Read any game or series preview and most of the focus will be on the teams and the players. As it ought to be, as games and series are competitions between teams made up of players. What we always want to believe is that the team with the players who perform better will emerge triumphant. But of course, what we know is that there are not countless variables, but there are more variables than we would like to count. It matters what the environment is. It matters what the weather is. It matters what other things are. And it matters who the home-plate umpire is. Because home-plate umpires are human, not all home-plate umpires are identical, so not all home-plate umpires will have the same effect on any given game.

It’s worthwhile, then, to talk a little bit about the home-plate umpire in anticipation of the start of the World Series. For tonight’s Game 1, the crew chief and guy behind the plate will be Gerry Davis. You might remember Gerry Davis for drawing some strike-zone criticism in last year’s playoffs, from the Yankees. You might alternately remember Gerry Davis for just being an umpire you’ve heard of, or for being a guy who lives on your block if you live near him. For the remainder of this post, we’re going to examine Gerry Davis’ average strike zone. For Justin Verlander, Barry Zito, and many of the rest of the Tigers and Giants, this is going to be some sort of factor.

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The 2012 World Series begins in just some hours, with the Tigers trotting out their ace in Justin Verlander. The Giants will respond by trotting out a guy who might have been an ace once many years ago in Barry Zito. I was tasked with the project of writing up a Barry Zito Game 1 game plan, and to me it couldn’t be more simple. Zito’s Wednesday night strategy:

1. do what Justin Verlander does
2. maybe do it better?

All right, so that is a physical impossibility, unless Verlander suffers a crippling injury between now and then and still somehow is allowed to start. A more realistic Barry Zito Game 1 game plan:

1. hit all of the spots
2. do not miss any of the spots

See how easy this is? Barry Zito might well win tonight just so long as he pitches perfectly. If he doesn’t make any mistakes, at all, then surely he’ll have the Tigers’ hitters off balance and maybe the Giants will score a run against Verlander or the bullpen and, presto, there’s a World Series advantage! I guess my work here is done, sooner than I expected it to be.

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After Jose Valverde’s meltdown in Game One of the ALCS — that followed his meltdown in Game Four of the ALDS — Jim Leyland had finally seen enough of Papa Grande in the ninth inning, and turned to Phil Coke to serve as the guy on the mound in the ninth inning for the rest of the series. However, he hasn’t anointed Coke as his new closer yet, and hasn’t committed to any specific direction for how he’ll handle ninth inning leads in the World Series. So, who should get ball if the Tigers have a lead in the ninth inning tonight, presuming Justin Verlander even lets Leyland take it from him in the first place?

It should probably depend entirely on who is coming up to bat. The Tigers best chance to win is by having multiple closers, including Jose Valverde.

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The Washington Nationals had under contract one of the very best starting pitchers in baseball, and they decided against using him in the playoffs, where they lost. The decision was talked about for weeks and months in advance. It’s probably still being talked about somewhere, and it’ll be a topic for years. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants have under contract one of the better hitting outfielders in baseball, and they’ve decided against using him in the playoffs, where they’ve advanced to the World Series. With the stakes at their absolute highest, the Giants are still committed to going forward without Melky Cabrera. The Cabrera situation and the Stephen Strasburg situation are very different, with little to do with one another, but I needed an intro and I feel like this served the purpose.

So here’s where we are: the Giants are in the Series, and while they have home-field advantage — in part thanks to Melky Cabrera’s performance in the All-Star Game! — they need to identify a designated hitter for Games 3 through 5 in Detroit. Were Cabrera on the active roster, this decision would be pretty easy. He’s not, so it isn’t, because the Giants’ bench is bad. Still, there has to be a best of the worst, so let us discuss in some depth.

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Recently, in the American League Championship Series, the Detroit Tigers played against the New York Yankees. The Tigers played the Yankees four times, and now, the Tigers will play the Yankees no more times, having achieved the necessary four conquests. The Tigers now are just four more victories away from winning everything and nothing, while the Yankees are faced with a bleak winter existence of being privileged millionaires. These are important times in sports.

Prior to the beginning of the ALCS, many people examined the matchup between the Tigers and the Yankees and attempted to identify potential keys that might lead one team to triumph. Given that this was a playoff series, many of those keys were unoriginal, having been applied to other playoff series before. People have ideas about the playoffs, see, ideas that the playoffs are meaningfully different from the regular season. Over the course of this series, some of those ideas were validated, and some of those ideas were contradicted. Let us take this opportunity to review, thoroughly yet incompletely.

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Max Scherzer hit a bump in the sixth inning, allowing a hit and a walk. Jim Leyland pulled him for Drew Smyly. It was about the only bad thing to happen to the Tigers all day.

Through the fifth inning, Scherzer was engaged in one of the most dominant starts in playoff history. He carried a no-hitter into the sixth, the only two runners coming via an error and a walk. He struck out nine of the first 18 hitters he faced.

It was dominance, and had the game not been firmly in hand by the sixth we may have seen more. There was no reason to force Scherzer to throw any mildly taxing pitch and risk even the slightest heading into the World Series, and so the fireballer was removed after just 5.2 innings. The Yankees mustered just two hits and one walk overall as Scherzer finished with 10 strikeouts.

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There’s a thing about rain-outs. Actually, there are two things.

1. They suck.
2. In theory, they should offer neither team an advantage.

The first one’s pretty evident. Where once there was supposed to be baseball, now there is no baseball, thanks to the rain, and that sucks. The second one seems pretty evident as well. Instead of there being baseball between two teams on one day, there will be baseball between the two teams the next day, with each team having been identically inconvenienced. But the reality is that the inconveniences aren’t always identical, and that’s what we observe in the ALCS between the Tigers and the Yankees. Rain delayed Game 4 by a day — so far, at least — and this has without question worked out in the Tigers’ favor.

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Yesterday morning, Eddie Yost, also know as “The Walking Man,” passed away at 86. Yost had a long career as a third baseman from 1944 to 1962, mostly with the Washington Senators. He also spent a couple of years playing for the Tigers before being selected in the pre-1961 expansion draft by the Angels and spending his final two seasons there. After he retired as a player, Yost coached in Washington, then with the Mets during the “Miracle Mets” era. His last coaching job was as third base coach for the Red Sox from 1977 to 1984. Of more interest for those reading this blog is how many walks Yost drew despite having little power. Now if we could just solve the mystery of his nickname. Oh wait, I’ve got it:0 the local scribe was a big fan of Giacometti.

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“You labored, it wasn’t a typical Justin Verlander game.”

That was TBS’s Craig Sager, just after Phil Coke made Justin Verlander’s Game 3 performance officially stand up: 8.1 innings, three hits, no walks, just one run.

It’s not good enough for Justin Verlander. Justin Verlander only struck out three Yankees; never mind that the Tigers’ ace held the New York Yankees to one run over 8.1 innings in Game 3 of the ALCS, we bolt to attention because he didn’t record enough strikeouts.

This is Justin Verlander’s level.

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After Game 3 Tuesday night, the Yankees find themselves behind three games to zero games in the ALCS, one game away from there being no games anymore. What a 3-0 series suggests is domination, and that hasn’t been the case — all three games have been close, with the Tigers just squeaking by. Yet the Yankees have without question been outplayed, and now they can’t lose again. It’s not a surprise they wound up here, since they were behind two games to none before facing Justin Verlander, but one doesn’t typically associate the Yankees with desperation, and this situation is desperate.

What’s interesting is that, while the Yankees faced long odds going up against Verlander on Tuesday, one could argue that plenty of things broke in their favor. It was a cold night, with the wind blowing in, and that helped to even the playing field, since the Verlander run environment couldn’t be reduced by as much as the Yankees pitchers’ run environment. The Yankees pitchers themselves allowed just two runs in eight innings, giving the offense a real chance. Verlander didn’t look like his overpowering self, single run and three hits aside; he tied a season-low for strikeouts with three, and on a handful or two of occasions Verlander left a hittable pitch over the plate that the Yankees didn’t drill. And then at the very end, the Yankees made their final out with the tying run on second and the go-ahead run on first.

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