The stat wars are over, and the bodies are buried. Some teams still run more numbers than others, and not every organization has made the same analytical investment, but by and large, the baseball industry has embraced the analytical revolution. We don’t need to go into this. I don’t want to go into this. Baseball has leaned so hard into the numbers that, if anything, it’s created an accidental problem of homogeneous thought. Intellectual diversity might currently be at a relative low. Did you hear about the new GM? He’s just like every other GM. That’s a stupid joke that doesn’t refer to anyone, but it could also refer to almost everyone. This entire paragraph is old hat by now.

Every baseball team has numbers coming out of its ears. Every baseball team has employees with ideas of how the team could be better. The new separator is buy-in. Let’s say you’ve got a player. Let’s say the team thinks it could help the player improve. Will the player be responsive? Does the player trust the people delivering the message? We’ve entered an era of middlemen, of organizations concentrating on finding or developing better communicators. Everyone has the data. The best teams get the players to listen.

At the end of July, right up against the deadline, the Dodgers traded for Yu Darvish. The Dodgers had ideas. Yu Darvish listened.

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The simplest, fundamental truth about closers is that none of them are perfect. Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith, Craig Kimbrel — they all blow saves, and they all take losses. Give them enough time and the bad outings will even pile up. It was Rivera who took the loss in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. Maybe the best playoff pitcher in history took one of the most devastating losses in memory. Baseball perfection is on a relative scale. All that baseball actually guarantees is that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it’ll piss everyone off. No one is safe from the baseball menace.

No closers are perfect. No closer ever has been perfect, and no closer ever will be perfect. But there’s another fundamental truth about the position. By public perception, closers are binary, black and white. There are the closers — the overwhelming majority of them included — who’ll just never earn trust. The closers who make fans roll their eyes and say “here we go again” when they come in and throw their first ball. Fans have no patience with closers. There’s little tolerance for hittability or wildness. In that sense, it can be a terrible job. There’s limited praise, and limitless blame.

Then there’s the lucky few. It’s a rare breed, but there are closers who’re considered automatic. Closers you don’t even feel you have to watch that intently, because success is a foregone conclusion. Why closely watch a baseball game that’s already over? These closers have all blown saves, each and every one of them, but they retain the perception of invulnerability. Maybe it’s more of an illusion, but one can’t deny its existence.

Kenley Jansen is one of those invulnerable closers. In the same way that Rivera was one of those invulnerable closers, Jansen comes in and basically throws one pitch, and after five or ten or fifteen of them, he gets to go change his clothes. Kenley Jansen is effectively bulletproof. Wednesday night, Kenley Jansen blew a save.

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Wednesday night had just about everything you could want in a baseball game. Game 2 is on the list, somewhere, of greatest World Series games in history.

There were dramatic swings in win probability in the late innings for each the Astros and Dodgers. Some of the game’s greatest stars produced signature moments. There was Yasiel Puig being Yasiel Puig, licking his bat and slamming his glove after nearly completing a five-star catch. There was the bill of Chris Taylor’s cap perhaps saving a run early. There was Justin Verlander returning from the visiting clubhouse to the dugout to implore his team to do something. There was this generation’s Rivera, Kenley Jansen, enduring a rare misstep. There was poor Josh Fields. There was a rare test of roster depth, with Austin Barnes becoming the first player to appear at catcher and second base in a World Series game.

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My father’s an avid tennis player, and there’s this thing he says anytime — or, because he’s a dad, precisely every time — he mis-hits a ball for an accidental winner. “Welp, I paid for the whole racquet,” is what he says. It’s a goofy way of acknowledging some good fortune, of apologizing for having benefited from something other than one’s actual skill.

The Los Angeles Dodgers pay Chris Taylor mostly for what he does with his bat and his glove and legs. But they employ the whole Chris Taylor. And while there was no reason to care about it before last night, one is compelled to acknowledge today that the whole Chris Taylor includes Chris Taylor’s ball cap.

Here’s why that’s relevant. With one out, runners on first and third, and the scored tied at 0-0, Houston’s Alex Bregman hit a liner to center field. What happened next actually kinda did shock everyone.

For those who haven’t fully pivoted to video, the footage above depicts center fielder Chris Taylor diving for Bregman’s liner, missing Bregman’s liner, and then somehow deflecting Bregman’s liner to left fielder Joc Pederson by means of his hat. While the base hit allowed Josh Reddick to score from third, the ricochet to Pederson forced George Springer to stop at second, limiting Bregman to a single. Rich Hill would strike out the next two batters. No further runs would score.

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Well, that was one of the craziest baseball games anyone has ever seen. A would-be triple that hit the bill of Chris Taylor’s cap and then bounced right to Joc Pederson, a pickoff at second base that looked like Laz Diaz got challenged to an impromptu game of dodgeball, and finally, an extra inning home run derby led to a 7-6 Astros victory, tying the series at one game apiece. If we get any more baseball games like that one, this series will be a classic.

But before most of those crazy things happened, Dave Roberts made a decision that seemingly set the wheels in motion. In the top of the fifth inning, the Dodgers’ manager summoned Kenta Maeda from the bullpen to take over for Rich Hill.

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Being expressive is half of Yasiel Puig’s whole thing. The Dodgers would love for him to be great, and the fans would love for him to be great, but if Yasiel Puig were great, he’d be just another great baseball player. That is, if he were great and great only. But there’s more to him, for better and for worse. Puig’s own expressiveness might be linked to personality traits that make him, shall we say, draining company, but fans don’t have to be around Puig for hours on end, every day of the week. They just get to watch him entertain. Puig is a highly-skilled professional entertainer.

He goes about his business with uncommon flair, eschewing baseball’s standard and pervasive stoic self-seriousness. It’s not that Puig is in any way lacking for intensity; it just has a different way of bubbling to the surface. Over these past few weeks, we’ve grown acquainted with Yasiel Puig’s tongue. Sometimes it’s hanging out of his mouth, and sometimes it’s licking the end of the barrel. Puig is also notorious for his bat flips, regardless of whether the ball’s leaving the yard. Puig has his own style of playing defense. He has his own style of running the bases. You know, in short, when it’s Puig that you’re watching even if you can’t see the name on his jersey.

Puig has even brought his own flavor to patience. You might not think there’s such a thing as taking a pitch in a particularly expressive way. Puig would disagree with you, and there’s a mountain of evidence from just these playoffs alone. Puig has shown some demonstrative takes for years, but this month, he’s reached a new level, as he’s been more patient than ever. Puig has one of the lower swing rates in the playoffs. He has one of the higher rates of pitches per plate appearance in the playoffs. Though he went 0-for-3 last night, he worked two counts to 2-and-0, and the other to 3-and-0. Puig has swung at the first pitch just three times in his last 54 opportunities since re-joining the Dodgers lineup in late September. One of those was a check-swing foul where the bat met the ball by accident.

This might be a bit of a slog. You’re welcome to leave at any time. But, I watched every pitch that Puig has seen this year in the playoffs. I’ve identified 16 different forms of demonstrative takes. This ignores the regular, boring, featureless take. There have been some of those. There have been many of the others. Watch as Yasiel Puig makes a show of doing nothing.

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This World Series has been dubbed a clash of analytical titans. Whatever the outcome, it would appear already to be a victory for the movement and an argument for greater investment in decision-science departments.

The Dodgers have one of the largest research departments in the game — perhaps the largest, though there isn’t a publicly available database for full accounting. The Astros have also benefited greatly from analytics, as we know. It’s possible that the two organizations have distanced themselves from much of the pack in a sport where every team has some sort of investment in statistically based R&D.

Nor is this development lost on the players. Consider left-hander Tony Watson’s comments from a recent piece by Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register.

“Just the sheer numbers as far as the bodies, the staff that is analytically-driven,” says Dodgers reliever Tony Watson who spent 6-1/2 seasons with the analytically-open Pittsburgh Pirates before joining the Dodgers this summer. “Then I later found out it’s the largest R & D in baseball. … Coming from Pittsburgh, it’s definitely bigger. That’s the focus. And it works. The numbers don’t lie.”

The Pirates have made a sizable investment in their analytics department. According to Watson, however, it’s overshadowed by the group assembled by Los Angeles. Once a tool for low-revenue teams, it’s become another area where large-market clubs can outspend and outinvest their opponents. It’s a troubling development for the league’s minnows: the richest teams are now also the smartest.

I bring all this up to establish that, if any club is capable of idenitfying the weaknesses and strengths of an opponent, it’s the Dodgers. They know what all the Astros do well and what they don’t.

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Last year’s World Series featured a true face-off between big and small markets, pitting the high-revenue Chicago Cubs against the lower-revenue Cleveland Indians. The difference in each club’s markets materialized in their respective payrolls: Chicago outspent Cleveland by roughly $90 million in 2016. The contrast was stark.

This year’s Series represents a different kind of contrast. Everyone’s aware of the Dodgers’ financial might, of course, but the Astros enjoy a large market, too. And even if that hasn’t been obvious recently, the club’s payrolls from a dozen years ago reflect the club’s spending capacities. Over the last decade, however, the team has executed a massive tank-job and also navigated difficulties with their gigantic television deal. The result? Dramatically lower payrolls. The rebuild has worked, however, and the club’s payroll has nearly doubled in just the last two years. However, that payroll is still in the bottom half of baseball and represents only half of the Dodgers’ expenditures in what is the largest disparity in World Series history.

I would be remiss when discussing the disparity between the two teams not to mention that the gap between the clubs’ payrolls is much more modest when comparing only active rosters. Carl Crawford has been gone from the roster for quite some time, but his $22 million salary is still on the books. Scott Kazmir is hurt. Adrian Gonzalez is in Italy. Those three account for around $60 million in salary alone. A handful of other players are no longer on the team. As a result, the Dodgers’ 25-man World Series roster is earning “only” $143 million. Even with all the money the Dodgers have written off, they still have an active roster that would place them in the top half of MLB payrolls. As for the Astros, their World Series roster comes in at around $115 million.

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Justin Turner refused to be fooled a third time by Dallas Keuchel in Game 1 of the World Series. He made an equipment change after a strikeout and a pop out, and was ready for the pitcher’s final attempt to go to the well. That go-ahead two-run home run in the sixth serves to give us all a look inside the type of adjustments hitters have to make from at-bat to at-bat.

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Last night, the Dodgers’ domination of the postseason continued. Winning a World Series game by two runs isn’t exactly steamrolling your opponent, but given what Clayton Kershaw, Brandon Morrow, and Kenley Jansen did to the Astros offense, the game never really felt in doubt. Houston got their only run on an Alex Bregman solo home run and never really threatened again.

The rest of their offensive production consisted of a pair of singles, but neither runner would get past first base. The Astros didn’t put a single runner in scoring position all night long. There were no rallies, no trouble out of which a Dodger pitcher had to work. Just outs, and most of them quick outs.

It took Los Angeles just 107 pitches to face 30 batters. Usually, when you see low pitch counts and quick innings, it’s because a team was overly aggressive, swinging at pitches early in counts and making quick outs. In Game 1, though, the Astros seemingly made it easy on the Dodgers by just not swinging at strikes.

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