If there is one thing we have learned from the American League teams this postseason, it’s that defense and baserunning really are very important. No one person has better exemplified this than Royals outfielder Jarrod Dyson. You’ve already read Jeff’s article on how Dyson stole perhaps the biggest base since Dave Roberts in 2004. Eventually though, this postseason run for the Royals is going to end. Whether that is in four games or 14 games is not yet certain, but when it does end, the Royals will need to make a decision as to what they are going to do with Dyson next season. They should let him play.

Over the past two seasons, there have only been 29 outfielders in baseball more valuable than Dyson. Of those 29, only one of them had as few plate appearances as did Dyson. Most of them have double the plate appearances, and some have 2.5 times Dyson’s 529 PAs. Dyson is particularly adept afield. Over the past two seasons, only three outfielders have been worth more defensively per our Def statistic, and only 15 position players in general.

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Billy Butler’s nickname is Country Breakfast. You know that — you’ve known that for years — but at this point, the connection’s automatic, and you probably don’t really think about it. This time, think about it. I don’t actually know why he’s nicknamed Country Breakfast, but it seems to be ever so fitting. If you think about whatever a country breakfast is, and if you think about the people likely to be eating it, you imagine a guy who looks like Billy Butler, a guy who doesn’t have plans to be active the rest of the day. Billy Butler’s all gravy and pig with a .300 average, and that’s an easy sort of player to fall in love with as long as you’ve got pinch-runners at the ready.

Billy Butler is slow. Not just relatively slow, among professional athletes — he is a slow man, when he’s running. The good news is he’s not supposed to be fast. The bad news is he’s slow. Since 2009, Butler’s posted six of the 80 worst baserunning seasons in baseball. This year he was on first base for 31 singles, and one time did he make it to third. About 10% of the time he took an extra base, against a league average of 40%. Current Fan Scouting Report results give Butler a 17/100 in sprint speed. This is consistent with his 18 from previous years. Jesus Montero also received a sprint rating of 18, and the Mariners hired a man to spend the offseason teaching him how to move his legs and arms. According to you guys, Billy Butler runs as fast as a player who didn’t know how to run. I could go on longer than this, but, this paragraph is your background.

And so on Sunday, in Game 3 of the ALDS, Billy Butler stole second base in the playoffs. It wasn’t the play that did the Angels in — truthfully, it wasn’t a play that really mattered — but it spoke to the confidence with which the Royals were plowing forward. The man on the mound, by the way, was a lefty.

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Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. You might damn well be sick of reading about this. I couldn’t even blame you, but you have to understand the nugget that we’re sitting on, here. It’s unusual that we know about such a stark vulnerability. It also happens to belong to the best player in baseball, a player we’ve written so many thousands of words about here before, and that player is in the playoffs now, looking to lead his team to a World Series. Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. The report’s been known for months, but to me it’s still endlessly fascinating to see how pitchers and teams make use of the information. This trend is pretty clear — the table below shows Trout’s month-by-month rates of high fastballs seen:

If we’ve been able to identify something, you’d better believe Major League Baseball has been able to identify that something, so Trout in the second half saw more high fastballs than anybody else, by a few percentage points. And what happened? Well, Trout remained pretty great, but after leading baseball in the first half with a 186 wRC+, second-half Trout dropped to 141, even with Jose Altuve. His walks went down and his strikeouts went up, and while he was seeing about 41% high fastballs, that means he was seeing 59% non-high-fastballs. That’s where Trout feasted. He’s going to win the league MVP, and he deserves it.

Thursday night, Trout played in the playoffs, as the Angels and Royals kicked off their ALDS. Starting for Kansas City was Jason Vargas, and that raised an interesting question. All right, pitch Trout high and hard. But what if you don’t have good high, hard stuff? What if you’re, say, Jason Vargas? One wondered how the Royals would approach Trout, and, now that we look back, the Royals approached Trout like the numbers say you should approach Trout. I have to note that Sam Miller has already written about this, very well, but he cheated by writing at night like some kind of hard and disciplined worker. It’s like, work during work hours, right? Let’s pretend like Miller didn’t beat me to the punch, and review Trout’s five trips to the plate. He finished 0-for-4 with a walk, by the way. The Royals won!

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Do you guys know Jaack? That’s not a very good introduction. We’ve run live game chats during the wild-card playoffs the previous two nights, and Jaack is the screen name of at least one participating commenter. This is Wednesday’s live chat, and this is Jaack, at 11:05pm EDT:

Comment From Jaack
There needs to be an article about how much better last night’s game was. Like inning by inning breakdown.

Jaack’s the best. Thank you, Jaack! Following is such a breakdown.

Tuesday’s game, of course, set an impossible standard. It feels like it’s an all-time kind of playoff game, and while I’m fully aware of recency bias, I felt the same way after Rangers/Cardinals Game 6 in 2011, and that one’s stood up. We can debate how amazing it was to watch the A’s and the Royals, but there’s no debate that it was some kind of amazing. So there was no chance at all that the Giants and Pirates would follow that show with at least an equivalent show of their own, but Wednesday was a total dud. The saving grace was that Madison Bumgarner pitched and was awesome, but for the most part he was awesome without any danger, and when the outcome feels decided, the entertainment value plummets.

This isn’t about the quality of the baseball. This is about the quality of the show. We already know that Tuesday’s show was several times better, but now let’s put some actual data to it because what else do you have to do for the next few minutes? If you started reading this, you can finish reading this.

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It’s too bad that the playoffs have to continue uninterrupted, because I’d be content to think about and write about Tuesday night’s wild-card game for the next month and a half. While it wasn’t actually a demonstration of smallball vs. Moneyball, the Royals resembled a team from the 80s, or more accurately, the Royals resembled themselves, beating the A’s with exactly their own brand of offense. The Royals this past season were the best base-stealing team in the league, and while it’s easy to downplay baserunning as a significant overall factor in determining wins and losses, the small picture doesn’t always work like the big picture, and Tuesday night, stolen bases were very much a huge reason behind the Royals’ stunning advance.

That was a key we all thought to watch for. Aggressiveness was part of the Royals’ game plan, as they tied a playoff record with seven steals. There’s blame going the way of Derek Norris, who replaced an injured Geovany Soto, and to be sure, Norris could’ve had a better game. But something we’ve really come to understand in the past few years is that steals are more off of pitchers than catchers, and this wasn’t so much the Royals taking advantage of Norris as it was the Royals taking advantage of the batteries. The Royals read and the Royals ran, and there was no bigger stolen base than Jarrod Dyson’s arrival at third in the bottom of the ninth.

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It doesn’t feel like corny sentiment to say the Kansas City Royals stole the American League Wild Card from the Oakland A’s. The Royals lineup does not inspire much in the way of fear but this ragtag bunch hung nine runs on the A’s best starter and its (rightly) maligned bullpen.

They did so while hitting just two extra base hits, both of which came in the 12th inning. Eric Hosmer tripled and Salvador Perez yanked the walkoff double down the line compared to 13 singles and three walks. Without the benefit of big bats, the Royals instead did what the Royals do – they swiped and stole and small ball’d their way to victory, just as our fearless leader suggested they should mere hours before the game began.

They stole seven bases on the night, equalling the record for a postseason game. While none of these steals are likely to reach “Dave Roberts Game 4” levels of notoriety, five of the seven thefts came around to score. Let’s look at each steal, ranking them by win probability added to see which was truly the biggest steal of the night.

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What are you going to remember from the AL wild card game? Be honest, really.

You’re going to remember Ned Yost. Hooooooo boy, are you going to remember Ned Yost. There’s going to be no shortage of post-mortems in Kansas City about Yost, for about 40 different reasons, surprisingly not all about bunting. (Argue about whether it was smart to take out James Shields [yes] for an on-one-day-rest Yordano Ventura [no] all you want, I’m still not over the early botched Eric Hosmer / Billy Butler double steal that was actually called on purpose.) You’re not going to forget Brandon Finnegan, either, or Salvador Perez, or Jarrod Dyson on the base paths.

You’re going to remember Bob Melvin and that eighth inning, too, inexplicably leaving Jon Lester in to rack up 111 pitches, get three men on base, and (along with Luke Gregerson) turn a 7-3 lead into a 7-6 nailbiter. You’re going to remember Jonny Gomes in left field, and what should be by all reason the last game that Derek Norris ever catches in the big leagues. I’ll remember thinking that for every time we laugh and make jokes all while understanding that managers know a million times more than we do, every single thing in this game happened. Yost was often brutal in this one. Melvin wasn’t necessarily better.

There’s so, so much to unpack there, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of what was one of the weirdest, greatest, worst, best, ludicrous baseball games ever. So much happened, in fact, that what no one at all is going to remember is what seemed for much of the evening like the biggest story of the night: Brandon Moss, who had hit two homers in the previous two months, hit two in the same playoff game. Let’s talk about that, a little.

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Tonight, the Royals and A’s play a single-game elimination to determine the winner of the American League Wild Card, with the winner going on to face the Angels starting on Thursday. Both teams have their best starters on the mound, and Jon Lester versus James Shields is about as good a match-up as you can hope for in a winner-take-all contest. With these two starters, strong defenses, and a pitcher’s park as the venue, we shouldn’t expect a ton of runs to be scored in tonight’s game.

And so the managers for each squad are likely going to feel the pressure to try and steal a run here or there, knowing that in a low run environment, every little advantage could turn out to be the difference between advancement or the end of the team’s season. So, against that background, let’s offer Ned Yost some friendly pieces of advice.

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The Royals made a trade for James Shields and evaluators had things to say about it. The Royals, for their part, were confident in their belief that Shields could help push the team to its intended destination, and on Tuesday, before a partisan audience, Shields will start the Royals’ biggest game in decades. It’s fitting for a man nicknamed Big Game James, and though a big part of the reason for that is the convenience of his first name rhyming with Game, this is how the Royals drew it up. They wanted to get to games that matter, and then they wanted to give the baseballs that matter to James Shields.

Good pitchers aren’t defined by any single quality, unless you grant the quality of being good. There’s a lot that goes into being a top-of-the-rotation starter, and while, say, Clayton Kershaw has an incredible slider, he’s not incredible because of his slider. Jon Lester has an incredible cutter, but he’s not incredible because of his cutter. Good pitchers, like all things, are complicated to understand, but there are most certainly standout skills. Kershaw does have a standout slider. Lester does have a standout cutter. And James Shields? Shields is good at a lot of things, but he’s known for having a standout changeup. Or, he was. And now he is again, but there was a time that the pitch went missing. It’s been an interesting year for the best pitch in Shields’ arsenal.

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Late last night after dropping a second consecutive game to the Kansas City Royals, the Cleveland Indians’ playoff odds slipped to 0.0% for the first time this season. That means two things. For starters, the Cleveland Indians will not be making the playoffs. But also the Kansas City Royals, barring a complete collapse and miraculous run by the Seattle Mariners, will be making the playoffs.

The Royals haven’t made the playoffs since 1985, so that’s a pretty big deal. Congrats, Royals! You guys did it. Enjoy playoff baseball, you’ve earned it. That the Royals even made the playoffs is noteworthy in and of itself. What might be more noteworthy, though, is how this team got there.
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