With Lance Lynn scheduled to start on Tuesday, it stood to reason the Cardinals would probably need a major contribution out of their relievers if they wanted to push the Dodgers to the brink of elimination. Indeed, the Cardinals did push the Dodgers to the brink, and indeed, the Cardinals did get a lot of help from their relief, with Seth Maness, Carlos Martinez, and Trevor Rosenthal holding the Dodgers scoreless from the sixth. But maybe the Cardinals’ most important reliever wasn’t a relief pitcher at all. Maybe it was another guy who handled the final four innings.

Obviously, the Cardinals had more visible heroes. Lynn himself pitched decently well into the sixth, all things considered. Matt Holliday hit a big dinger. Shane Robinson hit an insurance dinger. Matt Carpenter drove home the first run with a double. There was no one guy who allowed the Cardinals to win — a lot of different parts had to come together just right. Among those parts, though, was Pete Kozma, who helped his team in the playoffs in a much less surprising way than he did a year ago. Last October, for pretty much no reason, Kozma hit. Tuesday, Kozma just played the field.

Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in July, when the Cardinals were good but unsure how good they would be, Adam Wainwright turned in a strong start against the Angels. Edward Mujica, however, blew a save and took the loss, the Angels walking off in the bottom of the ninth. It was an uncharacteristic show of weakness from a guy who to that point had been a dominant closer, and afterward Mujica knew exactly what he’d done wrong. For the first time since joining the Cardinals, Mujica shook off Yadier Molina. The first time he shook Molina off, the Angels hit a tying homer. The second time he shook Molina off, the Angels won. Mujica swore to follow Yadier from that point forward.

One of the exciting things about pitch-framing research is that we’re able to quantify a part of catcher defense that, before, we just had to guesstimate. We might’ve had a sense of who was good and who was bad, but we didn’t know what that meant. Now, we’re closer than ever before to understanding catcher value, but we’re still dealing with a massive blind spot. We don’t know how to quantify good and bad game-calling. True, pitchers get the final say, but pitchers and catchers work together, and some catchers have better plans than others. They say Molina’s the best, that he gets in the hitters’ heads. This October, Molina has taken very good care of Wainwright. Monday night, Wainwright and Molina had one particular disagreement. Moments later, the Dodgers had the only run they’d need.

Read the rest of this entry »

Those who made it through yesterday’s 13-inning National League Championship Series opener were treated to the latest chapter in “The Legend of Carlos Beltran.” He drove in all three of the Cardinals’ runs, adding to his legacy as perhaps the best postseason hitter of all time. Hidden behind the story of Beltran’s postseason greatness was Joe Kelly’s shaky, yet effective start.

Prior to yesterday’s game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals, Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan spent about 2,000 words, four GIFs, and two tables covering who Kelly is, his most noteworthy skills, and why the Cardinals chose to start him in Game One of the NLCS. You can find those articles here and here. In short, it was determined that Kelly probably isn’t as good as his career 3.08 ERA, but may not be as bad as his 4.00 FIP either. Jeff offered Henderson Alvarez as a comparable player.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals’ pitching staff, obviously, is led by Adam Wainwright, and Wainwright’s curveball is the single biggest reason the team was able to slip past the Pirates in the previous round. Wainwright’s a veteran, and though he can throw pretty hard, he’s not known for his velocity so much as his movement and command. But behind Wainwright, this is a postseason staff featuring a hell of a lot of mostly young heat. Michael Wacha kept the Cardinals alive by nearly keeping the Pirates no-hit. Lance Lynn can run it up there. Trevor Rosenthal’s fastball is the main reason he’s so dominant. Kevin Siegrist and Carlos Martinez can blow hitters away in front of Rosenthal. Shelby Miller and John Axford have big heat, if also big question marks. And there’s Joe Kelly, whose fastball this season averaged 95 miles per hour.

If you’re being honest with yourself, unless you’re a Cardinals fan, Kelly’s probably a virtual unknown. He’s also tonight’s Game 1 starter in the NLCS against the Dodgers, and if you just glance over Kelly’s statistics, you’ll come away unimpressed. If you dig into the splits and isolate his performance as a starter, you’ll come away even more unimpressed. The performance numbers paint one picture of Kelly. The velocity numbers paint a picture quite different. The two different Kellys are somewhat hard to reconcile, but it helps that the same profile exists somewhere else.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, the Cardinals and Dodgers square off in Game 1 of the NLCS. The Dodgers are throwing Zack Greinke, who you probably know as one of the best pitchers alive. The Cardinals are throwing Joe Kelly, who, if you don’t watch the Cardinals regularly, you may have never heard of. But, being the Cardinals, it is no huge surprise that they have found some moderate prospect in the third round and turned him into an ace. This is what they do. So, Joe Kelly and his 3.08 career ERA is taking the mound for the Cardinals tonight as yet another example of the Cardinals ridiculous player development success.

Except Joe Kelly is a little different than the rest of the terrific young arms the Cardinals keep pulling out of thin air. A table of the most often used 27-and-under pitchers that St. Louis has thrown over the last two years, to illustrate the difference:

Read the rest of this entry »

With all the Division Series now over, it now time to give a quick look at the League Championship Series umpires. I will look at the NLCS umpires today and the ALCS umpires tomorrow.

For each umpire, I have include their 3-year average K%, BB% and Zone% for both left-handed and right-handed hitters. I have created a 100 scale which shows how much more or less an umpire is than the league average. A value over 100 is always pitcher friendly (a lower BB% means a higher 100 value).

Additionally, I have included a heat map of the umpire’s called strike zone compared to the league average zone. It subtracts the percentage of called strikes divided by the total of the called balls and strikes of the umpire from the league average. For example, if the umpire called a pitch in the zone a strike 40% of the time and if the league average is 50%, the output would be -10% (40%-50%) or 0.10.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies in the World Series in 2009, and though Lee and the Phillies didn’t win, the ace impressed armchair psychiatrists and industry officials alike with his apparent countenance and composure under stress. One of my favorite baseball anecdotes is that, the next spring, in a team meeting, a coach pointed to Lee and held him up as an example of how to stay balanced and perform when the pressure’s really on. It was then that Lee spoke up and said, paraphrased, “actually I damn near s*** my pants.”

In a postgame interview Wednesday night, Adam Wainwright admitted to having been nervous, given that he was tasked to start a do-or-die Division Series Game 5. Wainwright’s pitched in a World Series before, and he already had 14 games of playoff experience, but you could hardly blame him for being human. Experience doesn’t make you immune to feelings. It maybe gives you a better idea of how to handle them. Wainwright was chosen for the postgame interview because he threw a complete game to allow the Cardinals to advance to the NLCS. For the second time in two starts, Wainwright was dominant, and though there’s no such thing as an unwinnable game, Wainwright is the reason why you talk about avoiding aces in October. The Pirates technically had two chances to win this series, but this is why it felt like they only had one.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, in one of my chats, someone asked if I could design a dream starting pitcher, throwing any four pitches of my choosing. Of the pitches, I wanted a curveball, and of all the curveballs, I settled on Adam Wainwright‘s. There are a host of excellent curveballs out there — Clayton Kershaw‘s is famous, and Jose Fernandez’s will be — but Wainwright’s is spectacular, and I was also dealing with recency bias after Wainwright’s start against the Pirates in which his curve flat-out dominated. That curve was fresh in my mind, and the worst thing about Wainwright’s game ending was that I wouldn’t be able to watch that curveball anymore.

A funny thing happened on an earlier tour through the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. I was looking at 2013 starting pitchers, and I was looking at curveballs, and almost by accident, I noticed that Wainwright’s curve generated a good whiff rate, but Gerrit Cole’s generated an excellent whiff rate. Cole — Wainwright’s opponent in just a couple hours in Game 5 of that series. This was originally slated to be a matchup between two great curves. Now it looks like a matchup between one of those great curves, and another, also great curve. There are a few things we can take away from this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: I don’t actually know if Michael Wacha thinks that. The headline is hyperbolic in nature, designed to convey the ideas from the article in a way that make you want to read said article. Michael Wacha might think pitching inside is really smart. I haven’t asked him. I doubt it, though.

Yesterday, with his team facing elimination, Michael Wacha shut down the Pirates. Not just in a good October performance kind of way, but in a you-can’t-hit-this-so-stop-trying kind of way. He took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, and left having only allowed Pedro Alvarez to deposit one into the seats. For the day, he allowed a BABIP of .000, and it didn’t look like great defense being played behind him. It was just Michael Wacha dominating a pretty solid offense.

But perhaps the most amazing part is he did it with half the strike zone. The outer half, specifically. Michael Wacha decided that he simply didn’t have any interest in throwing to the inner half of the plate, and if the Pirates were going to hit him, they were going to have to do it by getting extension and driving a ball the other way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being up 2-1 in the NLDS, today is a pretty important game for the Pirates. A loss not only means that the series goes to a deciding game 5, but that game 5 would be in St. Louis, and the Cardinals would put Adam Wainwright back on the hill for that deciding game. Beating Wainwright at home is no easy task, and they can’t feel very good about that match-up given how poorly the first game of this series went for the Pirates.

So, it’s not an elimination game for Pittsburgh, but this is the one they want to win. Beating Michael Wacha in Pittsburgh is a much easier task than beating Wainwright in St. Louis. To win this game, though, they’re going to need a strong performance from Charlie Morton, or at least, several innings that keep the score close before the battle of the bullpens takes over. If you look at Morton’s season line — 116 innings, 3.26 ERA/3.60 FIP/3.69 xFIP — that doesn’t seem like it should be too much to ask. But Morton, as a pitcher, has one very big flaw that might be a problem against St. Louis today.

Morton throws fastballs about 70% of the time, and most of his fastballs are of the two-seam variety. It’s why he posted a 62% GB% this year, and it’s why he absolutely destroys right-handed batters. He throws a heavy, pounding sinker that just eats RHBs for breakfast, but the same strengths that allow him do dominate righties create serious problems against left-handers.

Read the rest of this entry »