The recipe for winning in the playoffs really shouldn’t be that complicated. You want your good players to do well, and you want the rest of your players to do well enough. It shouldn’t take any more than that, so, for the Rangers, they came into the ALDS against the Blue Jays hoping to lean on Cole Hamels and Yu Darvish, which is totally fine. Those are two outstanding pitchers; you expect them to have outstanding games. Hamels, yesterday, allowed seven runs, and couldn’t get out of the fourth. Darvish, today, allowed five runs, and couldn’t get into the sixth. Now the Rangers are probably screwed. What do you do? They just got baseballed.

Darvish’s problem was that he allowed four homers. And I’m not going to try to defend him — you have to work pretty hard to give up four homers. But we should at least be able to excuse him for one of them. Behold Kevin Pillar doubling what was, in the moment, a one-run lead. I’d argue that Pillar might’ve done a worse job of executing here than even Darvish did. No, that sounds stupid, but, you know what I mean. What is this!

Literally just the other day, Pillar knocked a double against a pitch that was similarly high, but that double could’ve been caught, and at least the pitch was somewhere over the plate. Pillar went up and Pillar went in to take Darvish yard, and I just honestly don’t know what you’re supposed to do with this. This isn’t the pitch that Darvish wanted to throw, but it should’ve just put him behind 3-1 in the count, not 3-1 on the scoreboard.

Here’s a plot of all the 2016 home runs, with data borrowed from Baseball Savant. I put righty and lefty home runs on the same scale, such that pitches on the left are inside, and pitches on the right are outside. You can easily see here that Pillar’s home run is exceptional, relative to the pack.

Maybe it’s not the single most exceptional home run. Maybe it is? I don’t know. But it’s out there. It’s above most of the group, and it’s to the left of most of the group, and it’s both of those things at the same time, which makes it bizarre. It doesn’t reflect well on Pillar that he swung at this pitch in the first place while ahead in the count. It’s probably no mystery why Pillar is the owner of a career 85 wRC+. But on the other hand, maybe that is a mystery, because if Pillar can go yard against a pitch like this, what’s to stop him from going yard against almost literally anything?

I am a professional baseball analyst, writing for a website founded upon baseball analysis. So often, around this time of year, my analysis comes down to a “welp.” Pillar put a…good? swing on the ball. I don’t even know, man. But it sure was a dinger, all right.

You get into a bubble sometimes. Even when that bubble doesn’t look like other bubbles, it’s there insulating you from seeing something you should see. I’m always looking for that new thing, that change, that great new pitcher, that guy overperforming his expectations. That’s the fun thing to look at! An ace, pitching like an ace again, with wipeout stuff? Huh. Somehow, that might be my blind spot.

But then again, sustained excellence can do that to you. We didn’t really write about Jon Lester this year, for example. Jon Lester was excellent, of course. But he was excellent in the way he’s usually excellent. It’s worked out for the Cubs, but there’s material there for analysis.

Corinne Landrey’s been the only one to write about Yu Darvish so far this year, even though he was the second-best starter by strikeout percentage in 2016 while also the author of the best walk rate of his career. We should regularly write about excellence, and here’s Darvish taking on the Blue Jays for Game Two. Here’s an opportunity to pop the Yu bubble.

The thing is, it looks like he hasn’t changed much since he was so excellent before his Tommy John surgery. It looks that way. I’m not sure that’s true.

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When I used to come in to pitch, I’d take my eight warm-ups from the mound, and almost without fail I’d hear loud shouts from the other dugout that “this guy’s got nothing!” For the most part this was because they were right, I had nothing, I should’ve been terrible, but what I think kept me from being truly terrible was their own overconfidence. I was never the best pitcher on my team, and opponents would swing like I was the worst pitcher on my team, but thanks to that overeager aggressiveness, there were surprising numbers of clean whiffs and pop-ups. I was as surprised as they were, but at some point it stops being a fluke.

Marco Estrada is better than he’s ever been. When he was younger, he threw about a league-average fastball. Now he’s four ticks below the league mark. Marco Estrada is a finesse pitcher, and as a general rule, finesse pitchers are worse than non-finesse pitchers. But the best ones — they succeed in part because of their own abilities to locate, but they succeed also by turning hitters against their own selves. Power pitchers force a hitter to shorten up. Finesse pitchers tempt a hitter to lengthen. They tempt hitters to come out of their shoes, as if a 500-foot homer means more than its 400-foot equivalent. Facing a Marco Estrada is a test in self-discipline. As we’ve all experienced for ourselves, when pressure starts to mount, self-discipline can unravel.

Estrada dominated the Rangers on Thursday, Texas hitters frequently swinging out of their shoes. Even knocking Estrada around might not have done much: The Blue Jays won by nine runs. But Estrada came close to a complete-game road shutout, and his finesse-y repertoire worked out just peaches. Too often, the Rangers couldn’t help themselves but overswing. Here now are their five worst swings, along with one honorable mention.

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Come playoff time, you tend to see a lot of team-to-team comparisons. And when you see team-to-team comparisons, the people doing the comparing frequently lean on regular-season statistics. And, you know, in theory that makes plenty of sense. Those numbers are readily available all over the place, and, isn’t the regular season a hell of a sample? Doesn’t the regular season pretty adequately reflect the level of talent on a given roster?

I’m not going to argue that regular-season numbers are or aren’t more important than, say, postseason numbers. The regular season obviously has the biggest and therefore the most meaningful sample. But as should go without saying, things change come October. Rosters are optimized, and usage patterns shift. For example, during the year, Rangers hitters had a 98 wRC+. Rangers hitters on the roster today averaged a weighted 106 wRC+. During the year, Rangers relievers had a 100 ERA-. Rangers relievers expected to relieve in the playoffs averaged a weighted 75 ERA-. The Rangers aren’t what they were for six months. No team is, entirely. So what do we have now? What does the actual, weighted playoff landscape look like?

Time for some tables of numbers. That’s almost as fun as actual baseball!

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Any story of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 5-2 Wild Card victory over the Baltimore Orioles at the Rogers Centre on Tuesday night will start and end with Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter’s refusal to allow ERA leader, Cy Young candidate, and flawless closer, Zach Britton, into the game. Britton watched from afar as Ubaldo Jimenez threw the final five pitches of the their team’s season, and considering how baffling Showalter’s decision-making was, it’s only right the stories should start and end there.

But a start and an end leave room in the middle, and the ending we got couldn’t have happened without everything that led up to it. Showalter’s decision was key to the final outcome of the game, as was Jimenez’s failure to execute. But we never get there without Jose Bautista’s first-inning home run, or the five innings of scoreless relief by Toronto’s bullpen, or Edwin Encarnacion hopping all over that fat Jimenez fastball in the 11th and raising his hands in triumph. And while those were the most obvious keys to success for Toronto last night, Bautista and Encarnacion have crushed hittable pitches hundreds of times in their career prior, and bullpens have thrown countless scoreless innings. What Kevin Pillar did in the fifth inning is something he’s never done. What Pillar did in the fifth was something most have never done.

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Tonight’s AL Wild Card game is a pretty fascinating matchup. Both teams launch home runs at prodigious rates, as the Orioles led the majors in long balls, and the Blue Jays finished fourth overall, just four home runs back of a tie for second. Interestingly, however, neither team was as good offensively as those home run totals might make you think; Toronto ranked 11th in offensive runs above average while Baltimore came in 13th. If they’re not launching homers, they can be held in check, so tonight’s game might not be the slugfest that could otherwise be expected.

Especially because the rules of the Wild Card game incentivize frequent pitching changes, and both of these teams should be taking advantage of the flexibility. The Blue Jays are starting Marcus Stroman, but they also have starters Francisco Liriano and Marco Estrada on the roster, plus the normal compliment of seven relievers; the Jays could mix-and-match their pitchers from the first inning and still have enough arms to get through the game, even while holding one of the extra starters in reserve for a potential extra inning contest.

Likewise, the Orioles are also carrying 10 pitchers, with Ubaldo Jimenez and Dylan Bundy available in relief, along with seven traditional relievers. But if you’re Buck Showalter, you’re probably a lot less excited about the possibility of bringing in Jimenez (5.44 ERA/4.43 FIP/4.64 xFIP) or Bundy (4.02 ERA/4.70 FIP/4.61 xFIP) in an elimination game, and the plan is more likely going to be to ride Tillman as long as he’s effective, than to turn the ball over the team’s normal relief corps.

That relief corps, of course, is anchored by Zach Britton, the best pitcher the Orioles have. Britton’s dominance is almost hard to believe at this point; 202 of the 254 batters he faced this year (80%) either struck out or hit a groundball. He’s the most extreme groundball pitcher we’ve ever seen, only he also blows hitters away with a similar strikeout rate to what Noah Syndergaard posted this year. Opposing batters hit .161/.221/.191 against him this year. To put that in perspective, Mariano Rivera only held hitters to a lower OPS than Britton’s .430 mark once in his career; in 2008, when hitters put up a .423 OPS against him.

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Francisco Liriano has pitched his way into consideration for today’s American League Wild Card game by having been excellent since his return to the rotation — during which period he’s recorded 24.2 innings with 26 strikeouts, six walks, and four earned runs — but also by being on the right schedule to pitch today and by pitching with his left hand.

It’s easy enough to sort this list of teams and find that the Orioles have been the worst American League team against lefties this year. But that’s just what’s happened in the past. It doesn’t necessarily dictate what would happen in the future.

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Following Torontos’ Wild Card-clinching win over the Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday, I asked Blue Jays reliever Joe Biagini if he’d just thrown the biggest inning of his life. Before answering, he paused to watch a champagne-soaked teammate traipse across the clubhouse, adorned in only a jockstrap, amid a cacophony of exultations.

“Probably,” mused Biagini. “Yesterday’s, today’s. They just kind of keep getting bigger.”

This one was huge. The 26-year-old rookie right-hander had entered in the eighth inning with the tying run on second base, and Dustin Pedroia — .318/.376/.449 on the season — due up. Two outs were needed to preserve a precious lead. That’s exactly what he got.

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I’ve got a vote for American League Manager of the Year this season and I’m terrified. My first vote as a member of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and it’s the impossible one.

Maybe impossible is too tough a word. I’m sure I’ll figure something out in time to submit a vote. But evaluating the productivity of a manager just seems so difficult. We’ve seen efforts that use the difference between projected and actual wins, or between “true talent” estimations for the team and their actual outcomes. But those attribute all sorts of random chance to the manager’s machinations.

I’d like to instead identify measurable moments where a manager exerts a direct influence on his team, assign those values or ranks, and see where each current manager sits. So what are those measurable moments?

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In a good way, Francisco Liriano is making life more complicated for the Blue Jays. Not that a team should take anything for granted, but as the Jays look ahead to the playoffs, it’s hard to know exactly which starters could and should serve as their starters. The Jays already had some depth when Liriano arrived as something of a salary dump, but a funny thing has happened — Liriano has found himself after leaving Pittsburgh. He’s slashed his walk rate, he’s upped his strike rate, and his ERA with Toronto is 2.92. Liriano looks good again, and he looked terrific Wednesday night.

Ultimately, for the Blue Jays, Wednesday was disappointing. They suffered through a blown save and a loss, and they still haven’t locked up an actual playoff spot. There’s work to be done, and because of the ninth-inning collapse, moments from Liriano’s start earlier have been forgotten. They simply can’t matter that much if the end result was a loss to a rival. I want to bring something to your attention, though. In the fifth inning, Liriano came through with a crucial strikeout of Chris Davis. In that showdown, Liriano took a hell of a chance, and the gamble paid off.

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