One of the many struggles of every baseball team in the major leagues is to balance the desire to win now and the desire to win in the future. That’s why we have arguments every April about reforming the arbitration system, why teams agonize over trade deadline decisions, and why we talk about pitcher workloads toward the end of each season. We want young, exciting players to be on the field as much as possible. Due to long-term team interests, that doesn’t always happen.

For the Mets, we’ve already witnessed an innings-limit battle play out during September with Matt Harvey, Scott Boras, and Harvey’s potential playoff availability in his first year back from Tommy John surgery. And, before the World Series started, Mets manager Terry Collins alluded to Jacob deGrom also feeling the possible effects of overuse:

“He’s at a stage where the ball doesn’t have the life down, even though he has the velocity,” Collins said. “It doesn’t have the life it once had. He’s been missing balls up in the zone.”

Usually, paying too much attention to word choice in manager interviews is a pointless exercise, but when the greatest strength of a team – its young, dominant starting pitching – is publicly called into question by the team’s manager, it’s at the very least something to pay attention to.

The concern over “the wall” that Collins has been voicing in relation to his young starters is merited. Harvey is coming off a Game One start in which he had some of the worst stuff of his career. And, despite deGrom’s healthy velocity during Game Two (his average fastball was 95.5 mph, not far from his regular season average of 95.8 mph), fatigue doesn’t affect every pitcher’s game in the same way. There are many indicators, as we’ll see below, that suggest deGrom hasn’t quite been himself in his past few starts.

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Before the World Series, Tom Verducci wrote an article about the Royals’ advance scouting. Specifically it discussed the scouting done by third base coach Mike Jirschele on Jose Bautista’s throwing habits. There was also a suggestion that the Royals had picked up on David Price tipping his changeup. They used both pieces of information to beat the Blue Jays. So it appears the Royals are pretty good at this advance scouting stuff.

Fast forward to last night’s Game Two against the Mets. Starter Jacob deGrom gave up four runs in the fifth inning on a walk and five singles. Following the game, which the Royals won 7-1, Adam Rubin of ESPN spoke to two people he identified as ex-Met players who suggested deGrom had been tipping his pitches.

From Rubin’s article:

As for deGrom, one ex-Mets player speculated he may have been tipping pitches.“I can’t figure it out yet, but they have something on deGrom out of the stretch,” the retired player indicated. “They better figure it out or they can’t win this series.” Another ex-Met saw the first ex-player’s comment and added: “He must speed up on his heater and a tad slower with other stuff. But I think it’s in his facial expressions — seriously.”

Interesting! The conspiratorial answer often is, after all. The fact that the Royals just did this to Toronto — and to such good effect, too — adds plausibility to the discussion. Even so, I’m not sure I agree. I went back and re-watched the inning to see.

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I don’t blame you if you’re getting tired of the the-Royals-make-a-lot-of-contact stuff. It’s the core of most of the analysis being done right now, but in fairness, it’s the core because the Royals make a lot of contact. It’s arguably their most outstanding skill, which is what makes them such an intriguing match-up for the Mets. And they were up to their usual business again Wednesday. You knew about it, because it was all over Twitter, and it was all over the broadcast, and also you have eyes. Jacob deGrom is the ace of the Mets, and in some other years he’d be the ace of the National League. He tends to be a strikeout machine, yet in Game 2 he assembled but two strikeouts before getting shut off. Mets relievers combined for one more. All the Mets, total, generated six swings and misses, and if you look just at deGrom, here’s his 2015 postseason swinging-strike log:

• October 9: 21 whiffs
• October 15: 14
• October 20: 18
• October 28: 3

You don’t need to conduct any deep level of analysis to know that last point stands out. Given just those bullet points, you’d figure something happened on October 28. With three swinging strikes, deGrom equaled his career low, and in no other starts did he finish with fewer than six. Based on the evidence, the Royals royaled. This is precisely why the Royals have been viewed as a legitimate threat. They could negate the Mets’ greatest strength.

So, as far as the contact, there was a question during and after the game — was it the pitchers, or was it the hitters? Were the Royals doing a particularly good job of taking the bat to the ball, or were the Mets doing something a little sloppy? Let me let you cheat: both. The answer is both. The answer is pretty much always both. But, for sure, the Mets weren’t executing. Beginning — but not ending — with deGrom, the Mets weren’t actually throwing the Royals swing-and-miss pitches.

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Let’s over-analyze. It’s why we’re here, right? We’ve got one baseball game to talk about, and we have a few more hours until we have another one baseball game to talk about. This is when we’re supposed to make a lot of a little, so let’s do just that, focusing on Game 1’s ninth inning. More specifically, let’s focus on Jeurys Familia facing Alex Gordon, with a one-run lead.

Gordon and Familia had never before faced off. So Gordon was trying to figure out his opponent, and after three pitches, you could say he did his job, tying the game with a homer to straightaway center field. It wasn’t a homer that won the ballgame, but it was a homer that later allowed the ballgame to be won, a stunning blast against an otherwise incredible closer. The Mets don’t expect Familia to fail. If anything, they’ve come to take him for granted. But the Royals went all Royals on him, and you know the rest. Familia would later admit that he made a mistake.

It’s easy enough to leave it there. Familia threw a bad fastball, and Gordon punished him for it. But why not go deeper? Why go deeper, you might ask? Because we can. Because the numbers are there for us to look at. This is the best time to be alive, so far.

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The title is a little alarmist, yes. Matt Harvey’s career has not been that long, and stuff usually just fades as you age. It’s a sad fact. Given all of that, though, his Game 1 performance was still noteworthy, in a bad way. In a lot of ways, he showed the worst stuff he’s ever shown.

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There are a few phrases in baseball that come up from time to time which have no real evidence behind them, but generally inject a little enjoyment to the game as a bit of harmless trivia. One of my favorites is “As so often happens,” employed to describe that sequence when a player makes a great defensive play to close out one half-inning only to begin the next half-inning as the leadoff batter. One hears another such phrase when a defensive player has been going through struggles, perhaps has a bad reputation as a fielder, or might be nursing an injury. On those occasions when the relevant fielder is involved in a play, announcers are quick to note that “The ball will find you.” Last night, the ball found Yoenis Cespedes.

Cespedes, though turning 30 years old earlier this month, is in just his fourth year of professional baseball in the United States after defecting from Cuba. The Oakland Athletics signed Cespedes to a four-year, $36 million contract and installed him as the team’s center fielder. That particular experiment didn’t last. The A’s, perhaps trying to ease Cespedes’ transition to the majors, moved Coco Crisp from center field to left field so Cespedes could play his preferred center field. By the end of the season, the two outfielders had switched places; Cespedes, in the end, had started just 46 games in center. Until his trade to the Mets, Cespedes had recorded just 19 more starts in center field over two-and-a-half seasons. With Curtis Granderson in right, Michael Conforto in left and no designated hitter, Cespedes took over in center field as his hot bat helped the Mets to a division title.

Whether Cespedes is a more ideal fit for center field or left field is not set in stone, but the evidence we do have suggests left field is better suited to his skills. Cespedes struggled in the field in his initial transition to the majors, in both center and left field, but he adjusted to left field and quickly became one of the better left fielders in Major League Baseball.

Best Left Fielders 2013-2015

	Pos	Inn	ARM	RngR	ErrR	UZR	UZR/150
Yoenis Cespedes	LF	2914.1	21.4	17.3	-1.7	36.9	17.6
Alex Gordon	LF	3601.2	19.1	17.5	3.8	40.4	14.2
Starling Marte	LF	3168.1	3.8	19.0	-3.2	19.6	12.0
Christian Yelich	LF	2474	-3.9	11.6	2.9	10.6	5.2
Brett Gardner	LF	2010	-2.6	2.6	1.4	1.3	1.5

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Alcides Escobar is not a good hitter. I don’t say that to be mean — I say that to be honest. Even the Royals don’t really know how to explain Esky Magic. There’s no getting around his regular-season numbers, and when you mix in what he’s done in the playoffs, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. He’s the kind of hitter that, if you saw him in a community park, you’d think, that guy ought to play in the majors. But he’s the kind of hitter that, when he’s in the majors, you think, that guy plays a hell of a shortstop. In his best year, Escobar was a bit below average. He followed that year with a year where he hit like a good-hitting pitcher.

Escobar doesn’t walk, and Escobar doesn’t hit for power. The thing he has going for him is he’s tremendously difficult to strike out. In that sense he blends in with the Royals, although even on that roster he’s one of the standouts. Escobar, in short, is good at taking the bat to the baseball. From there, things will sort themselves out. The most charitable way to describe Escobar’s offense is that, with his speed and his contact ability, he’s usually capable of making something happen. Better a ball in play than a whiff, right? You never know, with a ball in play.

In the World Series opener, Escobar’s contact allowed for things to happen. After days of talking about the Royals’ ability to avoid the whiff, Escobar put contact to good use. Two examples were and are obvious. A third was subtle, but without it, Escobar doesn’t score the winning run on the Eric Hosmer sac fly.

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You can’t always feel original, even when you want to. Yesterday I wrote about the Royals going up against the Mets’ power pitching. I wrote about it because I think it’s interesting, but then, everyone thinks it’s interesting, so everyone has been writing about it. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fastballs well. Lots of people have observed that the Royals have hit fast fastballs well. It’s been demonstrated now that good contact hitters have a slight advantage against power pitchers, relative to worse contact hitters. So much, coming from the Royals’ perspective. It’s all over the place.

A frequent counter-point: the Royals won’t just be facing hard-throwers. They’ll be facing Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, and Steven Matz. These are hard-throwers with other pitches; these are hard-throwers with instincts and command. They’re not just 98-mile-per-hour fastball machines, so maybe it’s not fair to mix them in with everyone else. I think that’s totally valid. So it’s worth running through these exercises from the Mets’ perspective. We’ve looked at the Royals against power pitchers. How about the Mets against contact hitters?

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The World Series is here! Well, not here. This is the internet. But the World Series is happening now, or soon, or… I refuse to continue covering up for how literally you are reading this opening. Point is, this is the time when baseball has the collective attention of the baseball-watching world and, possibly not coincidentally, this is also the time when fans of the teams that are still alive in the playoffs are cajoled into compelled to purchase World-Series-inspired items to World Series-ize themselves for the big games. Can a Royals fan really truly enjoy the Series without American League Champion beverage coasters? Can a Mets fan feel the tension without a World Series-themed oven mitt? I double-dog dare you!

It is in this vein that I present, here, now, to you, the internet baseball reader, the FanGraphs World Series Gift Guide to World Series Gifts.

The first item any self-respecting fan requires is a t-shirt. And boy does baseball have you covered there! Of course there are shirts for fans of the Royals and fans of the Mets, but that mere fact highlights a small problem with this sort of thing. As the World Series has yet to be played, we don’t yet know who the winner is. Thus, any fan who purchases a 2015 World Series t-shirt now is taking a chance. Who among us wants to wear a t-shirt commemorating that time our favorite baseball team lost the World Series? Or, even worse, blew the Series in horrific and excessively painful fashion! All you Rangers fans wear your 2011 World Series shirts to parties all the time, I’m sure. An even more recent example can be found here:

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The last week of October is here; the clocks are about to be turned back, autumn is in full swing, and there are two teams left standing in pursuit of the World Series title. This week, let’s take a look at the defining characteristics that have delivered the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals to the brink of the game’s ultimate goals. Today, it’s the National League champion Mets.

On the last day of July, the Mets ranked 30th and last in the majors in runs scored. Just a couple of days before, shortstop Wilmer Flores was nearly traded in a deal that would have delivered outfielder Carlos Gomez to the Mets, and he stood in tears at his shortstop position as news of the trade swept through his home stadium. October glory seemed far away indeed in those seemingly long-ago days.

We all know what has happened since. The Flores-Gomez deal fell through, and the Mets’ big trade-deadline move eventually netted them Yoenis Cespedes. He ignited the offense almost immediately, and Curtis Granderson and especially Daniel Murphy joined him to catalyze a stretch run in which their bats nearly kept pace with their ever-present young arms. The Nationals imploded, and the NL East belonged to the Metropolitans.

They outlasted the Dodgers, and outclassed the previously explosive Cubs, never trailing for even a single moment in the NLCS. For all of the ups and downs this club has endured in recent months, their heart and soul has been easily identifiable all along.

The Lethal 1-2-3 Punch at the Top of the Rotation
The Mets have won two World Series titles in their history, and both were built on the backs of young, dominant starting pitchers. The 1969 Miracle Mets rode Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Gary Gentry and Nolan Ryan, who started 112 of their 162 games. Koosman was the oldest of the group at age 26. Two more youngsters, Jim McAndrew and co-closer Tug McGraw, aged 25 and 24, started half of the remaining contests. They outdid themselves in 1986, when Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez and Rick Aguilera, all 25 and under, started 118 of the club’s 162 games. Ace Gooden was all of 21 years old.

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