This being primarily a numbers site and all, we tend to try our hardest to deal with objective truths around these parts. If it’s not backed by, y’know, evidence, why say it? That’s one of the primary reasons this whole sabermetrics thing got off the ground in the first place. But, hey. We’re human beings. We’ve all got a little hot take in us, whether we care to admit it or not. Inside all of us, there’s a little pool of hot take magma, bubbling up over time until we can’t hold it down anymore and we’ve got no choice but to let it spew out and suffer the consequences. Anyway, it’s been a while since I fired one off, and I can’t hold it down anymore. Here it comes!

Johnny Cueto Is the Most Entertaining Player in Baseball.

Whew! That felt good. Johnny Cueto, yep. Most entertaining player in baseball. Try and stop me. I’ve even got a list of four subjective reasons as to why Johnny Cueto is the Most Entertaining Player in baseball, and, yes, I’d put them in a slideshow if I could.

Reason number one: dreadlocks. They’re awesome and baseball needs more of them. Let Cueto’s brothers play too. Number two: he yells on the mound a lot. Yells at himself, yells at the umpire, yells at opposing batters after he strikes them out. If I can go against the hot take grain for a second, I’d like to put forth that the more emotion in baseball, the better. Number three: the unpredictability of his performance. Never know what you’re gonna get from Cueto! All-time postseason clunker, or all-time World Series great? How about both, in back-to-back starts? I’ll tell you who the most boring pitcher in baseball is — that Clayton Kershaw. Yawn. Where’s the fun in watching a guy who’s just awesome every time out? (Crosses “Call Clayton Kershaw boring” off outline.) Last, but certainly not least: he has four different deliveries! Four! And one of them is called “The Rocking Chair”! If anybody else strays from their typical mechanics by even a hair, they have to sit down with their pitching coach the next day to fix it and someone on the internet writes 1,000 words on how that pitcher is now broken. Cueto does this on purpose!

And it’s awesome. So, of course it needs to be broken down. It’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and I figure there’s no better time than now, after Cueto just threw the first World Series complete game by an AL pitcher since Jack Morris in ’91, and might not even pitch again this year, what with the Royals already being up 2-0 in the series.

So, after the conclusion of last night’s game, I went back and charted all of Cueto’s deliveries in a spreadsheet alongside the PITCHf/x data provided by BrooksBaseball. Jeff Passan has named the deliveries: the Tiant, the Quick Pitch, the Rocking Chair and the Traditional (this essentially just means he’s in the stretch).

First, the most basic numbers. Usage:

• Quick Pitch: 48%
• Tiant: 25%
• Rocking Chair: 7%
• Traditional: 20%

The Johnny Cueto motion you’re used to is the Tiant. That’s the one he came up using in Cincinnati, where he turns his back to the hitter before delivering. Seems that’s been usurped as the go-to delivery by the Quick Pitch. The pitches, themselves, don’t seem to change much, between the two. The fastball went 93.4 with the Quick Pitch, and 93.7 with the Tiant. With the Quick Pitch, the four-seam had a bit more rise, and the sinker a bit more sink. The changeup was more fade-heavy out of the Quick Pitch, and more drop-heavy out of the Tiant. Surely, in such small samples, the differences could be a product of noise. It’s also not hard to imagine the different deliveries resulting in differently shaped pitches.

Read the rest of this entry »

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, we’re taking 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. Earlier this week, we discussed the Mets. Today, it’s the American League champion Royals.

In 2014, the Royals snuck up on a lot of people, including myself. This year, not so much. They have once again ridden their own unique formula — a combination of contact hitting, speed, defense and a deep, flame-throwing bullpen — to the Fall Classic. While the Mets were a second-half phenomenon, the Royals sat at the front of the AL Central pack all season. The only doubt was whether they would earn home-field advantage throughout the AL playoffs, which they did with a productive final weekend of the regular season.

The postseason has been a little dicier. The Astros appeared to have them pinned in the ALDS, only to watch the Royals escape with a late Game Four rally. The ALCS versus the Blue Jays wasn’t quite as eventful, though the Royals needed to survive a classic Game Six at home to finally put away the Blue Jays. They unleashed a bit more of their blue magic in Game One of the World Series, winning an instant classic that featured everything from leadoff inside-the-park homers to Bartolo Colon–Chris Young relief pitching duels, to you name it. What are some of the distinguishing characteristics that have the delivered the Royals to this moment?

Their Position Players Show Up for Work
About a year ago, in this space, and a couple months back at ESPN Insider, I examined the continuity and dependability of the Royals’ position player corps. In 2014, they became only the sixth AL playoff team in the divisional era to return eight or nine of their position player regulars from the previous season. Last season, 84.9% of the Royals’ total plate appearances were recorded by their nine regulars, fourth highest among that group of six clubs.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »