In terms of significant, game-changing moments, no World Series game in history compares to Wednesday night’s epic between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros. In the sixth inning, Corey Seager hit a two-run homer off of Justin Verlander to break a 1-1 tie. In the top of the ninth, Marwin Gonzalez hit a solo shot to tie the game 3-3. In the 10th, Jose Altuve broke the tie with a solo shot. In the bottom half of that same inning, Enrique Hernandez’s RBI single tied the game, and then in the top of the 11th, George Springer hit a two-run homer that would put the Astros up for good. Each of those five plays increased the scoring club’s chances victory by 25% according to Win Probability Added. That’s never happened before in a World Series game.

Since 2002, only one in three games have produced plays with at least one play with a WPA of .25 or greater. To put that in greater context, consider: there have been only 18 plays total this posteason that produced a WPA of .25 or greater.  Here they are, in order of impact on win probability:

Of the eight biggest plays in the postseason this year, four occurred in Game 2. Hernandez’s single in a losing effort produced the highest WPA of any play in this postseason.

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A recent Sunday Notes column published here featured the title Charlie Morton Is Different (and Better). While those words referred to his pitching identity, they could just as easily refer to his personality. The 33-year-old right-hander is about as far away from Nuke LaLoosh as you can get. Thoughtful and articulate, he is anything but a cliche-spouting dumb jock.

His career has been a roller coaster. Prior to this year’s breakout with the Houston Astros, Morton had compiled a record of 46-71 and a 4.54 ERA in nine up-and-down seasons with the Braves, Pirates, and Phillies. Injuries played a big role in the inconsistencies. Along the way Morton had multiple surgeries, including Tommy John, and repairs to both hips.

And then there’s his psyche. Morton has been guilty of getting into his own head, which has resulted in frustration and a tendency to get “too finicky about things like my mechanics and my approach.” Admittedly not serious enough in his early years of pro ball, he eventually found himself taking things too seriously for his own good.

An integral part of the Astros’ win over the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS, Morton is scheduled to start Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday. He talked about his evolving approach to the game — and to life — at the conclusion of the regular season.

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Charlie Morton: “Between injuries and not pitching well, and getting older… your perspective changes. You try to enjoy your time. You try to enjoy the cities you go to, you try to enjoy your teammates, you try to finish up your last few years on a high note.

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George Springer hit the game-winning home run last night, and it was — well, look, these aren’t my words. I’ll let someone else express it.

George Springer just hit the biggest HR in Astros history.

— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) October 26, 2017

It held up. Unlike previous home runs, it held up, and the Astros won 7-6. And for Springer, it was a game of redemption, because he’d entered in a slump. The playoffs make it hard to figure out a player’s trajectory — when they began, Springer went 7-for-17 against the Red Sox. But he was 3-for-26 against the Yankees, and in Game 1 against the Dodgers, Springer was fitted for a golden sombrero. Springer was at least perceived to be in a rut, and one could argue he might’ve been over-swinging. Now, Springer often swings hard, but here’s a selection from his four Game 1 at-bats.

Fast-forward to Game 2’s 11th inning. This is all I really want to show you. Springer came up with a man on base, and the first two pitches he saw from Brandon McCarthy were balls. Then he saw the same pitch two times in a row. McCarthy threw sliders, sliders that were probably supposed to be further away than they were. But, in any case, at 2-and-0 and 2-and-1, McCarthy threw a couple of low sliders, and Springer swung at them both. Here are the locations, in case you thought I was exaggerating.

Same pitch. Two swings. The first one was a foul ball. The second one led to the decisive line-drive dinger. Let’s look at those swings. Here’s the first!

And here’s the second.

Of course, the swings look similar — hitters have their own hitting mechanics, just as pitchers have their own pitching mechanics. But the follow-through can be a reliable tell, and so, here’s the first, shown as a screenshot.

That’s Springer with, I don’t know, the full wrap. Springer has been a hard swinger since before he even emerged in the major leagues, so there’s nothing astonishing about seeing him swing with such force. But contrast that picture with the next one. Here’s the aftermath of Springer’s second swing at the same low-middle slider.

At 2-and-0, Springer tried to beat the crap out of the ball. At 2-and-1, he cut down on his swing and tried to go back up the middle. The count was obviously different, but it’s not like this was Springer’s two-strike approach, because he wasn’t there yet. You see in the upper image that Springer’s shoulders are completely rotated, and his lower body is turned to face left field. In the lower image, Springer’s lower body is turned more toward center-left, and his shoulders are stopped short of a full rotation. It’s not like Springer was just trying to slap at the pitch — slap swings don’t go for home runs to that area. But, between pitches, Springer changed his mindset, and took a different swing at the same pitch. The twist is that Springer cut down on his swing and wound up with the best possible result. That’s baseball in 2017 for you.

It’s not often baseball gives you virtually identical consecutive pitches. It makes for a convenient comparison, especially when you don’t have a two-strike count involved. George Springer came into the game in a slump, his powerful whack having failed to deliver its usual results. In extra innings, he cut down on that power a little bit. The ball sailed out of the yard. Funny sport.

Tony Kemp had barely started his professional career when we ran a Q&A with him in July 2013. Just a month earlier, the 5-foot-6 second baseman had been drafted in the fifth round out of Vanderbilt University. With his position, physical stature, and bat-to-ball skills in mind, the piece was titled Tony Kemp, the Astros Next Altuve.

Four years later, he is well established at the minor-league level and essentially blocked in Houston. Kemp has slashed .309/.368/.423 in 1,164 Triple-A plate appearances, but when your comp is collecting batting titles, cups of coffee are about all you can ask for. Altuve’s understudy has logged just 175 plate appearances over parts of two big-league seasons.

A more extended opportunity seems inevitable. Whether it comes with the Astros or elsewhere, Kemp will have more than his raw ability to thank. The 25-year-old infielder has learned a lot since joining the organization, most notably how to consistently square up baseballs. In short, he’s learned how to hit the Astros way.

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Tony Kemp on evolving as a hitter: “Man, a lot has changed for me [since entering pro ball]. How my swing has kind of come to fruition, how I’ve adjusted to each level and what needed to happen — control the strike zone, get my strikeout rate down and my on-base percentage up, hit for a little more power… being able to do those things over the last four years has been something special.

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The simplest, fundamental truth about closers is that none of them are perfect. Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith, Craig Kimbrel — they all blow saves, and they all take losses. Give them enough time and the bad outings will even pile up. It was Rivera who took the loss in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. Maybe the best playoff pitcher in history took one of the most devastating losses in memory. Baseball perfection is on a relative scale. All that baseball actually guarantees is that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it’ll piss everyone off. No one is safe from the baseball menace.

No closers are perfect. No closer ever has been perfect, and no closer ever will be perfect. But there’s another fundamental truth about the position. By public perception, closers are binary, black and white. There are the closers — the overwhelming majority of them included — who’ll just never earn trust. The closers who make fans roll their eyes and say “here we go again” when they come in and throw their first ball. Fans have no patience with closers. There’s little tolerance for hittability or wildness. In that sense, it can be a terrible job. There’s limited praise, and limitless blame.

Then there’s the lucky few. It’s a rare breed, but there are closers who’re considered automatic. Closers you don’t even feel you have to watch that intently, because success is a foregone conclusion. Why closely watch a baseball game that’s already over? These closers have all blown saves, each and every one of them, but they retain the perception of invulnerability. Maybe it’s more of an illusion, but one can’t deny its existence.

Kenley Jansen is one of those invulnerable closers. In the same way that Rivera was one of those invulnerable closers, Jansen comes in and basically throws one pitch, and after five or ten or fifteen of them, he gets to go change his clothes. Kenley Jansen is effectively bulletproof. Wednesday night, Kenley Jansen blew a save.

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Wednesday night had just about everything you could want in a baseball game. Game 2 is on the list, somewhere, of greatest World Series games in history.

There were dramatic swings in win probability in the late innings for each the Astros and Dodgers. Some of the game’s greatest stars produced signature moments. There was Yasiel Puig being Yasiel Puig, licking his bat and slamming his glove after nearly completing a five-star catch. There was the bill of Chris Taylor’s cap perhaps saving a run early. There was Justin Verlander returning from the visiting clubhouse to the dugout to implore his team to do something. There was this generation’s Rivera, Kenley Jansen, enduring a rare misstep. There was poor Josh Fields. There was a rare test of roster depth, with Austin Barnes becoming the first player to appear at catcher and second base in a World Series game.

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My father’s an avid tennis player, and there’s this thing he says anytime — or, because he’s a dad, precisely every time — he mis-hits a ball for an accidental winner. “Welp, I paid for the whole racquet,” is what he says. It’s a goofy way of acknowledging some good fortune, of apologizing for having benefited from something other than one’s actual skill.

The Los Angeles Dodgers pay Chris Taylor mostly for what he does with his bat and his glove and legs. But they employ the whole Chris Taylor. And while there was no reason to care about it before last night, one is compelled to acknowledge today that the whole Chris Taylor includes Chris Taylor’s ball cap.

Here’s why that’s relevant. With one out, runners on first and third, and the scored tied at 0-0, Houston’s Alex Bregman hit a liner to center field. What happened next actually kinda did shock everyone.

For those who haven’t fully pivoted to video, the footage above depicts center fielder Chris Taylor diving for Bregman’s liner, missing Bregman’s liner, and then somehow deflecting Bregman’s liner to left fielder Joc Pederson by means of his hat. While the base hit allowed Josh Reddick to score from third, the ricochet to Pederson forced George Springer to stop at second, limiting Bregman to a single. Rich Hill would strike out the next two batters. No further runs would score.

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Well, that was one of the craziest baseball games anyone has ever seen. A would-be triple that hit the bill of Chris Taylor’s cap and then bounced right to Joc Pederson, a pickoff at second base that looked like Laz Diaz got challenged to an impromptu game of dodgeball, and finally, an extra inning home run derby led to a 7-6 Astros victory, tying the series at one game apiece. If we get any more baseball games like that one, this series will be a classic.

But before most of those crazy things happened, Dave Roberts made a decision that seemingly set the wheels in motion. In the top of the fifth inning, the Dodgers’ manager summoned Kenta Maeda from the bullpen to take over for Rich Hill.

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This World Series has been dubbed a clash of analytical titans. Whatever the outcome, it would appear already to be a victory for the movement and an argument for greater investment in decision-science departments.

The Dodgers have one of the largest research departments in the game — perhaps the largest, though there isn’t a publicly available database for full accounting. The Astros have also benefited greatly from analytics, as we know. It’s possible that the two organizations have distanced themselves from much of the pack in a sport where every team has some sort of investment in statistically based R&D.

Nor is this development lost on the players. Consider left-hander Tony Watson’s comments from a recent piece by Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register.

“Just the sheer numbers as far as the bodies, the staff that is analytically-driven,” says Dodgers reliever Tony Watson who spent 6-1/2 seasons with the analytically-open Pittsburgh Pirates before joining the Dodgers this summer. “Then I later found out it’s the largest R & D in baseball. … Coming from Pittsburgh, it’s definitely bigger. That’s the focus. And it works. The numbers don’t lie.”

The Pirates have made a sizable investment in their analytics department. According to Watson, however, it’s overshadowed by the group assembled by Los Angeles. Once a tool for low-revenue teams, it’s become another area where large-market clubs can outspend and outinvest their opponents. It’s a troubling development for the league’s minnows: the richest teams are now also the smartest.

I bring all this up to establish that, if any club is capable of idenitfying the weaknesses and strengths of an opponent, it’s the Dodgers. They know what all the Astros do well and what they don’t.

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Last year’s World Series featured a true face-off between big and small markets, pitting the high-revenue Chicago Cubs against the lower-revenue Cleveland Indians. The difference in each club’s markets materialized in their respective payrolls: Chicago outspent Cleveland by roughly $90 million in 2016. The contrast was stark.

This year’s Series represents a different kind of contrast. Everyone’s aware of the Dodgers’ financial might, of course, but the Astros enjoy a large market, too. And even if that hasn’t been obvious recently, the club’s payrolls from a dozen years ago reflect the club’s spending capacities. Over the last decade, however, the team has executed a massive tank-job and also navigated difficulties with their gigantic television deal. The result? Dramatically lower payrolls. The rebuild has worked, however, and the club’s payroll has nearly doubled in just the last two years. However, that payroll is still in the bottom half of baseball and represents only half of the Dodgers’ expenditures in what is the largest disparity in World Series history.

I would be remiss when discussing the disparity between the two teams not to mention that the gap between the clubs’ payrolls is much more modest when comparing only active rosters. Carl Crawford has been gone from the roster for quite some time, but his $22 million salary is still on the books. Scott Kazmir is hurt. Adrian Gonzalez is in Italy. Those three account for around $60 million in salary alone. A handful of other players are no longer on the team. As a result, the Dodgers’ 25-man World Series roster is earning “only” $143 million. Even with all the money the Dodgers have written off, they still have an active roster that would place them in the top half of MLB payrolls. As for the Astros, their World Series roster comes in at around $115 million.

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