Earlier in the regular season, I got a message from a pitcher asking about how his slider rate compared to that of a teammate. It seems they had something of a friendly wager. I checked and replied that, while his slider rate was high, and higher than his teammate’s, neither was close to the league lead. Way up top were guys like Luke Gregerson and Sergio Romo, who threw sliders with nearly two-thirds of their pitches. Romo, for example, threw sliders like Clayton Kershaw threw fastballs. Romo’s got a pitch, and he’s especially got that pitch against right-handed batters.

Now let’s take a step back. Between 2007-2011, Tim Wakefield posted a roughly league-average ERA over nearly 800 innings. The overwhelming majority of his pitches were knuckleballs, a very small minority of his pitches were curveballs, and just over ten percent of his pitches were fastballs. His fastball had the average velocity of another guy’s slow curve. It was, in isolation, a very bad major-league fastball. Yet, on a per-pitch basis, between 2007-2011, Tim Wakefield’s fastball was one of the most effective fastballs in the league. You don’t have to do much research to figure it’s because hitters were taken by surprise. The fastball seemed faster than it was, and it was often simply unexpected. Nearly three in four Wakefield fastballs were strikes. There was nearly an equal ratio of called strikes to swings.

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You think of the Tigers and first and foremost you think of Justin Verlander, Prince Fielder, and Miguel Cabrera. You think of the Tigers on a day that Verlander isn’t pitching and you think of Fielder and Cabrera. There are other guys on the roster — lots of them! — and some of them are good, but Fielder and Cabrera are the big offensive guns. They’re the players the Tigers most want in the spotlight in important situations.

The Tigers lost Game 3 of the World Series on Saturday, and now they have to win four in a row if they want to take the title. They lost not because the Giants lit them up, but rather because they very much didn’t light the Giants up. The story right now, depending on your perspective, is either the Giants’ run prevention or the Tigers’ miserable run production, and Saturday saw the Tigers blow what opportunities they generated. Worse, opportunities were blown by both Fielder and Cabrera. The Tigers got the bats they wanted up in the situations they wanted, and still they got shut out by Ryan Vogelsong and the San Francisco bullpen.

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Let’s face it: try as you might, you can’t really help the things that stick with you. What I remember most vividly from visiting the Acropolis so many years ago is an Offspring song I was listening to. What I remember most about attending a Montreal Canadiens home game is the in-arena Youppi! exhibit. And something I can’t shake from Thursday night’s Game 2 of the World Series is a fastball that was taken by Marco Scutaro for strike three in the bottom of the eighth. Plenty of things happened in the game and Scutaro’s at-bat was of little ultimate consequence, but I keep seeing that pitch over and over. Forgive me, but now I’m going to write about it.

I think I’ve established that I have something of a fascination for Marco Scutaro, and how difficult it is to get him to swing and miss. At no point on Thursday did Scutaro swing and miss — he hardly ever does — but he did strike out, and that’s also weird, if less so. Weirder still was how he struck out. Dave Cameron expressed surprise, too, in the live chat, so I know I’m not the only one. Let’s review the events.

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For a while, there was every reason to believe the Giants would look forward to having Madison Bumgarner start in the playoffs. Bumgarner was a very good starting pitcher, and teams like to have very good starting pitchers start for them come playoff time. Then Bumgarner started to wear down, or — if you don’t like that explanation — Bumgarner just started pitching a lot worse. His repertoire got worse, his results got worse, and there was a question of whether Bumgarner would start at all in the World Series. He was ultimately given the start in Game 2, but nobody really knew what to expect. The Giants had talked about a promising mechanical tweak, but Bumgarner was still coming off some lousy performances at the wrong times.

So, naturally, Bumgarner was terrific Thursday night. His box-score results, at least, were terrific, and though it was thanks to an impressive relay that Bumgarner managed to keep the Tigers completely off the board, even a slightly worse performance might’ve meant a Giants loss. Instead, in large part thanks to Bumgarner, the Giants hold a commanding series lead as everybody transitions to Michigan. Bruce Bochy, they say, can’t do any wrong right now. Everything he touches turns to figurative, strategic gold.

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The big mystery in Thursday night’s Game 2 of the World Series is what the Giants might get from the struggling Madison Bumgarner. Bumgarner posted strong overall numbers this year, but he seemed to wear down. Now the Giants say they’ve worked on a mechanical tweak and he should be more effective. It’s certainly intriguing, although one recalls that the Tigers said they worked on a mechanical tweak with Jose Valverde, and then Valverde did what he did in Game 1. Sometimes it’s nonsense. Sometimes it’s not nonsense, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s a mystery, basically, again.

Less of a mystery is what the Tigers might get from Doug Fister. As Justin Verlander and Barry Zito have established, there’s always mystery when you’re talking about individual starts, but Fister is more of a known entity at the moment than Bumgarner is. Fister’s just a guy who’s quietly become one of the better right-handed starting pitchers in all of baseball. As bad as the Tigers might feel about losing a Verlander start, they have the consolation of knowing the rest of their starting rotation is really good, too.

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I think my favorite fun fact Wednesday night came from Sam Miller on Twitter. The Giants, of course, hit only 31 home runs at home all season long, far and away the fewest in baseball. Only three Giants players hit at least three. Granted, those totals were seven, seven, and five — not three, three, and three — but this provided some context. It was more or less within this context that Pablo Sandoval went deep three consecutive times to start off Game 1 of the World Series. And he did it in late October in a game started by Justin Verlander. Maybe a little more impressive than Albert Pujols homering three times in a playoff game in Texas in a game started by Matt Harrison. Apparently I’ve decided to support Sandoval’s performance by denigrating other, similar performances.

In a game where the story was supposed to be about the mismatch between Verlander and Barry Zito, it was Sandoval who completely stole the show, and it was Sandoval who seemed to get Joe Buck legitimately excited with dinger number three. He hit one out to center, he hit one out to left, and then he hit one out to center again. Sandoval would finish 4-for-4, singling off Jose Valverde, but if anything, considering the rest of the night, Valverde successfully kept Sandoval in check. It might’ve been the highlight of Valverde’s Game 1 appearance.

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Headed into last night, the Tigers were the favorites to win the World Series in large part because they had Justin Verlander, and people tend to favor teams who have ace starters in the playoffs. Last night, however, Justin Verlander did not pitch like an ace, and the Giants jumped on him for five runs in four innings of work – as many as he’d allowed in his previous seven starts combined.

So, what went wrong for Verlander last night? At the risk of oversimplification, his problems can essentially be traced to two factors:

1. Bad location
2. Good hitting

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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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