To be clear, there are three postings here.

Position: Detroit Tigers Manager, Baseball Analytics

Location: Detroit
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Position: Houston Astros Baseball Research & Development Analyst

Location: Houston
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Cubs manager Joe Maddon likes to put a saying — often an inspirational quote — on the clubhouse chalkboard before games. Earlier today, I asked Toronto’s John Gibbons what message he’d put on his club’s chalkboard leading into ALCS Game 5. His response was, “We let Bautista do that.”

In retrospect, “You can’t predict baseball” would have been apropos.

The Indians weren’t supposed to beat the Blue Jays this afternoon. Not at raucous Rogers Centre with an obscure, and inexperienced, rookie on the mound. Ryan Merritt had all of 11 big-league innings under his belt, and in terms of prospect helium, he’s not exactly Julio Urias. Let’s be honest, there was a greater chance that Merritt would crack than dazzle. Bautista went as far as to say the youngster would be “shaking in his boots.”

Before the game, Terry Francona admitted that Merritt was nervous. The Cleveland skipper also predicted that those nerves would lessen once the game started.

They did. In the first inning, the kid induced weak ground balls from Bautista and Josh Donaldson, then fanned Edwin Encarnacion. “Merritt” chants were started in the stands, but they never gained steam. Neither did Blue Jays bats; they continued to fizzle. Merritt set down the first 10 he faced, and when he finally did give up a hit, it was followed by a double play.

Through four innings,the bullpen phone had remained eerily quiet. Cinderella still hadn’t called for her slippers. The Indians led 3-0.

One out into the fifth, the rookie with the pedestrian fastball surrendered a soft single, and was lifted. He’d done his job. Expected to do little, Merritt instead was receiving congratulatory handshakes after retiring 12 of the 14 hitters he faced. The game was now in the capable hands of the Cleveland bullpen. Then it was over.

The Indians are on to the World Series, and Ryan Merritt — unknown, unheralded, unfazed — is one of the biggest reasons. Baseball.

Eric Longenhagen is publishing brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, for the moment, the Fall Instructional League. Find all editions here.

Yankees RHP James Kaprielian sat mostly 92-93 mph and touched 96 one start after sitting 94-97 in his first appearance since an elbow flexor strain. His velocity is worth monitoring, not only because he’s returning from injury but because the 94-plus we saw before his injury and in his first AFL start was not the kind of velo was saw from Kaprielian at UCLA and we’re still trying to figure out exactly what this guy is.

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In a few hours, Ryan Merritt will take the mound for the Indians in Game 5 of the ALCS. Statistically, Merritt doesn’t look like much. He’s posted exceptionally low strikeout numbers at every stop, and although he’s coupled them with minuscule walk rates, KATOH isn’t sold. KATOH likes tall pitchers who strike guys out. As a 6-foot hurler who pitches to contact, Merritt is the exact opposite of that.

KATOH pegs Merritt for just 1.4 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 1.5 WAR by KATOH+, which integrates Baseball America’s rankings. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Merritt’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

To put some faces to Merritt’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the command-oriented lefty. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Merritt’s performance this year and every Triple-A season since 1991 in which a pitcher faced at least 350 batters. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

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Position: Sports Info Solutions Research & Development Associate

Location: Coplay, Pa.
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Jose Bautista is a quote machine, good and bad. Earlier, Craig Edwards looked at what the Jays outfielder said about the strike zone, and here’s a more benign thing that Bautista said about Andrew Miller’s great slider: “For some reason his slider seems like he’s playing with it a little more,” he told reporters Sunday. “I felt like I saw two different sliders. Sometimes it’s more of a short slider. Sometimes it’s like a little slurve, with a lot more break, a sharper turn on it. As opposed to last year when he was throwing only one type of slider, which was a slurvy one.”

Bautista is right — Miller’s slider is different now. What’s interesting beyond that fact is that, by adding a second slider, Miller may have changed the movement on all of the versions of the pitch.

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Eric Longenhagen is publishing brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, for the moment, the Fall Instructional League. Find all editions here.

For this edition of the Fall League notes, here’s a brief collection of superlatives from last week’s action.

Hardest Fastball
Riley Pint, RHP, Colorado Rockies (101 mph on team gun)

Best Breaking Ball
Riley Pint’s 85-mph slider at the 5:45 mark of this video

Best Offspeed
James Kaprielian, RHP, New York Yankees (changeup) (Video)

Best At-Bats
Pat Valaika, SS, Colorado Rockies

Loudest Contact
Ramon Laureano, OF, Houston Astros (Video)

Fastest Home-to-First time
Yefri Perez, CF, Miami Marlins (4.01 (R))

Other Notes from the Past Week
Yoan Moncada’s footwork at third base looks far more polished and effortless than I anticipated… White Sox LHP Louie Lechich, a converted outfielder, has only been pitching in games since July 28th and is already flashing a plus changeup… The quality of defense, especially among Fall League catchers, has been quite poor.

This morning, I wrote about Andrew Miller’s postseason dominance, and compared his current usage to how Mariano Rivera was deployed by the Yankees during their World Series runs. I noted Miller’s postseason dominance, but because I didn’t have access to postseason splits, I couldn’t put those in context, showing how well Miller has done in the postseason relative to other relievers. Thankfully, David Appelman sent me the data today, and so now I can add some context to Miller’s playoff dominance.

We currently only have this kind of postseason data going back to 2002, so I can’t compare Miller directly to pitchers before then, but we can look at how well he’s done relative to other playoff relievers in the last 15 years. And, as you’d guess, he ranks pretty highly. Here are all the relievers (or pitchers pitching in relief, anyway) who have held hitters below a .200 wOBA during the last 15 years.

Miller isn’t quite at the top, but he’s in that top-three tier separated from everyone else. And yes, given what Tim Lincecum did out of the bullpen for the Giants in 2012, he probably deserved a mention in my piece this morning. He was doing what Miller is doing now before it was cool. It’s too bad he didn’t want to stay in that role; it would have been fun to see what Lincecum could have been as a relief ace before the stuff went away.

Also, if you’re surprised to see Roberto Osuna at the top of the list, join the club. I knew he was good for Toronto last year, but didn’t realize he’d been quite at this level. Of course, the primary reason we’re talking about Miller’s dominance more than Osuna’s is the way they’re doing it; Osuna has a career 25% strikeout rate in the postseason, and has mostly gotten to this list by holding hitters to an .091 BABIP during his playoff appearances. Miller has a 49% postseason strikeout rate, and is at 61% this year; he’s not relying on weak contact or quality defense for his outs, and it’s easier to remember a guy just making his opponents look foolish.

But also, yeah, look at Rivera in that table. 62 innings of a .173 wOBA allowed, and that’s just since 2002, so we’re not even including his earlier dominant years. What Miller has done for 16 innings has been remarkable; Rivera did something similar over a much larger sample. And that’s why he’s the best reliever of all time.

Yesterday, our own Eno Sarris astutely pointed out the advantage that a fastball-heavy pitching staff like the Blue Jays might have against the Indians lineup, who have done the overwhelming majority of their damage on slow stuff and have struggled against heaters. And while I do believe it’s true that, on the whole, Toronto’s fastballing ways could still give the Indians lineup fits, I go thinking about a couple follow-up point that might be important, and that might help mitigate this potential advantage.

Namely, I got to thinking about Marco Estrada, because it’s fun to think about Marco Estrada; Marco Estrada is a fascinatingly unique pitcher. Estrada is set to start Game 1 of the NLCS for Toronto against Cleveland in a few hours and, according to our PITCHf/x run values, Estrada had something like baseball’s 11th-most valuable fastball, right between Robbie Ray and Stephen Strasburg. Strasburg throws 95. Ray throws 94. Makes sense — the best fastballs are usually the fastest fastballs. Not Estrada, though. Estrada’s fastball sits 88. Estrada’s fastball is all about spin, and how it plays off his changeup, and since it’s so different, I got to wondering if maybe Estrada’s elite fastball plays by different rules than the fastballs against which Cleveland struggles.

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