I Tweeted the following from Wrigley Field on August 9:

Fantastic game at Wrigley. Cubs up 2-0 in ninth, Giants load bases, then three consecutive K's, last on 3-2 pitch. Crowd explodes. Baseball.

— David Laurila (@DavidLaurilaQA) August 9, 2015

Yesterday, Joe Maddon called the four-game set that culminated with that out a “seminal moment.” According to the Cubs skipper, his team “played that series in a playoff manner.”

Tonight, they played like a young, hungry team that’s hell-bent on reaching the World Series. Behind bombs and pitching brilliance, they dismantled the Pirates 4-0 at PNC Park.

The expected pitchers’ duel between Jake Arrieta and Gerrit Cole never materialized. Refusing to follow the narrative, the Cubs scored before Cole could record an out. Dexter Fowler singled and stole second, and Kyle Schwarber drove him in with a hit to the opposite field. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we looked at some data for Eric Cooper and suggested that the AL Wild Card game would likely see a taller-than-average strike zone. That’s pretty much what Cooper ended up calling, so today, let’s go ahead and give Jeff Nelson — who will be behind the plate for tonight’s Cubs/Pirates game — the same treatment.

With a left-handed batter up.

With a right-handed batter up.

Nelson has pretty different zones here, so it’s worth keeping in mind that the zone is likely going to change batter to batter tonight. With a lefty at the plate, Nelson is very generous on the inside corner, and has one of the widest zones inside to LH batters of any umpire in baseball. With a right-handed batter at the plate, he’s pretty much league average in and out, but a little more generous than average up in the zone, especially up-and-away.

Overall, though, it’s the inside strike to lefties that stands out as his most notable trait. Given that the Cubs are likely to start five left-handed hitters tonight, they’re the ones who will have to be more likely to make some adjustments; especially because the Pirates pitch inside more than almost any other team in MLB. Nelson’s generous inside corner is likely a potential benefit for Gerrit Cole in going after guys like Dexter Fowler and Chris Coghlan, who tend to take a lot of borderline pitches, and might need to be more aggressive on the inner-half tonight.

Like last night, expect the zone to favor pitchers a bit tonight, as Nelson is a bit pitcher-friendly with the size of his strike zone. But unlike with Cooper, who calls high and low strikes against everyone, Nelson’s tendencies likely hurt LH batters a bit more, and that might be a small advantage for a Pirates team that leans more to the right side of the plate.

Win-or-go-home games are old hat for the Pirates. Pittsburgh has hosted the NL Wild Card in each of the past two seasons. In 2013, they ousted Cincinnati as chants of “Cue-to, Cue-to” echoed down from the boisterous black-clad crowd. Last October, Madison Bumgarner quieted PNC Park by blanking the Bucs.

Tonight represents new territory for the Cubs. Joe Maddon’s squad is as young and talented as any in the game, but given the pressure cooker they’re about to encounter, could “young” prove to be the operative word in that description? Especially if Clint Hurdle’s team jumps out to an early lead and PNC becomes a cacophony. Will Chicago’s kiddie-corp be able to handle it?

Needless to say, jumping out against Jake Arrieta is a momentous task. The right-hander has been on a Bumgarner-like run, and if it continues into October, Pittsburgh is probably toast. Of course, Arrieta has never pitched in the postseason. There’s no reason to believe he won’t perform on the big stage, but just like his younger teammates, he hasn’t had a chance to prove that he can. Read the rest of this entry »

As a rule, life is characterized predominantly both by crippling doubt and also other kinds of doubt. Less susceptible to that sort of doubt is Houston outfielder Carlos Gomez, depicted here recording a home run against Masahiro Tanaka — with regard to which home run Gomez exhibits something much closer to unambiguous certainty.

The Astros and Yankees are set to meet tonight in the first postseason game of 2015, with the winner advancing to play the Royals in the division series. While both teams are likely to do everything they can to win tonight’s game, there is one potentially significant variable they won’t be able to control; the called strike zone. So that’s preview what we might look for from the home plate umpire tonight.

17 year veteran Eric Cooper is going to be behind the plate for the Wild Card game. Per Baseball Heat Maps, here’s Cooper’s called strike zone compared to the league average (warmer colors indicate more calls in that area).

RH hitters

LH hitters.

The first thing that stands out is that Cooper has a very tall strike zone, calling far more pitches than the average umpire at both the top and bottom of the rulebook zone. He’s especially generous at the very top sliver of the zone with a right-handed batter at the plate, which is also a very tough area for hitters to make contact on. He offsets the height of his zone to some degree by having a fairly narrow strike zone compared to the average umpire, calling fewer pitches away against both lefties and righties, but the effect isn’t as large as his large vertical zone.

As you can see at the charts available over at Baseball Savant, Cooper calls an above average pitches out of the zone as strikes, and has one of the lowest rates of calling pitches in the zone balls. Overall, he’s a pitcher friendly umpire, and hitters are going to need to protect the plate more often than they normally would, especially on high and low pitches.

Interestingly, neither Keuchel nor Tanaka attack the top of the strike zone that regularly, as both are primarily trying to keep the ball down, so there’s not a clear advantage to either side based on the umpire tendency with regards to the starting pitcher. But both teams are likely to use an army of relievers, and Cooper’s zone could work out pretty well for a pitcher like Houston’s Josh Fields, who likes to pitch up with his fastball.

The postseason kicks off tonight with the American League Wild Card game starting at 8 pm eastern time. Tomorrow night, we get the NL Wild Card game — in what might be the most fascinating single MLB game I can remember in some time — and then the ALDS starts on Thursdday, with the NLDS starting Friday and bringing us our first four-games-in-a-row day.

To celebrate the launch of the postseason, we’re going to live blog every single game between now and Friday night. I’m going to be hosting (along with Sean Dolinar) the AL Wild Card game tonight — and imploring both managers to go to the bullpen after every pitch, probably — while Jeff (and maybe Carson…) will be here for the NL Wild Card game tomorrow night. We’ll then have coverage of both games on Thursday and all four on Friday as well.

If you haven’t been part of a postseason live blog before, they’re a blast. Plan on hanging out with us as we watch some October baseball, no spreadsheets required.

Before the season began I made an interactive graphic showing the on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) of our Depth Charts projections for each team. Since the season is almost over and players’ offensive output stats won’t change much between now and October 4, I remade the interactive visual using the player’s 2015 OPS and weighted on-base average (wOBA).

The original Depth Charts projections use a combination of ZiPS and Steamers for OPS and wOBA. The original chart from March is at the bottom of the page for reference. Projections — the expected performance of a player — should fall in the middle of the possible performance spectrum, so the season results will have more spread than the projections do.

The visualization shows each player’s OPS or wOBA as a circle with the size of the circle corresponding to plate appearance. The gray box and yellow line represent summary information about the team. The gray box brackets the middle 50% of players on each team and the yellow line is the team OPS or wOBA. Please note this isn’t the average or median OPS or wOBA but rather how the team performed on the aggregate. Together these elements create a psuedo boxplot.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last pitch of Kyle Hendricks’ nine-strikeout appearance on Monday.

This past spring, the author published a three–part series in these electronic pages with a view towards examining the amateur origins of baseball’s good players — where “good” was defined by the half-arbitrary threshold of three wins in a given season. The results of the study suggest that — over the five years in question, at least — that a number of junior-college players outperform the win totals expected from their draft slots; that second basemen go to college, but shortstops not so much; and that three-dimensional pie charts are unambiguously cherished by all readers of this site.

Another revelation facilitated by the research: zero players drafted from an Ivy League school produced a 3.0 WAR or higher between the years 2010 and -14.

The point is noteworthy today because, if extended through the year 2015, the study would now include an Ivy Leaguer. On the strength of a nine-strikeout performance against Kansas City last night, Cubs right-hander and Dartmouth College product Kyle Hendricks has now recorded 3.1 WAR over 31 starts and 174.0 innings this year.

There are multiple caveats which accompany this observation, of course. For one, the three-win threshold is necessarily arbitrary. And two, the WAR being considered here is the sort based only on fielding-independent pitching and not on runs allowed. Using the latter input instead, Hendricks has produced only about two wins of value this year. Still, the point remains that one of the schools responsible for providing a lot of the front-office talent in the game is responsible, in the case of Hendricks, for providing on-field talent, as well.

What the video here depicts is Cubs right-hander Jake Arrieta — not unlike an illusionist who’s been hired to participate in orientation week at an area liberal arts college — is Jake Arrieta performing a number of unlikely acts simultaneously. One of those acts isn’t impressive, per se, even if it’s somewhat rare — namely, that he’s a pitcher recording a hit of any sort. Data suggests that the league’s pitchers have produced a hit in fewer than 12% of their collective plate appearances this season. That’s roughly the rate at which Steve Nash missed a free throw when he played — an example which illustrates not only (a) the frequency with which pitchers produce base hits, but also (b) the most recent year in which the author followed NBA basketball with considerable interest.

A second, more improbable feature of this episode is how the sort of hit Arrieta’s recording is a home run. Pitchers, as a group this season, have produced only 25 of these — a figure which accounts for just 0.5% of all their collective plate appearances in 2015. Phrased alternatively, pitchers record a home run about once only every 200 plate appearances. Jake Arrieta, here, is recording one home run per every one of his plate appearances. Were he to continue at this pace, he’d hit 200 home runs. Jake Arrieta would be the best player ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Besides the fact that they’re natives of Latin America and play baseball and haven’t died ever, Elvis Andrus and Adrian Beltre are basically carbon copies of mid-century comedy duo Burns and Allen. What the footage here — from, like, five minutes ago — what the footage here reveals is another installment in their ongoing series of amusing scenarios. In this particular case, Beltre (first) feigns as though he intends to catch Jon Singleton’s pop-up but then (second) doesn’t catch that same pop-up. The premise is simple; the effect, nevertheless, profound. Andrus and Beltre for president? No one hasn’t not said it. No one hasn’t ever not said it real hard.