Being expressive is half of Yasiel Puig’s whole thing. The Dodgers would love for him to be great, and the fans would love for him to be great, but if Yasiel Puig were great, he’d be just another great baseball player. That is, if he were great and great only. But there’s more to him, for better and for worse. Puig’s own expressiveness might be linked to personality traits that make him, shall we say, draining company, but fans don’t have to be around Puig for hours on end, every day of the week. They just get to watch him entertain. Puig is a highly-skilled professional entertainer.

He goes about his business with uncommon flair, eschewing baseball’s standard and pervasive stoic self-seriousness. It’s not that Puig is in any way lacking for intensity; it just has a different way of bubbling to the surface. Over these past few weeks, we’ve grown acquainted with Yasiel Puig’s tongue. Sometimes it’s hanging out of his mouth, and sometimes it’s licking the end of the barrel. Puig is also notorious for his bat flips, regardless of whether the ball’s leaving the yard. Puig has his own style of playing defense. He has his own style of running the bases. You know, in short, when it’s Puig that you’re watching even if you can’t see the name on his jersey.

Puig has even brought his own flavor to patience. You might not think there’s such a thing as taking a pitch in a particularly expressive way. Puig would disagree with you, and there’s a mountain of evidence from just these playoffs alone. Puig has shown some demonstrative takes for years, but this month, he’s reached a new level, as he’s been more patient than ever. Puig has one of the lower swing rates in the playoffs. He has one of the higher rates of pitches per plate appearance in the playoffs. Though he went 0-for-3 last night, he worked two counts to 2-and-0, and the other to 3-and-0. Puig has swung at the first pitch just three times in his last 54 opportunities since re-joining the Dodgers lineup in late September. One of those was a check-swing foul where the bat met the ball by accident.

This might be a bit of a slog. You’re welcome to leave at any time. But, I watched every pitch that Puig has seen this year in the playoffs. I’ve identified 16 different forms of demonstrative takes. This ignores the regular, boring, featureless take. There have been some of those. There have been many of the others. Watch as Yasiel Puig makes a show of doing nothing.

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Keston Hiura went into the 2017 draft with a compromised throwing arm and a reputation as the best pure hitter available. Downplaying the severity of the former and embracing the latter, the Milwaukee Brewers selected the University of California, Irvine, infielder with the ninth overall pick of the first round. They’re not regretting the decision. Hiura began his professional career by slashing a healthy .371/.422/.611 in 187 plate appearances between Rookie-level ball and Low-A Wisconsin.

Just as importantly, his elbow appears sound. Hiura primarily DH’d during his initial taste of pro ball, but he played second base during his stint in instructional league. He probably could have done so earlier. When I talked to him in August, the erstwhile Anteater told me that his elbow has been back to 100% for approximately a month.

Our conversation was primarily about his offensive acumen, which is spurred by a smooth right-handed stroke honed between trips to the library. Keston Wee Hing Natsuo Hiura — his father was born in California and is of Japanese descent; his mother was born in Hawaii and is of Chinese descent — majored in business economics at UC Irvine.

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Hiura on his hitting mechanics: “I have a different swing than most people. You see people with leg kicks and you see people with toe taps, and I do both. I toe tap into a leg kick — a pretty high leg kick — and then my swing is very inside-out oriented with a high finish at the end. I also finish with both hands on the bat. That helps me get quick through the zone with some good bat speed, as well as generating power with my backside. I’m able to drive the ball to all sides of the field.

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A pitcher’s mix is constantly evolving. With Jeff Sullivan’s help, we’ve already pointed out how Astros righty Justin Verlander rediscovered his high fastball and then his slider. In the course of finding those pitches, Verlander lost one of his other pitches, though — namely, the changeup.

“It was horrible, almost unusable,” said Verlander at the World Series of his least-thrown pitch. The pitcher fooled with some drastic changes when he joined the Astros and then gave up. This might not actually seem that foreign: something that once came easy suddenly becomes difficult. It happens to everyone, not just former Cy Young winners. And thinking or trying harder doesn’t necessarily solve the situation. Sometimes it’s necessary just to take a day off, return at a later time, and find that old necessary ease.

It seems that Verlander had the same issue with his changeup.

“It just kind of showed up, I can’t even really figure out what it was,” said Verlander of the pitch. “Out of nowhere, around two weeks ago, I started throwing it again.” We may even see it tonight in World Series Game 2, when Verlander steps to the mound.

It’s not that success for Verlander is contingent on the changeup. He’s slowly been throwing it less and less often over the years, even through some otherwise excellent seasons.

The decline isn’t smooth, but the trend is clearly downward.

If you look at the horizontal movement on the pitch over the season, four basic versions of the pitch emerge: the changeup that once was, a changeup that was better earlier this year, a changeup that shouldn’t have been thrown much and wasn’t, and then — sometime very recently — a return to at least early-season form.

Lower on this chart is better. Since Verlander said he re-found the pitch a couple of weeks ago, and you can see some of his best movement of the year has come in his last few starts, let’s outline the four changeups we’ve seen so far.

As Verlander has slowly inched his release point up recently, he’s gotten more drop on many of his pitches. This year, he’s had some of the best drop on his changeup and slider in recent memory. What he’s done these last few starts is return to his old fade — now the ball moves away from left-handers as much as it used to — and retained that new drop. In terms of movement, it has the potential to be the best changeup he’s thrown.

Here’s what it looked like in the last start.

Excuse me while I fan myself.

Of course, how he got there is still interesting. Verlander worked with pitching coach Brent Strom and fiddled around, but he couldn’t point to any one change that made the difference.

“I threw one in a game and some in a bullpen, and me and Strommy were like, ‘What the hell was that?'” laughed Verlander. “I fooled with some different stuff, and maybe through fooling with different stuff, when I was like ‘Screw it, I’m just going to go back to it,’ then it was like, ‘Oh!'”

Our bodies and minds are complicated entities; there’s no simple wiring. We don’t pull a circuit out and solder it somewhere else and fix the machine. Instead, we bang our heads against the wall, we try new things, we stress, we complain, we go by feel, we check our work, and we fail. Sometimes, we relax and everything pops back into focus.

“I wish I could explain it to you,” summed up Verlander. “I wish I could explain it to myself, because I’m sure it will evade me again and I wish I could tell myself how to get it back.”

This World Series has been dubbed a clash of analytical titans. Whatever the outcome, it would appear already to be a victory for the movement and an argument for greater investment in decision-science departments.

The Dodgers have one of the largest research departments in the game — perhaps the largest, though there isn’t a publicly available database for full accounting. The Astros have also benefited greatly from analytics, as we know. It’s possible that the two organizations have distanced themselves from much of the pack in a sport where every team has some sort of investment in statistically based R&D.

Nor is this development lost on the players. Consider left-hander Tony Watson’s comments from a recent piece by Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register.

“Just the sheer numbers as far as the bodies, the staff that is analytically-driven,” says Dodgers reliever Tony Watson who spent 6-1/2 seasons with the analytically-open Pittsburgh Pirates before joining the Dodgers this summer. “Then I later found out it’s the largest R & D in baseball. … Coming from Pittsburgh, it’s definitely bigger. That’s the focus. And it works. The numbers don’t lie.”

The Pirates have made a sizable investment in their analytics department. According to Watson, however, it’s overshadowed by the group assembled by Los Angeles. Once a tool for low-revenue teams, it’s become another area where large-market clubs can outspend and outinvest their opponents. It’s a troubling development for the league’s minnows: the richest teams are now also the smartest.

I bring all this up to establish that, if any club is capable of idenitfying the weaknesses and strengths of an opponent, it’s the Dodgers. They know what all the Astros do well and what they don’t.

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Last year’s World Series featured a true face-off between big and small markets, pitting the high-revenue Chicago Cubs against the lower-revenue Cleveland Indians. The difference in each club’s markets materialized in their respective payrolls: Chicago outspent Cleveland by roughly $90 million in 2016. The contrast was stark.

This year’s Series represents a different kind of contrast. Everyone’s aware of the Dodgers’ financial might, of course, but the Astros enjoy a large market, too. And even if that hasn’t been obvious recently, the club’s payrolls from a dozen years ago reflect the club’s spending capacities. Over the last decade, however, the team has executed a massive tank-job and also navigated difficulties with their gigantic television deal. The result? Dramatically lower payrolls. The rebuild has worked, however, and the club’s payroll has nearly doubled in just the last two years. However, that payroll is still in the bottom half of baseball and represents only half of the Dodgers’ expenditures in what is the largest disparity in World Series history.

I would be remiss when discussing the disparity between the two teams not to mention that the gap between the clubs’ payrolls is much more modest when comparing only active rosters. Carl Crawford has been gone from the roster for quite some time, but his $22 million salary is still on the books. Scott Kazmir is hurt. Adrian Gonzalez is in Italy. Those three account for around $60 million in salary alone. A handful of other players are no longer on the team. As a result, the Dodgers’ 25-man World Series roster is earning “only” $143 million. Even with all the money the Dodgers have written off, they still have an active roster that would place them in the top half of MLB payrolls. As for the Astros, their World Series roster comes in at around $115 million.

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Justin Turner refused to be fooled a third time by Dallas Keuchel in Game 1 of the World Series. He made an equipment change after a strikeout and a pop out, and was ready for the pitcher’s final attempt to go to the well. That go-ahead two-run home run in the sixth serves to give us all a look inside the type of adjustments hitters have to make from at-bat to at-bat.

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Last night, the Dodgers’ domination of the postseason continued. Winning a World Series game by two runs isn’t exactly steamrolling your opponent, but given what Clayton Kershaw, Brandon Morrow, and Kenley Jansen did to the Astros offense, the game never really felt in doubt. Houston got their only run on an Alex Bregman solo home run and never really threatened again.

The rest of their offensive production consisted of a pair of singles, but neither runner would get past first base. The Astros didn’t put a single runner in scoring position all night long. There were no rallies, no trouble out of which a Dodger pitcher had to work. Just outs, and most of them quick outs.

It took Los Angeles just 107 pitches to face 30 batters. Usually, when you see low pitch counts and quick innings, it’s because a team was overly aggressive, swinging at pitches early in counts and making quick outs. In Game 1, though, the Astros seemingly made it easy on the Dodgers by just not swinging at strikes.

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