In something of a surprise move, the Kansas City Royals added 20-year-old Raul Mondesi — the son of the former Dodgers outfielder — to their World Series roster to replace pinch-runner Terrance Gore. Since Mondesi can play shortstop and second base, he gives the team a bit more roster flexibility, especially for the games that will be played under NL rules. Interestingly, Mondesi has never played in a major league game, or even a Triple-A game for that matter. So if Ned Yost decides to use him off the bench this series, he’ll make his big league debut in the World Series — something no one’s done before. As I noted in my write-up of Matt Reynolds, who was on the Mets’ NLDS and NLCS rosters despite having zero big league experience, this sort of thing is super unusual.

Mondesi’s most notable attribute is his infield defense. Kiley McDaniel, our erstwhile lead prospect analyst, gave his fielding and throwing tools future grades of 60. Yet, despite his defensive savvy, Mondesi’s hitting — or lack thereof — makes him a something of a polarizing prospect. Baseball Prospectus ranked him 12th on their mid-season list, while Keith Law had him down at 38th. Others put him somewhere in-between. There’s not a ton of consensus on Mondesi’s future.

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Lorenzo Cain didn’t know Alex Gordon was going to homer in the bottom of the ninth. The Royals still needed a run. They were trailing, 4-3, with six outs to spare and the dominant never-gonna-give-up-a-game-tying-homer Jeurys Familia looming in the Mets’ bullpen.

Forty-six seconds after Ben Zobrist stepped on second base, having led off the eighth with a first-pitch double against Tyler Clippard, Cain stepped into the batter’s box. Forty-six seconds was all the time he needed. Presumably, by then, he’d considered the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and made up his mind. “I’m gonna bunt.”

Sixteen seconds later, he squared around.

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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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After Edinson Volquez last pitched, the Jays batters had a fair amount to say about his stuff. Yes, his velocity boost has been third-best this postseason, but Jose Bautista and Chris Colabello told Jordan Bastian that his movement was different from how they remembered him.

From Bastian’s piece at MLB.com:

“His fastball is playing with a little rise, rather than sink,” Blue Jays first baseman Chris Colabello said. “When he’s lower 90s, I think he has a tendency to sink a little bit more. Right now, it’s more of a lateral movement, or an upshoot.”
…
“His fastball wasn’t running that much,” Bautista said. “I think he was trying to throw a little harder and it was straighter. I kept hitting the bottom of the ball. I was expecting to see more sink.”

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There’s this thing about the World Series: It’s the only baseball left. There are two teams, and they need to finish before the offseason can begin. This is the most meaningful baseball on the calendar. After all, the World Series is the whole point. So you’ve got everyone focused on at least four games — and maybe as many as seven. There are days off in the lead-up, and there are days off in the middle. During that time, almost every single thing is analyzed. Every stone in the stony field gets turned in the World Series, which is also funny because it’s one series — and it’s baseball — which means we might as well not do any analysis at all. The long and short of this paragraph is this: There’s no harm in talking about how Salvador Perez and Travis d’Arnaud receive pitches.

By the numbers at StatCorner, and by the numbers at Baseball Prospectus, d’Arnaud is a better receiver than Perez. Perez seems to be somewhere in the area of average, while d’Arnaud is one of the better receivers. I could just leave the point here, but what might be more interesting are the juicier, more granular details. Like, with hitters, you could stop at wOBA, but why not look at sub-components like walks and power? I’m going to borrow from an excellent post-ALCS article by Tom Verducci. There’s a lot in there that’s worth your time, but I’m drawing from just one section.

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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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