Allow me to oversimplify the upcoming World Series: earlier in games, the Mets are going to send out pitcher after pitcher armed with a shoulder bazooka. The Royals will try to deflect their attacks by swatting the shells away, which they’re particularly good at doing. If the Royals do well enough swatting, then they’ll take the advantageous position, trotting out their own bazookas. And the Mets won’t have much defense against that. In case this oversimplification failed to make anything clearer, the Royals just want to get leads to their bullpen. Which means a critical match-up will be the Royals’ famously contact-heavy bats against the Mets’ famously velocity-heavy arms.

Sometimes, when you’re looking for keys and distinguishing characteristics, you really have to dig and get at the subtleties. This one is super obvious. The Mets are driven by their hard-throwing starters. The Royals are driven at least in part by their aggressive, ball-in-play lineup. The Mets’ rotation is historically powerful. The Royals’ lineup is historically good at touching the baseball. It’s something that’s just begging to be analyzed. And, it has been analyzed already. I’ve just decided to go about it a different way.

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No matter what happens in the next seven games, we’ll be motivated to learn a grander lesson from it. Not many picked this World Series matchup anyway, so we’ll search ourselves for a takeaway. Why did we look the wrong way?

The problem with going too far down this rabbit hole, other than not finding very much, is that these teams couldn’t be any more different. Name a facet of the game and the Mets and the Royals are on opposite sides of the leaderboard. You have to squint to get them in the same neighborhood anywhere really.

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In any given nine-inning baseball game, there are upward of 250 pitches thrown. More than half of those pitches, more often than not, are going to be thrown somewhere in the range of 90-97 mph. They’re all going to move somewhere between two and 12 inches, and most of them will travel through the same theoretical three-square-foot box. It’s easy for these pitches to begin blending together. That’s why we appreciate the ones that truly set themselves apart. These ones are easy to spot.

This is similar to a post I did last year around this time. The mission: find the 10 individual pitches deemed nastiest by my subjective criteria, hopefully learn something about those pitches and what it is that makes them so effective, and then see them in action so we have a reference point and something extra to keep an eye out for the in World Series.

How it’s done: I expanded a bit on last year’s criteria. Last year’s criteria, it was just whiff rate and ground ball rate, per individual pitch. Those are the two best common results-based outcomes a pitch can have. A complete swing-and-miss, or the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types. This year, I folded in two process-based characteristics along with the results, adding velocity and spin rate, with spin data coming from Statcast. Two big things that make a pitch aesthetically pleasing, to us, are speed and movement. Velocity and spin rate should capture that. Two big things that make a pitch effective, to pitchers, are whiffs and grounders. We’ve got that down. Oh, also, an executive decision I made and forgot to mention: for four-seam fastballs, I substituted pop-up rate for ground ball rate. Felt like the right thing to do, given four-seams are the one pitch, more than any other, thrown up in the zone with no intention of getting grounders. Anyway, I calculated z-scores for each of the four selected characteristics, for each pitch type, added them up, and found 10 pitches that stood above the rest. These are those 10 pitches.

No. 10: Wade Davis – Knuckle Curve

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Daniel Murphy chose a really good time to play some really good baseball. He’s hit home runs in six straight games, with a chance to extend that streak once the World Series commences on Tuesday. This is a record for postseason play, as you may have learned if you’ve paid any attention to baseball reporting in the last three days.

However, it’s certainly not unheard of. Since 1914, as far back as Baseball-Reference’s game-by-game records go, 28 players have managed a regular-season home run streak of six or more games*. I will not overload you with the full list, but it includes names both very familiar (Gehrig, Mays, Griffey, Bonds) and obscure, folks you’d fully expect on the list and others who would make you scratch your head.

* The standard I used allows a streak to remain intact if a player had no plate appearances in a game, similar though not identical to the official rules governing hitting streaks. This actually arose among the 28, notably with Graig Nettles. In 1984, Nettles hit homers in two straight games, got two games off, homered in his next two, took two more off, and homered in the following two. I also permit a streak to carry over between seasons, which put 1997-98 Mark McGwire on the list.

Going into October, Murphy would have been one of the head-scratchers. In his seven seasons, his highest home-run total is 14, produced this season. He simply lacked the power to be a reasonable candidate for such a feat — until he flipped the switch and lit up the Dodgers and Cubs.

Is Murphy the unlikeliest of the players who have put together a homer streak of six games or more?

To produce an answer, I looked at the seasons in which those on the list did the deed, and took their rates of home runs per plate appearance (HR/PA). I went by season rather than career because such a streak is an event likeliest at a player’s peak, and the chances go up much more than linearly with rising rates. The HR/PA stat seemed better than raw homer totals because probability per time up is more germane to the nature of a streak than mere accumulation.

As I’ve noted, homer streaks are no shock with some players. In 2001, Barry Bonds homered in 10.99% of his plate appearances. He had two separate six-game homer streaks, one in April and one in May. This inaugurated the golden age of home run streaks. Ten of the 28 streaks occurred in just six years, from 2001 to 2006. (As for why they happened in that span, discuss among yourselves.)

Bonds’ 2001 is the top HR/PA rate on the list. The lowest would belong to… Daniel Murphy, with 14 homers in 538 PA for a 2.60% rate. The hitch is that he’s made his streak in the postseason, so regular season numbers are, if not irrelevant, at least incomplete. Adding his postseason numbers to the regular season gives him 21 for 577, coming out to a 3.64% rate.

That’s a very low rate for a homer streaker, but two other players beat him out. Second lowest on the list is George “Highpockets” Kelly. He made his streak for the New York Giants in July 1924, in a year when he hit 21 round-trippers in 627 appearances for a rate of 3.35%. (Interestingly, despite the Polo Grounds being a great place for dead-pull power, Kelly’s whole streak was on the road, mainly at Wrigley Field.)

For the lowest rate on the list, we go to someone who actually beat the streak criterion. Out of the first 28 players with homer streaks at least six games long, six have gone longer. Tied for the record at eight are Dale Long (1956), Don Mattingly (1987), and Ken Griffey Jr. (1993). Behind them, at seven games, are Jim Thome (2002), Barry Bonds (2004), and the 2006 season of our homer-rate anchorman… Kevin Mench.

Mench, who honest to goodness I did not remember had played baseball until he popped up on this list, did not string together his streak in his best power season, or second-best, or third-best. He did it with a mere 13 home runs in 482 PA, a rate of 2.70%. He hit more than half of his season’s homers in an eight-day, seven-game stretch in late April, against the Devil Rays, A’s, and Indians. Six of the games were at home in Arlington, Texas.

That combination of obscurity, low power, and pushing his streak to a seventh game makes Mench’s run easily the most improbable of the 28 who did it in the regular season. As for being more unlikely than Murphy’s, so far it is, with two caveats.

First is degree of difficulty. Murphy’s done his streaking against, not just playoff teams, but super pitchers. His streak includes dingers off Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Jake Arrieta, who will be gold, silver, and bronze in some order in the NL Cy Young race. Jon Lester’s no slouch either. Mench’s streak included three games against the Devil Rays, who were still in the laughingstock phase of their existence.

The second caveat is that Murphy’s streak is not over yet. It may fade out in the long wait for Game One, but it’s a bold prognosticator who would take that as a given. If he can stretch it for one more game, the title may be his. If he manages two, it’s definitely his.

That just one more reason to look forward to Tuesday. And maybe Wednesday.

Sitting on the desk of nearly every manager in baseball before any given game are several large packets of information, compiled by that team’s analytics department about that day’s opponent. The packets are thick, and the front pages typically contain images with which you’re likely familiar simply from reading FanGraphs every day. Red and blue heat maps, sometimes varying by handedness, pitch type or count. Spray charts, usually with lines as the visual component rather than dots, and almost always split up by ground balls, fly balls and line drives. The middle and back pages, presumably, get more and more detailed, and the most interesting thing I’ve seen is command data for each opposing pitcher, split up by pitch type.

Condensed versions of these packets are placed in players’ lockers several hours before first pitch, met with varying levels of reception. Some can be seen rigorously studying them, others will give them one quick glance over before crumpling them up and throwing them in the trash.

Information is a good thing, but sports are still physical and reactionary by nature, and for some players, information overload certainly exists as a con. In all reality, for a middle-of-the-season noon game against the Phillies on getaway day, it probably doesn’t matter too much. We’re past that point in the season, now. The scouting reports are to be read. The packets are to be studied.

Over the next week, one American League team will be learning everything there is to know about the New York Metropolitans. Their unique individual tendencies, strategies, weaknesses and strengths. Where they hit the ball, where they pitch the ball, where they stand in the field, how they react to different situations and more. In the grand scheme of things, the advantages to be gained from this information are small, sure, but every little advantage in the World Series is an advantage in the World Series.

Somewhere in the middle of that packet in the manager’s office may exist a page about a team’s tendencies, at the plate, by count. It’s a page that might be skipped over in July. It’s not a page that gets skipped in October. No pages get skipped in October.

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Twitter was apoplectic. Drug tests were demanded. Old suspensions were being brought up. Hands were wrung. Edinson Volquez? Throwing 96s and 97s deep into his start? Where is this velocity coming from? This can’t possibly be right.

Turns out, Volquez hasn’t even added the most velocity this postseason. He’s fourth or fifth among starters, depending on your definition, and he’s not too far from the the norm that we should be bugging out. The postseason, like the debut, comes with adrenaline, and that adrenaline leads to a bump in velocity. Baseball is that simple sometimes.

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The Mets just made the formula look pretty simple. You want to win in the playoffs? You have to hit, especially at the right times. You have to be good in the field, and you have to be aware on the basepaths. And you have to have good pitching, and you want to give the ball almost exclusively to the good pitchers. Baseball looks pretty simple when a team does literally everything well, and while you don’t want to just project the Mets’ NLCS performance ahead into the World Series, there’s no denying the fact that the Mets didn’t just beat the Cubs — they clobbered them. They outplayed the Cubs everywhere, and the Cubs would probably be the first to tell you that.

There’s obvious consolation for the Cubs and their fans. If there are any teams set up better for the future, you’re talking about maybe just the Dodgers, and this was a Cubs team that arguably arrived a little ahead of time. There are going to be more opportunities, and there are very likely going to be some NLCS wins. This pain will fade; the future’s too beautiful. One year ago, the Royals felt worse. Now they’re on the verge of getting back to the Series. You know all this stuff. Four losses aside, the Cubs are doing fine.

Yet before we all start to look ahead, to next week and to next season, I want to take a quick chance to reflect on the NLCS that just wrapped up. I don’t do this to rub anyone’s noses in it. I do it just because I think it’s interesting. Within a historical context, just how noncompetitive was this series?

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Baseball really is something else. Coming into this postseason, there was no shortage of potential playoff narratives. You had the teams with the three best records in baseball, all hailing from the same division. There was the Toronto offensive juggernaut, and the Royals proving they weren’t a one-year phenomenon. There was phoenix-like rise of the Astros, America’s introduction to Rougned Odor, the two-headed Kershaw/Greinke monster from Los Angeles, the Cubs’ young bats, and the Mets’ young arms.

Enter, against this backdrop, Mets’ second baseman Daniel Murphy, who prior to this October drew attention only for arguably being baseball’s most average regular, the game’s equivalent of vanilla ice cream, suddenly deciding to morph into a latter-day version of Babe Ruth.

While the effect of Murphy’s sudden power explosion on the Mets’ postseason run has taken center stage, the near-term future of both player and club has become an enduring secondary plot line. Will the Mets extend a qualifying offer to free-agent-to-be Murphy? Until yesterday, the answer appeared to be no, though the rumor mill is now listing in the opposite direction. Might Murphy accept? The odds of that appear to be declining, in inverse proportion to the possibility that at least one club could lob a lucrative four- or five-year deal in his direction.

Most observers tend to agree on one thing, however: Murphy’s power surge just has to be a fluke. While I’m not going to be the guy suggesting that Murphy has 30-homer seasons in his future, I am going to go out on a limb and state that Murphy is a better player than the 2.5 WAR guy we’ve grown to know and, well, like. It’s just not for the reason playoff observers might guess.

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Ask Joe Maddon, and he’ll tell you what’s wrong. To this point, the Cubs have simply been out-played. The Cubs have been out-pitched, they’ve been out-hit, and they’ve been out-executed in between. The Mets have played quality baseball, not giving the Cubs very many openings of any significance, and that’s a sure-fire way to end up with a 3-0 series standing. When a team like the Mets blends ability with smarts, that makes for a hell of a foe.

Quietly, over the course of the year, the Mets were an above-average baserunning team, but they weren’t much of a stolen-base team. In the playoffs, and especially against the Cubs, the Mets have turned their aggressiveness up, responding to worse hitting conditions by trying to squeeze everything they can out of being on base. Tuesday night, a pivotal play was Yoenis Cespedes stealing third base in the sixth inning of a tie game. The Mets didn’t used to do much stealing of third, but Cespedes would come in to score on a wild third strike, and his would be the winning run. It was an important event, and somewhat stunning for the ease with which Cespedes advanced.

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Two things you’re sure to find this time of year are unpredictable baseball outcomes and women and men who failed to predict those results. While I’ve managed to accidentally correctly predict the 2015 postseason so far, one need not look further than the present author’s own preseason predictions to find evidence of very incorrect baseball prognostication.  They’re everywhere because predicting baseball is inherently challenging. In order to do it well, you have to accurately predict the quality of the players and then the order in which events unfold in games involving those players.

Due to the nature of baseball, it’s relatively common for teams that are objectively worse than their opponent to win playoff series. If you put this year’s Tigers into a five game series against the Royals and let them play over and over, the Tigers would win a decent number of those series even though it’s pretty clear the Royals are the better team. Unfortunately, because the world is not yet an interactive computer simulation, we only get to observe one series between each set of opponents per year. Even if we knew for sure which team was better, that still wouldn’t ensure that we could predict the outcome. A .500 true talent team can outplay a .550 true talent team for a week. That’s just the nature of the game.

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