I had slightly higher hopes for this post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the final result. But when I first cooked this idea up, my plan was to utilize the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to pull velocity, horizontal movement, vertical movement, whiff rate and groundball rate to determine the nastiest pitches we’ll see in the World Series. But, there were a few problems.

While more velocity generally makes a pitch nastier, that’s not always true, especially in the case of offspeed pitches. More movement definitely makes a pitch nastier, but movement is hard to compare across a PITCHf/x leaderboard because a lot of it is dependent on arm slot and you get some funky values from guys who throw with funky motions.

So then, I was left with just whiff rate and groundball rate, but I actually kind of like that. Those are two of the best outcomes, and they’re the direct result of some of the things we weren’t able to capture, such as velocity, horizontal movement and vertical movement. The most dominant outcome of a pitch, for a pitcher, is a swing and miss. But not all guys dominate by getting whiffs, and so they don’t all pitch that way. Some guys dominate by getting weak contact, and ground balls yield the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types (grounders, flies and line drives). But the guys who really dominate are the ones who get the best of both worlds: whiffs and grounders.
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There’s no shortage of reasons why the Giants find themselves in the World Series for the third time in five years, really, and you can start anywhere. Maybe that’s Jake Peavy, a disappointment in Boston and now a revelation in San Francisco. Or rookie Joe Panik, filling a hole that was so bad it had led to Dan Uggla desperation, or the hilarious story that is Travis Ishikawa. There’s help from outsiders like Mike Matheny & Randy Choate, not to mention the Pirates deciding they’d rather have Edinson Volquez on the mound for the wild card game rather than Gerrit Cole. There’s been 18-inning playoff games, and the complete disappearance of Tim Lincecum, and the much more explainable absences of Matt Cain, Angel Pagan and Marco Scutaro, and 12 October runs that came in without the benefit of hits.

For an 88-win team to get to the World Series, a lot has to go their way. Much of it is going to be of their own doing, and some of it is going to be the usual insanity that comes in short-series baseball, which is less about crowning the “best” team and more about rewarding the right team, the one that did what needed to be done at the appropriate times.

This Giants team has all of that and more, and certainly Bruce Bochy and his staff have earned the credit they’ve been given. But in our rush to try to identify all the unusual ways that a team that always seems to be more good than great keeps getting this far in the playoffs, it’s easy to look past some of the more obvious reasons, like the fact that the Giants have two of the best players in baseball. Ace Madison Bumgarner is really, really good. So, of course, is Buster Posey.

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So we’re all set, then, for a weekend without any baseball. The Royals did away with the Orioles in the minimum number of games, and the Giants almost did that same thing to the Cardinals. So out of a possible 14 LCS contests, we got nine of them, and now we’re set up for a showdown that isn’t exactly improbable, but that wasn’t predicted by (m)any. The Royals are in the World Series, after winning 89 games and after having once been 48-50. The Giants are in the World Series, after winning 88 games and after having once been 63-57. It’s going to be a World Series between two wild-card teams, and that’s absolutely terrific.

Major League Baseball is getting what it wanted from this postseason. And I don’t just mean in terms of the drama, although I think we’ve all been aware of that. The series haven’t been long, but the games have just about all been close. As one example, during the regular season, 19 percent of all plate appearances occurred with a score deficit of at least four runs. In the playoffs, that’s dropped all the way to 9 percent, and there were only three such plate appearances in the whole ALCS. It’s absurd how suspenseful and electrifying this has all been, but then that’s something more particular to this postseason. The wild-card thing is a bigger-picture issue.

It’s … I don’t know, what’s a good word? Controversial? The argument against being, wild-card berths dilute the level of talent in the playoffs. So perhaps the wild-card teams are undeserving, and then what does that tell you if you get a pair of them in the championship? What does a World Series title tell you about a team, if it’s a series between two teams who failed to win their divisions?

It tells you that a team beat another team in a baseball tournament. It tells you nothing more, and it’s not designed to tell you anything more. Tournaments thrive on drama and unpredictability. What baseball’s got set up is a hell of a tournament, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of wild-card teams surviving to the end. In another sport, we’d call them Cinderellas.

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Not long ago, a prominent national baseball writer declared that Madison Bumgarner is the one pitcher you’d want starting a must-win game for your team in the playoffs. The statement’s certainly debatable, but at the same time the feeling is understandable — Bumgarner’s tough as nails, and he’s been on a hell of a run. He’s been on the radar for years, having spent plenty of time pitching in the postseason, and there’s something that comes to mind when you think about Bumgarner: his signature cutter. Or slider. Whichever. No matter the name, they describe the same weapon, and it’s something Bumgarner has thrown before almost 40% of the time. Madison Bumgarner? Awesome cutter. Yeah. The association’s automatic.

Regarding that, I want to show you a table. You know our pitch values? You know our pitch values. Positive numbers are good. Bigger positive numbers are more good. Here are Bumgarner’s year-to-year pitch values, from his player page:

Based on that, a year ago, Bumgarner really improved his fastball. And this year, his cutter wasn’t much of a weapon. Let’s do more! Here are 2014 season splits:

All that fastball value came in the second half. As a matter of fact, after the All-Star break, Madison Bumgarner’s fastball was the most valuable pitch in baseball. The cutter? It was fine, and it’s still fine, but it’s not what it has been. And Bumgarner doesn’t seem to mind. Despite the cutter association, the Madison Bumgarner we’ve been seeing for months is, more than anything else, an elite fastball pitcher.

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Before the National League Division Series, Giants outfielder Michael Morse met with manager Bruce Bochy and the team’s brass to talk about his spot on the team. He felt good. His oblique was finally healthy. He’d been taking full swings in batting practice. He was ready to go.

There was one problem. “I didn’t have enough at-bats,” Morse said after the Giants won Game Five of the National League Championship Series and emerged as NL champions Thursday night. “For me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable at the plate.”

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Anybody in baseball could have had these guys. Gregor Blanco, Yusmeiro Petit, Javier Lopez. Sure, the Giants spent a little to get them, but that little has meant a lot to them in return. All three came up huge in Wednesday’s Game Four victory. And the tweaks those players made to get where they are today weren’t big tweaks. The Giants just saw the talent underneath some iffy results.

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It was the inning that shouldn’t have been.

First, in the tenth inning of Game Three of the National League Championship series, the Giants saw Brandon Crawford stroll to the plate against Randy Choate. It’s easy to say that the matchup didn’t favor the hitter based on Choate’s career splits. Choate has struck out 27% of the lefties he’s seen, and only walked 7.7%. Crawford walks 8.7% of the time against lefties, but his strikeout rate jumps to 24.5% when he’s seeing a southpaw.

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There’s a sort of check list you can go to when a pitcher’s performance changes. You run down the possible reasons, and if there’s no box checked, you shrug and figure a few bounces have gone differently and that was all that happened.

So what do you do when a pitcher has a breakout performance, then suffers a setback and then looks like he’s re-found what he’s lost? Especially when that pitcher doesn’t have any obvious checkmarks on the checklist? What do you say about Shelby Miller’s up-and-down year so far?

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Every year, there’s a gaggle of young guns, ready to take the league by storm. Wether it’s Clayton Kershaw, Jose Fernandez, or Matt Harvey, there’s a new face that everyone can dream careers upon. Unwrinkled faces, unworn arm ligaments, and the bright unknown future might be the stuff Spring Training dreams are built upon.

And here we are, October 14, 2014, and we’ll be watching 39-year-old Tim Hudson go up against 35-year-old John Lackey in game three of the National League Championship series. If, at the beginning of this decade, you had these guys down as top-25 pitchers for the next 14 years, congratulations. This game is your reward.

But that won’t stop us from looking back and trying to figure out how we got to this moment.

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If everybody in baseball were better at execution, offense would go down. Though the hitters would be improved on talent, hitting is reactionary, and if pitchers could more consistently hit their spots, it stands to reason there would be far fewer dingers. Pitches aren’t usually called in dinger-friendly areas — home runs, commonly, come out of mistakes.

Sunday night, the Cardinals went deep four times against Giants pitching. Matt Carpenter clobbered a Jake Peavy fastball that drifted out over the plate. Oscar Taveras got out ahead of a Jean Machi splitter that never dropped. Matt Adams punished a high Hunter Strickland fastball that, if Strickland had his druthers, would’ve been higher. And then Kolten Wong was the hero in the bottom of the ninth, taking advantage of a Sergio Romo mistake. And for Romo, it was a mistake he hadn’t made.

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