Yesterday, the Red Sox offense finally woke up, rallying from an early deficit to score 10 unanswered runs, keeping their division series going for at least one more game. Thanks to the bats of Hanley Ramirez and Rafael Devers, David Price’s four brilliant innings of relief work weren’t wasted this time, and now the Sox live to fight another day.

That day is today, and with the season on the line again, John Farrell will hand the ball to Rick Porcello, saving Chris Sale for a potential Game 5 rematch with Justin Verlander. And the logic behind that decision is pretty straight forward.

The Red Sox have to win both of the next two games to move on to the ALCS. Chris Sale can only pitch in one of those two games. Since they have to win both, their odds of advancing don’t increase by simply changing the date of the game he pitches, and in fact, their odds might very well go down if they move him up. Sale has started on three days’ rest just once in his career, back in 2012, and he wasn’t very good in that outing. Pitchers generally perform worse on short rest, even the great ones. And over his last six starts, Sale has allowed 12 home runs, so his most recent performances have created a bit more concern than the Red Sox would like to have about their ace right now.

So, yeah, throwing Rick Porcello for a few innings on Monday and saving Sale until Wednesday makes plenty of sense. However, I think the way the series has played out has created a specific set of circumstances that could make Sale-on-short-rest the right call anyway.

Any discussion about Game 4 strategy has to begin with the weather, because, well, this is the Weather Underground forecast for Fenway Park today, beginning at the scheduled time of first pitch.

It might not be raining when the game begins, but barring a significant change in the forecast, everyone should expect to get rained on at some point this afternoon. And the later the game goes, the more confident the meteorologists are that things will be falling out of the sky. There’s a pretty decent chance that Game 4 involves some kind of rain delay, or at least messy conditions while everyone tries to get this thing in the books before a delay is necessary.

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Alex Bregman slashed .337/.409/.514 in three seasons at Louisiana State University, twice earning All-American honors. Displaying outstanding bat-to-ball skills, he fanned just 68 times in 786 collegiate at bats. The Houston Astros rewarded his efforts by selecting him second overall in the 2015 draft.

And then they asked him to change.

“A ton,” answered Bregman, when asked how much he’s evolved as a hitter since signing. “In college, I tried to hit the ball on the ground and low line drives. Up here, there aren’t a lot of hits on the ground with guys like Carlos Correa and Andrelton Simmons playing shortstop. Now I try to not hit ground balls.”

The ink had barely dried on his contract when he was told to alter his approach. Organizations typically let first-year players finish the season before suggesting changes, but Bregman was told “right away” that something else was expected. Before he could get his feet wet at the professional level, he had to “learn on the fly how to drive a baseball.”

He proved to be a quick study. Two short years later, in his first full big-league season, the 23-year-old infielder put up a .284/.352/.475 slash line, and his 63 extra-base hits included 19 home runs. He strikes out more often than he used to — “I never used to swing and miss, and now I do occasionally” — but it’s not as though he’s become all or nothing. His K-rate was a wholly acceptable 15.5%.

The adjustments he made were both mental and mechanical in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the larger improbability and significance of Archie Bradley’s triple in the NL wild-card game, how to experience a four-playoff-game day, the first games of both AL division series, Chris Sale’s and Masahiro Tanaka’s semi-struggles and the vexing nature of pitcher home-run allowance, the danger of using home/road splits to set playoff rotations, things every fan base believes about its team, Jose Altuve’s unusual strike zone, and more.

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There’s been some discussion in recent years about the prospect of super teams in the game, about the ingredients necessary for their development and the respective ETAs of certain specific super teams. The Cubs of 2016 created a road map for others to follow: begin with a collection of young talent, wait for it to arrive in the majors, and supplement it with big-ticket free-agency items. The Cubs are a big-market club that maximized its smarts and financial might. The result? A World Series championship.

I think just about everyone has speculated about whom the Yankees might add in the historic 2018-19 free-agency class, one that will permit them to add to their already impressive collection of young talent. The Yankees have perhaps arrived ahead of schedule, although Indians manager Terry Francona suspects the Yankees themselves don’t believe they’ve arrived ahead of schedule given the contract they handed to Aroldis Chapman this past offseason.

The Astros voluntarily elected to become the DisAstros, tanking with mediocre rosters to collect premium picks and young assets, then rising to become one of the preeminent teams in the game. It was an NBA-type model, this idea that the easiest, most predictable path to becoming really good is first to become really bad, to acquire premium picks and create financial flexibility. This plan has apparently inspired other teams in the game to actively pursue failure.

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Tonight, the Chicago Cubs begin their attempt to become the first team to repeat as champions since the New York Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000. Since free agency really took hold about 40 years ago, the only other team to win consecutive titles has been Toronto in 1992 and 1993. Since integration, the A’s, Blue Jays, Reds, and Yankees are the only franchises to repeat — and the runs by Cincinnati, Oakland, and (in one case) New York all occurred in the 1970s. While parity seemingly drives the game, a repeat isn’t impossible, and the Cubs have passed the all-important first step of making the playoffs.

That’s not to say it was easy. The Cubs dug themselves a hole early this season, going 43-45 before the All-Star break, about eight wins shy of where the projections thought they’d be at that point. In the second half, however, they produced a 49-25 record, about six wins better than the projections called for. In the end, the club fell just a few games short of their preseason forecasts and made the playoffs without much trouble.

As I wrote in September, it’s hard to characterize this Cubs team as one that’s underachieved. While some have attributed the club’s early-season difficulties to a “hangover” effect from last year’s championship, there’s not much evidence that the club actually underperformed reasonable expectations, receiving strong campaigns from a number of their stars and good production from unexpected sources. There’s also little evidence that World Series hangovers exist in the first place.

More on that second point in a moment. First, let’s consider the team’s most important players. We begin with Kris Bryant. The Cubs’ third baseman might not be clutch, but he recorded his third consecutive season of six wins or better, finishing sixth in the majors by WAR. And about his clutch performance: while it might be fair to say he hasn’t been clutch, that’s obvious different than being clutch. Keep in mind that the 150 wRC+ Bryant has recorded in low- and medium-leverage situations has occurred over 1,801 plate appearances; the 87 wRC+ he’s produced in high-leverage situations, meanwhile, is the result of just 213 plate appearances.

A sample of 213 PAs is obviously subject to considerable variation. For example, did you notice when, in the 197 regular-season plate appearances between September 2 of last year and April 23 of this one, that Bryant recorded an 82 wRC+? Probably not. (Especially since he recorded a 148 wRC+ in the middle of it during last year’s postseason.) Those 197 PA where Bryant wasn’t so good obviously don’t represent his real talent level. They occurred over an interval of two different seasons and he actually played well in the middle of that span. So naturally, if those somehwat disjointed 200-or-so plate appearances don’t reflect the real Bryant, it’s possible that the other 200-or-so high-leverage plate appearances — spread out over three years and inclusive only of regular-season play — likely don’t, either. Probably best not to make a big deal over them.

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