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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Listen up, people. It’s time to face facts. #EskyMagic is real.

Alcides Escobar has swung at the first pitch to lead off the last five games, and eight of nine games this postseason. In every game of the ALCS, he’s led off with a first-pitch swing and reached on a hit. In the last two, that hit resulted in a run, and the Royals won the ballgame. The Royals are now 47-19 when Escobar swings at the first pitch this season, regardless the outcome of that swing. #EskyMagic is happening, and there is nothing we can do about it.

There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the part that got me thinking, because there has to be something someone can do about it.

This post is going to go like this. First, I’ll look up all the facts I can think of, deemed pertinent to #EskyMagic. Then, I’ll just dump them all onto this page and put some words around them. You’ll read them, I won’t have a conclusion, we’ll all leave confused and afraid, and the Royals will never lose another game with Alcides Escobar leading off. Cool? Cool.

Here comes the first one. This one’s the easy one, and it’s the obvious place to start.

For some reason, Alcides Escobar was the Royals’ leadoff hitter for the first 125 games he played this season. During that time, he wasn’t a good hitter, because he isn’t a good hitter, and so Ned Yost bumped him down to the nine-hole in favor of good hitters Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist for most of September. With good hitters Gordon and Zobrist leading off, the Royals lost a few, and so Yost got not good hitter Escobar back to the top of the lineup for the last five games of the regular season, and, bam! #EskyMagic.

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First things first — by sheer coincidence, Ben Lindbergh wrote about something similar this morning at Grantland. This is a link to the post, and if you missed it, this is another link, and you should read it, and it’s good! It’s never fun to have article overlap, but as I’ve noted before, I’m stubborn about writing ideas, and more importantly, Lindbergh went about doing his research in a different way. So what follows is my own spin on things. It won’t surprise you that we arrive at similar conclusions.

Here’s a theory. The Royals have been successful in the playoffs, right? Already, today, they’ve gotten to R.A. Dickey, not that he’s the ordinary type of postseason pitcher. In the playoffs, the Royals have been able to hit. In the playoffs, pitchers overall tend to be better. A year ago, the Royals were an excellent contact team. This year, the Royals were maybe the best contact team in a very long time. So, does it make sense that being a contact team might provide some sort of playoff advantage? Are contact teams less vulnerable to going quiet against the best pitchers in the game? Not that all the best pitchers make the playoffs, but, you see where this is going. The pitchers are good. Does the offensive style really matter?

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You can detect the nervousness. The Royals stormed out to take a commanding series lead, but then Johnny Cueto’s own arm abandoned him, wrecking not only Game 3 but also a potential Game 7 as well. So there’s some discomfort there, some uncertainty, and now in a short while the Royals are going to throw Chris Young at the best offense in the league in the center of a homer-happy ballpark. If Young were a bad pitcher, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but I don’t think he’s perceived as a trustworthy pitcher. So the thought is the Blue Jays are in a good place to go and tie this series up.

I don’t think we can help the way we feel about Young. He’s unusual and by no means overpowering, and everything we’ve learned about pitchers gives us reason to be skeptical. He puts the ball in the air. He doesn’t pound the zone. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats. Young’s whole game is suppressing quality contact, and being skeptical of that is like Sabermetrics 101. Yet Young, for his career, has posted a better-than-average ERA. The same has held true of late, following his career revival. Young has a real chance this afternoon, our own doubts aside. As always, it’s just going to take precision.

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So here’s something weird. I’ve noticed on Twitter that when Blue Jays fans refer to last night’s ALCS Game Three, they seem to give the credit to the Jays. They say things like, “The Jays were crushing the ball.” But when Royals fans talk about the game, they do it in a Royals-centric context, taking credit away from the Royals, as in, “Cueto sucked.” This isn’t to knock on either fan base. We all do this. I sure do. The truth though, as is often the case, lies in the middle somewhere. The Royals, Cueto especially, pitched badly. The Blue Jays, Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Goins especially, hit well. But, when parcelling out the blame and/or credit, one can’t be binary about it. Unlike pooping the bed, it’s not an all or nothing thing.

Cueto ended up with a final line of two innings pitched and eight runs allowed. To my eye he struggled, and I doubt your eye would say much different, but based solely on his stuff I wouldn’t have guessed he was eight-runs-in-two-innings bad. Partially because that’s reeeeeeally bad (that’s an ERA of 36.00!), but partially because he just didn’t appear all that awful. So maybe more of the credit/blame for the outcome should fall on the Blue Jays. But then again, I’m not a scout, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.* I was curious to see if I could figure out who should get the credit and how much.

*Maybe?

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Johnny Cueto’s changeup is currently flatter than it’s been in five years. Literally. To some extent, everything in his arsenal is flat right now, but it’s most radical when you look at the changeup. With that wiggle in his delivery and a possibly falling arm slot, it’s easy to find a culprit. But he’s wiggled forever, why has he lost his drop now?

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The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.

Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.

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For the first time in more than two months, the Royals again saw the capital-J Johnny Cueto for whom they traded at the deadline, the capital-A Ace they needed to front their rotation following the departure of James Shields on their journey towards a second consecutive World Series appearance – this time with the hopes of capturing that final, elusive victory.

Cueto, when healthy, has been among the most consistently effective pitchers in baseball for the past half-decade. Though you can’t count on what his delivery may look like on any given pitch, you could always count on an ERA that began with a 2, which is precisely what the Royals acquired when they shipped Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb and Cody Reed to Cincinnati for the 29-year-old Dominican hurler in late July.

The guy they wanted was exactly the guy they got, until he wasn’t. After three initial Cueto-like performances in Royal blue, he gave up six earned runs to Boston. Then six to Baltimore, and four to Detroit, and five to the White Sox, and seven more to Baltimore.

Thoughts were, maybe Cueto was hurt. Or he was tipping his pitches. Or his catcher wasn’t setting up low enough in the zone. Or he was just running into some bad luck.

Fact is, no one outside the organization knew quite what was happening to Cueto. But that all feels like a distant memory after he shoved against the Astros on Wednesday night, allowing just two baserunners and striking out eight in eight dominant innings to clinch an ALCS berth.

Cueto’s average fastball, typically, sits around 93 mph. During the height of his struggles in Kansas City, it had dipped to 92. There were others factors to Cueto’s slump, certainly, but there’s usually a correlation between a drop in velocity and a drop in performance, and Cueto suffered both. Three weeks ago, Cueto’s average fastball dropped to 91. Two weeks ago, just in time for the playoffs, it had fallen to 90.

During Wednesday’s start against Houston, facing elimination, Cueto’s fastball sat at 93, touching 96. He came out throwing hard, and held it throughout the game. There wasn’t an obvious move on the rubber. His release point doesn’t appear to have changed. Just like Cueto’s early Kansas City struggles, there didn’t appear to be a clear explanation. So I went back and watched some film from the Twins game, when Cueto sat 90, and I rewatched some film from last night. Before we get into things, I’d like to just show you some first-inning fastballs.
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The Kansas City Royals succeeded last season in the face of low expectations — and, among many who appreciate advanced statistics, at least slight derision regarding the way Dayton Moore assembled his team. Contracts to middling pitchers like Jeremy Guthrie and Jason Vargas seemed unlikely to get the Royals from also-ran status. Trading away top prospect Wil Myers, even for a talented pitcher like James Shields, did not look to be enough to take the Royals over the top. So it was with this backdrop that Shields, along with the talented and young Yordano Ventura, stabilized the rotation; Wade Davis and Greg Holland anchored an incredible bullpen; and a slew of former top position prospects whose luster had worn off came together to win the Wild Card and make a run to the World Series.

Fast-forward to spring training — the Royals lost Shields and Billy Butler to free agency, and the improbable run of 2014 seemed even more unlikely to repeat itself this season. Not a single FanGraphs writer picked the Royals to make it back to the postseason. Nobody picked the Houston Astros or Texas Rangers, either, in an American League race that ran counter to predictions everywhere. The Royals had not done a whole lot to make themselves better and expecting their good fortune to continue for another year did not make for a good bet.

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