The biggest play of last night’s Game Six was a defensive one, but not in a positive manner: a miscommunication between Tyler Naquin in center field and Lonnie Chisenhall in right failed to result in a catch. Two runs scored for Chicago, and the Cubs took a 3-0 lead in just the first inning. The biggest strategic decision, meanwhile, concerned the use of Aroldis Chapman by Joe Maddon, as Chicago’s manager went to his closer in the seventh inning of a 7-2 game. It’s hard to discount the the implications either of Cleveland’s defensive misplay or Maddon’s bullpen management on the outcome of this World Series.

However, Game Six of the World Series also featured an unimportant strategic decision that facilitated some unimportant defensive plays. Even though he scored no runs and recorded zero hits, the decision to start Jason Heyward was likely worth several runs for the Cubs. And even if those runs didn’t ultimately represent the difference between a win and a loss, Heyward’s presence in the game nevertheless revealed how an offensively struggling but defensively forceful player can impact a result.

In the fourth inning of last night’s contest, right after Mike Napoli singled in Jason Kipnis to make the game 7-1, the Chicago Cubs possessed a 94.8% chance of victory. The leverage index was a fairly low 0.47, so even a positive result for Cleveland was unlikely to influence the game greatly. Facing Jake Arrieta, Jose Ramirez struck a ball that lands for a hit 56.8% of the time and goes for extra bases 20% of the time.

Here’s the end of that play:

At first glance, the play appears challenging for Heyward but hardly impossible. As mentioned above, batted balls with similar exit velocity and launch angles were caught around 43% of the time. Nearly half, in other words. What that figure doesn’t account for, however, is Heyward’s position at the start of the play relative to the location of the ball in the field. We can go a little further with the Statcast data.

Jason Heyward’s catch in 4th. Ball off Jose Ramirez’s bat = 97.9 mph. Hang time = 2.9 seconds. Distance = 35 feet. H/t: @mike_petriello

— Dan Hayes (@CSNHayes) November 2, 2016

By doing a few calculations, we can determine that, if he were running in a 40-yard dash in this case, Heyward would have recorded a time of roughly 9.9 seconds, which is really slow for a 40-yard dash. Of course, when Jason Heyward hears the ball off the bat, he doesn’t simply get to sprint straight forward in a line. He has no idea in which direction he might have to run — backwards, forwards, left, right. He decides where to run by looking at a small white object that begins its trajectory roughly 300 feet away while also traveling at 98 mph.

We rarely see an outfielder’s first step when watching the game because both our own eyes and also the cameras themsleves are focused on the batter-pitcher matchup. Heyward is very good at making quick decisions, though: the first step on his acrobatic play near the wall in Game Five occurred within 0.17 seconds.

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You never want to overreact too strongly to what happened the night before. You never want to overreact too strongly to what’s happened in a postseason series, or even an entire postseason. A hallmark of a great manager is often knowing when to ride their guys out and when to take action, and players are so much more than one- or seven- or 20-game samples that it’s rare to see enough in such a short time to reasonably warrant a change.

It’s easy to forget that, per plate appearance, Tyler Naquin was actually Cleveland’s best hitter this year. That’s a real thing that happened, and that occurred over 116 games and 365 plate appearances. We know, for a fact, that Naquin possesses the ability to do great things at the plate, because he is literally the same person that just did great things at the plate. Naquin was a legitimate Rookie of the Year candidate, even favorite, for much of the year, though it’s easy to forget that now, after a rough postseason was punctuated by an even worse Game Six of the World Series.

For the postseason, Naquin’s hitting .190/.227/.286. He’s struck out in over half his plate appearances, and he’s walked once. Again, that’s a nine-game, 23-plate appearance sample. It’s important to always compare that to the 365-plate appearance, 135 wRC+ sample, for context. That doesn’t change the fact that Naquin, most recently, has struggled. Less recently, but still recently, he’s struggled, too. Over the final two months of the regular season, he ran an 83 wRC+, the power he showed in the first half having almost completely disappeared. He hasn’t hit a home run since his infamous pinch-hit, walkoff, inside-the-park homer against the Blue Jays all the way back on August 19. That’s two-and-a-half months without a dinger, and even that one didn’t leave the yard.

And so after last night, a game in which Naquin struck out in both his plate appearances, including Cleveland’s highest-leverage plate appearance of the game, and perhaps more notably was involved in, and possibly was the culprit of the first-inning fly ball mishap that kept the inning alive for the Cubs and led to two runs, plenty of Cleveland fans have called for Naquin to sit Game Seven in favor of Rajai Davis, despite right-hander Kyle Hendricks being on the mound for the Cubs.

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Following their Game Five win at Wrigley Field, Cubs catcher Willson Contreras was asked about his club’s mood as they prepared to head to Cleveland, down three games to two.

“We are fired up,” responded Contreras. “We are going to go out there Tuesday and play our best baseball.”

They did exactly that. There was no Indian summer in Cleveland last night — it was 71 degrees at first pitch — as the Cubs won 9-3, setting up a decisive Game Seven.

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“It’s fun,” Anthony Rizzo said afterward. “Any Game Seven. I was at a Game Seven when the Blackhawks won. It was a Game Seven. It’s must watch if you’re a fan. Not just baseball. Game Seven of any sport is must watch.”

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Tonight’s Game Seven will be the 38th in World Series history. Of the previous 37, the home team has been victorious 18 times and the road team has been victorious 19 times.

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David Ross will put on a big-league uniform — at least as a player — for the last time tonight. The 39-year-old catcher didn’t sound too focused on his imminent retirement leading into Game Seven.

“All I’m going to be worried about is winning the World Series,” said Ross. “Screw my career. Let’s win the World Series.”

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The Indians have received a lot of kudos for their game-planning throughout the postseason. The Cubs deserve kudos of their own. Advance scouting has played a big role for the data-driven squad.

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Unofficially, Game 6 was over in the blink of an eye. Officially, it wasn’t complete for three and a half hours, but from close to the start, most fans were thinking ahead to Wednesday. Even while Game 6 was going, Game 7 was on everyone’s mind, as we prepared for the most anticipated showdown in, what, at least 15 years? You’re on this site right now to read about baseball, but you’re not looking to read about the game in the books. You want to read about the finale. Nothing is ever as important as it is in the finale.

Game 7 presents a funny situation. It’s one game, so it could turn on almost literally anything. In Game 6, after all, the biggest point according to win expectancy was Addison Russell’s routine fly ball that somehow dropped between two outfielders. Who would’ve guessed? You can’t predict any one-game scenario. At the same time, it’s never more critical to maximize the odds. Strategic calls are at their most important. Bullpen usage is at its most important. Lineup construction is at its most important. There’s nothing after Game 7 but gray clouds and winter. Half of the players will have a happier winter than the others.

As that lineup construction goes for the Cubs — look, I don’t want to deceive you. This isn’t that critical. What I’m writing about probably won’t make the biggest difference. But I see a case for starting David Ross over Willson Contreras. It has a lot to do with a guy supposedly available out of the bullpen.

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In order to keep their season alive, the Cubs had to win Game Six. They won Game Six. Tomorrow, they play for all the marbles, with one more win bringing the franchise their first championship in 108 years. From that perspective, tonight was a success. Full stop.

But that perspective is a particularly binary view of the world, with only good and bad outcomes, and no room for the shades of gray that make up real life. In this world, things can be somewhat good, or very good, or painfully awful, or just kind of not great. In this world, we have not two possible outcomes, but thousands of them, with differing levels of magnitude. And from a perspective that accounts for the different magnitudes of outcomes, this Cubs win isn’t quite as great as it could have been. This win came with a cost, and probably unnecessarily so.

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Yesterday I slapped together an InstaGraphs post about a Jon Lester strikeout of Brandon Guyer. It was a called strikeout on a pitch off the plate, but it was also a strikeout Lester has recorded several dozen times before. That part, I found interesting. But the call was also important in the moment. It changed the Indians’ odds of winning Game 5 by 10 percentage points, and during the game I tweeted that out with a screenshot. I didn’t expect the tweet to blow up like it did.

This isn’t supposed to be boastful. Wow, retweets, all right. Nobody cares. What happened as a consequence of that tweet going around was that countless different people started showing up in my mentions. And wouldn’t you know it, but those people had opinions about the strike zone! Some people were convinced the umpires were in the tank for the Cubs. Other people were convinced the Indians didn’t have any right to complain after calls they’d gotten earlier. More people still accused me of whining for some reason, as if a screenshot and a fact are opinions. The overall response was emotionally charged. Maybe not a surprise, in a World Series elimination game, but people were stirred the hell up.

Guess what! The zone’s been even. The Indians have gotten calls in their favor. The Cubs have also gotten calls in their favor. The World Series isn’t over yet, of course, but through the five games we’ve watched, neither team has really gotten a more favorable zone to pitch around.

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This past Sunday night, one of the most important baseball games of the year went head-to-head with a primetime regular-season NFL broadcast on NBC. Millions more opted to watch the Chicago Cubs host their final home game of the year and stave off elimination in a close game. That Major League Baseball went head-to-head with the NFL and won isn’t that big of a deal. That MLB has garnered ratings not seen in a decade, however — and bested the top-rated program in all of television over the past few years — represents a big win for a sport receiving near-constant criticism for sagging ratings.

The broadcast of Game Five on Sunday night was one of the highest-rated broadcasts for the World Series in years. Since Boston ended their 86-year championship drought back in 2004, only one game has drawn more than the 23.6 million viewers Cleveland and Chicago netted on Sunday night: Game Seven of the 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers. If you remove clinching games, it was one of the most viewed games of the century. The table below shows the most-viewed non-clinching games since 2000, the year FOX exclusively began broadcasting the World Series.

More people tuned into to see Sunday night’s World Series game than watched Game One in 2004 when the Red Sox began their attempt to end the curse. The game drew more viewers than the epic extra-inning Game Six between the Cardinals and Rangers in 2011. Indeed, only one non-2004 World Series game exceeded Sunday night’s in terms of viewership: the Diamondbacks-Yankees contest from 2001, best remembered for Derek Jeter’s 10th-inning walk-off homer against Byung-Hyun Kim.

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