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.

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Audio outro: The Postal Service, "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)"

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Max Muncy hit a lot of home runs this year. Including his opposite-field effort on Monday against Colorado, he hit 35 of them overall. Not only will that total rank him 14th forever among major leaguers from the 2018 campaign, it will also represent the greatest improvement for a batter between last season and this one. This year, Muncy hit 35 home runs. Last year, he hit zero of them. Arithmetic suggests that he produced a net total of +35 by this very specific measure. A perusal of the leaderboards reveals that no batter rivals him in this regard. Among the many ways in which Muncy’s 2018 season was exceptional, that’s one of them.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to catalog all the unlikely exploits of Muncy’s 2018 campaign, but rather to examine one specific way in which Muncy’s home run on Monday was different than all the others he’s ever hit. To understand the significance of that homer, though, it’s necessary first to contemplate another, different homer.

That’s footage of Muncy, tying the score against the Mariners’ Edwin Diaz in the ninth inning of an August 18th game this season. Edwin Diaz was one of the best relievers in baseball this year. Part of what makes Diaz so effective is his arm speed. Diaz threw this fastball to Muncy at 98 mph, as the hastily edited screencap below indicates.

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While the rest of the baseball world was focusing on #TeamEntropy, news broke this past weekend that Major League Baseball is currently the subject of a federal grand-jury investigation targeting the league’s business practices in Latin America. Jeff Passan’s report on the investigation is well worth the read, but this passage in particular highlights the broad scope of the probe:

A federal grand jury is looking into Major League Baseball teams’ international dealings and has issued subpoenas to club officials and other personnel involved in the transactions, three sources familiar with the probe told Yahoo Sports. Agents from the FBI have spearheaded the investigation, according to sources familiar with it, and lawyers from the Department of Justice who specialize in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases – which typically involve bribery of foreign officials – are involved as well. While the target of the inquiry could not be confirmed by Yahoo Sports, sources said investigators have subpoenaed at least one former Atlanta Braves official as well as people involved with the signing of Cuban star Hector Olivera, who agreed to a deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers before being traded to the Braves. Multiple witnesses have agreed to cooperate with the investigation, according to sources.

This has the potential to emerge as one of the more notable developments concerning Major League Baseball since the end of the Steroid Era. To understand why, let me start by discussing the significance of a grand jury. If you’ve ever served on a jury or received a summons for jury duty, odds are really good that your paperwork contained language including “petit jury.” A petit jury isn’t one that’s really tiny or consists of a dozen Jose Altuves. Instead, it’s a jury assembled to determine issues of fact at a trial. It’s also the only kind of jury with which most people are familiar.

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Before we get going, allow me to say four things:

1. This is not the official FanGraphs position. FanGraphs doesn’t have an official position on any awards. This is a company of a bunch of different writers, and any bunch of writers will possess a bunch of different opinions. These are my thoughts, and my thoughts alone.
2. My vote this year is for the AL Cy Young. I do not have a vote for the NL MVP. If I did have a vote for the NL MVP, I wouldn’t be allowed to write this right now! As far as this race is concerned, I’m an outside observer.
3. Reasonable people can conclude that Jacob deGrom shouldn’t be the NL MVP. In such an event, I imagine the support would go to Christian Yelich. Yelich has been amazing, especially of late. Every number has error bars, and Yelich has an argument. This case isn’t open and shut.
4. You’ve probably read much of my argument before, written by different people in different places. This is the “best player” argument. It’s the Mike Trout argument. I’m just going to make the argument with different words.

So we can get into it, then. Last week, I wasn’t sure who I supported. I’ve never voted for the league MVP, so I’ve never given it all that much thought. But now I’ve come around, and I can say that, if I had a vote for the NL MVP, my first-place choice would be Jacob deGrom. My second-place choice would be Christian Yelich. deGrom, of course, is done for the year, because the Mets were bad. Yelich’s Brewers are playing literally right now, and for all I know, he’ll provide the winning hit that sends the Brewers straight to the NLDS. For so many voters, that’s likely to be a factor. Perhaps that’s likely to be the factor. I don’t believe that it should be. I believe that deGrom made a winning case.

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Heading into the final weekend of the regular season, the Dodgers originally had Walker Buehler scheduled to start Sunday. Manager Dave Roberts opted to push Buehler back, however, letting Rich Hill take the mound against the Giants in San Francisco.

The team indicated the move was based partially on the Nationals’ decision not to pitch Max Scherzer against the Rockies on Sunday. Regardless of whether Scherzer was starting, however, the choice made a lot of sense. The Dodgers did not control their own destiny in yesterday’s matchups. Even if they won (which is what happened), they would inevitably have to play another game to reach the divisional series (which is what they’re doing this afternoon). Letting Buehler start a less important game would have left the team worse off in a more consequential one, like today’s.

The decision is predicated on the belief that Buehler is one of the best, if not the best, Dodger pitcher at the moment. It’s not particularly difficult to make that case. For the season, Buehler’s 2.99 FIP leads the Dodgers; his 2.76 ERA is virtually even with Clayton Kershaw’s 2.73 mark. Hyun-Jin Ryu has a 1.97 ERA in just under 100 innings with a FIP right at 3.00, so he’s certainly part of the conversation, as well. Buehler has been roughly as good (if not better) in the second half as the first, recording a 2.96 FIP and 2.20 ERA since the All-Star break. Kershaw and Hill have been close — as has Ryu in nine starts. In September, though, nobody can touch Buehler’s 2.30 FIP. Kershaw has slowed some (4.32 FIP), while Hill (3.36) and Ryu (2.76) have pitched well, just not as well as Buehler.

With Ryu and Kershaw having started Friday and Saturday, they weren’t going to be available Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, so flipping Buehler and Hill meant the 24-year-old rookie would be pitching in a game which, with a Dodger victory, would advance them directly to the division series.

That raises a question, however: by the logic employed above, wouldn’t it make sense to save Buehler for a hypothetical Wild Card game, with a view to saving the team from possible elimination? The short answer is, “No.” The longer answer is below.

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