Archive for Teams

Jake Arrieta, Zack Greinke, and Clayton Kershaw are going to be the top three finishers in this year’s NL Cy Young Award voting. This is about as much of a lock as sports award voting gets. They have been that dominant, and that far ahead of the pack. Dave Cameron has written here several times on the race between those three and no others, and that settles things for me.

This means the New York Mets have done something no other baseball team ever has: they have beaten the top three finishers in their league’s Cy Young voting in a single postseason. They defeated Kershaw in Game 1 of the NLDS, aced out Greinke in the deciding Game 5, and on Sunday night, in Game 2 of the NLCS, Arrieta took an L for the first time since July 25 (or June 16, if you give him a pass for getting beaten by Cole Hamels‘ no-hitter).

Yes, yes, I know: it’s probably best to “Kill The Win,” which strongly implies collateral damage upon the loss. I acknowledge the arbitrary component that goes into assignment of pitcher losses. However, if I let that forestall me, we won’t have any fun and we won’t learn anything. So instead let’s have some fun and learn something.

It isn’t just a single-league mark the Mets have set. If you count the top three finishers in both leagues, only the 2015 Mets have ever beaten three top-three vote-getters in one postseason. They join eleven clubs that have managed to beat two.

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Johnny Cueto’s changeup is currently flatter than it’s been in five years. Literally. To some extent, everything in his arsenal is flat right now, but it’s most radical when you look at the changeup. With that wiggle in his delivery and a possibly falling arm slot, it’s easy to find a culprit. But he’s wiggled forever, why has he lost his drop now?

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The wheels started spinning for me Friday afternoon. I was absentmindedly scrolling through numbers, looking for anything relevant to the NLCS, when I came upon something on the Baseball-Reference Cubs splits page. I’ll show you the exact thing I saw:

Go ahead and squint. You’ll make it out. You see categories, designating power and finesse pitchers. Then you see the Cubs’ hitting statistics. They’ve been much, much worse against power pitchers, and while everyone is much, much worse against power pitchers, the Cubs still look worse if you adjust for that. That’s what the last column shows. I made a note to try to write this up. See, the Cubs are playing the Mets, and a lot of the Mets happen to throw super hard.

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We watch playoff baseball in part to see the stars of the game write their legacies. Whether they become legends or eventual disappointments, the October stage grants them a chance to produce the alluring commodity we most crave in this wild month of baseball: narrative.

We know the names. Reggie Jackson; Kirk Gibson; Carlton Fisk. We can see their postseason highlight reels in our heads just by reading the words on the page; we know the accompanying commentator clips so well that the audio plays along with them. They’re more than legends — they’re woven into a historic fabric, embedded in our consciousness as touchstones for the game’s future.

Somewhere in our minds, amid the grocery lists and afternoon meeting agendas, Gibson is pumping his fist as he rounds the bases. Fisk is waving it fair. And a Yankee Stadium crowd is yelling “Reggie. Reggie. Reggie.” They’re all there, because they’re now part of who we are as a collective baseball mind.

And so we come to Daniel Murphy, who’s not yet one of those household names. An important part of the Mets during the past few years, yes, but never what anyone would call a superstar. Only now, after fueling another Mets win in the NLCS over the Chicago Cubs by homering in his fourth consecutive game, he’s becoming something else — a one-man show, a phenomenon, a postseason hero in the making.

This is happening because most professional baseball players are capable of doing extraordinary things for short periods of time. The greatest among them are able to stretch those periods, shortening the downtime between each episode. However, sometimes we need to recognize when someone’s performance is not just a hot streak; oftentimes there have been legitimate improvements made, and those coincide with a streak at just the right moment, like crucial at-bats over a few playoff series. That’s exactly what’s happening to Daniel Murphy, and it’s cause for us to look deeper into the forces behind his incredible run in this year’s playoffs.

To begin with, Murphy made a conscious decision to pull the ball more often in 2015. Take a look at the percentage of balls he has hit to the pull side since 2008 (as a note, he missed all of 2010 due to injury):

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Once upon a time, this was a post about how the Cubs lineup was a good matchup for the Mets pitchers. It’s what I’d planned to write if/when the Mets knocked out the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS, but then Corey Seager forgot to cover third base and Andre Ethier caught a foul ball so that became a thing instead.

Now, here we are. The Mets-Cubs series was billed as a battle between New York’s young pitching and Chicago’s young hitting. There were a couple things in the numbers that initially led me to believe the Cubs might have a neutralizer but, so far, it’s been all Mets.

That neutralizer was fastballs. The Mets pitchers, see, throw a lot of fastballs. Correction: the Mets pitchers don’t throw an unusually high number of fastballs; the fastballs they do throw, though, you notice. Think Jacob deGrom, and you think fastball. Think Noah Syndergaard, think fastball. Matt Harvey pops into your head, you probably think “pitch count” or some similarly annoying storyline, but after that, you think fastball. That’s not to say the Mets’ fantastic young rotation doesn’t have other good pitches, too, but, if you’re like me, it’s the fastballs that stand out.

They all throw them hard, and they all throw them well. Theoretically, a team that stands the best chance against the trio of deGrom, Syndergaard and Harvey is one that can hit the hard fastball. Harvey and deGrom throw 95. Syndergaard throws 97. The Cubs, this year, had the second-best slugging percentage in the league against fastballs 96+. An arbitrary cutoff, sure, but the point is: high heat hasn’t crippled the Cubs. Guys like Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber — can’t just blow it by them. There’s got to be other ways to get them out.

Let’s now turn our attention to Schwarber in particular. Until Daniel Murphy started happening, maybe no other player did more in the postseason to make a name for himself than Schwarber. When he’s hit the ball, mostly, it’s gone a long way. He hit one into a river, and rivers don’t happen inside baseball stadiums. He hit one onto a roof, and that roof now has a shrine on it. Anyone who didn’t know about Kyle Schwarber before, knows about him now.

Same goes for pitchers. You hear about the league adjusting to young players who come up and experience immediate success. The book getting out. Weaknesses in a hitter can reveal themselves by the way the league begins pitching to them.

And now, Kyle Schwarber’s rate of pitch types seen, by month, since entering the league:

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The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.

Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.

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If you somehow missed the seventh inning of Wednesday’s ALDS Game 5 and now somehow find yourself here at this website, do yourself a favor: go watch it. On the days following games like that, after we’ve been through something as grand, troubling, exultant, and trying as that seventh inning, we spend most of our time trying to make sense of it all: not only the fact that what we witnessed could only happen in this singular game of baseball, but that we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just think: there are more games like that in the future. How crazy is that knowledge? How will we possibly survive all of them?

Even though many of you, like me, are probably still dealing with the fallout of increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and psychological trauma, we all have a job to do, and mine is to somehow analyze a piece of what went on Wednesday. We already had Jeff breaking it down with his usual aplomb. We had Eno looking into the rules associated with the plays in question. And, perhaps most pertinent to this article, Dave weighed in on the line between emotion and sportsmanship.

There’s a part of that final subject that we’re going to key in on: emotion. We try, in many ways, to capture how players perform in different situations. We can look at dozens of splits on our player pages. Leverage is the situation that immediately comes to mind when we’re talking about intangible forces that can impact performance. The closest we get to measuring an emotional response is how players perform under pressure — how clutch they are.

But what about anger? We don’t measure that, and it’s understandable why we don’t — measuring anger is impossible or impractical with the tools we have right now. It would also be a pretty strange thing to measure, but we also measure plenty of strange things.

That brings us to what happened on Wednesday in the bottom of the seventh inning. By this point, the top half of the inning had already included the go-ahead run scoring on a deflected ball being thrown back to the pitcher, multiple instances of fans throwing objects onto the field, and the Blue Jays playing the game under protest. To say that tensions were running high would be a gross understatement, especially for the Blue Jays.

So, when Bautista stepped to the plate in the bottom of the inning during a tie game that hung in the balance, it’s not a stretch to say he was probably feeling a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. Then he did this:

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For an athlete, a constant struggle in decision-making exists between the body and mind. When presented with a choice, there are two routes a person can take. The most informed route, typically, is to hand over the keys to the mind. The mind can think logically and, with ample time and preparation — sometimes just a few extra seconds — the mind can parse out a number of options, choose what it believes to the best one, and send the correct signal to the body.

But the body reacts faster. Under pressure, when an instantaneous decision is required, the decision-making process defaults to the body’s reaction, because it gets to skip the step of the mind parsing information and sending a signal. This is an involuntary response. The mind still parses, and still sends its signal, it’s just, sometimes, the body beats it to the punch. So it’s hard to fault someone when they choose the body’s reaction over the mind’s conclusion, because all that means is that the mind didn’t have enough time, in the moment, to trump the body’s reaction. Yet, here we are.

Before you can question Andre Ethier for his choices in Thursday’s fourth-inning sacrifice fly that scored Daniel Murphy and tied Game 5 of the Dodgers-Mets NLDS at 2-2, you’ve got to take a step back and examine how we got there.
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That a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball gains velocity as he heads to the bullpen is not a new phenomenon. At this point, it is a strategy. When a pitcher cannot last five innings consistently or fails to develop a necessary off-speed pitch, the pitcher is sent to the bullpen to see if his stuff will “play up” in shorter outings, allowing him to air out the fastball. It is rare, however, to see a pitcher who can go five innings, who has the off-speed stuff to stick as a starter, and already has elite bullpen-ready velocity as a starter. With Noah Syndergaard last night, we were able to witness exactly what that is like. For one night, Syndergaard turned himself into Aroldis Chapman.

There were few doubts that Syndergaard could hit 100 mph as a reliever. Syndergaard’s velocity has been with him all season. He throws two fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer, and both of them have averaged close to 98 mph this season, according to Brooks Baseball. He hit 100 mph twice during the season as a starter, joining only Gerrit Cole, Nathan Eovaldi, Carlos Martinez, and Rubby de la Rosa as starters to reach that mark, per Baseball Savant. Also according to Baseball Savant, only 24 pitchers total in the majors this season have hit 100 mph. Only a few days ago, Syndergaard hit 100 mph at the end of his outing in Game 2 of the National League Division Series against the Dodgers.

If throwing fast gained a pitcher sainthood, Aroldis Chapman would have been canonized a while ago. The Reds left-hander threw more balls over 100 mph than the rest of MLB combined this year. Nearly 30% of all of Chapman’s pitches this season reached triple digits and, for one night, Syndergaard was Chapman’s equal.

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If it’s a preview of Game 5 you want, here’s all that really needs to be said: Zack Greinke is good, and Jacob deGrom is good, and the rest of the Dodgers are good, and the rest of the Mets are good, and some combination of events is going to lead one good team beyond the other. Maybe the combination will be predictable; maybe a catcher will accidentally throw a return toss off of the batter’s hand in a tie game in the ninth. Maybe that counts as predictable now. We’ll keep our eyes out.

Any preview bigger than that is lying to you. If not lying, then implying this’ll be in any way foreseeable. There’s a game, and things will happen in it. What I want to do here isn’t project which team is more likely to win. Rather, I just want to point out a really neat thing about Greinke’s 2015 record. It does say more than a little something about the way that Greinke pitches, so in that way this is immediately relevant, but mostly I wanted to make sure to get this in somewhere before Greinke’s season was officially over. It might be over in a matter of hours. So, now’s the time.

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