Episode 777
Travis Sawchik recently won his second consecutive title in the simulation baseball league of which he and a number of major-league beat reporters are a part. The tactics on which he’s relied for success, however, are the very sort that he’s condemned in actual baseball. Will he be able to sleep at night? Should he be able to? These are merely two of the questions he’s reluctant to answer on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 16 min play time.)

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It’s been apparent from the beginning that these playoffs have included some awfully talented teams. Travis wrote a couple weeks ago about the possible arrival of the era of the super-team, and I examined the landscape myself at the start of the month, when I did my best to rate all 10 of the playoff teams based on their numbers and their expected playing times. We’re watching a lot of elite-level talent this month, and it only helps that the two weakest participants were eliminated in the wild-card games. Only quality left.

But now I want to look at this in a different way. I ran some numbers in the way that I did last October. I’d actually forgotten about that analysis until last night, when I mis-clicked on a spreadsheet I’d saved before. Nothing quite like stumbling your way into a new and timely article.

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Of all the unlikely breakout stars of 2017, Chris Taylor is a candidate for the honor of unlikeliest.

The infielder/outfielder continues to be a force, homering and tripling in the Dodgers’ Game 3 NLCS victory on Tuesday night to push the Cubs to the brink of elimination.

Taylor entered the season as a wiry, inconspicuous, 6-foot-1, 200-pound, 26-year-old utility man. Over parts of three major-league seasons with the Mariners and Dodgers, he had produced a combined .234/.289/.309 slash line over 318 plate appearances before the 2017 campaign. He was traded by the Seattle to Los Angeles for Zach Lee on June 16 of last season. (Lee was released by the Padres back in August of this season.)

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Last night represented the sixth game of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ postseason run. Over the club’s first five playoff games, the left-handed trio of Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Chase Utley recorded one start combined — specifically, Chase Utley’s in Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the Diamondbacks. That arrangement appeared to work: Roberts and company entered Tuesday with five consecutive wins. That’s what made the manager’s decision on Tuesday slightly unusual. Against Kyle Hendricks in Chicago, Roberts started all three players.

The gambit worked. All together, the trio went 3-for-10 with a double and home run. At one level, the decision was simple, logical. Because of the stage, however, it would have been easy for Roberts to go in a different direction. We often talk about how the postseason is different from the regular season, that it requires a different style of management. That’s no doubt true, particularly when it comes to the bullpen. There are instances, however, in which it’s also important to keep managing like the regular season. Roberts did that last night.

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The Cubs didn’t lose to the Dodgers last night because Carl Edwards Jr. walked Yu Darvish with the bases loaded. The Cubs aren’t on the verge of getting swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS because Carl Edwards Jr. walked Yu Darvish with the bases loaded. The Cubs are losing because their series OBP is .202, while the Dodgers are up at .360. They’re losing because their series SLG is .266, while the Dodgers are up at .484. They’re losing because their pitchers have 18 walks and 20 strikeouts, while the Dodgers’ pitchers have 4 and 32. The Dodgers have been, by far, the better team. It’s the simplest possible explanation.

The Cubs are losing because they’ve been worse. That’s not Edwards’ fault. And you never know when things could flip; in last year’s NLCS, the Cubs were blanked in back-to-back games. They’re still the reigning champs until they’re gone. But the Cubs are losing because they’ve been worse. Edwards’ walk of Darvish didn’t turn the series on its head. It’s more about the symbolism. It captures the story of how the series has gone. Have I mentioned that Darvish walked on four pitches? With the bases loaded and two out in a two-run game, Darvish took four balls in a row.

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2017-18 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents, including four catchers and also Yonder Alonso.

Alex Avila (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Avila:

• Has averaged 268 PA and 1.3 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.2 WAR per 450 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 2.5 WAR in 376 PA in 2017.
• Is projected to record 1.7 WAR per 450 PA**.
• Is entering his age-31 season.
• Made $2.0M in 2017, as part of deal signed in December 2016.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting catcher.
**Prorated version of final 2017 depth-chart projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Avila.

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Unlike their ALCS opponents, the New York Yankees aren’t widely known for being at the forefront of analytics. According to their longtime general manager, they should be. When I asked Brian Cashman about the team’s not-as-geeky-as-the-Astros reputation, his response was, “I would put our analytics in the top five in all sports.”

Regardless of where they rank, any suggestion that Cashman’s club isn’t cutting edge would qualify as folly. Under the direction of assistant general manager Mike Fishman — his previous title was director of quantitative analytics — their reliance on data has grown exponentially over the last decade.

“It started as a department of one — Mike was the director and the staff — and now it’s a major part of our operation,” said Cashman. “And it should be. This is the New York Yankees, and we want to use every tool in the toolbox. One of those important tools is analytics.”

Joe Girardi doesn’t disagree. As a a matter of fact, the Yankees skipper seemed almost taken aback when I asked the following question at Tuesday’s pre-game press conference:

The Astros are known as a team that incorporates analytics in their decision-making process pretty heavily. Your team isn’t really seen that way. Should you be?

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A little later today, Jeff will have a post about the most amazing play we’ve seen all postseason: Yu Darvish drawing a bases-loaded walk — on four pitches — from Carl Edwards Jr. last night. How did a quality reliever throw four consecutive balls to a career AL pitcher who had zero intention of ever swinging? In the NLCS? For the defending champs?

But in this post, I’m going to ask a different question about that at-bat: why did we ever see it in the first place?

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When Charlie Morton was a Pirate and this author a beat reporter covering Pittsburgh’s ball club, I became familiar with Morton through a number of conversations.

He was one of the first players I encountered who discussed having employed PITCHf/x data to better understand his performance, to move away from the box score as a means of evaluation. He would have phone calls with his father during which they discussed the velocity and movement from his appearances as recorded by pitch-tracking technology. Morton struggled mightily at times early in his career with Pittsburgh and Atlanta before that, but not all of it was his fault. He was one of the first pitchers with whom I spoke who wanted to better understand how to separate his own performance from those other variables that lead to run-prevention and -allowance. He wanted to know how he could better control what he could control. Data helped keep Morton sane.

This is pertinent today, because we might not see a better performance lead to a poorer pitching line this postseason than the performance and line produced by Morton on Monday night.

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