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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There’s something that would bother me about Kelvin Herrera. To be clear, it had nothing to do with his personality. And it had nothing to do with the fact that he was successful. Herrera should be successful. Have you watched him? The last two years, he’s run a 2.06 ERA. He’s allowed a .570 OPS, and while maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to you without context, how about this as context — Kenley Jansen has allowed a .569 OPS. David Robertson, .581. The numbers have been there for Herrera. He’s been a reliever with a triple-digit fastball and some statistics to match. Nothing about that is weird.

What would bother me was that, just from watching Herrera for a few minutes, you’d think he’d be a high-strikeout pitcher. Just from being aware of his velocity, you’d think he’d be a high-strikeout pitcher. I know we might make too much of strikeouts around here. I know I shouldn’t have been too bothered when Herrera was still finding ways to succeed. But the last two years, he’s been a flamethrower with the same strikeout rate as Chad Qualls. Compared to the league, Herrera actually ran a strikeout rate that was slightly below average for a reliever. It’s a small thing, maybe a petty thing, but it’s a thing my brain struggled to understand. Whenever I looked at Herrera’s numbers, I’d expect them to be something different.

Something like, say, what Herrera’s done in these playoffs. Since really emerging as a shutdown reliever for the Royals, Herrera’s struck out a little more than a fifth of the hitters he’s faced. Against the Astros and Blue Jays, however, he’s struck out about half of the hitters he’s faced. Herrera in this postseason: 33 batters, 16 strikeouts, .438 OPS. The heat, as you know, has been there. But it’s been accompanied by something different, something new. Kelvin Herrera tinkered with a slider, and he learned to harness it just in time.

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The Royals put me in a weird position. It’s not because their two consecutive pennants make skeptical and critical analysts look stupid — we went over that a year ago, and previously, we went over the same stuff with the Giants. If anything, that part of this is just funny. No, the Royals put me in a weird position, because they make it tempting to believe in ideas that run contrary to what I’ve been taught. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s vibe. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s unkillability. I’m not really supposed to believe in powerful and particular things, because baseball is intensely competitive, and it doesn’t make sense that one team would ever have a secret. I’m not supposed to believe the Royals are more special than any other team. Than, say, the Blue Jays. And I’m not saying I do believe in the Royals’ magic. They’re just pretty good at sucking me in. It’s a baseball team that makes me think twice about assumptions I have about baseball teams.

The ALCS isn’t going to have a Game 7. Would’ve been fun, but this was a plenty good way to wrap up. The ALDS between the Rangers and the Blue Jays came to an unforgettable conclusion, a very wild and unpredictable conclusion, but aside from the tie-breaking home run, that memorable inning turned on a series of defensive mistakes. Just before the homer, the whole inning was sloppy. That might’ve been baseball around its most entertaining. What we just saw in Game 6 was baseball in the vicinity of its best. The Royals and Blue Jays competed in a classic, and, of course, the Royals won. They’re the Royals, after all. I don’t know exactly how we got here, but I can tell where we are on the map.

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Allow me to argue something that isn’t going to matter in a day or two. That’s the thing about writing about playoff series — no matter what, the relevance is fleeting. It all seems so important in the moment; it’s all over in just a few blinks of the eye. This argument probably isn’t going to mean very much, and it would’ve been better made before the ALCS began, but think about series keys. A full series is almost entirely unpredictable, only a little less unpredictable than one or two games, so think of this as a general series note, being made with the series in progress.

What it is, I think, is a matter of team identities. When people think about the Kansas City Royals, they think about defense, clutch hitting, and the bullpen. Holy crap, the bullpen, that’s been so valuable for them in the past. It seems like they got past the loss of Greg Holland without even missing a beat. The Toronto Blue Jays? When people think about the Blue Jays, they think about home runs, and David Price, and Marcus Stroman, and home runs. They’re the could-be and should-be and have-already-been offensive juggernaut put together to blast its way to the Series. The Blue Jays are supposed to have the obvious strength. The Royals are supposed to do more of the little things.

One of those being, get the late outs. And even the middle outs, depending on things. The Royals bullpen has a reputation, now, and it’s been fairly earned. The Royals bullpen is thought of as shortening ballgames, a group of arms the opponent doesn’t want to see because it means a total offensive shutdown. The way the pen gets talked about sometimes, it’s like it’s almost invincible. It is, without question, very good. Even without Holland. But an easy thing to miss is the Blue Jays aren’t much worse. Even without Brett Cecil. I don’t know to what extent the bullpens will matter over what’s left of this series, but it doesn’t look like a terrible mismatch.

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Twitter was apoplectic. Drug tests were demanded. Old suspensions were being brought up. Hands were wrung. Edinson Volquez? Throwing 96s and 97s deep into his start? Where is this velocity coming from? This can’t possibly be right.

Turns out, Volquez hasn’t even added the most velocity this postseason. He’s fourth or fifth among starters, depending on your definition, and he’s not too far from the the norm that we should be bugging out. The postseason, like the debut, comes with adrenaline, and that adrenaline leads to a bump in velocity. Baseball is that simple sometimes.

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The manager of the Royals was his typical Yostian self heading into Game Five of the American League Championship Series. He went into the game with a 3-1 lead, needing just one victory out of four games to advance to a second straight World Series. He joked about the possibility of “watching 35 drunk guys try to get through customs” if the Royals clinched in Toronto. He put Alcides Escobar in leadoff spot so Escobar could work his magic. He sent 32-year-old Edinson Volquez to the mound against the Toronto Blue Jays to try and clinch the American League crown, and for a time he got nearly the best performance he could ask for from the right-hander.

Volquez, pitching for his fifth team in five years, had his best season in half a dozen years after the Royals signed him to a two-year, $20 million contract with an option for a third season. From 2009 to 2014, Volquez pitched nearly 800 innings, putting up a mediocre 4.46 ERA (121 ERA-) and 4.35 FIP (114 FIP-) and amassing just four wins above replacement in six seasons. He put up a good 3.04 ERA in 2014, aided by a low .263 BABIP and a very good Pittsburgh Pirates defense as his 4.15 FIP indicated not much had changed. Despite high velocity, Volquez struck out players at a below average rate, although he had dropped his walk rate in recent seasons. He pitched well in two postseason games entering yesterday, with 13 strikeouts and just 3 runs conceded in 11.2 innings over two starts, but spread out eight walks and was the clear third option behind Yordano Ventura and Johnny Cueto.

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The consolation you hope for is that these uncertainties don’t end up making a difference. That way, you can talk about them, and you can investigate them, but you don’t have to worry about the results hinging on a decision one way or the other. It worked a little like that with the Rangers’ weird go-ahead run in Game 5 of the ALDS — as strange as that was, the Blue Jays still won, so it didn’t really matter in the end. Of course, that wasn’t true uncertainty, because the rules weren’t ambiguous. It was an unfamiliar play, but a legitimate run. With Edinson Volquez’s last full-count pitch to Jose Bautista in Wednesday’s sixth inning, there’s no getting to that point. You can see in the pitch whatever you want.

And you can say, all right, but the Blue Jays won by six. You can say, even as the pitch was being delivered, the Jays were heavy in-game favorites. You can try to claim the call didn’t end up too significant. But the call, in the moment, was huge. It was the difference between bases loaded and nobody out, and two on with one out. The score, you’ll recall, was 1-0. If the Royals get the call their way, maybe the inning is completely different. Maybe the Jays score, but not too much, and they have to turn to David Price out of the bullpen. The game and series didn’t turn because of one pitch, but that one pitch did some of the pushing. That one pitch was also the very definition of borderline. The only thing we know is Volquez’s breaking ball was perfect. What happened? Unfortunately, it’s a mess, in a very baseball way.

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