Jason Heyward struggled with the bat all year. The expensive free agent acquisition had a .631 OPS during the regular season, and he went 5 for 48 during the postseason. He didn’t struggle with perspective.

Heyward pulled his Cubs teammates together during the Game 7 rain delay, reminding them that they were baseball’s best team. He told them, ‘We’re going to win this game.”

Nine days earlier, on the eve of the World Series, he was thoughtful while espousing the quality of his club. 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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The Detroit Tigers find themselves at a crossroads as this offseason begins. With players like Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander — stars who can still contribute but who are on the wrong side of 30 — the Tigers’ window for contention with this group is closing. Ian Kinsler is another player who’s bound to experience age-related decline. Meanwhile, outfielder J.D. Martinez — one of the best hitters in the game over the past three years — is a free agent after 2017. All in all, it’s difficult to see this team contending beyond next year without an overhaul. Given those constraints, it makes a lot of sense to go all in next year. The aging core’s decline, along with the addition of some new free-agent signings, should make the team decent once again; a little more help would make them contenders.

However, Detroit’s practice of running with the big markets in terms of payroll and addressing weaknesses through free agency might be coming to an end. Based on what Buster Olney wrote last month, it appears as though, while everyone is technically available, that the Tigers aren’t prepared for a full rebuild. Here are some of Olney’s comments as they relate to Verlander:

But remember, the Tigers don’t want a full-blown teardown. They want to try to win next season, and Verlander was their best pitcher in 2016. (And yes, he can block any trade, and the future Hall of Famer could ask any interested team to guarantee his $22 million vesting option for 2020.)

The Tigers aren’t likely to make the playoffs next year by only half-committing to their roster, and they already have around $175 million in contract obligations. Moving Ian Kinsler or J.D. Martinez makes them worse in 2017, and if a larger and larger percentage of their payroll is allocated to declining players like Miguel Cabrera, the club isn’t any more likely to contend in 2018 and beyond. If they aren’t going all in next year — and it appears they aren’t — the quickest route to the playoffs is to tear it all down. To do that, the team needs to move Miguel Cabrera, and that might best be done by packaging him with Justin Verlander.

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Earlier recaps: Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4 / Episode 5.

Welcome to our recap of the sixth episode of Pitch, entitled “Wear It”. As always, there are spoilers, so read at your own risk.

Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury) has apparently had an eventful couple of days. The episode opens with her meeting with a psychiatrist, Dr. Andrea Barton (Rita Wilson), who asks Ginny to recount what she’s been through. While this week’s episode still has the present/flashback format, these flashbacks take place relatively recently, all within the past 48 hours.

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So that was a pretty enjoyable postseason. A terrific World Series, with one of the best Game Sevens of all-time, wrapped up a month of high-quality baseball, with only a few duds mixed in here and there. As usual, it was a low-scoring month, with cold weather and elite pitchers serving to make offense scarce, but that just makes for more tense, high-leverage innings.

Of course, there was one notable change this year, particularly emphasized because of Cleveland’s run to the championship. More than ever before, managers were willing to use their bullpens without regard for role or inning, with Andrew Miller serving as the platonic ideal of a relief ace. It wasn’t just Miller, though; Cody Allen entered in the middle innings a few times, while Kenley Jansen and Aroldis Chapman both entered in the seventh inning in several outings.

Some of this change was the inevitable rationalization of Major League organizations, as the concept of strict relief usage has never really been the optimal way to run a bullpen in the postseason. That was an idea in need of challenging, and it was only a matter of time before the incentives to win overcame the notion that relievers could only be used in the way they were deployed in the regular season.

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We’ve arrived at the point of the baseball life cycle where Father Time hangs up his Cubs jersey and ponders which jersey he’ll wear next year. A clown car full of free agents is about to hit the open market and already all 30 front offices are drawing up plans about which ones they’ll sign. This year’s free-agent class is woefully lacking in talent and in depth. There are a select few elite players who are sure to attract all sorts of attention, there are a handful of mid-level talents, and there are huge swaths of roster filler. Slim pickings will be had this winter.

However, for teams seeking a new closer, there are three men who present incredibly attractive options. Kenley Jansen, Mark Melancon, and recently crowned World Series champion Aroldis Chapman will be free to sign with any team they please, and Jansen and Chapman will almost certainly destroy any preconceived notions of what typical pay for an elite relief pitcher looks like.

It’s pretty safe to say that every team with intentions of anything resembling contention will be looking to add to their bullpen. These three are just about as good as it gets. Which closer is the absolute best commodity, though? Each has their attractive points and each has their warts.

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“More breaking balls!” That’s how Theo Epstein characterized the postseason for Brian Kenny on the latter’s lead-in show before Game Five of the World Series. It’s a notable observation insofar as it’s a little more actual content than you typically get publicly from a high-ranking front-office exec, but it’s also a matter of public record that his team was seeing a ton of breaking balls in the World Series. Dave Cameron, for example, took an excellent look at the subject earlier this week.

What’s interesting about Epstein’s comment, however, is how he was somehow able to remain vague about his point, even as he seemed to be offering something incredibly specific. He suggests there are more breaking balls in the playoffs, sure. But it’s not clear if he’s implying that there are more breaking balls every postseason for every team, or merely that there were more this postseason for his team, or something in between.

This postseason was defined by a transformation in bullpen usage; that’s not up for discussion, really. But it seems possible that pitching mixes themselves also changed this postseason. And while it would be impossible for Andrew Miller to throw 225 innings and strike out nearly 400 batters — the unfathomable numbers you get if you prorate his postseason work to a full season out of the pen — it might be possible for starting pitchers to throw more breaking balls all season. This postseason trend (if it actually exists) could inform the regular season in a real way.

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This is August Fagerstrom’s last piece here. As he announced on Tuesday, he has taken a position with a Major League team, and that organization will now benefit from the insights that we will miss. August wrote this piece before officially leaving, but we wanted to save it for after the World Series storm had calmed down, since it deserved not to get overshadowed by Chicago’s celebration.

What will be remembered about this year’s postseason, for the rest of history, is the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. It hadn’t happened in 108 years, if you didn’t hear. That’s the big takeaway here. Beyond that: Game Seven. Game Seven was crazy! We’ll be talking about Game Seven for years.

The other part of the equation is the Cleveland Indians, and the story that seems most likely to be remembered about them was how far they got with so relatively little. The team with the super-rotation at the beginning of the season that was left with scraps at the end. Despite missing two of their three best starters in Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar, Cleveland held three of baseball’s most threatening lineups in Boston, Toronto, and Chicago to 42 runs in 15 games, good for a 2.69 ERA, while tossing a record-setting five shutouts. They rode Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, and Cody Allen as far as they could, but even guys like Josh Tomlin and Ryan Merritt (?!) handed the ball off to the Millers and the Allens with a lead more often than not.

Throughout the postseason, every Indians pitcher was quick to mention the game plan, the approach, and the way catcher Roberto Perez attacked the hitters. Part of that is typical athlete speak, sure. Almost always, these guys are going to deflect and give credit to their teammates. But what does that really mean? What goes into a pre-series, or even pre-game scouting report? Who’s the brains behind that operation? How many brains are behind that operation? And what happens when it makes its way out onto the field?
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