Current Cy Young-candidate Chris Sale and former Cy Young-winner Justin Verlander faced off last Monday in Game 4 of the ALDS on a dreary afternoon in Boston. It’s the kind of matchup that grabs our collective attention. It’s how they were matched up, however — each pitcher entering the game out of his respective team’s bullpen — that merits further consideration. For Sale, it marked his first relief appearance since 2012. For Verlander, it was the first time he’d pitched out of the bullpen as a major leaguer.

During LDS play, David Price, Jose Quintana, and Max Scherzer were among the other starting pitchers employed as relievers.

A year after Buck Showaler failed to use Zach Britton in an elimination game and the Indians creatively employed Andrew Miller in the late summer and October to nearly advance to a World Series title, it seems managers (and, by extension, the clubs they represent) are attempting to replicate the latter approach, thinking unconventionally, moving away from tradition to best leverage pitching talent.

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Last night, the Cubs lost Game 2 of the NLCS to the Dodgers and now head back to Chicago down 2-0 in the series. They lost on a Justin Turner walk-off home run, but the big story after the game was who threw the pitch that Turner drove over the center-field fence. John Lackey, a career starter who had never pitched on back-to-back days, was brought in to face Chris Taylor with a man on in the ninth inning. Wade Davis, the team’s best reliever, did not pitch.

Last year, Buck Showalter was excoriated for leaving Zach Britton in the bullpen to watch Ubaldo Jimenez end the team’s season, and given the drastic shift we saw in postseason reliever usage after that happened, it seemed like no one was in any hurry to be the next guy to lose a road game while holding his closer for a save situation that would never come. After a few weeks of pretty aggressive reliever usage — Maddon called on Davis in the seventh inning of Game 5 on Thursday, after all — this was a pretty surprising decision, and Maddon is taking a lot of heat for going to Lackey to face the middle of the Dodgers order in a situation where a run ends the game.

But of all the decisions he made last night, I actually think that one is one of the more defensible.

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Corey Knebel has come a long way since I first talked to him four years ago. At the time, the hard-throwing right-hander was wrapping up an Arizona Fall League season, five months after the Detroit Tigers had drafted him 39th overall out of the University of Texas.

Knebel is now 25 years old and coming off a season where he logged 39 saves and a 1.78 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers. In January 2015, the NL Central club acquired him from the Texas Rangers, who’d earlier procured his services from the perpetually-bullpen-deficient Tigers.

According to Knebel. while some things have changed since our 2013 conversation, overs haven’t. By and large, he’s the same guy on the mound.

“I guess I’ve kind of grown into this new role,” the 6’4″ 220-lb. fastball-curveball specialist told me in September. “Other than that, I’ve just tried to perfect two pitches. I like to focus on what I know I can do. My delivery is the exact same — I’m still herky-jerky — although I don’t go from the windup anymore; I’m just straight stretch.”

There has been a velocity jump. Knebel’s heater averaged 97.8 MPH this season, up a few ticks from previous seasons. He didn’t have an explanation for why that is, but he does know one thing — it’s not because of a weighted-ball program. 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 Yellowstone-explosion sensationalism and discuss the improbability of the Cubs’ 277-minute NLDS Game 5 victory over the Nationals, the game’s umpiring oddities and errors, the Nationals’ and Cubs’ reputations and legacies in the wake of the series, and what to do about instant replay and slides.

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Baseball can be really weird, but the game has rarely facilitated action more unusual than the sort that occurred in the fifth inning of Game 5 on Thursday night between the Nationals and Cubs.

The inning in question produced a series of four events that had never happened consecutively in the game’s recorded history, covering some 2.3 million half-innings.

Craig Edwards dove into a potentially overlooked batter-interference call that would have stopped the Nationals’ hemorrhaging in the inning, held the deficit at one, and perhaps have allowed the team to keep playing this October.

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In a win-or-go-home game that finishes 9-8, there are going to be a lot of important moments. Big plays made or not made by players. Important decisions made or not made by managers. Huge calls made or not made by umpires. We never want to focus on the umpires if at all possible because it takes away from the more important and more entertaining aspects of the game. At some point, however, it’s impossible to omit them from the conversation.

In the top of the fifth inning of last night’s deciding Division Series game between the Cubs and Nationals, the visiting team had runners on first and second base. With two outs and an 0-2 count, Max Scherzer threw Javy Baez a pitch in the dirt. Baez swung and missed for strike three, but the ball got past Matt Wieters, allowing Baez to run to first base. During Baez’s backswing, his bat made contact with Wieters’ helmet.

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