The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Last October gave us the postseason of the curveball — of the breaking ball, in general. The Indians, among others, navigated their way through the playoffs with an increasing reliance on breaking pitches. A combination of Andrew Miller’s slider and Corey Kluber’s breaking-ball combination nearly delivered a World Series title for Cleveland.

These playoffs have been different, however. This year, the fastball has been king.

The current postseason began, of course, with a Yankees club employing a fastball that averaged 98 mph against the Twins in the Wild Card game. Other pitchers, other teams have increasingly relied upon the pitch, as well. Consider, for example, that, through Tuesday, fastball usage was up seven percentage points from last postseason. While the postseason does, by nature, produce a smaller sample of data and a varying pool of teams from year to year, we haven’t seen a continuation of last year’s trend in terms of breaking-ball usage.

Yes, it helps to have Justin Verlander and Luis Severino on the mound in October to boost fastball usage.

On Saturday, Verlander — whose velocity is back — shoved 71 four-seam fastballs. The pitch averaged 96.1 mph and the 71st traveled out of his hand at 96.7 mph. Severino, for his part, has displayed an electric arm for much of the postseason and is quite possibly the best AL pitcher not named Kluber or Chris Sale.

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Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

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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.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

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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