Way back in April, the Blue Jays turned some heads when they filled out their bullpen with a couple of 20-year-old A-Ballers: Miguel Castro and Roberto Osuna. Few doubted that these young arms had closer-type stuff, but they also lacked any experience against big league hitting. There wasn’t much of precedent for pitchers making that type of jump, making it darn near impossible to know what to expect.

The two arms went in polar opposite directions. Castro had a brief run as the Jays’ closer, but was sent back to the minors in May after a rough start. Toronto later flipped him to Colorado in the Troy Tulowitzki deal, and he remained in the minors until September.

Osuna, on the other hand, pitched brilliantly from the get-go. He took hold of the closer’s job in June after a strong start, and he never looked back. He finished the year with a 63 ERA- and 73 FIP-, both of which marks ranked in the top 35 among qualified relievers. He struck out 28% of opposing batters while only walking 6%.

The season I just described would be impressive for any reliever. But Osuna’s campaign is especially notable given his age: 20 years old. Twenty-year-old big leaguers are a rarity in modern baseball. Some of the very best prospects don’t debut until they’re 22 or 23. Kris Bryant and Noah Syndergaard are a couple of super-recent examples. Osuna was the youngest player to appear in the majors this year, and is currently the only player born in 1995 (Gosh, I feel old) to appear in a big league game.

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You can detect the nervousness. The Royals stormed out to take a commanding series lead, but then Johnny Cueto’s own arm abandoned him, wrecking not only Game 3 but also a potential Game 7 as well. So there’s some discomfort there, some uncertainty, and now in a short while the Royals are going to throw Chris Young at the best offense in the league in the center of a homer-happy ballpark. If Young were a bad pitcher, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but I don’t think he’s perceived as a trustworthy pitcher. So the thought is the Blue Jays are in a good place to go and tie this series up.

I don’t think we can help the way we feel about Young. He’s unusual and by no means overpowering, and everything we’ve learned about pitchers gives us reason to be skeptical. He puts the ball in the air. He doesn’t pound the zone. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats. Young’s whole game is suppressing quality contact, and being skeptical of that is like Sabermetrics 101. Yet Young, for his career, has posted a better-than-average ERA. The same has held true of late, following his career revival. Young has a real chance this afternoon, our own doubts aside. As always, it’s just going to take precision.

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Every year, up until this one when he retired, Carlos Quentin was my guy. You know the one. “This is it, guys! This is the year Carlos Quentin stays healthy for a full season and hits 40 bombs!” I’d say in March. That never happened, of course, because Carlos Quentin never stopped getting hit by pitches and injuring himself in other ways, but Quentin was one of the classic “when/if” players. “When he plays a full season… If he could just stay healthy…” Quentin was always productive on the field, it’s just he was never actually on the field.

To some extent, Troy Tulowitzki has had a similar career. Tulowitzki’s injury history isn’t quite as extensive as Quentin’s, but his on-field production, when healthy, has always lent itself to a similar “when/if” discussion each offseason. Point is, with Tulowitzki comes some manner of certainty, due to his obvious talent, but also seemingly endless untapped potential.

This year, though, for the first time since his age-23 season, Tulowitzki’s season-end numbers were just average, as indicated by his season-end wRC+ of exactly 100. Add in the shoulder injury that Tulowitzki’s currently playing through, and the Blue Jays have been left playing the “when/if” game that’s typically reserved for the offseason.

So right now, with Tulowitzki, you’re looking for clues. Clues that the perennial preseason when/if MVP candidate is still in there, lurking underneath the cracked shoulder blade and the underwhelmingly average season. It’s a never-ending upside game with Tulowitzki, and clues are the currency for upside. As long as the Blue Jays have a couple clues, they know that, while the consistency may not be there, Tulowitzki still owns the potential to be a game-changer on any given trip to the plate. Last night, the Blue Jays received a clue:
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There are things that are different about R.A. Dickey, of course. No one pitch was thrown as often as the 2,840 regular season knuckleballs that Dickey threw this year. No other qualified pitcher threw any knuckle balls this year by PITCHf/x. The starter who threw the fewest fastballs other than Dickey threw three times as many. No pitch gets equal swinging strike results in and out of the zone like the knuckleball. Dickey can throw with injuries that would fell other pitchers, mostly because he throws at about 75% effort. He has no Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

And yet, despite the fact that Dickey is a one-pitch pitcher who throws a unique pitch that people seemingly can’t figure out no matter where he throws it, there are also conventional aspects to his craft. And to a certain extent, they’ve come to the fore this year.

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So here’s something weird. I’ve noticed on Twitter that when Blue Jays fans refer to last night’s ALCS Game Three, they seem to give the credit to the Jays. They say things like, “The Jays were crushing the ball.” But when Royals fans talk about the game, they do it in a Royals-centric context, taking credit away from the Royals, as in, “Cueto sucked.” This isn’t to knock on either fan base. We all do this. I sure do. The truth though, as is often the case, lies in the middle somewhere. The Royals, Cueto especially, pitched badly. The Blue Jays, Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Goins especially, hit well. But, when parcelling out the blame and/or credit, one can’t be binary about it. Unlike pooping the bed, it’s not an all or nothing thing.

Cueto ended up with a final line of two innings pitched and eight runs allowed. To my eye he struggled, and I doubt your eye would say much different, but based solely on his stuff I wouldn’t have guessed he was eight-runs-in-two-innings bad. Partially because that’s reeeeeeally bad (that’s an ERA of 36.00!), but partially because he just didn’t appear all that awful. So maybe more of the credit/blame for the outcome should fall on the Blue Jays. But then again, I’m not a scout, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.* I was curious to see if I could figure out who should get the credit and how much.

*Maybe?

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Johnny Cueto’s changeup is currently flatter than it’s been in five years. Literally. To some extent, everything in his arsenal is flat right now, but it’s most radical when you look at the changeup. With that wiggle in his delivery and a possibly falling arm slot, it’s easy to find a culprit. But he’s wiggled forever, why has he lost his drop now?

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The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.

Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.

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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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