Award season is upon us. It is a time for arguing about ERA versus FIP, pitching to the score, defensive value, and the meaning of “valuable.” Fun, right? It is also a time for me to whip out fun little toys to recognize different kinds of offensive contributions. One of these is the basis for the Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award, which annually recognizes the hitter whose RBI total most overstates his actual offensive contribution.

Spoiler alert: it was a banner year for the National League Central. Taste the excitement!

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The 2013 postseason was a wild ride. We witnessed crazy endings, ill-timed errors, bizarre managerial gaffes, and plenty of the usual heroics. Perhaps you may be interested to learn how certain plays affected a team’s odds of winning the World Series. Luckily, we have a stat for that.

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It is perhaps no longer appropriate to talk about the 2013 St. Louis Cardinals as a current baseball team. As of late Wednesday night, there are no current baseball teams, with all teams now to be referred to in the past tense. In the end, the Cardinals came up just short of the Red Sox, and though they lost the finale by five runs, they did manage to strand runner after runner against John Lackey and bits of the Boston bullpen. It was a theme for the Cardinals in the World Series — though they didn’t perform much worse than Boston at the plate, their timing was worse, and as Dave noted earlier Thursday, the Cardinals were let down by a lack of timeliness that had driven them all regular season long.

Oddly and interestingly, some semblance of Cardinals magic was with them in October. In the playoffs, with runners in scoring position, the Cardinals batted just .259 with a .701 OPS. Those numbers aren’t particularly good, but in the playoffs, with the bases empty, those same Cardinals batted a woeful .190 with a .522 OPS. On the one hand, the Cardinals weren’t automatic in run-scoring situations, like they were during the year. On the other, they still significantly elevated their performance, and this gets to a subject most perplexing.

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The St. Louis Cardinals are often referred to as a “model organization”, and for good reason. Despite playing in one of the smallest markets of any team in Major League Baseball, they have built a sustainable model of success, flowing through nearly every aspect of the game. They draft and develop talent exceptionally well, leading to a seemingly never ending pipeline of young talent flowing into the big leagues. They manage their financial resources very well, and consistently add quality veterans at prices that won’t prohibit them from making other necessary improvements. They have a formula in place that has allowed them to win in both the short and long term, and have shown that it doesn’t take a $175 million payroll to be one of baseball’s elite franchises.

But, of course, they aren’t perfect. No organization is. So, while the Cardinals 2013 season was a remarkable success, and should be viewed that way no matter how the season ended, there may be a few things that can be learned from their final series loss to the Red Sox.

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In the little picture, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The better baseball team clinched the World Series, on its own home field. One of the truths about the MLB playoffs is that the format doesn’t always reward the best team in baseball. This time, though, the Red Sox have a hell of an argument, and they’re a more than deserving champion. In the big picture, also, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The Red Sox won their third title in a decade. They’re always thought of as a powerhouse. The magic is in the medium picture. The picture in which you realize the Red Sox did go from worst to first. Just one season ago, the Red Sox lost 93 games. This season, the Mariners lost 91 games. The Mets lost 88 games. The Padres lost 86 games. There was a lot of talent already in place, but the Red Sox badly needed some work, and the franchise identity shouldn’t blind people to the near improbability of the turnaround. No World Series champion has ever had a worse previous season.

For Sox fans, this was another opportunity to celebrate, and an opportunity to celebrate a Series win at home for the first time in almost a century. For Sox fans and all other fans too, this made for a relatively stress-free game by the middle innings. The top of the seventh offered a glimpse of possible stress, but there was no real stress to be felt after the Sox went up 3-0 in the third and double that in the fourth. Stephen Drew’s homer put Boston’s win expectancy over 90% and it never sank back down below. For several innings, the Sox all but had the clincher in the bag, after chasing the un-chase-able Michael Wacha.

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It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that David Ortiz has been the Red Sox’ whole offense during the World Series, but only a bit, as he is hitting .733/.750/1.267 in the Series so far. Of course, he hit .091/.200/.227 in the ALCS versus Detroit. The reader probably understands both sets of numbers to be both small sample fluctuations — Ortiz is an excellent hitter, but making decisions based on any short span of plate appearances is a bad idea. The temptation to give Ortiz the “Barry Bonds treatment,” i.e., walk him every time he comes to the plate, no matter what the situation, is understandable, but should be resisted.

Even if Ortiz is no Bonds, he is an excellent hitter, and clearly the Red Sox’ best. Although the intentional walk in general seems to be overused, there are situations in which it makes sense, especially with the Cardinals sending the right-handed Michael Wacha to the mound tonight and the Red Sox (probably) hitting several right-handed hitters behind the left-handed hitting Ortiz. When to walk or not walk is not a clear cut situation, but using some general principles, we can at least outline some basic game situations when it is might be the right idea.

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I want to assure you right away that what follows isn’t sour grapes. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Even if I did, I’d complain on my own time, and not on the job in front of everyone (probably). What follows is about a call, and a controversial one at that, early in Monday’s Game. But I’m not here to talk about  various implications. I’m here to talk about the call’s significance, relative to others, and about the process that contributed to the call. It was, in the end, a call most extraordinary that went Boston’s way.

The Red Sox went ahead 1-0 in the first, as you recall. The score remained the same into the bottom of the third, when David Freese led off with a single. Pete Kozma bunted Freese to second, and Adam Wainwright advanced Freese to nowhere with a strikeout. Matt Carpenter came up with two down, and he worked the count full. In that full count, Jon Lester threw a cutter inside. Carpenter started to first, assuming he’d drawn a two-out walk. Bill Miller, however, called him out, and Carpenter expressed his disagreement. That went about as well as most fairly cordial expressions of disagreement on a baseball field. That is, nothing changed, and the game moved on to the top of the fourth, with Carpenter having struck out looking.

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What happened in the sixth inning Monday night probably mattered. It probably mattered in ways we can’t conceive of, in ways we’d never be able to figure out. Everything, every last thing in a baseball game, is connected, and if you remove one screw, the whole bridge might collapse. No, that doesn’t work. The whole bridge might rearrange itself? No, that doesn’t work, either. Change one thing and you change more and bigger things. There we go. The sixth inning of Game 5 was probably critical somehow.

But people sure aren’t thinking about it today. The sixth inning featured the minimum number of batters, the minimum number of baserunners, and the minimum number of runs. After Adam Wainwright worked a 1-2-3 inning, Jon Lester did the same, and then the seventh inning happened, in which the Red Sox stormed out in front. The sixth didn’t feature any pivotal events, as we understand them. But it did feature maybe the most interesting at-bat of the game. In the top of the sixth, Wainwright threw six pitches to David Ortiz.

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Without doubt, the worst question asked of Mike Matheny in his postgame press conference Monday night was whether or not he thought David Ortiz deserved the World Series MVP award. That question, presumably, came from a trained and experienced professional journalist, and Matheny responded about exactly as you’d think he would. If it used to be true that there are no stupid questions, then I think we can agree it’s true no longer. Humanity has broken new ground. But with all that said, you figure Ortiz does have the inside track at this point. In this paragraph we’re going to pretend to care about the World Series MVP award. Ortiz presently doesn’t have much in the way of competition, but perhaps some consideration could be given to Koji Uehara, and of course plenty of consideration would deserve to go to Jon Lester. For it’s Lester who has now bested Adam Wainwright twice, including once Monday in St. Louis.

In retrospect, Lester didn’t need to be as good in Game 1 as he was. He did need to be as good as he was in Game 5, and thankfully because he was so good, we don’t need to sit here talking about whether he should’ve batted in the top of the seventh. (No.) We can just focus on Lester’s performance on the mound, and he finished with a run and seven strikeouts over nearly eight innings. Ask the Cardinals and they’ll tell you Lester on Monday was the same as he was before. A few have gone on record saying as much, and twice now the Cardinals haven’t had an answer. But I think it should be pointed out things weren’t completely alike. There were plenty of similarities between Game 1 Lester and Game 5 Lester — Lester himself was genetically identical — but Game 5 Lester featured a couple twists.

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One of the points we’ve been hammering home really all postseason long is that starting pitchers tend to perform worse and worse as a game goes on. It’s far from a dramatic effect — a pitcher the third time around shouldn’t be expected to get completely and utterly bombed — but an effect is there, as pitchers make subsequent trips through the order. Starters become less effective, and so it becomes more and more important to put your trust in a fresh bullpen. It stands to reason part of the effect is pitchers getting a little fatigued. It stands to reason another part of the effect is hitters getting multiple looks at a guy. Hitters communicating with one another about what they’ve seen from a guy. The second and third time, the average hitter might be more prepared to punish the guy on the mound.

Let’s assume that it’s true that there’s a benefit to having already seen a guy once in a game. Maybe it’s not, but that would be quite the discovery. It doesn’t take much of a leap, then, to suggest there might be a benefit to having already seen a guy start in a series. Face a pitcher in one plate appearance, and you might be more prepared in the second plate appearance. Face a pitcher in three plate appearances, and you might be more prepared in the fourth through sixth plate appearances. It sounds sensible, meaning this works as a starting point. It doesn’t yet work as a conclusion.

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