When it became very clear that the 2016 Chicago Cubs, the 103-win Chicago Cubs, were potentially one game away from their historical season coming to a disappointing finish, the pitcher standing on the mound was Travis Wood. Wood had just been brought in to face the left-handed Jason Kipnis, and Wood had just thrown three balls in four pitches to Jason Kipnis, and then an 87-mph cutter breaking right toward the heart of the plate. Kipnis hit the very hittable cutter 10 rows deep into the right field bleachers at Wrigley Field, on a windy night in Chicago when would-be home runs were becoming warning track fly outs all evening long. Not this one.

Nothing was stopping this ball, off the bat at 105 mph, from landing in the bleachers (and then immediately being thrown back onto the field), from giving the Indians a 7-1 lead in the game, and from getting the Indians one step closer to the 3-1 lead in the World Series which they now possess. And when that ball was on its way out of the playing field, Aroldis Chapman, Hector Rondon, and Pedro Strop, the three most important Cubs relievers during the regular season, looked on from the third-base bullpen, none of them having thrown a single pitch in the game.

Rondon eventually mopped up Wood’s mess — and Justin Grimm‘s and Mike Montgomery’s mess, too — throwing two scoreless innings, striking out two of the eight batters he faced while pumping fastballs that touched 99 mph. And the fact that it was Rondon who mopped up the mess caused by lesser relievers, while Chapman and Strop contributed nothing, highlights the key difference between the bullpens of the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians in this World Series.
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Like a lot of people, I don’t gamble, but, like a lot of people, I have done it before. I was a sophomore in college, and I thought I knew an awful lot about baseball, so I thought, you know what, I bet I can monetize this. I decided to lean on my baseball expertise to bet on individual baseball games. I bet for two days, I lost about four hundred dollars, and I haven’t tried it again since. I’ve learned more about baseball over the decade, but, have I, really?

If there’s one thing we know about baseball, it’s that we can’t predict it. The smaller the sample, the wilder it gets. But we can be so, so easily tricked, and never is that more clear than it is in the playoffs. In the playoffs, see, individual games are under greater scrutiny. And when you get to the World Series, people are searching for possible keys everywhere. *Everything* is important. This pitcher’s vulnerability could be exploited. That player on the bench will have a good matchup. The guy over there’s a bad defender. We examine these games in so much detail that we start to convince ourselves the games can be actually predicted. We convince ourselves the games will make sense. Earlier Friday, in my chat, I fielded countless questions about the degree to which the Indians would be screwed in Game 3. Road park, Josh Tomlin pitching, wind blowing strongly out, DH in left field. It was all lining up for the Cubs. It was so easy to believe, yeah, this is the Cubs’ game. How couldn’t it be?

You can stare at a coin all you like, but heads or tails will still come up half the time. An exhaustively-examined game in the World Series is not meaningfully more predictable than an unexamined regular-season game in July. Give it one game at a time, and baseball’s likely to baseball. Give it one game at a time, and Tomlin and the Indians can knock off the Cubs 1-0 in a pretty extreme hitters’ environment.

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John Lackey might be slightly overlooked on a Chicago Cubs team that’s almost ideally constructed. He isn’t young and he isn’t really a star — which tend to be the two traits that earn a player attention during the postseason. He is an above-average pitcher, though, and as the Cubs’ starter for Game Four of the World Series, he’s in a position to exert some influence over the club’s chances of winning the championship. With all of his antics on the mound, it’s hard to say Lackey does anything gracefully. What he has done, though is age quite well, putting up one of the best two-year runs among pitchers his age over the last three decades. And here’s something about him that’s relevant for Saturday’s game against Cleveland: while he doesn’t need a generous strike zone to succeed — his pitching ability and the great Cubs defense are enough — Lackey, more than most, is in a position to benefit from one.

Over the past two seasons, John Lackey has pitched more than 400 innings with a better-than-league-average FIP. Over the last 30 years, he’s one of just a dozen pitchers to pull off that feat between the age-36 to -37 seasons. While his 6.7 WAR total over that interval might not seem incredibly high, the only pitchers over the last three decades to pitch more innings with a higher WAR are (listed in order of wins) Randy Johnson, David Wells, Chuck Finley, Dennis Martinez, Jack Morris,  R.A. Dickey, Greg Maddux, and Woody Williams .

The relatively even success over the 2015 and -16 seasons doesn’t mean that Lackey hasn’t made adjustments. As Eno Sarris wrote, Lackey improved his change and took a different approach against left-handed batters this season that could have lessened his platoon splits. He both struck out and also walked a few more hitters this year while giving up homers at a higher rate (something to watch for if the wind is blowing out on Saturday), but because of the overall increase in scoring this season, Lackey’s fielding-independent numbers remained nearly identical when taken in context. While he isn’t mowing hitters down, he has continued to record an above-average strikeout rate and walk rate, and the Cubs appear to have gotten a pretty good deal on the two-year, $32 million contract Lackey signed, even if the team did also have to concede a draft pick.

Lackey is a pitcher who relies on swings to get batters out. His strike-zone percentage at 48% is a little below average, but he’s one of just five starting pitchers (Kevin Gausman, Cole Hamels, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander) in 2016 to finish among the top-20 starters in out-of-zone swing rate (O-Swing%), in-zone swing rate (Z-Swing%), and overall swing percentage. Among the right-handers in that group, all of them throw several miles per hour harder than Lackey — and even the lefty Hamels throws a bit harder on average. Lackey relies on being close enough to the zone to (a) elicit swings on pitches that will either be missed or yield weak contact or (b) get called strikes on borderline pitches. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fall Classic is underway, with the underdog Cleveland Indians landing the first haymaker blow for their third series in a row. The NL Champion Chicago Cubs were clearly the best team in baseball throughout the regular season; will they be able to do what the Tribe’s previous postseason opponents couldn’t, and fight their way off of the ropes and onto ultimate victory?

This week, we’re taking a macro, ball-in-play-oriented look at each team and its key players. Earlier this week, we looked at the AL champs; today, it’s the Cubs’ turn under the microscope, as we examine granular data such as BIP frequencies, exit speeds and launch angles to get a feel for what made them tick in 2016.

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As you’ve likely heard, the first World Series game at Wrigley Field in seven decades will be played this evening. The starting assignment belongs to Kyle Hendricks, the soft-tossing right-hander lovingly known as “The Professor.” At this point, Hendricks has done enough to convince the attentive fan that he’s an above-average major-league pitcher. While many of us were on board with Hendricks in 2014 and 2015, there might have still been cause to doubt a pitcher whose fastball sits at 88 mph. After a 2016 season during which he both maintained his strong fielding-independent numbers and allowed very few runs, there isn’t much room left for doubt.

Hendricks has further cemented that impression on the biggest stage, allowing just three runs in 16.1 innings this postseason to go along with his consistently strong fielding-independent resume. Even if you give plenty of credit to the Cubs’ superb defense for Hendricks’ top-line numbers, it’s hard to ignore his performance this season and over the last few weeks.

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I might need to prime you for this one first. I don’t know if this is something people are actually talking about, or if I just made this theory up. But it sounds like it could make sense, so let’s go forward. In Game 3, the Indians are throwing Josh Tomlin against Kyle Hendricks and the Cubs, in Chicago. That doesn’t seem to bode very well for the visitors. The Indians were already the underdog, and now they’re losing the DH and the home-field advantage. Our scoreboard page puts the Cubs’ odds of winning at 64%. You could argue a few points in either direction but the Cubs are supposed to win this game.

However, let’s theorize! How might you make yourself feel better about the Indians’ shot? We know Tomlin is by no means overpowering. He’s not a strikeout pitcher. What he is is a control pitcher, and in that regard he’s one of the best. He led the American League in strike rate, among qualified pitchers. He had baseball’s lowest walk rate, among qualified pitchers. Tomlin is forever around the zone, and, the Cubs offense just finished with the highest walk rate in baseball. Being disciplined about the zone has been a big part of the Cubs’ offensive equation. Doesn’t it make sense that the Cubs could struggle against strike-throwers, who consistently get ahead? Could Tomlin turn the Cubs’ discipline against them?

Pretty interesting theory, right? Yeah! No. Sorry, but, nope. Tomlin isn’t poised to turn the Cubs’ walk rate into a weakness. Sorry if I just spoiled the rest of the article, but if Tomlin is going to succeed, he’s going to have to do it simply by executing almost perfectly, just like everyone else.

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It may be impossible to believe after the last two games — after all the front-door sinkers thrown by Corey Kluber that turned the Cubs’ bats into mush and after a similar experience last night facilitated by his apprentice Trevor Bauer — but the front-door sinker is not a hot new trend in baseball.

First, to review: the front-door sinker is thrown from a pitcher of one hand to a hitter of the opposite one. The intention? Essentially, to fake the batter into not swinging. It’s a sinker thrown at the hip that then moves into the strike zone. Here’s an example from August Fagerstrom’s piece on Kluber this week:

Seems like a rad pitch. In the era of the swinging strike, it’s a pitch that’s designed to elicit a take. It relies on command in an era when we wonder if pitchers even have any command. After all, as I noted in my for last year’s Hardball Times Annual, the average pitcher misses the catcher’s target by more than 11 inches on a 3-0 count.

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Kyle Schwarber was the show, or at least the story, in last night’s Game Two of the World Series. After five plate appearances in April without a hit — followed by a six-month layoff that prevented him from facing even one major-league pitcher in a game situation — Schwarber has been up to the plate nine times on the biggest stage baseball has to offer. In those nine plate appearances, Schwarber has reached base safely more often than he hasn’t, and has yet to be retired when hitting the ball in play. Last night, his hits proved timely, producing the second and fourth runs for the Chicago Cubs as they evened a series that now heads back to Chicago. How has Cleveland approached him, and how has he responded?

It’s often said at the beginning of spring training that the pitchers are ahead of the hitters; batters don’t yet have their timing back and can have difficulty recognizing pitches. The chart below depicts all 40 pitches Schwarber has seen this postseason, color-coded by the result of the pitch. From Baseball Savant:

Of the 20 or so pitches clearly outside of the box above, Schwarber has offered at just three of them. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest strikeouts in last night’s World Series Game Two came in the seventh inning when Carlos Santana swung through a curveball from Mike Montgomery. The Indians had two on and two out, and trailed 5-1. One swing of the bat would have brought them to within a run.

The curveball has been Montgomery’s secret to success. The 27-year-old lefty began featuring it prominently after coming to the Cubs from the Mariners in late July. His sinker has also became a primary weapon. His pitching coach, Chris Bosio, deserves much of the credit.

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