The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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Unlike their ALCS opponents, the New York Yankees aren’t widely known for being at the forefront of analytics. According to their longtime general manager, they should be. When I asked Brian Cashman about the team’s not-as-geeky-as-the-Astros reputation, his response was, “I would put our analytics in the top five in all sports.”

Regardless of where they rank, any suggestion that Cashman’s club isn’t cutting edge would qualify as folly. Under the direction of assistant general manager Mike Fishman — his previous title was director of quantitative analytics — their reliance on data has grown exponentially over the last decade.

“It started as a department of one — Mike was the director and the staff — and now it’s a major part of our operation,” said Cashman. “And it should be. This is the New York Yankees, and we want to use every tool in the toolbox. One of those important tools is analytics.”

Joe Girardi doesn’t disagree. As a a matter of fact, the Yankees skipper seemed almost taken aback when I asked the following question at Tuesday’s pre-game press conference:

The Astros are known as a team that incorporates analytics in their decision-making process pretty heavily. Your team isn’t really seen that way. Should you be?

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When Charlie Morton was a Pirate and this author a beat reporter covering Pittsburgh’s ball club, I became familiar with Morton through a number of conversations.

He was one of the first players I encountered who discussed having employed PITCHf/x data to better understand his performance, to move away from the box score as a means of evaluation. He would have phone calls with his father during which they discussed the velocity and movement from his appearances as recorded by pitch-tracking technology. Morton struggled mightily at times early in his career with Pittsburgh and Atlanta before that, but not all of it was his fault. He was one of the first pitchers with whom I spoke who wanted to better understand how to separate his own performance from those other variables that lead to run-prevention and -allowance. He wanted to know how he could better control what he could control. Data helped keep Morton sane.

This is pertinent today, because we might not see a better performance lead to a poorer pitching line this postseason than the performance and line produced by Morton on Monday night.

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The Astros announced last night that Lance McCullers will take the ball in today’s Game 4 of the ALCS. When asked why he chose McCullers over Brad Peacock, A.J. Hinch responded with a simple answer: “He’s really good.”

McCullers certainly has been really good at times, and he was one of the AL’s best pitchers in the first half of the season, running a 3.05 ERA/2.74 FIP/2.74 xFIP before the All-Star break. But back problems put him on the DL a few times in the second half, and when he did pitch, he wasn’t particularly effective, running an 8.23 ERA/4.29 FIP/4.58 xFIP. At the end of July, I noted that the Astros had a Lance McCullers problem, and they never really got it fixed.

If the Astros were convinced that McCullers was healthy and back to his first-half form, they would have started him in the ALDS. Instead, they went with Peacock as their 4th starter in that series, and used McCullers in relief when that didn’t go well. So why are they showing confidence today in a guy who hasn’t gotten hitters out regularly in several months?

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I have a handful of rules I try to abide as an everyday writer. For example, I try not to pick favorites. My job isn’t to have any favorites. My job is to try to be as objective as possible. I also think it’s vitally important to not tell people how they ought to feel. This is sports. You’re in it for your own reasons. It’s not my business to dictate how you consume your chosen form of entertainment. You should get from baseball whatever you want to get. You should feel about baseball however you want to feel.

That being said, now I’m going to cross myself. I’m going to violate one of my own rules. Let’s focus on Todd Frazier’s early three-run homer in Monday’s Game 3. The internet response was fairly consistent: joke of a stadium, and/or the ball is juiced. The response was uniformly derisive. I get it, because I felt the same way! But I’ve come all the way around, and I’d like to encourage you to do the same, if you can. That wasn’t a home run to be mocked. That was a home run to be celebrated. For Todd Frazier, it was a good piece of hitting.

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My wife and I were driving from the west side of Cleveland to my parents’ place on the east side of the city over the weekend. During a lull in the in-car conversation, I elected to carry out a small-sample experiment.

Before I detail the finer points of that experiment, though, a bit of context. As you’re likely aware, there’s been much discussion about and handwringing over the increasing frequency of the Three True Outcomes in the game, over the decline of balls in play, and, by extension, the greater amounts of downtime between moments of action.

Consider this remarkable nugget from Dan Hirsch:

What we see here is an effect with a number of causes: fewer balls in play, greater stretches of time between pitches, and longer commercial breaks. It took John Lackey about five minutes to throw six pitches on Sunday night.

That’s a remarkable trend, and I think we all understand why the commissioner’s office has been concerned about the dwindling number of balls in play while also wanting to experiment with pitch clocks and pace rules.

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During the Astros’ walk-off win on Saturday, Justin Verlander threw a 124-pitch complete game, which I didn’t think was allowed. Verlander piled up 13 strikeouts, and, of those, nine came on sliders. Verlander threw 39 sliders in all, 30 of which went for strikes, in large part because the Yankees swung at the slider 27 times. Verlander’s always been known for his fastball, and, in Game 2, the heat was there from start to finish, but the slider appeared overwhelming, with the Yankees having absolutely no answer.

This part’s almost obligatory. Let’s watch a couple strikeout sliders, if only just for the memories.

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Corey Knebel has come a long way since I first talked to him four years ago. At the time, the hard-throwing right-hander was wrapping up an Arizona Fall League season, five months after the Detroit Tigers had drafted him 39th overall out of the University of Texas.

Knebel is now 25 years old and coming off a season where he logged 39 saves and a 1.78 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers. In January 2015, the NL Central club acquired him from the Texas Rangers, who’d earlier procured his services from the perpetually-bullpen-deficient Tigers.

According to Knebel. while some things have changed since our 2013 conversation, overs haven’t. By and large, he’s the same guy on the mound.

“I guess I’ve kind of grown into this new role,” the 6’4″ 220-lb. fastball-curveball specialist told me in September. “Other than that, I’ve just tried to perfect two pitches. I like to focus on what I know I can do. My delivery is the exact same — I’m still herky-jerky — although I don’t go from the windup anymore; I’m just straight stretch.”

There has been a velocity jump. Knebel’s heater averaged 97.8 MPH this season, up a few ticks from previous seasons. He didn’t have an explanation for why that is, but he does know one thing — it’s not because of a weighted-ball program. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday’s Notes column led with Alex Bregman talking about how hitting the ball in the air became a priority once he’d signed with the Astros. That approach paid off in spades yesterday. With his team down a run, the 2015 draft pick took a Chris Sale pitch over Fenway Park’s Green Monster to tie the game in the eighth inning. Houston went on to win 5-4 and advance to the ALCS.

When I approached Bregman after the game, his first words were, “How was the launch angle on that?” (I hadn’t looked it up yet, but it was 32 degrees.) Asked if he liked whatever the launch angle was, he smiled and said that he loved it.

Needless to say, the youngster was in seventh heaven.

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