FanGraphs Baseball

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Things could be going better for the Toronto Blue Jays. The only true “must-win” games are elimination games, but trailing Cleveland two games to none in the ALCS, there’s little doubt that tonight’s Game 3 feels like a must-win game Toronto. Should they lose tonight, all anyone will be able to talk about is how only one MLB team has ever come back to win a series after being down three games to none.

Could the Blue Jays become the second team to make such a comeback? Of course. They strung together a four-game win streak as recently as the Wild Card Game through their ALDS sweep over the Rangers, after all. But, naturally, facing a best-case scenario of four straight elimination games is not the outcome Toronto will be seeking in tonight’s game.

The most obvious aspect of Toronto’s game which needs to improve if they want to win is their offense. In the 18 innings they’ve played against Cleveland thus far, they’ve scored just one run – not exactly an ideal method for winning games. Of course, scoring runs at prodigious rates is something else we just saw Toronto do,what l when they tallied up 22 runs in their three-game ALDS sweep over the Rangers. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision Josh Donaldson or Edwin Encarnacion or another key member of their lineup stepping up to the plate and delivering for Toronto. If they want to win tonight, someone is going to have to push runs across the plate and they aren’t lacking for players who can be that guy.

However, to state the obvious, a two-game stretch of inept offense does not change the fundamental realities of baseball for the Blue Jays. Hitting well isn’t their singular path to getting back into the series. Defense and pitching are just as important as ever. So far, Toronto’s pitching staff has done a tremendous job of keeping Cleveland’s offense in check, yielding just four runs over the two games. There are a multitude of paths to success in a baseball game, but among the simplest is to prevent the other team from scoring. Tonight, they’ll turn to starting pitcher Marcus Stroman in hopes that he’ll become their latest pitcher to keep Cleveland’s offense in check. One of the interesting things to watch tonight will be what Stroman looks like — aside from the diminutive bundle of energy we’ve come to know over the past few seasons — because Stroman is constantly evolving.

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Clayton Kershaw continued to chip away at the mostly misguided narrative that he’s not a postseason pitcher, throwing seven dominant shutout innings against the Cubs at Wrigley in Sunday night’s 1-0 NLCS Game 2 victory, striking out six while walking just one. Kershaw talked manager Dave Roberts into letting him face the final batter of the seventh inning with reliever Kenley Jansen ready for action in the bullpen. Having thrown just 84 pitches after the conclusion of the seventh, Kershaw certainly would have gone out for the eighth inning if this were regular-season game, and likely would have gotten a shot for a complete-game shutout in the ninth.

As his final pitch count indicates, Kershaw was incredibly efficient with his pitches against Chicago’s typically uber-patient lineup, needing just 45 pitches to get through 4.2 perfect innings before Javier Baez’s two-out single in the fifth broke up his bid for perfection. He either got ahead of or retired each of the first six batters he faced, and seven of the first nine the first time through the order.

The pitches he threw to those nine batters the first time through the order:

Even the two that missed were close. In text form, in case you couldn’t pick up the pitch types from the video, those nine first-pitches were:

1. fastball
2. fastball
3. fastball
4. fastball
5. fastball
6. fastball
7. fastball
8. fastball
9. fastball

This isn’t exactly a new development for Kershaw. We talk a lot about Kershaw’s extremes, and one of the perhaps underrated Kershaw outlier tendencies is his reliance on the first-pitch fastball. To measure this, I took every pitcher who faced at least 500 batters this year, using BaseballSavant, and I calculated their fastball rate on the first pitch of at-bats, and on the rest of the pitches in at-bats, and found the difference between the two, indicating the pitchers who most relied on the fastball to begin at-bats, relative to the rest of their arsenal.

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2016-17 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for four of this year’s free agents, including exclusively some DH-types.

Other Players: Erick Aybar / Jose Bautista / Rajai Davis / Ian Desmond / Dexter Fowler / Carlos Gomez / Matt Holliday / Austin Jackson / Jon Jay / Matt Joyce / Brandon Moss / Mike Napoli / Angel Pagan / Steve Pearce / Wilson Ramos / Colby Rasmus / Josh Reddick / Michael Saunders / Kurt Suzuki / Mark Trumbo / Justin Turner / Chase Utley / Luis Valbuena / Neil Walker / Matt Wieters.

Pedro Alvarez (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Alvarez:

• Has averaged 437 PA and 0.4 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 0.6 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 1.1 WAR in 376 PA in 2016.
• Is projected to record 1.8 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-30 season.
• Made $5.8M in 2016, as part of a deal signed in March.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of final updated 2016 depth-chart projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Alvarez.

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As the Blue Jays take the field in Toronto tonight, they’ll find themselves down two games to none in the ALCS, with Game 3 representing as close to a must-win game as you can get without actually facing elimination. Teams have come back from down 3-0 before, of course, so the Blue Jays aren’t definitively done if they can’t figure out how to win on Monday night, but having to win four straight games against any good team is a massive challenge. And the idea of winning four straight against Andrew Miller’s team seems downright impossible, because right now, Andrew Miller is basically the walking embodiment of the perfect relief pitcher.

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It’s convenient the way this worked out. In the worst-case interpretation, Javier Baez got away with something on Sunday. In the best-case interpretation, Baez might’ve taken advantage of a rule-book loophole. What Baez did provoked Dave Roberts to complain at least a little bit, but in the end, the Dodgers scored one run, and the Cubs scored less than that. Because the Dodgers won, Baez’s play doesn’t matter. So now we can talk about it a little bit without emotions threatening to take over.

In Game 2, Baez was praised for his casual on-the-fly brilliance, and it came up because of a double play he started in the top of the sixth. The play allowed for the Cubs to get out of a jam, keeping the deficit at the narrowest margin. The Dodgers wouldn’t have any real protest if Baez started a regular double play. But this double play started with Baez very much intentionally not catching a catchable baseball.

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The borderline balk move that Julio Urias used to pick off Bryce Harper on Thursday night had me thinking about a lefty reliever who has spent the past four seasons in independent ball. In 2009, Derrick Loop — pitching in high-A in the Red Sox system — picked off 17 runners in just 71-and-a-third innings. (I interviewed him about his move later that year.)

Loop no longer logs a plethora of pickoffs. Part of the reason is his reputation — runners rarely take liberties against him — and another is his approach. Once upon a time, the southpaw used his move as a primary weapon. When I caught up to him this week, Loop told me he used to “give up the count to the hitter in order to set up my pickoff.” Against a higher level of competition, that strategy was a recipe for disaster.

Loop has bounced around since his pickoff-heavy season, with stops in the Phillies and Dodgers organizations, as well as the Atlantic League. His last year in affiliated ball was 2012, when he appeared in 34 games — 13 as a starter — for Triple-A Albuquerque. Despite an 11-4 record and 101 hits allowed in 103 innings, he found himself on the outside looking in.

“With the year I had, it was devastating to have not received a spring training invite,” admitted Loop. “Not just from the Dodgers, but from any team at any level. I was playing winter ball in Venezuela that off-season, hoping and waiting for a call. From anyone. It never came.” Read the rest of this entry »

An injury only hurts a team as much as the replacement lets it. The Dodgers were able to withstand their record-setting number of injuries because of what they had behind the guys who got hurt. Not every team has the luxury of being able to simply plug a Julio Urias or a Brandon McCarthy into the rotation when their top starters go down. And so when Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar each suffered season-ending injuries for the Cleveland Indians in the final month of the season, it was Josh Tomlin who was forced back into the postseason rotation picture, casting doubt on Cleveland’s chances of a deep October run. It’s also been Josh Tomlin who’s held two of baseball’s most imposing lineups — Boston and now Toronto — to three runs in two starts and helped the Indians come within two games of their first World Series appearance in 20 years.

It’s difficult to completely fault Tomlin’s doubters. By the end of August, he’d pitched himself out of Cleveland’s rotation, with a 4.89 ERA and a 5.24 FIP over 25 starts, and even during his best stretches, Tomlin’s rarely looked like much more than a home run-prone, back-end innings eater. Despite that, he’s held the Red Sox and Blue Jays at bay, and now has a 1.98 ERA in six starts since returning to the rotation. The secret, at least in the postseason? Pitching nothing like himself:
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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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Yesterday, our own Eno Sarris astutely pointed out the advantage that a fastball-heavy pitching staff like the Blue Jays might have against the Indians lineup, who have done the overwhelming majority of their damage on slow stuff and have struggled against heaters. And while I do believe it’s true that, on the whole, Toronto’s fastballing ways could still give the Indians lineup fits, I go thinking about a couple follow-up point that might be important, and that might help mitigate this potential advantage.

Namely, I got to thinking about Marco Estrada, because it’s fun to think about Marco Estrada; Marco Estrada is a fascinatingly unique pitcher. Estrada is set to start Game 1 of the NLCS for Toronto against Cleveland in a few hours and, according to our PITCHf/x run values, Estrada had something like baseball’s 11th-most valuable fastball, right between Robbie Ray and Stephen Strasburg. Strasburg throws 95. Ray throws 94. Makes sense — the best fastballs are usually the fastest fastballs. Not Estrada, though. Estrada’s fastball sits 88. Estrada’s fastball is all about spin, and how it plays off his changeup, and since it’s so different, I got to wondering if maybe Estrada’s elite fastball plays by different rules than the fastballs against which Cleveland struggles.

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