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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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Episode 695
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. During this edition of FanGraphs Audio, he examines Aroldis Chapman, Joe Maddon, and the latter’s management of the former in the World Series; considers Chicago’s susceptibility to the breaking ball and Cleveland’s use of it; and determines which club stands to benefit most from a championship.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 40 min play time.)

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Earlier today, Nick Stellini made his FanGraphs debut with a piece about Joe Maddon’s bullpen options for tonight’s win-or-go-home Game 6. As Nick noted, Maddon has seemingly lost faith in the two guys who anchored his bullpen for most of the year: Hector Rondon and Pedro Strop. Strop, particularly, has been out of the loop, as he’s faced just four batters so far in this series. Given how dominant Strop was in the regular season, he was supposed to be a big part of their October bullpen, but given his usage and performance since coming off the disabled list at the end of September, it seems pretty likely that Maddon doesn’t think he’s at 100%.

Hector Rondon’s issues are more obvious. He faced 49 batters in August and September between battling arm issues and serving time on the DL, and those 49 batters hit .422/.469/.778 against him. In the postseason, Rondon has faced 25 more batters, and they’ve gone .333/.360/.542, which only counts as improvement because he was basically the worst pitcher in baseball the last two months of the year. Given that he hasn’t gotten hitters out regularly since July, it’s pretty unlikely we’re going to see Rondon pitching in a high leverage situation tonight.

So, to Nick’s point, the bridge between Jake Arrieta and Aroldis Chapman is pretty shaky. Mike Montgomery provides a good left-handed option, but Cleveland has some guys you don’t want to send a lefty up against in the middle of their order, so what Maddon could really use is a quality right-hander to help him get the ball from his starter to his closer. And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to see John Lackey come out of the bullpen tonight.

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Oh, how quickly the tables were turned.

The Cubs, they of the 103 regular-season wins, entered the World Series as the presumptive favorites in the minds of nearly all who chose to be foolish enough to actually forecast the madness that is postseason baseball. The Cubs have the star power and the narrative and the Kris Bryant. That didn’t matter, because the Indians have the pitching. They have Corey Kluber and Andrew Miller, Cody Allen and Bryan Shaw. Chicago now teeters at the precipice of elimination, a hair’s breadth from breaking the hearts of Cubs fans everywhere. Joe Maddon will need to play his hand tonight perfectly, because if they don’t succeed tonight, there will be no Game Seven over which to agonize. He’ll need to save the season, and he’ll need his bullpen to do it.

Given that the Cubs have almost no margin for error at this point, they will need to maximize run prevention above all else. Cleveland will be deploying Josh Tomlin and Kluber in games Six and Seven, respectively, along with a likely heavy dosage of Miller. Runs will be at a premium. Kyle Schwarber will be back in the Chicago lineup, which will help, but there’s only so much he can do when Willson Contreras and Javy Baez are swinging at pitches thrown into the next state and Jason Heyward’s bat is on the side of a milk carton. These games will be about preventing runs, not scoring them.

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The dominant storyline of this postseason is reliever usage — well, the dominant storyline aside from the length of championship droughts, at least. Cleveland manager Terry Francona has freed himself to use elite reliever Andrew Miller when necessary rather than constrain himself to such trivial guidelines as save opportunities. Miller’s success (and Francona’s resultant success) has led people to ask whether this is a watershed moment for standard relief pitcher usage. Has Francona made it acceptable to more closely align optimal reliever usage with leverage rather than inning?

There are a few big reasons to think Miller’s 2016 postseason isn’t going to change bullpens as we know them. First of all, Miller’s contract status makes him immune from the reality that relief pitcher’s earnings are intimately tied to save totals. Like it or not, save totals are of real consequence to relief pitchers who aren’t already receiving hefty salaries. Secondly, managers can do things in the postseason that simply aren’t practical during the 162-game regular-season grind. As an example, consider: even though Francona has utilized Miller in a notably flexible relief-ace role ever since Cleveland acquired him from the Yankees at the end of July, Miller also entered a game in the sixth inning or earlier just once in his 26 regular-season appearances. In the postseason, however, he’s entered in the sixth or early in four of his nine outings.

Perhaps the biggest reason, though, that Miller’s case is unlikely to cause any immediate radical changes in bullpen management, is one discussed by an aptly titled article at ESPN.com by Sam Miller: “Cody Allen makes the Andrew Miller experiment possible”. To avoid confusion (and the resultant mass hysteria) likely to be caused by their shared surname, we’ll refer to the illustrious writer as Sam, and continue referring to the pitcher as Miller. Sam rightfully points out that the mere existence of another elite reliever is what frees up Francona to utilize Miller in such unconventional ways.

“If there were no Andrew Miller, [Cody] Allen might be the talk of this postseason… But Miller’s brilliance has ensured that Allen’s brilliance has gone overlooked. The irony is that Allen’s brilliance had ensured that Miller’s brilliance has been possible.”

Although the ship has long since sailed on making Allen “the talk of this postseason”, we still can (and should) spend some time talking about the other elite reliever who’s helped to situate Cleveland one win away from their first championship in 68 years. Allen has pitched 11.2 innings this postseason — or, to put it another way, has recorded 35 outs. Of those 35 outs, 22 have been via the strikeout — giving him a positively obscene 17.0 K/9 rate. To put that in perspective, uber-reliever Miller is sporting a 15.4 K/9 this postseason and the only reliever ever to top 17.0 K/9 in a regular season is some guy named Aroldis Chapman, who reached 17.7 K/9 in 2014.

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It says something when a pitcher wins 18 games, records a 3.10 ERA, and people are still left wondering what went wrong. Nevertheless, that’s the case for Jake Arrieta and his 2016 season. Because he’s almost cut his slider usage in half this year — and because that alteration coincided with less dominant results than his 2015 campaign — much of the discourse settles on that pitch. His manager even admitted to wondering about it: “The break on the slider/cutter/whatever you want to call it has been more inconsistent,” Joe Maddon said after a poor outing by Arrieta in July.

The Cubs need Arrieta to find his slider tonight in Game Six in order to force this World Series to continue. By one metric — usage — the righty has returned to normal with the pitch. But has he really found it again? To answer the question, we first we need to figure out what he lacked this season relative to last; then we can see if things have returned to normal in the meantime. We’ll break the pitch down by three components: velocity, movement, and command.

Velocity
It’s tempting to point to velocity as the problem. Arrieta has lost a mile per hour on his slider from last year, and velocity is the most important aspect of a slider when it comes to whiffs. Case closed.

Except! Arrieta was up a tick on the fastball and the slider in 2015. Arrieta lost that tick, but he returned to the same velocity that he possessed in 2014, when he posted a 2.53 ERA and broke out with the Cubs. He struck out a batter more per nine innings in 2014, too, so it’s not just ERA that indicates Arrieta has been effective with an 89 mph slider.

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