Much has been made of Cleveland’s bullpen usage during the postseason. The attention has been focused primarily on two things: Terry Francona’s willingness to deviate from traditional relief roles, and the lights-out performances of Cody Allen and Andrew Miller.

Not much has been said about the limited looks hitters have been getting against Indians pitchers.

Through seven games, an Indians starter has yet to face an opposing hitter four times in the same game. They’ve faced a hitter three times on just 25 occasions, and 19 of those belong to Corey Kluber. Third-time-through-the-order penalties haven’t been injurious. Red Sox and Blue Jays batters are a combined 3-for-22 with a pair of walks and a hit-by-pitch in their third look. Francona has been masterful at pulling his starters at the right time.

He’s applied a similar approach with his management of Cleveland’s relievers. In Monday’s bullpen game, Francona flip-flopped what has been his postseason convention by using Cody Allen in the seventh, followed by Andrew Miller in a closing role. He had a reason. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, mentioning Aaron Sanchez and “save” in the same sentence might have been regarded as a commentary on the right hander’s potential future in the closer role. After excelling in the bullpen at the end of 2014, Sanchez moved to the rotation in 2015 and put up a 5.21 FIP in 11 starts, before finding himself back in the bullpen, where he was once again quite good. In 2016, the Toronto Blue Jays again put Sanchez in the rotation, unwilling to give up on a 24-year-old potential ace. Sanchez proved doubters, like myself, wrong and rewarded the Blue Jays with that confidence. Now he’s being asked to keep the Blue Jays’ season alive against former Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber.

Sanchez’s stuff jumps out. Half the time, he throws a sinker that averages 95 mph. He complements that pitch with a similarly fast four-seamer. Between the two, Sanchez brings mid- to high-90s heat on three-quarters of all his pitches. That velocity and that usage is perhaps what caused some concern about lasting as a starter. Only Bartolo Colon threw a higher percentage of fastballs this season among qualified starters. Since 2011, only Colon, Justin Masterson, Lance Lynn, and Ross Detwiler have navigated a full season of starting while also using their fastballs with such frequency. To throw a fastball that often, it has to be good — and Sanchez’s is very good.

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Losing is generally not a fun, enjoyable experience. Winning is better, and when you don’t win, sometimes you look for reasons why that coveted win didn’t occur. In baseball, the margin between winning and losing is often very small, and that has certainly been the case in the American League Championship Series: both of the series’ first two games were close, low-scoring affairs won by a Cleveland team that scored a total of runs. While players generally control outcomes, for a high-scoring team like the Toronto Blue Jays to score just one run in two games, the results have been unusual, a little too unusual, per Mike Vorkunov’s twitter account.

I don’t know if I’m lumped in there with “you guys,” but I’m more than happy to discuss the “circumstances” of which Bautista speaks. Bautista’s addressing the strike zone, and he believes that Cleveland pitchers have been getting borderline calls that Toronto’s pitchers haven’t. Let’s work backwards and begin with Saturday’s game. Here’s the strike-zone plot against left-handers hitters for Cleveland and Toronto pitchers care of Brooks Baseball. (View from the catcher’s perspective.)

Green is a called ball and red is a called strike, with Cleveland represented by squares and the Blue Jays represented by triangles. For our purposes here, let’s break things into categories. We can look at missed calls in and out of the strike zone and borderline calls. Based on the typical strike zone, we find two missed calls going against Blue Jays pitchers. For borderline calls, let’s say anything touching the line of the typical strike zone is borderline. By that definition, Cleveland threw three borderline pitches and got two strikes. Toronto threw two borderline pitches and got one strike.

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Things could be going better for the Toronto Blue Jays. The only true “must-win” games are elimination games, but trailing Cleveland two games to none in the ALCS, there’s little doubt that tonight’s Game 3 feels like a must-win game Toronto. Should they lose tonight, all anyone will be able to talk about is how only one MLB team has ever come back to win a series after being down three games to none.

Could the Blue Jays become the second team to make such a comeback? Of course. They strung together a four-game win streak as recently as the Wild Card Game through their ALDS sweep over the Rangers, after all. But, naturally, facing a best-case scenario of four straight elimination games is not the outcome Toronto will be seeking in tonight’s game.

The most obvious aspect of Toronto’s game which needs to improve if they want to win is their offense. In the 18 innings they’ve played against Cleveland thus far, they’ve scored just one run – not exactly an ideal method for winning games. Of course, scoring runs at prodigious rates is something else we just saw Toronto do,what l when they tallied up 22 runs in their three-game ALDS sweep over the Rangers. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision Josh Donaldson or Edwin Encarnacion or another key member of their lineup stepping up to the plate and delivering for Toronto. If they want to win tonight, someone is going to have to push runs across the plate and they aren’t lacking for players who can be that guy.

However, to state the obvious, a two-game stretch of inept offense does not change the fundamental realities of baseball for the Blue Jays. Hitting well isn’t their singular path to getting back into the series. Defense and pitching are just as important as ever. So far, Toronto’s pitching staff has done a tremendous job of keeping Cleveland’s offense in check, yielding just four runs over the two games. There are a multitude of paths to success in a baseball game, but among the simplest is to prevent the other team from scoring. Tonight, they’ll turn to starting pitcher Marcus Stroman in hopes that he’ll become their latest pitcher to keep Cleveland’s offense in check. One of the interesting things to watch tonight will be what Stroman looks like — aside from the diminutive bundle of energy we’ve come to know over the past few seasons — because Stroman is constantly evolving.

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Yesterday, our own Eno Sarris astutely pointed out the advantage that a fastball-heavy pitching staff like the Blue Jays might have against the Indians lineup, who have done the overwhelming majority of their damage on slow stuff and have struggled against heaters. And while I do believe it’s true that, on the whole, Toronto’s fastballing ways could still give the Indians lineup fits, I go thinking about a couple follow-up point that might be important, and that might help mitigate this potential advantage.

Namely, I got to thinking about Marco Estrada, because it’s fun to think about Marco Estrada; Marco Estrada is a fascinatingly unique pitcher. Estrada is set to start Game 1 of the NLCS for Toronto against Cleveland in a few hours and, according to our PITCHf/x run values, Estrada had something like baseball’s 11th-most valuable fastball, right between Robbie Ray and Stephen Strasburg. Strasburg throws 95. Ray throws 94. Makes sense — the best fastballs are usually the fastest fastballs. Not Estrada, though. Estrada’s fastball sits 88. Estrada’s fastball is all about spin, and how it plays off his changeup, and since it’s so different, I got to wondering if maybe Estrada’s elite fastball plays by different rules than the fastballs against which Cleveland struggles.

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Eric Longenhagen is publishing brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, for the moment, the Fall Instructional League. Find all editions here.

As Fall Instructional League winds down here in Arizona, teams have begun playing their games earlier in the day, allowing scouts to double and triple up should they so choose, catching instrux at 9 or 10 am before moving on to the afternoon and night Fall League games. For me yesterday, that meant seeing the Brewers’ and Diamondbacks’ instructional-league teams in the early morning. Of note from that game, the Brewers lined up second-round pick Lucas Erceg at shortstop and shifted Gilbert Lara over to third. Lara’s destiny likely lies at a position other than his usual shortstop — and so, too, does Erceg’s (despite a 70-grade arm) — and this was probably more of a fun experiment or opportunity to let Lara move around than it is earnest developmental news for Erceg, who has looked great throughout instrux but can’t play shortstop.

Luis Alejandro Basabe homered the opposite way during the game. He has more power than his incredibly small frame would otherwise indicate. His double-play partner, Jasrado (Jazz) Chisholm, showed off his precocious defensive ability at shortstop, ranging to his left behind the bag, corralling an odd hop while he simultaneously made contact with second base and then making a strong, mostly accurate throw to first base from an awkward platform. It wasn’t especially pretty but an impressive play nonetheless.

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Earlier this morning, I wrote about the exploitable advantage the Indians’ offense ought to have against Blue Jays pitching in the ALCS, in that Toronto’s been notoriously susceptible to allowing stolen bases this season, while Cleveland’s notoriously successful in stealing bases themselves. And, while it’s not always true that good base-stealers are also good baserunners, it’s the logical line of thinking, and in this particular instance, it’s true.

We host a stat here on FanGraphs called Ultimate Base Running (UBR), which filters out stolen base attempts and focuses just on a player’s ability and efficiency in taking the extra base on hits and tagging up on fly balls. As a team, the Indians rank second in baseball in this measure, behind only the historic Padres. On an individual level, Jose Ramirez was baseball’s best baserunner. Rajai Davis ranked seventh, among 268 batters with at least 300 plate appearances. Jason Kipnis, Tyler Naquin, and Carlos Santana were all soundly above-average, and in fact, Mike Napoli and Chris Gimenez are the only members of Cleveland’s postseason roster that were soundly below-average at taking the extra base.

For more context, the league-average in taking the extra base on a hit is 40%. Cleveland ranked second, successfully taking the extra base on 45% of their hits, when possible. They led baseball in scoring from second on a single, doing so 129 times in 184 opportunities. Ramirez did this 18 times, while taking the extra base in 60% of his opportunities. Francisco Lindor scored from second on a single 17 times. There’s either speed, baserunning instincts, or a combination of both, all throughout Cleveland’s lineup.

This is simply one of the tents of this Cleveland team. Been that way all season. Nothing new here. Like the stolen bases, it only becomes interesting in the context of the upcoming series when you consider the opponent.

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The starting pitching staff of the Toronto Blue Jays possesses an inherent advantage over the lineup of the Cleveland Indians in the ALCS, in that Indians hitters do the brunt of their damage on offspeed and breaking pitches, while Blue Jays pitchers rely on the fastball moreso than any other team, as our own Eno Sarris wrote about earlier this morning. Both teams know this, and both teams will attempt to adjust accordingly in order to maximize or limit the effect of this matchup in their favor. That’s what happens in the postseason, when every little piece of information becomes that much more valuable.

Along those same lines, but on the flip side, there’s also a weakness shared by many of those same fastballing Blue Jays pitchers that perhaps no team other than the Indians is better suited to exploit. Whatever inherent disadvantage Indians hitters may have at the plate, they may make up for on the bases.

We saw what kind of an effect controlling the running game can have in the postseason when the Royals ran wild on Jon Lester and the A’s in the Wild Card game two years ago. And while none of the Blue Jays pitchers are quite at Lester-level mediocrity in this facet of the game, only three of Kansas City’s seven stolen bases in that game came against Lester. Part of it was Lester. Part of it were the relievers who replaced Lester. Part of it was the catcher, Derek Norris.

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A while back, August Fagerstrom noticed a near-historic aspect of the Cleveland Indians’ offense. They do really well against breaking and offspeed pitches. They led the non-Colorado division of baseball in slugging percentage against those pitches, and they had one of the most extreme splits as an offense against fastballs, as opposed to breaking/offspeed pitches, in the history of baseball. That’s quite a strength.

Of course, it’s a strength that belies a relative weakness on the other side. Take a look at how the Indians ranked in production against fastballs when judged by pitch-type values in the American League this year.

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In this year’s postseason, relievers have received attention based on when (or if) they have entered the game. For the Toronto Blue Jays and closer Roberto Osuna, there were questions a week ago whether Osuna would be able to pitch at all in the postseason after being removed from the Wild Card victory over the Baltimore Orioles with a shoulder issue. Osuna pitched to four batters in that game, retiring them all and striking out two, but his availability for the recently completed Division Series against the Texas Rangers was in some doubt. Osuna has laid those doubts, as well as those that accompanied a less-than-stellar end-of-season run, to rest.

If you were to hazard a guess at which Blue Jays player was most important in this year’s playoffs — at least in terms of increasing the probability of winning games — you probably would not guess Roberto Osuna. You would also be right not to guess Osuna, as Josh Donaldson’s nine hits and a walk in 19 postseason plate appearances led to a team-leading .635 WPA over the Jays’ four postseason games. Osuna, however, is second on the team WPA leaderboard, despite pitching in only three of the four games and recording just five total innings.

Osuna, despite his shoulder issue, has now appeared in three of the four Blue Jays playoffs games (having not been needed in the Game 1 rout of the Rangers). In this year of the non-traditional closer use in the postseason, Osuna has yet to come in at the start of the ninth in a save situation. Every single appearance has been incredibly important — and has often coincided with the most important moments of each game, by leverage index.

In the playoffs this year, Blue Jays pitchers have faced 15 batters at a point in the game when the leverage index had reached 2.0 or greater. Osuna has recorded eight of those high-leverage plate appearances — more than J.A. Happ (who had four in his start), Francisco Liriano (one), or Joe Biagini (two, one of which was a run-scoring double by Mitch Moreland in Game 2).

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