In the little picture, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The better baseball team clinched the World Series, on its own home field. One of the truths about the MLB playoffs is that the format doesn’t always reward the best team in baseball. This time, though, the Red Sox have a hell of an argument, and they’re a more than deserving champion. In the big picture, also, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The Red Sox won their third title in a decade. They’re always thought of as a powerhouse. The magic is in the medium picture. The picture in which you realize the Red Sox did go from worst to first. Just one season ago, the Red Sox lost 93 games. This season, the Mariners lost 91 games. The Mets lost 88 games. The Padres lost 86 games. There was a lot of talent already in place, but the Red Sox badly needed some work, and the franchise identity shouldn’t blind people to the near improbability of the turnaround. No World Series champion has ever had a worse previous season.

For Sox fans, this was another opportunity to celebrate, and an opportunity to celebrate a Series win at home for the first time in almost a century. For Sox fans and all other fans too, this made for a relatively stress-free game by the middle innings. The top of the seventh offered a glimpse of possible stress, but there was no real stress to be felt after the Sox went up 3-0 in the third and double that in the fourth. Stephen Drew’s homer put Boston’s win expectancy over 90% and it never sank back down below. For several innings, the Sox all but had the clincher in the bag, after chasing the un-chase-able Michael Wacha.

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For a hot minute, used to be the story of the World Series was wacky finishes. More generally, it was overall wackiness, taking into account some defensive blunders. But then we were treated to a more or less clean and conventional Game 5, and now the clear story is David Ortiz, and how he’s presently un-get-outtable. I mean, I guess the real story is how the Red Sox are on the verge of another championship, but as far as players are concerned, Ortiz is the guy. He’s the main guy on the Red Sox, and he’s thought to be the main focus of the Cardinals.

In case you haven’t heard, so far Ortiz has had one of the most productive World Series of all time. He’s got 11 hits in 15 at-bats, and that doesn’t include a grand slam he had taken away by Carlos Beltran, which left him with a meager sacrifice fly. Always a presence, right now Ortiz feels like either a dream or a nightmare, depending on your loyalty. The sense is that he’s seeing the ball better than ever, and hitting the ball better than ever, and as a consequence, if you look around the Internet you’ll recognize the familiar debate about the nature and very existence of hot streaks. They say David Ortiz is locked in. It’s an easy thing to believe. It’s a more difficult thing to prove.

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It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that David Ortiz has been the Red Sox’ whole offense during the World Series, but only a bit, as he is hitting .733/.750/1.267 in the Series so far. Of course, he hit .091/.200/.227 in the ALCS versus Detroit. The reader probably understands both sets of numbers to be both small sample fluctuations — Ortiz is an excellent hitter, but making decisions based on any short span of plate appearances is a bad idea. The temptation to give Ortiz the “Barry Bonds treatment,” i.e., walk him every time he comes to the plate, no matter what the situation, is understandable, but should be resisted.

Even if Ortiz is no Bonds, he is an excellent hitter, and clearly the Red Sox’ best. Although the intentional walk in general seems to be overused, there are situations in which it makes sense, especially with the Cardinals sending the right-handed Michael Wacha to the mound tonight and the Red Sox (probably) hitting several right-handed hitters behind the left-handed hitting Ortiz. When to walk or not walk is not a clear cut situation, but using some general principles, we can at least outline some basic game situations when it is might be the right idea.

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I want to assure you right away that what follows isn’t sour grapes. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Even if I did, I’d complain on my own time, and not on the job in front of everyone (probably). What follows is about a call, and a controversial one at that, early in Monday’s Game. But I’m not here to talk about  various implications. I’m here to talk about the call’s significance, relative to others, and about the process that contributed to the call. It was, in the end, a call most extraordinary that went Boston’s way.

The Red Sox went ahead 1-0 in the first, as you recall. The score remained the same into the bottom of the third, when David Freese led off with a single. Pete Kozma bunted Freese to second, and Adam Wainwright advanced Freese to nowhere with a strikeout. Matt Carpenter came up with two down, and he worked the count full. In that full count, Jon Lester threw a cutter inside. Carpenter started to first, assuming he’d drawn a two-out walk. Bill Miller, however, called him out, and Carpenter expressed his disagreement. That went about as well as most fairly cordial expressions of disagreement on a baseball field. That is, nothing changed, and the game moved on to the top of the fourth, with Carpenter having struck out looking.

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You’ll hear some superlatives sent in Jon Lester’s direction after a couple of strong performances in the World Series. The All-Star break — when Lester was sporting a 4.58 ERA and velocity readings that didn’t inspire hope — seems like a long time ago. Between then and now came a mechanical change, and maybe a short rest, that brought the old Jon Lester back in time for this great postseason run. Remarkable about that fact, though, is that the change has been a long time coming.

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What happened in the sixth inning Monday night probably mattered. It probably mattered in ways we can’t conceive of, in ways we’d never be able to figure out. Everything, every last thing in a baseball game, is connected, and if you remove one screw, the whole bridge might collapse. No, that doesn’t work. The whole bridge might rearrange itself? No, that doesn’t work, either. Change one thing and you change more and bigger things. There we go. The sixth inning of Game 5 was probably critical somehow.

But people sure aren’t thinking about it today. The sixth inning featured the minimum number of batters, the minimum number of baserunners, and the minimum number of runs. After Adam Wainwright worked a 1-2-3 inning, Jon Lester did the same, and then the seventh inning happened, in which the Red Sox stormed out in front. The sixth didn’t feature any pivotal events, as we understand them. But it did feature maybe the most interesting at-bat of the game. In the top of the sixth, Wainwright threw six pitches to David Ortiz.

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Last night, the Red Sox won 3-1, and are headed back to Boston with two shots to win one game. They are now the heavy favorites to end the season as the World Series champs, thanks in large part to Jon Lester outdueling Adam Wainwright for the second time in this series. The Wainwright/Lester match-ups, on paper, favored St. Louis, but Boston was able to beat the Cardinals best pitcher because Jon Lester threw two brilliant outings in this series. But, for some people, the thing that they’ll remember most about last night’s game isn’t Jon Lester’s pitching, but instead, Jon Lester’s hitting.

Or, at least, Jon Lester being sent to the batter’s box with a bat in his hand; I don’t know that you can call what he does up there “hitting”. In his career, including the postseason, Jon Lester — career AL pitcher — has walked up to the plate 43 times, and in those 43 opportunities, he has made 43 outs. Back in 2009, he drew a walk, the only time he’s ever reached base successfully, but he made up for it in 2012 by hitting into a double play, bringing his totals of PAs and outs back into equalization. 21 of his 43 plate appearances have ended with a strikeout. He is, maybe, the closest thing baseball has to an automatic out.

And yet, with runners at second and third, in the 7th inning of a one run game, Jon Lester was allowed to hit. With Mike Napoli sitting on the bench. With Adam Wainwright tiring on the mound. The Red Sox had a chance to turn a close game into a pretty sure victory, but passed on the opportunity for a big inning in favor of keeping Lester in the game for a couple more innings. And that decision is essentially a microcosm of how baseball is managed.

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Without doubt, the worst question asked of Mike Matheny in his postgame press conference Monday night was whether or not he thought David Ortiz deserved the World Series MVP award. That question, presumably, came from a trained and experienced professional journalist, and Matheny responded about exactly as you’d think he would. If it used to be true that there are no stupid questions, then I think we can agree it’s true no longer. Humanity has broken new ground. But with all that said, you figure Ortiz does have the inside track at this point. In this paragraph we’re going to pretend to care about the World Series MVP award. Ortiz presently doesn’t have much in the way of competition, but perhaps some consideration could be given to Koji Uehara, and of course plenty of consideration would deserve to go to Jon Lester. For it’s Lester who has now bested Adam Wainwright twice, including once Monday in St. Louis.

In retrospect, Lester didn’t need to be as good in Game 1 as he was. He did need to be as good as he was in Game 5, and thankfully because he was so good, we don’t need to sit here talking about whether he should’ve batted in the top of the seventh. (No.) We can just focus on Lester’s performance on the mound, and he finished with a run and seven strikeouts over nearly eight innings. Ask the Cardinals and they’ll tell you Lester on Monday was the same as he was before. A few have gone on record saying as much, and twice now the Cardinals haven’t had an answer. But I think it should be pointed out things weren’t completely alike. There were plenty of similarities between Game 1 Lester and Game 5 Lester — Lester himself was genetically identical — but Game 5 Lester featured a couple twists.

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One of the points we’ve been hammering home really all postseason long is that starting pitchers tend to perform worse and worse as a game goes on. It’s far from a dramatic effect — a pitcher the third time around shouldn’t be expected to get completely and utterly bombed — but an effect is there, as pitchers make subsequent trips through the order. Starters become less effective, and so it becomes more and more important to put your trust in a fresh bullpen. It stands to reason part of the effect is pitchers getting a little fatigued. It stands to reason another part of the effect is hitters getting multiple looks at a guy. Hitters communicating with one another about what they’ve seen from a guy. The second and third time, the average hitter might be more prepared to punish the guy on the mound.

Let’s assume that it’s true that there’s a benefit to having already seen a guy once in a game. Maybe it’s not, but that would be quite the discovery. It doesn’t take much of a leap, then, to suggest there might be a benefit to having already seen a guy start in a series. Face a pitcher in one plate appearance, and you might be more prepared in the second plate appearance. Face a pitcher in three plate appearances, and you might be more prepared in the fourth through sixth plate appearances. It sounds sensible, meaning this works as a starting point. It doesn’t yet work as a conclusion.

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We begin with some acknowledgements. First, a baseball game is never entirely won or lost based on a single event, a single match-up. Certain events can be of massive importance, but they’re massive because of the context, and the context is established by other events, that would’ve led to different outcomes given different outcomes. So many different things contribute to a game result. An impossible, uncountable number of things, some of them things you’d never consider. Perhaps you’ve recognized that baseball is complicated. This isn’t checkers. Checkers is also complicated.

Second, managerial decisions tend to have their significance exaggerated. As MGL is fond of reminding us, most managerial decisions lead to very minor swings in win expectancy, which of course is the only thing that matters. Certain decisions are worse than others, and some can be relatively major in a good way or a bad way, but at the end of the day it’s still up to the players on the field, and pitchers are always going to have the advantage over hitters, save for the most extreme of circumstances. When managers get ripped to shreds, there tends to be a lot of results-based analysis, and that’s by and large worthless.

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