I had slightly higher hopes for this post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the final result. But when I first cooked this idea up, my plan was to utilize the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to pull velocity, horizontal movement, vertical movement, whiff rate and groundball rate to determine the nastiest pitches we’ll see in the World Series. But, there were a few problems.

While more velocity generally makes a pitch nastier, that’s not always true, especially in the case of offspeed pitches. More movement definitely makes a pitch nastier, but movement is hard to compare across a PITCHf/x leaderboard because a lot of it is dependent on arm slot and you get some funky values from guys who throw with funky motions.

So then, I was left with just whiff rate and groundball rate, but I actually kind of like that. Those are two of the best outcomes, and they’re the direct result of some of the things we weren’t able to capture, such as velocity, horizontal movement and vertical movement. The most dominant outcome of a pitch, for a pitcher, is a swing and miss. But not all guys dominate by getting whiffs, and so they don’t all pitch that way. Some guys dominate by getting weak contact, and ground balls yield the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types (grounders, flies and line drives). But the guys who really dominate are the ones who get the best of both worlds: whiffs and grounders.
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So we’re all set, then, for a weekend without any baseball. The Royals did away with the Orioles in the minimum number of games, and the Giants almost did that same thing to the Cardinals. So out of a possible 14 LCS contests, we got nine of them, and now we’re set up for a showdown that isn’t exactly improbable, but that wasn’t predicted by (m)any. The Royals are in the World Series, after winning 89 games and after having once been 48-50. The Giants are in the World Series, after winning 88 games and after having once been 63-57. It’s going to be a World Series between two wild-card teams, and that’s absolutely terrific.

Major League Baseball is getting what it wanted from this postseason. And I don’t just mean in terms of the drama, although I think we’ve all been aware of that. The series haven’t been long, but the games have just about all been close. As one example, during the regular season, 19 percent of all plate appearances occurred with a score deficit of at least four runs. In the playoffs, that’s dropped all the way to 9 percent, and there were only three such plate appearances in the whole ALCS. It’s absurd how suspenseful and electrifying this has all been, but then that’s something more particular to this postseason. The wild-card thing is a bigger-picture issue.

It’s … I don’t know, what’s a good word? Controversial? The argument against being, wild-card berths dilute the level of talent in the playoffs. So perhaps the wild-card teams are undeserving, and then what does that tell you if you get a pair of them in the championship? What does a World Series title tell you about a team, if it’s a series between two teams who failed to win their divisions?

It tells you that a team beat another team in a baseball tournament. It tells you nothing more, and it’s not designed to tell you anything more. Tournaments thrive on drama and unpredictability. What baseball’s got set up is a hell of a tournament, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of wild-card teams surviving to the end. In another sport, we’d call them Cinderellas.

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Probably my favorite sub-plot of this manic Royals conquest is the team’s 25th man, Terrance Gore, who had played in 11 major league regular season games before this most iconic of winning streaks. In fact, including his postseason appearances, Gore has played only 33 games above single-A, and is now a World Series contestant.

One way to easily identify Gore on the field is his uniform number 0, an under-utilized quirk that is an easy way to gain my affection. (Much respect also to Adam Ottavino.) There are other easy ways to identify him: he’s by far the smallest person on the field, somewhere around 5’7”, and he is only summoned off the bench in order to pinch-run in late-inning situations, and almost always for designated hitter Billy Butler. The substitution for Butler is doubly brilliant on the Royals’ part: slow Billy is taken off of the basepaths, and inexperienced Terrance does not have to play high-leverage innings of defense. In his sixteen games as a Royal, Gore has only been allowed two plate appearances, neither of them in the postseason.

Gore’s inclusion on the roster is a brilliant example of an entire Major League organization working in orchestration. Anticipating his usefulness as a playoff bench weapon, the Royals promoted Gore from High-A Wilmington to Triple-A Omaha at the beginning of August, and then from Omaha to Kansas City at the end of the month. Come playoff time, and Gore effectively replaced Raul Ibanez on the 25-man roster, with the hoodied Ibanez looking more and more like a coach as he watches and encourages from the dugout.

It has been easy to compare Gore to Herb Washington, a track champion and an Oakland A from 1974-75. In his two years in the big leagues, Washington appeared in 110 games, stole 31 bases, and ended up with more World Series rings (1) than career plate appearances (0).

To compare these two players is actually disrespectful to Gore. For Washington’s career, he successfully stole on 31 of his 50 attempts — an unremarkable 62% — and went 0 for 2 in the playoffs. To wit:

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Following the Royals’ four-game sweep of the Orioles, the ALCS MVP award was presented to Lorenzo Cain. I had forgotten that there exists such a thing as the ALCS MVP award, and relatively recent winners include Delmon Young, Adam Kennedy, and Placido Polanco. So the award itself doesn’t mean much, as cool as it is for Cain to get, but thinking deeper about Cain reminded me of one of my absolute favorite anecdotes from the regular season. From a tremendous feature by Andy McCullough:

One June afternoon during his senior year, the phone rang in Cain’s house. He was sitting on his couch, thumbs twiddling as he played Madden NFL. On the other line was Doug Reynolds, an area scout from Milwaukee. Reynolds told Cain the team had chosen him in the 17th round of the draft.

Cain didn’t know what to say.

“OK, thanks,” he replied, and hung up.

It can no longer be said that Cain is new to baseball. He was drafted in 2004. He’s well past 1,000 games of professional experience. Cain’s caught up with the rest of his peers, and more than that, he’s blown by a lot of them. It’s true with the ALCS MVP, and it would be true without it: Lorenzo Cain has blossomed into a star center fielder.

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It was the year of the shift in major league baseball this season. It was also the year of the strikeout, the year of the position player pitching and, apparently, the year of the Royals – at least so far. But it was definitely the year of the shift.

As you are well aware, shifts were up across baseball this year. We saw them more than we’ve ever seen them in the regular season, and we’re seeing them more than we’ve ever seen them in the playoffs.

When we think of a defensive shift, we think of a second baseman positioned in shallow right grass against a left-handed hitter. Recently, we’ve seen three defenders positioned on the left side of second base become more common against pull-happy righties. But these aren’t the only kinds of defensive shifts. I mean, it’s right there in the name: defensive shift. A shift of the defense, away from standard positioning, to give your team a tactical advantage. Sometimes you see the corners hug the lines. Sometimes you see no-doubles in the outfield. Sometimes you see a third baseman creep in on the bunt. These are all ways we’ve seen teams shift against a batter. For the first time since perhaps Rickey Henderson, the Orioles shifted against a baserunner.
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Ned Yost has taken a lot of flak for his decisions this year, ranging from his decision to use Yordano Ventura as a reliever in the Wild Card game, an unchanging line-up that has Alex Gordon hitting 6th, and the team’s reputation for aggressive sacrifice bunt attempts. But more than anything else, he came under fire for his strict adherence to bullpen labels, deeming them too important to deviate from, even when the season hung in the balance.

During the ALCS, though, Yost moved away from the rigid bullpen patters he’d been an ardent supporter of previously. In both games one and four, Kelvin Herrera was brought in during the sixth inning, recording six outs in the first game and five more in the finale. Wade Davis also was used to get six outs in the opening game, and then in the second game, Herrera and Davis were called on to pitch the seventh and eighth innings of a tie game. Instead of holding Herrera for the seventh inning only, or only using his big three to protect leads, Yost deployed them in a more aggressive manner, and the result was four more victories and a trip to the World Series.

While the defense was spectacular and Lorenzo Cain seemingly never made an out, the Royals bullpen was the MVP of this series, and Yost’s aggressive usage of his dominant relief corps is one of the main reasons why Kansas City looks unbeatable right now. Bullpens matter a lot more in October than in the regular season, and when they’re used as they were in the ALCS, they can turn a good pitching staff into an unhittable one.

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Watching the late innings of of the ALCS, I had but one thought: The Orioles have no chance here. With the exception of stolen bases, that series was basically “the Royals way” in a nutshell. Get better starting pitching than you’d expect, scratch out just enough offense, receive some outstanding defense, and turn the game over to Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland for the final three innings.

The Royals haven’t discovered some new market inefficiency there, because “have good relievers” isn’t exactly cutting edge. It’s easier said than done, of course, because as difficult as it is to find one reliever like that, the Royals have come up with three of them. It’s why it’s very much selling Davis short when we refer to the deal that brought him to town as “the James Shields trade,” because while Shields has obviously pitched significantly more innings, Davis’ impact has been enormous. It’s the redundancy there that’s really incredible, because if one has an off night — which rarely ever happens — Ned Yost still has two others at his disposal.

Still, it got me thinking about how anyone could come back in the late innings against that group, and when Buster Olney’s column yesterday pointed out that the Royals were an AL-best 65-4 when leading after six innings, it really drove home how rarely such a thing happens. But there’s still that “4” out there, so it’s not like it never happens, and by diving into the Baseball-Reference innings database, we can see that they also blew a game apiece when leading after seven and eight.

So, how did it happen? How, other than waiting for the inevitable imperfections of humanity to show up, do you beat the unbeatable? Let’s break it open. First, a note: There’s actually slightly more occurrences than the six times B-R indicates. Why? Because they have it defined as “leads after X innings,” and that’s not always how baseball works. For example, the Royals could be tied or behind at the end of an inning, take the lead in the top of the inning, and then blow it in the bottom of the inning. That would be a late lead blown, but not counted because a lead was never held at the end of a full inning. Sometimes, also, the bullpen could blow a lead and be saved by the offense later.

I’ve accounted for that as much as possible, but with the understanding that there may be one or two that slipped through the cracks, here’s how you come back from a deficit against the Kansas City bullpen in the late innings. Spoiler alert: Mostly, you don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Relative to the rest of the league, Ned Yost’s bunting isn’t exactly out of control. However, he does seem rather fond of the strategy, so he pulls it out pretty often, and it’s a big part of how he’s labeled online. The Royals bunted and ran like crazy people in the wild-card playoff against Oakland, and in Wednesday’s Game 4 against the Orioles, Lorenzo Cain sac bunted in the first inning, with nobody out, as the third hitter in the Kansas City lineup, facing Miguel Gonzalez. The Royals did score twice in the inning, but it was taken to be another bit of good Royals luck, and the bunt predictably drew its critics. If nothing else, it looked weird. Cain, again, was batted third, by his own manager.

But there’s a funny thing about Ned Yost’s sacrifice bunts. This goes beyond just the wild-card playoff bunts mostly being defensible. In theory, a sacrifice bunt is either successful or unsuccessful. Even if successful, it trades an out for a base or two. But bunts, as you know, have a whole range of potential outcomes. The Giants, just Tuesday, won on a walk-off sac bunt attempt. 2014 Ned Yost has called for a bunch of sacrifice bunt attempts, and overall, they’ve actually been good for the team.

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I’m writing this underneath a framed ESPN magazine cover from the 2010 baseball preview. The cover features Cliff Lee, Felix Hernandez, and Ichiro Suzuki, and right up top are these words: “Outs are in — and so are the Mariners”. It’s funny now, and it was given to me half as a joke, because of course the 2010 Seattle Mariners were a total catastrophe. But I remember the feeling, the state of things back then. The 2009 Mariners had set a UZR record, and then the front office brought in Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman. The goal was to win by prevention, and the prevention was there, but what happened was the Mariners prevented their own scoring too and lost 101 times. Things changed rapidly for the organization. There was a missed opportunity to have defense front and center on a national stage.

We’ve never been real shy about WAR, and as such, we’ve never been real shy about the more advanced defensive metrics. FanGraphs didn’t exactly invent the concept of baseball players with good gloves, but statheads have argued for years that defensive players deserve more respect, that a guy can be incredibly valuable because of what he does in the field, instead of the box. Naturally, there’s been resistance, because hitting is a lot more visible, and nothing in the field is as valuable as a home run. And, absolutely, offensive value does have a higher ceiling than defensive value, just because of the limited opportunities. But defense, as a concept, needed a mascot. It needed a representation that would allow more people to understand how significant it can really be. Defense needed a team like the Royals.

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When the Royals and Orioles resume their rain-interrupted ALCS tonight in Kansas City, the Royals are going to use their fifth-best starting pitcher, and on the surface this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not that Yordano Ventura was going to pitch on two days rest, or that James Shields was likely to go on three days rest, but with Jason Vargas and Danny Duffy around, Ned Yost has options. Instead, he’s going with Jeremy Guthrie, who hasn’t pitched since Sept. 26, a full 17 days of rest. Though he’s 35 years old, Guthrie has never thrown a pitch in a postseason game, so the often-seen “but playoff-tested” excuse doesn’t work here.

When we say “fifth starter,” that’s based entirely on performance. Of the five regular Kansas City starters, Guthrie’s ERA this year was the worst. His FIP was the worst. His WAR, despite throwing the second-most innings, was the worst. Over the last five years, his FIP is 215th of 228 qualified pitchers, basically making him Randy Wolf with fewer injuries. Just two seasons ago, he was getting traded straight-up for Jonathan Sanchez after a brutal half-season in Colorado. Now, he’s starting a playoff game, one of the most important games for his franchise in years.

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