If you somehow missed the seventh inning of Wednesday’s ALDS Game 5 and now somehow find yourself here at this website, do yourself a favor: go watch it. On the days following games like that, after we’ve been through something as grand, troubling, exultant, and trying as that seventh inning, we spend most of our time trying to make sense of it all: not only the fact that what we witnessed could only happen in this singular game of baseball, but that we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just think: there are more games like that in the future. How crazy is that knowledge? How will we possibly survive all of them?

Even though many of you, like me, are probably still dealing with the fallout of increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and psychological trauma, we all have a job to do, and mine is to somehow analyze a piece of what went on Wednesday. We already had Jeff breaking it down with his usual aplomb. We had Eno looking into the rules associated with the plays in question. And, perhaps most pertinent to this article, Dave weighed in on the line between emotion and sportsmanship.

There’s a part of that final subject that we’re going to key in on: emotion. We try, in many ways, to capture how players perform in different situations. We can look at dozens of splits on our player pages. Leverage is the situation that immediately comes to mind when we’re talking about intangible forces that can impact performance. The closest we get to measuring an emotional response is how players perform under pressure — how clutch they are.

But what about anger? We don’t measure that, and it’s understandable why we don’t — measuring anger is impossible or impractical with the tools we have right now. It would also be a pretty strange thing to measure, but we also measure plenty of strange things.

That brings us to what happened on Wednesday in the bottom of the seventh inning. By this point, the top half of the inning had already included the go-ahead run scoring on a deflected ball being thrown back to the pitcher, multiple instances of fans throwing objects onto the field, and the Blue Jays playing the game under protest. To say that tensions were running high would be a gross understatement, especially for the Blue Jays.

So, when Bautista stepped to the plate in the bottom of the inning during a tie game that hung in the balance, it’s not a stretch to say he was probably feeling a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. Then he did this:

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You probably don’t need an introductory paragraph to this post. You read the title, so you already know what this one is about. Last night, with one swing, Jose Bautista untied the deciding game of the Blue Jays/Rangers series, and then Jose Bautista did this.

If you’re a Blue Jays fan, odds are you loved it.

The team hasn’t been to the postseason in 22 years, and have been lousy for most of that stretch. A few days ago, the team dropped the first two games of this series and looked like they were going to have a disappointing end to a promising season, only to go on the road and win a couple of games to force this decisive game five. Cole Hamels had mostly stifled the team’s offense, giving a crowd who came to be as loud as possible few reasons to make noise. And then, in the top half of the inning, the Rangers had taken the lead on a fluke play that hardly anyone even knew could happen. The crowd was tense and angry, and they were looking for a moment to release their frustration. And Joey Bats gave them exactly what they wanted.

Not everyone enjoyed the spectacle, however. Sam Dyson, the Rangers pitcher who gave up Bautista’s home run, said this when talking to the media after the game.

“I told him Jose needs to calm that down, just kind of respect the game a little more,” Dyson said. “He’s a huge role model for the younger generation that’s coming up playing this game, and I mean he’s doing stuff that kids do in Wiffle ball games and backyard baseball. It shouldn’t be done.”

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You’re in a pickle, see. The Devil wants to take your soul, and he’s pretty intent on doing it, but he’ll leave you be on one condition: in the span of one hour, you are to teach him everything there is to understand about the game of baseball. Up to this point the game’s been over his head, and he’d like to know what it’s all about, but he also has only so much patience, especially with you. If you can convey to him that special essence of the sport, you’re free to go, spared an eternal damnation. If not, you lose. You know what’s at stake. Of course you do. Your mind races.

Or, your mind would’ve raced. Before Wednesday, before Game 5 between the Rangers and the Blue Jays. You would’ve thought about explaining the rules. You would’ve thought about reviewing certain eras, and certain Hall-of-Fame players. You would’ve thought about going through the physical motions. But now — now — this is an easy situation to fix. You show the Devil Game 5’s seventh inning. He’s gotta have the Internet somewhere. You show him the entirety of the seventh inning, from start to finish. When it’s done, and the second bench-clearing incident is broken up, you’ve got six minutes to take questions.

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When Russell Martin’s throw back to the pitcher hit Shin-Soo Choo, and Rougned Odor raced home to score the go-ahead run, the pages of baseball’s rule book fluttered open across America and Canada. A stunned silence in the park hid the grinding of gears behind the masks, and in baseball’s offices — was that strange, strange play… legal?

Yes, it turns out. To the consternation of the fans, who began to litter the field with debris. Twitter, the announcers, the fans — it was bedlam.

But investigating the rules that led to this play, and any rules that could clean up a play like this in the future, brings us to the never-ending unintended consequences that come with any alteration of the rule book.

First, the play.

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The Blue Jays paid a lot to get David Price, even though they knew he was about to become a free agent. The Jays rightly figured the starting rotation could use a big upgrade if the team was going to go on to make some playoff noise. Of course, at that point, they didn’t yet know what to expect from Marcus Stroman. They might not have expected anything.

The American League Cy Young is going to go to Price or another guy. Price stands a perfectly fine chance, and you’d assume that when a team trades for that sort of pitcher, the same team will use him in as many important starts as possible. Sure enough, Price started Game 1 of the ALDS, but as you know by now, the ball in Game 5 is being handed to Marcus Stroman. Price just threw a lot of pitches in relief in Game 4, even though the Jays were already heavily favored. It’s surprising, and it’s complicated. It doesn’t seem like throwing Price so much out of the bullpen was a good managerial call. Yet we can at least say this much: it’s not all that clear the Jays are worse off. Stroman might even come with a certain advantage.

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Coming into the postseason, the Blue Jays were regarded widely as the favorites to win it all. A historically great offense, a souped-up roster fueled by the trading deadline acquisitions of Troy Tulowitzki and David Price… what could possibly go wrong? Well, the vagaries of postseason randomness quickly paid them a visit, and within 24 hours from the first pitch of Game 1, they had found themselves Hanser Alberto-ed within one game of extinction.

Until Marco Estrada saved them, at least temporarily. A journeyman who turned 32 this summer and who, until this year, had never even pitched enough innings in a season to qualify for an ERA title. The same guy who this season nosed out the likes of Dallas Keuchel, Collin McHugh and Sonny Gray for AL Contact Manager of the Year honors.

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David Price now has a victory to his name in the American League Division Series, but it’s probably not how anyone imagined he would get it. In yesterday’s game, with the Blue Jays up by a score of 7-1 in the bottom of the fifth inning, manager John Gibbons took out R.A. Dickey in favor of his staff ace, installing Price into a game that was, except in the case of a cataclysm, already well in hand. Price threw 50 pitches, giving up six hits and three runs, thereby eliminating him from starting Wednesday’s deciding Game 5 in Toronto.

Yesterday, Dave wrote about how the Jays shouldn’t use Price out of the bullpen during Game 4. That article was predicated on a simple assumption: that the score of the game would be close, and a high leverage situation would push Gibbons to go to the best pitcher he had available. That method of thinking is an understandable one, and a decision many managers would make with little hesitation.

That wasn’t the case in Game 4, however. To illustrate, take a look at the Win Expectancy chart for yesterday’s game, with a highlight on the point at which Price was summoned from the bullpen:

After Robinson Chirinos singled to center with one out and Delino DeShields then flied out to center — the former being the event that sealed Dickey’s fate — the Rangers’ Win Expectancy was just 3.2%. If the argument is that Price was brought in to stifle any perceived danger, there’s isn’t really a good case for it: Chirinos’ single was a blip, a faintest hint of danger, and Dickey had been pitching well in the game up until then.

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The scientific method begins by asking a question. Ask a question, do some research, and form a hypothesis. Once you’ve got your hypothesis, it’s time to do a little testing. Or, to employ a more lively word, experimenting. Once the test, ahem, experiment is underway, data is collected and analyzed, leading to new questions, new hypotheses and new experiments.

Over in Toronto, a season’s worth of question-asking, researching, hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing, refining and retesting has been taking place, slowly building up to a grand experiment that will take place on the national stage when the Blue Jays have no room left for error with everything on the line. More likely than not, the experiment will go over just fine and Toronto’s hypothesis will be confirmed. Even if the experiment doesn’t go over fine, the hypothesis could hold water. There still exists the chance, though, that the test tubes suddenly begin to boil over, sending the experiment awry and the laboratory into a frenzy with no time left for reevaluating and retesting.
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The second game of the Texas-Toronto ALDS ended in a memorable fashion, the Rangers surviving a razor-thin review of a potential third out to score two in the 14th and hold off the Blue Jays. This ended up obscuring the memorable way it began, with a top of the first replete with odd incidents. Had it not begun in this memorable way, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have ended as memorably, so let’s look at all the weird stuff that happened.
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In the latest example of how playoff baseball is less predictable than a deer by a roadway, the Rangers just won two games in Toronto, with Ross Ohlendorf slamming the door, and with Rougned Odor’s baserunning arguably occupying center stage. In a game that sent 109 men to the plate, it wouldn’t be fair to suggest it all came down to one or two events, but there’s one event and one event only that’ll be dominating the conversation until Game 3. If you watched, you know what it is. If you didn’t watch, you probably still know what it is, because umpiring controversies have a way of getting around.

With two down in the top of the 14th, Odor slapped an infield single. That put the go-ahead run on first base, and then Odor advanced to second on a subsequent single. Odor actually rounded second aggressively, thinking about getting to third, but then he decided to return. Yet, cleverly, Jose Bautista threw behind him. There was a tag attempt, and, immediately, the play became everything.

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