In the bottom of the fourth inning of Game 4, with the Cardinals up 1-0, St. Louis manager Mike Matheny faced a choice. With two outs and men on first and second, pitcher Lance Lynn stepped up. Like most pitchers, Lynn is hardly a threat with the bat; in 137 regular season plate appearances over his first three seasons, he had just seven hits, all singles. Lynn had thrown four solid innings, so Matheny let his pitcher bat. Lynn flew out to right, and the Cardinals would score just one more run.

In the top of the fifth inning of Game 4, with the Cardinals still up 1-0, Boston manager John Farrell faced a similar choice. With two outs and men on first and second, pitcher Clay Buchholz stepped up. He may or may not be able to handle the bat, but with only four career regular season plate appearances in his seven years in the bigs, there’s little reason to think he could. Buchholz had also thrown four productive innings, but Farrell instead chose not to let his pitcher bat.

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We begin with some acknowledgements. First, a baseball game is never entirely won or lost based on a single event, a single match-up. Certain events can be of massive importance, but they’re massive because of the context, and the context is established by other events, that would’ve led to different outcomes given different outcomes. So many different things contribute to a game result. An impossible, uncountable number of things, some of them things you’d never consider. Perhaps you’ve recognized that baseball is complicated. This isn’t checkers. Checkers is also complicated.

Second, managerial decisions tend to have their significance exaggerated. As MGL is fond of reminding us, most managerial decisions lead to very minor swings in win expectancy, which of course is the only thing that matters. Certain decisions are worse than others, and some can be relatively major in a good way or a bad way, but at the end of the day it’s still up to the players on the field, and pitchers are always going to have the advantage over hitters, save for the most extreme of circumstances. When managers get ripped to shreds, there tends to be a lot of results-based analysis, and that’s by and large worthless.

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You may have heard that Game Three of the 2013 World Series had an unusual ending. The kind that nobody could have predicted. Even @CantPredictBaseball had trouble finding the right words to describe the play.

Imagine, if you would, a vast scale of all difficult-to-predict ways a game could end, ranging from unlikely to unbelievable. On the unlikely side of the scale you have something like a 1-2-3 double play. On the unbelievable end is Bud Selig arbitrarily deciding that he’s seen enough (oh wait…). An obstruction call at third base on a play that included a tag out at home plate falls smack dab on the end of the unbelievable side. In case you want to see the play again (h/t @CJZero):

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In the afternoon of Saturday, October 10th, 1931, the Cardinals took on the Philadelphia Athletics at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. This would be the seventh and final matchup of these teams in that year’s World Series. Philadelphia had gone 107-45 that season (beating their Pythagorean record by 10 games), behind the one-two-three punch of catcher Mickey Cochrane, a young Jimmie Foxx, and outfielder Al Simmons. They also boasted a pitching staff including the likes of Lefty Grove and Waite Hoyt. Though they had won six less games, the Cardinals were no slouches, either. Hall-of-Famers Jim Bottemley and Frankie Frisch manned the infield, with Pepper Martin in the outfield in his first full season. Paul Derringer and the fantastically-named (and HOF spitballer) Burleigh Grimes anchored the rotation for St. Louis. The Athletics were favored to win the series somewhat heavily, as Connie Mack’s club was coming of two consecutive world titles, and had beaten the (more-or-less) same Cardinals team the previous year. It was a fairly evenly-matched series all-in-all, save for Game 6 when the Athletics kicked around the Cardinals to the tune of 8 – 1. Al Simmons was hitting out of his mind that series, and would eventually end up with a 1.030 OPS for the fall classic, while Pepper Martin posted a 1.330 OPS with the Cardinals. Grimes was dealing, allowing only one run over 18 innings, while Grove and George Earnshaw were racking up the strikeouts for the Philly (well, as much as you could rack up strikeouts back then.) Read the rest of this entry »

In his piece this morning about Carlos Martinez and Trevor Rosenthal, Jeff wrote about Mike Matheny’s decision to stay with Martinez against David Ortiz, rather than go to the left-handed Randy Choate, in the 8th inning: The relevant post-game quote, again:

It’s not an easy decision. Knowing that we have a left-hander up and ready to go. A lot of it has to do with what we see, how the ball is coming out of Carlos’s hands at that time. We have two guys on base, one by an error and another by a ball that made it’s way kinda through the infield. Looked like he had real good life. And if we get through Ortiz, then we have an opportunity to use Carlos’s good life right there against a Napoli, where we don’t have to bring Trevor in more than one. Not an easy call, but we liked the way Carlos was throwing the ball at that particular time.

It’s probably really hard to take Carlos Martinez out of the game, I imagine. When you have that kind of stuff, and he’s been dominating the way he was in the postseason, it has to be tempting to just say “hey, let’s stick with the kid who throws 100.” Martinez isn’t a righty specialist, and as Eno Sarris pointed out before the series began, Ortiz struggled against especially hard fastballs this year, hitting just .238/.284/.365 on at-bats that ended with a fastball of 94+ mph.

Perhaps Martinez’s premium velocity makes him a better match-up there than the platoon splits would indicate. And, as Matheny noted, keeping Martinez in to face Ortiz meant that he also got to stay in to face Napoli, and he put some value on not having to make two pitching changes, including one that would force Trevor Rosenthal to enter the game in the 8th inning, then sit around and wait for the 9th to begin before taking the mound again.

But, while acknowledging that Matheny noted this was a difficult decision, it is not hard to see that decision as part of a broader pattern, as Mike Matheny has consistently chosen the pitcher on the mound over a potentially more attractive match-up available out of the bullpen. In fact, Matheny made perhaps an even more questionable decision to let Ortiz face a right-hander two innings earlier.

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Here’s something you might not have known about the Red Sox: they’re good, especially at the hitting part. Over the course of the regular season, they scored 853 runs in 1439 innings, or about 0.6 runs per. Pitchers facing the Red Sox posted a 5.02 ERA, nearly half a run higher than the next-highest mark. As the Red Sox demonstrated in Game 1, they’re capable of scoring runs in a hurry, which, incidentally, is the only thing they do in a hurry, and this is one of the reasons why the Sox are probably the best team in baseball. That statement should hold true no matter how this series ends up.

Much of the talk after Game 2 is focusing on the top of the seventh, when the Cardinals rallied and took advantage of some defensive lapses to establish a two-run lead. In that frame the Cardinals went ahead 4-2; by that score, the Cardinals were triumphant. But a two-run lead against the Red Sox in Fenway is precarious, no matter how it’s achieved. Better to be ahead than behind, of course, but the Cardinals couldn’t have considered their position safe. They still needed to keep the Red Sox off the board, and that’s where Carlos Martinez and Trevor Rosenthal came in handy.

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The most amazing thing that happened in the first game of the World Series happened when the game was already well in hand for the Red Sox. The first inning was nearly turned upside-down by an embarrassing initial call, and Pete Kozma performed worse in the field than at the plate, and Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina allowed the easiest of pops to drop between them. It was, without question, a weird game, and the Cardinals never got themselves righted, but if you’re in search of the amazing, you look to the bottom of the seventh. When David Ortiz came to the plate, Boston’s chances of winning were just under 99%. When David Ortiz took his curtain call, Boston’s chances of winning were just under 100%. What Ortiz did hardly mattered, in the grand scheme of things, or even in the lesser scheme of things. A not-close game became a less-close game. But what Ortiz did hadn’t been done.

I was looking forward to watching Kevin Siegrist face David Ortiz, as much as you can look forward to any individual matchup late in a five-run game. Ortiz, obviously, has his own presence, which goes beyond the statistics, but Siegrist has been good and lately he’s been throwing harder. In September and October he’s been pushing his fastball to 98 and 99, and between him and Ortiz, I was interested to see who would have the advantage. It could at least mean something for the rest of the series. The at-bat was over in one pitch. Siegrist did throw his fastball.

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Wednesday night, in Game 1 of the World Series, Jon Lester was good. The Cardinals’ hitters, in turn, were not, or at least their performance was not, and as a consequence, the Cardinals lost. The Red Sox are now ahead by a game, and the Cardinals have as long as possible to wait for the next start by Adam Wainwright.

That’s the story, basically. It’s not the story that’s going to get all of the physical and electronic ink — the Cardinals’ defense, early on, was atrocious, and Wainwright gave up a few solid hits, and Carlos Beltran got hurt robbing a grand slam, and David Ortiz subsequently got his home run anyway to pour gravy all over the blowout. There’s a lot that’ll be written about what went wrong for St. Louis early. There’s a lot that’ll be written about the implications of Beltran being injured. But the Cardinals didn’t score a run until Ryan Dempster hung a splitter in the top of the ninth. With some luck, this game could’ve been closer. With some luck, this game could’ve been even more lopsided. Against Lester, the Cardinals just weren’t going to win without a miracle.

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During the postseason is when we talk about postseason statistics, and one of the first points always brought up is that the level of competition in the postseason is more difficult. As such, it isn’t fair to just run a straight comparison between numbers in the playoffs and numbers not in the playoffs. The postseason is selective for the best teams, which will have many of the best players. Many of the worst players on the best teams won’t play, or won’t play much. There is a counterpoint, though, at least as far as pitchers are concerned: the playoffs take place in October, by which point a lot of arms might be worn down. The season is long, and it’s taxing, and who’s to say what’s really left in the tank come Columbus Day or whenever?

What we know, anecdotally, is that good pitchers tend to still be good. We seldom ever see a player’s velocity crater, and if a guy were truly worn down he probably wouldn’t be used. One of the interesting things we’ve seen with Michael Wacha, though, is that his velocity hasn’t just stayed the same — lately he’s been throwing harder. It stands to reason that’s why he’s been so effective, at least in part. And it turns out Wacha isn’t the only Cardinal with strength saved for a final push.

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The league’s getting faster. Not the time of game — fastball velocity. And throwing some of the fastest fastballs in a league of fast have been the Cardinals, whose 92.6 mph average as a staff was good for third overall this year. The Red Sox did fine against a Tigers team that was only .3 mph short of that average, but going into this World Series, it’s still fair to say they will see some fastballs that are over 94 mph. And it’s fair to wonder how they’ll do against that added oomph.

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