The biggest play of last night’s Game Six was a defensive one, but not in a positive manner: a miscommunication between Tyler Naquin in center field and Lonnie Chisenhall in right failed to result in a catch. Two runs scored for Chicago, and the Cubs took a 3-0 lead in just the first inning. The biggest strategic decision, meanwhile, concerned the use of Aroldis Chapman by Joe Maddon, as Chicago’s manager went to his closer in the seventh inning of a 7-2 game. It’s hard to discount the the implications either of Cleveland’s defensive misplay or Maddon’s bullpen management on the outcome of this World Series.

However, Game Six of the World Series also featured an unimportant strategic decision that facilitated some unimportant defensive plays. Even though he scored no runs and recorded zero hits, the decision to start Jason Heyward was likely worth several runs for the Cubs. And even if those runs didn’t ultimately represent the difference between a win and a loss, Heyward’s presence in the game nevertheless revealed how an offensively struggling but defensively forceful player can impact a result.

In the fourth inning of last night’s contest, right after Mike Napoli singled in Jason Kipnis to make the game 7-1, the Chicago Cubs possessed a 94.8% chance of victory. The leverage index was a fairly low 0.47, so even a positive result for Cleveland was unlikely to influence the game greatly. Facing Jake Arrieta, Jose Ramirez struck a ball that lands for a hit 56.8% of the time and goes for extra bases 20% of the time.

Here’s the end of that play:

At first glance, the play appears challenging for Heyward but hardly impossible. As mentioned above, batted balls with similar exit velocity and launch angles were caught around 43% of the time. Nearly half, in other words. What that figure doesn’t account for, however, is Heyward’s position at the start of the play relative to the location of the ball in the field. We can go a little further with the Statcast data.

Jason Heyward’s catch in 4th. Ball off Jose Ramirez’s bat = 97.9 mph. Hang time = 2.9 seconds. Distance = 35 feet. H/t: @mike_petriello

— Dan Hayes (@CSNHayes) November 2, 2016

By doing a few calculations, we can determine that, if he were running in a 40-yard dash in this case, Heyward would have recorded a time of roughly 9.9 seconds, which is really slow for a 40-yard dash. Of course, when Jason Heyward hears the ball off the bat, he doesn’t simply get to sprint straight forward in a line. He has no idea in which direction he might have to run — backwards, forwards, left, right. He decides where to run by looking at a small white object that begins its trajectory roughly 300 feet away while also traveling at 98 mph.

We rarely see an outfielder’s first step when watching the game because both our own eyes and also the cameras themsleves are focused on the batter-pitcher matchup. Heyward is very good at making quick decisions, though: the first step on his acrobatic play near the wall in Game Five occurred within 0.17 seconds.

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Unofficially, Game 6 was over in the blink of an eye. Officially, it wasn’t complete for three and a half hours, but from close to the start, most fans were thinking ahead to Wednesday. Even while Game 6 was going, Game 7 was on everyone’s mind, as we prepared for the most anticipated showdown in, what, at least 15 years? You’re on this site right now to read about baseball, but you’re not looking to read about the game in the books. You want to read about the finale. Nothing is ever as important as it is in the finale.

Game 7 presents a funny situation. It’s one game, so it could turn on almost literally anything. In Game 6, after all, the biggest point according to win expectancy was Addison Russell’s routine fly ball that somehow dropped between two outfielders. Who would’ve guessed? You can’t predict any one-game scenario. At the same time, it’s never more critical to maximize the odds. Strategic calls are at their most important. Bullpen usage is at its most important. Lineup construction is at its most important. There’s nothing after Game 7 but gray clouds and winter. Half of the players will have a happier winter than the others.

As that lineup construction goes for the Cubs — look, I don’t want to deceive you. This isn’t that critical. What I’m writing about probably won’t make the biggest difference. But I see a case for starting David Ross over Willson Contreras. It has a lot to do with a guy supposedly available out of the bullpen.

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In order to keep their season alive, the Cubs had to win Game Six. They won Game Six. Tomorrow, they play for all the marbles, with one more win bringing the franchise their first championship in 108 years. From that perspective, tonight was a success. Full stop.

But that perspective is a particularly binary view of the world, with only good and bad outcomes, and no room for the shades of gray that make up real life. In this world, things can be somewhat good, or very good, or painfully awful, or just kind of not great. In this world, we have not two possible outcomes, but thousands of them, with differing levels of magnitude. And from a perspective that accounts for the different magnitudes of outcomes, this Cubs win isn’t quite as great as it could have been. This win came with a cost, and probably unnecessarily so.

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Yesterday I slapped together an InstaGraphs post about a Jon Lester strikeout of Brandon Guyer. It was a called strikeout on a pitch off the plate, but it was also a strikeout Lester has recorded several dozen times before. That part, I found interesting. But the call was also important in the moment. It changed the Indians’ odds of winning Game 5 by 10 percentage points, and during the game I tweeted that out with a screenshot. I didn’t expect the tweet to blow up like it did.

This isn’t supposed to be boastful. Wow, retweets, all right. Nobody cares. What happened as a consequence of that tweet going around was that countless different people started showing up in my mentions. And wouldn’t you know it, but those people had opinions about the strike zone! Some people were convinced the umpires were in the tank for the Cubs. Other people were convinced the Indians didn’t have any right to complain after calls they’d gotten earlier. More people still accused me of whining for some reason, as if a screenshot and a fact are opinions. The overall response was emotionally charged. Maybe not a surprise, in a World Series elimination game, but people were stirred the hell up.

Guess what! The zone’s been even. The Indians have gotten calls in their favor. The Cubs have also gotten calls in their favor. The World Series isn’t over yet, of course, but through the five games we’ve watched, neither team has really gotten a more favorable zone to pitch around.

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This past Sunday night, one of the most important baseball games of the year went head-to-head with a primetime regular-season NFL broadcast on NBC. Millions more opted to watch the Chicago Cubs host their final home game of the year and stave off elimination in a close game. That Major League Baseball went head-to-head with the NFL and won isn’t that big of a deal. That MLB has garnered ratings not seen in a decade, however — and bested the top-rated program in all of television over the past few years — represents a big win for a sport receiving near-constant criticism for sagging ratings.

The broadcast of Game Five on Sunday night was one of the highest-rated broadcasts for the World Series in years. Since Boston ended their 86-year championship drought back in 2004, only one game has drawn more than the 23.6 million viewers Cleveland and Chicago netted on Sunday night: Game Seven of the 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers. If you remove clinching games, it was one of the most viewed games of the century. The table below shows the most-viewed non-clinching games since 2000, the year FOX exclusively began broadcasting the World Series.

More people tuned into to see Sunday night’s World Series game than watched Game One in 2004 when the Red Sox began their attempt to end the curse. The game drew more viewers than the epic extra-inning Game Six between the Cardinals and Rangers in 2011. Indeed, only one non-2004 World Series game exceeded Sunday night’s in terms of viewership: the Diamondbacks-Yankees contest from 2001, best remembered for Derek Jeter’s 10th-inning walk-off homer against Byung-Hyun Kim.

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Oh, how quickly the tables were turned.

The Cubs, they of the 103 regular-season wins, entered the World Series as the presumptive favorites in the minds of nearly all who chose to be foolish enough to actually forecast the madness that is postseason baseball. The Cubs have the star power and the narrative and the Kris Bryant. That didn’t matter, because the Indians have the pitching. They have Corey Kluber and Andrew Miller, Cody Allen and Bryan Shaw. Chicago now teeters at the precipice of elimination, a hair’s breadth from breaking the hearts of Cubs fans everywhere. Joe Maddon will need to play his hand tonight perfectly, because if they don’t succeed tonight, there will be no Game Seven over which to agonize. He’ll need to save the season, and he’ll need his bullpen to do it.

Given that the Cubs have almost no margin for error at this point, they will need to maximize run prevention above all else. Cleveland will be deploying Josh Tomlin and Kluber in games Six and Seven, respectively, along with a likely heavy dosage of Miller. Runs will be at a premium. Kyle Schwarber will be back in the Chicago lineup, which will help, but there’s only so much he can do when Willson Contreras and Javy Baez are swinging at pitches thrown into the next state and Jason Heyward’s bat is on the side of a milk carton. These games will be about preventing runs, not scoring them.

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It says something when a pitcher wins 18 games, records a 3.10 ERA, and people are still left wondering what went wrong. Nevertheless, that’s the case for Jake Arrieta and his 2016 season. Because he’s almost cut his slider usage in half this year — and because that alteration coincided with less dominant results than his 2015 campaign — much of the discourse settles on that pitch. His manager even admitted to wondering about it: “The break on the slider/cutter/whatever you want to call it has been more inconsistent,” Joe Maddon said after a poor outing by Arrieta in July.

The Cubs need Arrieta to find his slider tonight in Game Six in order to force this World Series to continue. By one metric — usage — the righty has returned to normal with the pitch. But has he really found it again? To answer the question, we first we need to figure out what he lacked this season relative to last; then we can see if things have returned to normal in the meantime. We’ll break the pitch down by three components: velocity, movement, and command.

Velocity
It’s tempting to point to velocity as the problem. Arrieta has lost a mile per hour on his slider from last year, and velocity is the most important aspect of a slider when it comes to whiffs. Case closed.

Except! Arrieta was up a tick on the fastball and the slider in 2015. Arrieta lost that tick, but he returned to the same velocity that he possessed in 2014, when he posted a 2.53 ERA and broke out with the Cubs. He struck out a batter more per nine innings in 2014, too, so it’s not just ERA that indicates Arrieta has been effective with an 89 mph slider.

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It’s never enjoyable to be the one who rains on a parade. To spoil someone’s hype, to kill someone’s vibe. Hype is an extension of excitement, of enjoyment, and enjoyment is a shared interest among us all. At the same time, it can be important not to let the hype get out of control. When the hype gets out of control, it begins to exceed reality, and disappointment is born out of unmet expectations. Just as the desire for enjoyment is a shared interest among us all, so, too, is the avoidance of disappointment.

Luckily, I’m not about to break any news here when I tell you that Javier Baez has looked a mess at the plate during the World Series, so I can’t take all the credit for raining on the parade and spoiling the hype. The hype is being spoiled right there, on the field, for all to see. I’ve had nothing to do with that. I’m just here to take note, because the 180 from Baez’s fantastic NLDS and NLCS is nearly as remarkable as what happened in those series themselves, and it serves as a necessary reminder not to let the hype get out of control and exceed reality.

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Remember that Josh Tomlin isn’t even really supposed to be here. Not that there’s anything wrong with him, but the Indians like Corey Kluber, and they like Trevor Bauer. They liked Danny Salazar, and they liked Carlos Carrasco. If the Indians had their druthers, Tomlin, perhaps, would be a bullpen long guy right about now. Maybe he would’ve been left off the roster entirely. Not only will Tomlin now start a game that could deliver the Indians a World Series championship — he’s going on short rest. Don’t lose sight of how the Indians are a miracle.

Of course, by name value, the Game 6 starter matchup is frightfully uneven. The Cubs are happy to be going with Jake Arrieta, because a year ago, he was maybe the best pitcher on the planet. Tomlin, meanwhile, recovered from shoulder surgery before making 10 starts. This year, Arrieta took a step back, but Tomlin basically lost his rotation spot. Go off perception, and it feels like the Cubs have a great chance of extending this all to seven. Anyone who knows anything would rather have Arrieta on the mound.

Arrieta, see, is the more talented pitcher. He’s the tougher pitcher to hit. He has higher-quality stuff. The edge Arrieta doesn’t have is in recent results. In what amounts to the most recent history, Tomlin has done a better job of pitching.

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Much has been made of Terry Francona’s bullpen use this postseason. His aggressive use of relievers, Andrew Miller in particular, has garnered him a considerable amount of praise from all corners. Phrases like “leverage index” have been evoked beyond just the confines of websites like this one. Francona has managed the postseason very differently from the regular season, and that approach has worked very well given the personnel with which he’s working. Francona has felt comfortable using Miller early in games to preserve leads and once even used him to maintain a tie. In the fourth inning of last night’s Game Five loss, however, Cleveland was presented with a high-leverage situation. Instead of turning to the bullpen, Francona chose to stick with his starter, Trevor Bauer. Bauer gave up three runs in what would ultimately be a 3-2 loss. Did Francona wait too long to make a move?

First, a bit of context. As noted, Bauer started the game for Cleveland — and, over the first three innings last night, was significantly better than he appeared in Game Two. In Bauer’s first World Series start, he recorded 71 pitches through three innings, labored to get outs, and struggled with the strike zone. After a walk, a double play, and a single, Bauer was out of the game, having thrown 87 pitches before completing four innings. Last night, Bauer completed his first three innings efficiently, requiring only 45 pitches against 10 batters, striking out five of them. When he headed out to pitch the fourth inning, Bauer had three very good innings under his belt.

The fourth inning didn’t go as well for Bauer, however. On the third pitch of the inning, he sent a sinker down the middle of the plate to Kris Bryant, and Bryant crushed it to tie the game. Nor was Bryant’s shot a wind-aided gift. Consider: of all batted balls this year which left the bat at 105 mph and with a 23-degree launch angle, 70% of them were home runs.

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