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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In the ninth inning of Game 5 on Wednesday night, Brett Gardner batted against Cody Allen for nine minutes. The Yankees were looking to add to a one-run lead, while the Indians were an out away from getting to give it one more try against the hardest-throwing pitcher in the world. Gardner batted with two runners on, and as his at-bat grew longer and longer, there was an increasing sense of urgency. Gardner batted for nine minutes after Todd Frazier had batted for five minutes, and it all meant that Aroldis Chapman was spending more time not throwing. More time cooling off. As Gardner saw pitch after pitch after pitch, insurance felt more and more critical. Chapman might come back out feeling too cold. You don’t want a pitcher sitting for half of an hour.

The last pitch was the twelfth pitch, and the twelfth pitch was fateful. Gardner lined a single into right, and since the count had been full, the runners were running. Aaron Hicks had no problem scoring from second, and to make matters worse for the Indians, an error allowed Frazier to also slide home. That last run was only salt in the wound; Hicks’ run felt like the killer. Although you can never know for sure, and although it was just last postseason that Chapman suffered a stunning blown save in the same ballpark, anything beyond a one-run margin felt insurmountable. For all intents and purposes, Brett Gardner ended the ALDS.

For Gardner, it was his longest plate appearance since 2014 — but for another 12-pitch at-bat he’d had in the fifth inning. For Allen, it was his longest plate appearance since 2012. It was the kind of at-bat that tempts you to read too much into it — to say things like, “there’s your proof that the Yankees don’t quit,” or “the Indians can never close anything out.” You shouldn’t give in. The at-bat didn’t mean anything larger. It was just an incredible at-bat, in a critical situation. And I’d like to go through it, pitch, by pitch, by pitch.

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In July, the Yankees sent a significant package of talent to the Oakland A’s in order to acquire Sonny Gray, hoping to improve their rotation for both the stretch run and the postseason. But now that they’re in the postseason, and their season is on the line, Joe Girardi has chosen to hand the ball to CC Sabathia instead.

On the surface, this looks like another example of one of Girardi’s primary weaknesses; overreacting to recent performances. We saw him do this with Luis Severino, bumping him to Game 4 of the ALDS after he was bombed in the Wild Card game, despite Severino being pretty clearly the Yankees best starter right now. And while Gray has a clear edge over Sabathia in track record, he didn’t finish the season very well, allowing a season-worst .330 wOBA in September, and he wasn’t good in his first outing in this series either.

Despite his struggles of late, though, Gray is pretty clearly a better pitcher than Sabathia at this point. I’d generally suggest that a team is better off relying on projections than on what-have-you-done-for-me-lately reactions, and so from a process standpoint, I don’t think picking Sabathia over Gray is a great choice.

But Girardi’s recency bias aside, there’s actually a pretty good case to be made for starting Sabathia tonight.

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The last time I saw Dan Haren in the clubhouse, I wanted to hug him. He was a part of a young Cubs team that was about to enter the postseason ahead of schedule. He was also about to retire, though, and I didn’t peg him for one who’d work in the game after he was done. I didn’t know when I’d see him next, and he’d been a go-to source for many of my pieces. This happens more often than we might imagine, this bit of deflation right in the middle of so much elation. For many players, their last appearance in a major-league game also represents their last day in baseball.

The effort to be here now, to be fully present in the moment, is an ongoing one — and a difficult one when it comes to baseball. For example: as much as I’m in love with the present version of Bartolo Colon, I sometimes remember fondly the days when he threw gas — and threw something other than a fastball. I’ve had the opposite experience with Rafael Devers recently: as impressed as I am by his abilities right now, I can’t help but think of his future whenever I watch him.

Contemplating CC Sabathia in this context yields a slightly different experience. The left-hander debuted as a 20-year-old and began producing above-average numbers right away. Over the course of his age-35 and -36 seasons, meanwhile, he’s recorded nearly seven wins. In terms of his capacity to prevent runs, the Sabathia of 2017 isn’t much different than the Sabathia of 2001. As such, Sabathia offers a unique means by which to experience nostalgia for yesterday, the immediacy of today, and the hope for tomorrow all at once.

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The Yankees gave us a glimpse of the future on Monday night, demonstrating how a game of ever-increasing extremes is only likely to continue trending in that direction.

No, this isn’t about bullpenning, a strategy that the club almost accidentally employed in the Wild Card game against Minnesota and that they ought to use again in Game 5 tonight. Rather, this is about fastball velocity.

The Yankees’ average fastball in Game 4 against Cleveland traveled at 98 mph. Ninety-eight! New York pitchers failed to throw a single fastball under 96 mph.

That’s kind of terrifying.

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A few years ago there existed a fun little game to play, brought to my attention by Sam Miller, I think it was. The instructions were simple: Follow a Justin Masterson start, and see if he’d go the duration without ever throwing anything other than a fastball. Masterson would live and die by his sinker, and while he wasn’t the only fastball-heavy starter around, he would sometimes take things near the one-note extreme. Depending on your perspective, it was a testament either to his talent or to his limitations.

I don’t remember if Masterson ever did it. It wasn’t the kind of game you’d play for the memories. But these days, you could play a very similar, if opposite game. You can follow a Masahiro Tanaka start, and see if he goes the duration without ever throwing anything other than a non-fastball. The odds are presumably slim, because every new start brings 90-some chances, yet Tanaka is trending in a certain direction. You could just ask the Indians last night.

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