On July 7th, 2006, a 23-year-old righty made his major league debut against the Tigers. He entered the game in relief and immediately began putting up 99s on the radar gun. It wasn’t enough, however, to prevent Chris Shelton from singling to shortstop and beating out the throw. Brandon Inge also wasn’t afraid of the velocity, as he hit a ground-rule double to center. The young righty was now flustered. He hit Curtis Granderson to load the bases. He paced around the mound, gathered himself, and then rallied to strike out Placido Polanco, get a weak grounder from Ivan Rodriguez, and strike out Magglio Ordonez to end the threat.

On that day, Mark Lowe began a journey that started with the Mariners and continued on to the Rangers (in the Cliff Lee deal), and then the Dodgers, Angels, Nationals, Rays, Indians, Mariners (again), and Blue Jays. And now, almost ten years later, the Tigers have signed him with a two-year deal to be their setup man. It’s been quite a trip for him.

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Before every game, we publish estimated game odds. The odds consider the identities of the starting pitchers, and as the first pitch draws closer, the odds update to factor in the actual starting lineups. I’m not saying it’s an infallible system or anything, but it’s a neat little feature we have, even if it doesn’t get all that much use. And though this is by no means a rigorous test, consider the top 100 most seemingly lopsided games from the season past. Based on the calculated odds, the favorites in those games should’ve won 70 times. The favorites actually won 71 times. So things check out.

The favorite won the game with the single most lopsided odds. Max Scherzer and the Nationals were projected to have 78% odds against Sean O’Sullivan and the Phillies. The favorite also won the next-most lopsided game, and the next-most lopsided game, and the next-most lopsided game, and the next-most lopsided game. The five games with the most imbalanced odds all went to the team expected to win. We find our first upset in sixth. Which would then qualify this as the season’s greatest upset, taking into consideration only pre-game odds. It was an upset when the Royals rallied past the Astros in the playoffs, but that wasn’t a lopsided game at the start. It only became that way later. The biggest upset, considering pre-game outlook? We rewind to June 17, and we go to Los Angeles.

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The Mariners needed a center fielder after they sent Brad Miller and Austin Jackson packing over the past year. They had an extra reliever, maybe, after they acquired Joaquin Benoit from the Padres last week. And, even given all the flaws in their new (probably platoon) center fielder, it’s hard not to like such a low-risk, high-reward move. Even if you value relievers highly.

But these are the things you have to talk about when you try to evaluate the trade that sent center fielder Leonys Martin and reliever Anthony Bass to the Mariners and reliever Tom Wilhelmsen and outfielder James Jones to the Rangers.

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Since we don’t have much more than velocity readings from Japan, it can be difficult to rely on anything but scouting reports when evaluating pitchers coming over from Nippon Professional Baseball. And now that 27-year-old Kenta Maeda is once again rumored to be coming to America through the posting system, we’re once again left wondering how to place him in context.

We have his Japanese strikeout and walk rates, which we can compare to recent postings to find comparable countrymen. We also have his velocity readings and a general sense of the quality of his pitches that we can use to compare him to pitchers beyond just ones that have come from Japan. We even have one game of PITCHf/x data to help us look at the movement of his pitches.

And the few comparable players we produce might be the best we can do from out here in the public sphere.

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During the fifth inning of Game Two, as Alcides Escobar attempted to bunt against Jacob deGrom, Harold Reynolds decried the current state of bunting in professional baseball. Even after he admitted that hard throwers are hard to bunt on, he went on a mini tirade: “I know it’s hard to get one down against a guy that throws this hard, but I’ve never seen this bad of bunting. Ever. Ever! In baseball, just across the board. I know Escobar can handle the bat, but we see this every night. They have to move the runner. Not just the Royals, but across the board.”

The moment was probably lost for a couple reasons. For one, Escobar decided to swing-away after two failed bunt attempts, and promptly tied the game with a single to center. There was too much excitement to think too deeply about the state of bunting in our game. Now we have a second to breathe, though.

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You’re in a pickle, see. The Devil wants to take your soul, and he’s pretty intent on doing it, but he’ll leave you be on one condition: in the span of one hour, you are to teach him everything there is to understand about the game of baseball. Up to this point the game’s been over his head, and he’d like to know what it’s all about, but he also has only so much patience, especially with you. If you can convey to him that special essence of the sport, you’re free to go, spared an eternal damnation. If not, you lose. You know what’s at stake. Of course you do. Your mind races.

Or, your mind would’ve raced. Before Wednesday, before Game 5 between the Rangers and the Blue Jays. You would’ve thought about explaining the rules. You would’ve thought about reviewing certain eras, and certain Hall-of-Fame players. You would’ve thought about going through the physical motions. But now — now — this is an easy situation to fix. You show the Devil Game 5’s seventh inning. He’s gotta have the Internet somewhere. You show him the entirety of the seventh inning, from start to finish. When it’s done, and the second bench-clearing incident is broken up, you’ve got six minutes to take questions.

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When Russell Martin’s throw back to the pitcher hit Shin-Soo Choo, and Rougned Odor raced home to score the go-ahead run, the pages of baseball’s rule book fluttered open across America and Canada. A stunned silence in the park hid the grinding of gears behind the masks, and in baseball’s offices — was that strange, strange play… legal?

Yes, it turns out. To the consternation of the fans, who began to litter the field with debris. Twitter, the announcers, the fans — it was bedlam.

But investigating the rules that led to this play, and any rules that could clean up a play like this in the future, brings us to the never-ending unintended consequences that come with any alteration of the rule book.

First, the play.

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The Blue Jays paid a lot to get David Price, even though they knew he was about to become a free agent. The Jays rightly figured the starting rotation could use a big upgrade if the team was going to go on to make some playoff noise. Of course, at that point, they didn’t yet know what to expect from Marcus Stroman. They might not have expected anything.

The American League Cy Young is going to go to Price or another guy. Price stands a perfectly fine chance, and you’d assume that when a team trades for that sort of pitcher, the same team will use him in as many important starts as possible. Sure enough, Price started Game 1 of the ALDS, but as you know by now, the ball in Game 5 is being handed to Marcus Stroman. Price just threw a lot of pitches in relief in Game 4, even though the Jays were already heavily favored. It’s surprising, and it’s complicated. It doesn’t seem like throwing Price so much out of the bullpen was a good managerial call. Yet we can at least say this much: it’s not all that clear the Jays are worse off. Stroman might even come with a certain advantage.

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The second game of the Texas-Toronto ALDS ended in a memorable fashion, the Rangers surviving a razor-thin review of a potential third out to score two in the 14th and hold off the Blue Jays. This ended up obscuring the memorable way it began, with a top of the first replete with odd incidents. Had it not begun in this memorable way, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have ended as memorably, so let’s look at all the weird stuff that happened.
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In the latest example of how playoff baseball is less predictable than a deer by a roadway, the Rangers just won two games in Toronto, with Ross Ohlendorf slamming the door, and with Rougned Odor’s baserunning arguably occupying center stage. In a game that sent 109 men to the plate, it wouldn’t be fair to suggest it all came down to one or two events, but there’s one event and one event only that’ll be dominating the conversation until Game 3. If you watched, you know what it is. If you didn’t watch, you probably still know what it is, because umpiring controversies have a way of getting around.

With two down in the top of the 14th, Odor slapped an infield single. That put the go-ahead run on first base, and then Odor advanced to second on a subsequent single. Odor actually rounded second aggressively, thinking about getting to third, but then he decided to return. Yet, cleverly, Jose Bautista threw behind him. There was a tag attempt, and, immediately, the play became everything.

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