together by humans from the hide of a cow, after all — but we’ll never truly know exactly how different this World Series ball really is.

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HOUSTON — Game 5 resided at an extreme pole along the baseball entertainment spectrum. It’s not a game you want to experience every night, but it’s something about which we’ll be talking and of which we’ll be trying to make sense for a while. At least until Game 6.

That said, the aesthetic appeal of the game can certainly be debated: the way fly balls were leaving Minute Maid Park gave the night something of a College World Series feel during its peak-offense period. If you recall, that was an environment that forced the college game to make adjustments to its bats and balls to suppress run scoring, to provide sanity.

One of the overriding themes of the sport this season is the speed at which it has changed, how extreme it has become so quickly. The game continues to evolve even in the postseason, where the average launch angle is 11.9 degrees — up a fraction of a degree from the 11.8 mark during this year’s regular season and 10.8 degrees in 2015 regular season. The average air ball is traveling 291 feet, up from 287 feet in the regular season.

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For most of this postseason, the primary story tying all these disparate series together has been the significant change in the way pitchers are deployed. After Andrew Miller’s dominance last October, aggressive bullpen usage has become the norm. The tone was set in the very first Wild Card game, when Luis Severino got one out but the Yankees advanced anyway, thanks to 8.2 dominant innings from their relief corps.

But now, here we are at the end of the month, and the two bullpens left standing combined to give up 15 runs last night. To be fair, the two starters combined to give up 10 runs, so they didn’t exactly impress either, but neither bullpen had any ability to hold any kind of lead last night. And the players entrusted with those opportunities just looked exhausted.

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I don’t know exactly what it is we just watched. From almost the very first pitch, Game 5 was unrelenting, and it didn’t let up for five hours and seventeen minutes. Even now, I’m afraid it might not be finished — if I turn the feed back on, the Astros and Dodgers might be in the 81st inning. It doesn’t feel right that the game is completed. It also very much needed to end, because it was becoming a matter of survival. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

I’m still not entirely sure that was a good baseball game, in one sense of the word. It was driven by homers, some of them silly, and I wouldn’t call the pitching quite sharp. Each of the bullpens was an absolute nightmare, after the starters threw a combined 8.1 innings, and the overall aesthetics left something to be desired. It wasn’t a game marked by its crispness. The only thing that stopped it from being the longest-ever nine-inning baseball game is that it had to progress to the tenth. The allotted nine innings weren’t enough. They should’ve been enough.

But they weren’t enough, and for that reason, and for so many others, that was a good baseball game, in the other and more obvious sense of the word. Every baseball game asks two things: that you play, and that you play to the end. Every game has a winner, and every game has a loser, and as with any such competition, the drama’s a product of probability swings. Game 5 had more than almost any other World Series game on record. On several occasions, it seemed like it was over. The winning run scored on the game’s final pitch, which was pitch number 417. Hopes were dashed, over and over and over again, as the World Series went completely off-script. That was a contest that spiraled out of control.

As with Game 2, it’s an impossible assignment to do the game justice through writing. We are mostly just fortunate that this series has been so evenly matched. But Alex Bregman won it with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. Here are the times the game seemed over before that.

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Source: FanGraphs

One of the most insane baseball games anyone has ever seen. We will have attempts at analysis later. Now, just amazement.

HOUSTON — The investigative team of Ben Lindbergh, Rob Arthur and Alan Nathan might have to get back to work. Not only has the ball played differently since 2015 when it became livelier, now the World Series ball is playing differently players told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci.

“Lance McCullers took the blindfold test in the bullpen,” said Charlie Morton, Houston’s Game 4 starter, referring to another Astros pitcher. “He could tell which ball was which with his eyes closed. It’s that different.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the top of the fifth inning of Saturday’s Game 4, Cody Bellinger faced Charlie Morton and struck out. This was nothing too terribly weird — for a good long while, Morton was dominant, and the Dodgers could hardly muster a threat. Bellinger was just another hitter put away. Yet the strikeout meant Bellinger was 0-for-13 in the World Series, with eight whiffs. It’s true that, in circumstances like these, people can make far too much of small-sample underperformance. It’s also true that, in circumstances like these, players can get into their own heads. Bellinger has never played under any greater pressure. It almost wouldn’t be possible.

In the top of the seventh inning, Bellinger drilled a one-out double, and he scored the tying run on Logan Forsythe’s two-out single. Later, in the top of the ninth inning, Bellinger drilled a tie-breaking double, scoring Corey Seager with nobody out. The inning got only larger from there, and the Dodgers knotted the series. If Bellinger didn’t have the team’s two biggest hits, he had two of the top three or four.

But let’s quickly go back to the strikeout. The count was 1-and-2, and Morton came after Bellinger with an inside breaking ball. Bellinger attempted a mighty swing.

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Following the final game of the regular season, Jose Altuve told a small group of reporters that once October rolls around, “everybody starts with zero wins and zero losses, and everybody’s average is zero.”

Nearly a month later, the Astros are even-steven with the Dodgers in the World Series and Altuve’s average (.322) is farther above zero than anyone’s in the postseason (minimum 20 at bats). That’s hardly a surprise. The 27-year-old second baseman captured his third American League batting title this year, hitting a career high .346. He doesn’t consider it his biggest personal accomplishment to date.

“That would be the Silver Slugger,” Altuve told the scribes, citing an honor he was awarded last year. “With the batting title, they only care if you hit .300/.320, but the Silver Slugger is all around — doubles, triples, home runs — and I’m 5’ 5” and 160 pounds.”

His numbers have been anything but Lilliputian. Over the past four seasons, the Venezuelan spark plug has a .334/.384/.496 slash line and 254 extra-base hits. And while he leads MLB in one-base hits over that same period, it’s not as though singles are a bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »