This year’s AL Wild Card Game will be a battle of competing philosophies, at least when it comes to the choice of starting pitchers. On Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, the opposing managers announced their picks for Wednesday night’s game. The Yankees have decided to remain old-school, with manager Aaron Boone tabbing 24-year-old righty Luis Severino, an All-Star who despite second-half struggles finished fourth in the league in WAR (5.7) and in a virtual tie for fifth in FIP (2.95) — and one whose early exit in last year’s Wild Card Game pushed the Yankees into a bullpen-oriented approach anyway. As for the A’s, a club whose rotation has has lost staff ace Sean Manaea and five other starters to season-ending surgeries, manager Bob Melvin is going the new-school route, with 29-year-old righty Liam Hendriks as his opener — a first of sorts. In eight September starts, Hendriks threw a combined 8.2 innings.

Together, the choices offer something of a callback to a year ago. Heading into the AL Wild Card game, then-manager Joe Girardi was ambivalent about the possibility of saving Severino for a potential Division Series Game One and relying upon his wealth of dominant relievers to face the Twins. “You could do that but that’s not something you’ve done during the course of the season,” Girardi told reporters. “And we have some starters who are pretty qualified to make that start… If you start doing crazy things, things guys aren’t used to, then I’m just not comfortable doing it. You want to keep it as normal as possible.”

Despite Girardi’s reservations, it was clear that the Yankees were built for such a scenario thanks to general manager Brian Cashman’s July 19 (re)acquisition of David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to add to a bullpen that already included Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances. “A veritable clown car of effective righties who can miss bats and take over before Twins batters get too familiar with Severino,” is how one wag put it.

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In a very short amount of time, the 2018 MLB playoffs will commence. Some number of hours after that, we will have already observed our first advance and our first elimination. The Cubs and Rockies played for half of their lives on Monday; tonight, one will be spared, and one will be finished off. Even though it was weird to have a couple of tiebreakers, they functioned as an effective warm-up for the postseason. Yesterday, the stakes were moderate. Beginning today, the stakes are high.

So, with the playoff field set: Who looks like the best playoff team in the bunch? Who looks like the biggest underdog? This is a post I try to get up each year. Here’s last year’s edition. I thought it would be weird to publish this after someone had already been knocked out, so I’m coming in today just under the wire. It’s time to look at what the numbers can tell us.

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Jon Lester’s experience in the postseason has been marked mostly by success. He’s made 21 career playoff starts and recorded a few important relief outings, too. In those games, he’s produced a 2.55 ERA and 3.62 FIP. In five World Series starts (plus one relief outing), Lester has pitched 35.2 innings, struck out 34, walked just eight, and conceded only eight runs (seven earned). He’s what one might characterize as a “big-game pitcher.”

The thing about so-called big-game pitchers, however, isn’t so much that they rise to important occasions, but rather that they simply replicate the performances that have brought them to the big stage in the first place. For over a decade, Lester has done just that. Tonight, however, the Cubs might require a little bit more of Lester.

In 2,366 regular-season innings over more than a decade, Lester has produced a 3.61 FIP. In 148 postseason innings, the 34-year-old lefty has a 3.62 FIP. Look at some of his other stats from the regular season and playoffs over the course of his career.

The numbers for Lester are pretty much the same across the board in the regular season and playoffs. His postseason ERA is lower than his regular-season mark due mostly to the .241 BABIP he’s recorded in the former. His slightly lower strikeout and walk numbers indicate that hitters have made more contact against Lester in the postseason, although it’s quite possible that some of that contact has been of the weaker variety if batters have traded in strikeout avoidance for power.

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Monday, I wrote about why, if I had a vote, I’d select Jacob deGrom for National League MVP. I do not have a vote, though, and I doubt that my argument is sufficiently convincing. The NL MVP is almost certainly going to end up being Christian Yelich. There was a somewhat crowded field for a little while, but Yelich pulled away from his fellow position players with an impossible final month. From the start of September, Yelich batted .370, with 16 strikeouts and 18 extra-base hits. Yelich was the best overall player from start to finish on a Brewers team that won the division literally yesterday. For what the MVP has turned into, Yelich is the obvious choice. Tremendous player on a team that wouldn’t have gotten to where it did without him.

Truth be told, it also wasn’t just the last month. Yelich was baseball’s best hitter in the second half, and it wasn’t even close. After the All-Star break, he registered a wRC+ of 220. Baseball Reference doesn’t keep track of wRC+, but it does keep track of OPS+ and its splits do go back further than ours, and according to the numbers at Baseball Reference, Yelich had one of the ten or so best second halves in the last 50 years. The only players with better second-half rate stats over enough of a sample: Barry Bonds, Mike Schmidt, Hank Aaron, and Jim Thome. Bonds actually has the four best second halves, and they all happened in a row between 2001-2004, but this isn’t a Barry Bonds fun-fact article. This is a Christian Yelich fun-fact article. He did his best to carry the Brewers into the NLDS.

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To date, Josh Bard’s managerial experience consists of a single game. In early September, he assumed that role while Aaron Boone was serving a one-game suspension. Don’t expect it to represent the end of his time in that capacity for a big-league team.

Currently in his first season as Boone’s bench coach with the New York Yankees, Bard is viewed by many as a future MLB manager. And for good reason. The 40-year-old former journeyman catcher has long been lauded for his interpersonal skills, and he’s been honing his analytics chops for years. Prior to joining the Yankees, the Texas Tech product spent five seasons in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, initially as a special assistant to the general manager. More recently, he served as the forward-thinking NL West club’s bullpen coach in 2016 and 2017.

Where will Bard be employed in the years to come and in what capacity? Multiple teams will be interviewing managerial candidates this offseason, and Bard’s name is certainly being bandied about in front offices. While he’s happy in New York, other opportunities surely await.

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Josh Bard: “My biggest role as bench coach is being a translator from the analytics group down to the dugout. I’m making sure that all the information we have is distilled down to the simplest way to understand it, not only for the staff, but also the players. My role is more pregame. It’s postgame review. What can we do better?

“Zac Fieroh is one of our analytics guys, and he’s with us every day. I give Brian Cashman and Michael Fishman, and that whole group, a lot of credit. They really pushed for him to be in there, and he’s done an awesome, awesome job.

“It’s funny. When you look at Oakland, or at L.A., or at Tampa, you think they’re these analytics juggernauts. That’s the perception. They are very good at it — don’t get me wrong — but when you look at us, that’s not really the perception. Well, when I came here from L.A., the information here is as good, if not better, than anywhere I’ve been.

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With nothing expected of the majority of the AL Central teams in 2018, the Twins were the main hope for making Cleveland’s season inconvenient. Like a Star Wars prequel, this new hope failed to materialize in a satisfying way.

The Setup

The Twins were one of the more successful regular-season teams in baseball during the aughts, making the playoffs in six of nine seasons, but also going 6-21 in the actual postseason. With the core of the team fading quickly after 2010, Minnesota spent several years wandering around as one of baseball’s few remaining (relatively) “pure” old-school franchises.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a wild end to the regular season, including the season’s final Willians Astudillo update (maybe), endings for Joe Mauer, David Wright, and Mike Scioscia, Khris Davis batting .247 again, the Orioles’ final ignominy, surgery for Shohei Ohtani, final regular-season stats about strikeouts, hits, homers, and fastball velocity, Jeff Wilpon’s incredible comments, an unprecedented two-tiebreaker day, the upcoming wild card games, and more. Then they bring on White Sox and ESPN broadcaster Jason Benetti to discuss ESPN 2’s alternative, stat-slanted broadcast of the NL wild card game, the future of sabermetric broadcasts, and playoff storylines and commentating cliches, and Ben talks to baseball-book author and math and statistics professor Jim Albert about the odds of Davis finishing with the same batting average in an unprecedented four consecutive seasons.

Audio intro: The Replacements, "When it Began"
Audio interstitial 1: T. Rex, "Jason B. Sad"
Audio interstitial 2: The Neighborhood, "24/7"
Audio outro: The Postal Service, "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)"

Link to Mauer catching video
Link to Wilpon comments
Link to Jim Albert’s homepage
Link to new edition of Analyzing Baseball Data with R

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