The Cardinals face possible elimination today at the hands of the Pirates. It has been a wild year for the National League Central. One could make an argument that, this season at least, the National League Central was right up there with the American League East as the best division in baseball. The Cardinals won that division and tied the Red Sox for the best record in baseball.

But it could all end for St. Louis today. Although I personally do not have a rooting interest in this series (yeah, it would be fun to see the Pirates advance, but that is not the same as being a fan of either team), it would be too bad to see the Cardinals’ Matt-heavy lineup depart. It has Matt Carpenter, a legitimate MVP candidate in his first year of full-time major league play, Matt Holliday, who overcame a relatively slow start to have another very good season, and Matt Adams, a rookie who is starting the place of the injured Allen Craig, and who managed to whack 17 home runs in part-time action.

With my own semi-vested interest in Matts, and with the Matt-loaded Cardinals playing perhaps their last game of 2013 today, a bit of trivia is in order: the best-hitting Matts in playoff history.

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We don’t know each other, but we’re part of the same circle, in that we spend a lot of our time thinking about baseball analysis. And because we’re in the same circle, we share a bunch of inside jokes. They might not feel like inside jokes, but that’s precisely what they are. Jokes about Jose Molina framing pitches. Jokes about Yuniesky Betancourt playing defense. Jokes about Delmon Young playing defense. Jokes about Delmon Young playing offense. Jokes about Delmon Young acquisitions. We’ve all been programmed to make fun of Delmon Young, and so we’re also programmed to make fun of the teams that like to use him. At least, this was the case, and then Young wound up back on the Rays.

We’re all biased. When Young went to the Phillies, people ripped them to bits, even though Young technically wasn’t even guaranteed a job at first. When Young eventually wound up with the Rays, though, we all paused. We wanted to make fun, but because it was the Rays, we also wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s something the Rays have earned, and now we figure when they do something weird, they must be up to something. Our assumption is generally that the Rays are right, even when we don’t know why, and the Rays made a particularly curious move on Wednesday against the Indians. It wasn’t the in-game equivalent of signing Delmon Young — who, incidentally, homered, off Danny Salazar — but there was something very much anti-traditional.

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Entering the season, Indians closer Chris Perez was probably pretty high up on the “closer most likely to get replaced” lists, but somehow he kept surviving. He kept the job through a sore shoulder, he kept it through drug charges, and he kept it through home run troubles that led to an awful 5.08 FIP. But finally, in the waning days of the season and in the midst of a miraculous run to the playoffs, manager Terry Francona could stand no more and finally removed Perez from the job on Friday.

Now, as the Indians welcome Tampa Bay to Cleveland for the one-game American League wild card game on Wednesday, Francona is suddenly without a defined closer. But that’s not the problem it might otherwise be, because what he does have available is an intriguingly unorthodox option — Opening Day starter Justin Masterson, who made his first All-Star team this year and has exactly zero career saves to his name. Masterson missed most of the final month with an oblique injury and is not considered to be stretched out enough to start until later in the playoffs, if at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the nation got to watch Francisco Liriano go up against Johnny Cueto. Come Thursday, Adam Wainwright and Clayton Kershaw are going to pitch, albeit not opposite each other. This is the playoffs, meaning the teams left are good, which means the players left are good, which means the pitchers left are good. There are going to be some incredible potential pitchers’ duels, and some of those are going to work out as actual pitchers’ duels. But Wednesday brings us a special one, even if the majority of baseball fans don’t know a thing about the guys taking the hill. As the Rays and Indians fight in the American League wild-card playoff, they’ll be throwing two of the league’s better and more unknown starters.

The Indians are turning to Danny Salazar, who’s far from a household name. Those who know him, at least, understand his sex appeal. The Rays, meanwhile, are turning to Alex Cobb, and there are people in Cobb’s own home who might not recognize him. Cobb certainly doesn’t have Salazar’s eye-popping stuff, but what the two do have in common are eye-popping numbers — numbers that put them in elite company. Numbers that make this a showdown to anticipate.

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Here is a quick look at the called strike zone and strikeout and walk rates for the three home plate umpires over the next three nights.

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When writing about statistics, there’s always the matter of finding the right balance between brevity and significance. Oftentimes, you’ll want to use filters, for purposes of proper analysis, and these filters show up as written qualifiers. Too many qualifiers, though, will turn off an audience, because audiences want numbers to be pretty easily consumable. It can already be difficult to try to sell numbers to readers; there’s a responsibility on the writer’s part to keep readability in mind.

You run into this all the time in baseball analysis, because there are virtually infinite ways to whittle a sample smaller and smaller. Every split is a qualifier. But some are just necessary, and there’s no other way around it. Like, with pitchers, you just have to separate starters and relievers. Starters need to be compared only to starters, and relievers need to be compared only to relievers, because they’re entirely different jobs. You’ve got marathon runners and hurdlers. What they have in common is that they throw baseballs, but they throw baseballs in different ways, and they use their bodies in different ways, and they prepare in different ways, and so they should be treated as distinct player pools. You don’t compare Aroldis Chapman to Yu Darvish. You compare Chapman to Craig Kimbrel, and Darvish to Max Scherzer. Not separating pitchers is at best irresponsible.

Some of the focus in this post will be on starting pitchers. Much of the focus in this post will be on Yordano Ventura.

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Who knew Yan Gomes was the key to playoff contention? When he and Mike Aviles were traded from Toronto to Cleveland for Esmil Rogers, the Jays were in the midst of a massive off-season makeover that was supposed to make them American League East contenders. They were sending two redundant bench pieces away to Cleveland — a team unlikely to chase down Detroit for the AL Central title — for a bit of pitching upside. Fast forward to today: the Jays have been out of realistic contention for months, while Cleveland currently has 20 or 30 percent chance of making the playoffs, depending on which set of odds one consults. Gomes has hit .302/.353/.513 (140 wRC+) with good defense this year, while Toronto’s J.P. Arencibia has hit .205/.241/.382 (65 wRC+) with terrible defense.
Clearly, the trade has been the difference.

Jokes aside, Gomes has played surprisingly well this season, and lately has even supplanted Carlos Santana (who has been getting starts at first and DH) as Cleveland’s primary catcher. Part of that has to do with Santana’s struggles behind the plate this year, but Gomes’ good play has also been a factor. It would be easy to say Cleveland got lucky, but every team has its share of unexpected good and bad performances.

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Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber entered the 2013 season as a 27-year-old with fewer than 70 major-league innings. He’s departing it, however, having established himself as one of the club’s — and perhaps the league’s — most effective starters, having recorded strikeout and walk rates of 23.3% and 5.2%, respectively, and a 74 xFIP- that’s fifth among pitchers with 100-plus innings.

Nor does Kluber’s success appear to be founded upon deception alone. His two-seam fastball sits at 93-95 mph. He has command of a cutter, which he throws around 90 mph, to either side of the plate. His slider has excellent two-plane break.

In summary, Kluber’s career arc is an unusual one: he’s in what’s typically a player’s peak-age season, entered that season with little in the way of major-league experience, is having great success in the majors presently, and appears to have the armspeed/command capable of sustaining that success.

While the understated right-hander isn’t inclined to meditate at length on the significance of his achievement (“That’s external to what I’m trying to focus on,” he says), he did consent — while rehabbing from a sprained middle finger — to provide briefly for the present author a biography of sorts for each of his four pitches, which appears below.

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A few things to know, that you already knew: (1) FanGraphs isn’t very busy on the weekends. (2) Much of the content on FanGraphs is planned and scheduled ahead of time. (3) We’re coming off a holiday weekend during which an awful lot of people got away to do some traveling or relaxing. (4) Baseball, this past weekend, was as active as ever. Put it all together and, here on FanGraphs, one could argue baseball has lately been under-covered. Things have happened that didn’t get words to them.

Things like trades on or before August 31, which is an important deadline for purposes having to do with postseason roster eligibility. Last Friday and Saturday, there were five trades swung in major-league baseball, none of which were written up on the site. This is an attempt to make up for that, by addressing them all at once. “Better late than never,” is an expression that applies, to a point. Below, find all five moves, each with its own subjectively appropriate classification. Five moves for five contenders. What have they done to themselves?

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