No one is lifting and launching like the Yankees this postseason.

More specifically, no one is lifting and launching like the Yankees at their home park, where the club is 6-0 this postseason after enjoying a sizable home-field advantage during the regular season (51-30), as well. If they can win Friday or Saturday at Houston, New York will be guaranteed at least two more home games at Yankee Stadium II, a launching pad in the year of launch angle.

According to Baseball Savant’s “barrel” and “solid contract” metrics — figures derived from Statcast data — the Yankees have a sizable lead on the playoff field in terms of quality contact on fly balls and line drives this postseason (see table below). And while their totals are higher than some other clubs’ simply for having advanced deeper into the postseason, they still have a sizable edge on their LCS contemporaries.

Nor is it just that the Yankees are driving more balls into the air with authority, it’s where they are engaging in this work: at their home ballpark.

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Dallas Keuchel didn’t overwhelm the Yankees like usual on Wednesday. Rather than continuing his career domination of the New York nine — which includes 14 scoreless innings in the postseason and a 1.09 ERA in eight starts overall — he did what Joe Girardi said before the game he rarely does: lay an egg. Keuchel was chased in the fifth, having surrendered seven hits and four runs.

In the lefty’s opinion, the egg was a matter more of results than process. Following the game, he wasn’t so much self-critical as he was complimentary of his competition.

“Outside of Castro’s double in the second — it was a backup cutter and he put a good swing on it — I don’t think I can pinpoint another mistake pitch,” Keuchel told reporters. “Sanchez’s double down the line was a pretty good pitch down and in, and he hadn’t had great success on that pitch. Judge… [the] cutter was in; maybe it wasn’t in quite far enough, but it was in enough to get an out. [Greg Bird] hit a good pitch. It was inside — it was off the plate — and he just stuck his hands in enough to get it over Yuli’s head.”

Yankees hitters expressed multiple viewpoints regarding Keuchel’s performance. Todd Frazier — presumably referring to more than just Castro’s knock — opined that his teammates “hit the mistakes.” (What constitutes a mistake from Keuchel is a point on which Frazier elaborates below.)

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The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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Unlike their ALCS opponents, the New York Yankees aren’t widely known for being at the forefront of analytics. According to their longtime general manager, they should be. When I asked Brian Cashman about the team’s not-as-geeky-as-the-Astros reputation, his response was, “I would put our analytics in the top five in all sports.”

Regardless of where they rank, any suggestion that Cashman’s club isn’t cutting edge would qualify as folly. Under the direction of assistant general manager Mike Fishman — his previous title was director of quantitative analytics — their reliance on data has grown exponentially over the last decade.

“It started as a department of one — Mike was the director and the staff — and now it’s a major part of our operation,” said Cashman. “And it should be. This is the New York Yankees, and we want to use every tool in the toolbox. One of those important tools is analytics.”

Joe Girardi doesn’t disagree. As a a matter of fact, the Yankees skipper seemed almost taken aback when I asked the following question at Tuesday’s pre-game press conference:

The Astros are known as a team that incorporates analytics in their decision-making process pretty heavily. Your team isn’t really seen that way. Should you be?

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The Astros announced last night that Lance McCullers will take the ball in today’s Game 4 of the ALCS. When asked why he chose McCullers over Brad Peacock, A.J. Hinch responded with a simple answer: “He’s really good.”

McCullers certainly has been really good at times, and he was one of the AL’s best pitchers in the first half of the season, running a 3.05 ERA/2.74 FIP/2.74 xFIP before the All-Star break. But back problems put him on the DL a few times in the second half, and when he did pitch, he wasn’t particularly effective, running an 8.23 ERA/4.29 FIP/4.58 xFIP. At the end of July, I noted that the Astros had a Lance McCullers problem, and they never really got it fixed.

If the Astros were convinced that McCullers was healthy and back to his first-half form, they would have started him in the ALDS. Instead, they went with Peacock as their 4th starter in that series, and used McCullers in relief when that didn’t go well. So why are they showing confidence today in a guy who hasn’t gotten hitters out regularly in several months?

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I have a handful of rules I try to abide as an everyday writer. For example, I try not to pick favorites. My job isn’t to have any favorites. My job is to try to be as objective as possible. I also think it’s vitally important to not tell people how they ought to feel. This is sports. You’re in it for your own reasons. It’s not my business to dictate how you consume your chosen form of entertainment. You should get from baseball whatever you want to get. You should feel about baseball however you want to feel.

That being said, now I’m going to cross myself. I’m going to violate one of my own rules. Let’s focus on Todd Frazier’s early three-run homer in Monday’s Game 3. The internet response was fairly consistent: joke of a stadium, and/or the ball is juiced. The response was uniformly derisive. I get it, because I felt the same way! But I’ve come all the way around, and I’d like to encourage you to do the same, if you can. That wasn’t a home run to be mocked. That was a home run to be celebrated. For Todd Frazier, it was a good piece of hitting.

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In Saturday’s Game 2, David Robertson relieved Tommy Kahnle, who had relieved Luis Severino. Robertson worked two shutout innings, and the first of them was the bottom of the seventh, during which Robertson threw 13 pitches. Here is a log of what they were.

1. breaking ball
2. breaking ball
3. breaking ball
4. breaking ball
5. breaking ball
6. breaking ball
7. breaking ball
8. breaking ball
9. breaking ball
10. breaking ball
11. breaking ball
12. breaking ball
13. breaking ball

Robertson’s first pitch in the bottom of the eighth was a fastball. It was taken for a strike.

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Back when he was a minor leaguer, Didi Gregorius hit a combined total of 26 home runs. Gregorius is now the regular shortstop for the Yankees, who are a major-league franchise, and last week, he hit his 26th home run of this year alone, off of Ervin Santana. In Game 5 of the ALDS, Gregorius hit home run number 27, off of Corey Kluber. Two innings later, he hit home run number 28, also off of Kluber. Gregorius hits for power now, and while this feels like a fairly sudden development, it hasn’t been so sudden that Gregorius hasn’t been able to perfect the subtle bat flip. By now, Gregorius has hit enough home runs that he knows what they feel like right away.

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Last night, the Yankees and Indians combined to strike out 31 times, the most strikeouts ever recorded in a playoff game that didn’t go extra innings. And during our live blog, complaining about the size of Jeff Nelson’s strike zone was a common occurrence. Accusing the home plate umpire of malfeasance is a regular thing fans do, especially in the postseason when the stakes are the highest, but in looking at the data today, there is some validity to the arguments. Last night, Jeff Nelson called a pretty huge strike zone.

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