The wheels started spinning for me Friday afternoon. I was absentmindedly scrolling through numbers, looking for anything relevant to the NLCS, when I came upon something on the Baseball-Reference Cubs splits page. I’ll show you the exact thing I saw:

Go ahead and squint. You’ll make it out. You see categories, designating power and finesse pitchers. Then you see the Cubs’ hitting statistics. They’ve been much, much worse against power pitchers, and while everyone is much, much worse against power pitchers, the Cubs still look worse if you adjust for that. That’s what the last column shows. I made a note to try to write this up. See, the Cubs are playing the Mets, and a lot of the Mets happen to throw super hard.

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Hitters, we generally accept, are capable of controlling their balls in play (BIP) to some degree. They don’t have complete control — for example, BABIP is a much less reliable statistic than strikeout rate in the absence of huge samples — but when we see a batter with a high BABIP it’s less suspicious than it would be if that were a pitcher.

Interestingly enough, the year-to-year correlation for BABIP for hitters is quite low. The r-squared is just 0.08 (with 1 being a perfect 1:1 relationship and 0 being no relationship), even when weighting by the number of balls in play in both years. There isn’t quite a total lack of a relationship: the model’s p-value — that is, the measure of the probability that input variables have no effect on the output — is effectively 0, indicating that there almost certainly is a relationship. But knowing a hitter’s BABIP one year doesn’t tell us all that much about what it will be the next.

In graphical format, it’s easy to see the existing-but-not-very-strong relationship between a hitter’s BABIP one year and his BABIP the year after. (The size of the dots in this graph reflect the total number of balls in play the hitter had in the two years.)

I’ve always wondered, though, if batters have any ability to control things on a more granular level than this. For example, do hitters have a lot of influence over whether their ground balls turn into hits? Maybe something like BABIP on ground balls is pretty stable from year to year, and the rest of the hitter’s BABIP is just pure luck from his other kinds of batted balls. Or maybe the three are all separate skills over which the batters have a good degree of control, and the instability comes from a hitter having a down year in one category but a good year in the others.

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We watch playoff baseball in part to see the stars of the game write their legacies. Whether they become legends or eventual disappointments, the October stage grants them a chance to produce the alluring commodity we most crave in this wild month of baseball: narrative.

We know the names. Reggie Jackson; Kirk Gibson; Carlton Fisk. We can see their postseason highlight reels in our heads just by reading the words on the page; we know the accompanying commentator clips so well that the audio plays along with them. They’re more than legends — they’re woven into a historic fabric, embedded in our consciousness as touchstones for the game’s future.

Somewhere in our minds, amid the grocery lists and afternoon meeting agendas, Gibson is pumping his fist as he rounds the bases. Fisk is waving it fair. And a Yankee Stadium crowd is yelling “Reggie. Reggie. Reggie.” They’re all there, because they’re now part of who we are as a collective baseball mind.

And so we come to Daniel Murphy, who’s not yet one of those household names. An important part of the Mets during the past few years, yes, but never what anyone would call a superstar. Only now, after fueling another Mets win in the NLCS over the Chicago Cubs by homering in his fourth consecutive game, he’s becoming something else — a one-man show, a phenomenon, a postseason hero in the making.

This is happening because most professional baseball players are capable of doing extraordinary things for short periods of time. The greatest among them are able to stretch those periods, shortening the downtime between each episode. However, sometimes we need to recognize when someone’s performance is not just a hot streak; oftentimes there have been legitimate improvements made, and those coincide with a streak at just the right moment, like crucial at-bats over a few playoff series. That’s exactly what’s happening to Daniel Murphy, and it’s cause for us to look deeper into the forces behind his incredible run in this year’s playoffs.

To begin with, Murphy made a conscious decision to pull the ball more often in 2015. Take a look at the percentage of balls he has hit to the pull side since 2008 (as a note, he missed all of 2010 due to injury):

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Last night, the Cubs saw their ace, Jake Arrieta, give up four runs in five innings in their Game Two loss to the Mets. Given how recently he seemed completely impossible to hit, it was bit jarring to see Arrieta struggle, and multiple observers noted during the game that his velocity appeared to be down from what he was throwing during the regular season. Jesse Rogers post-game recap on ESPN was even headlined “Jake Arrieta’s velocity dip spelled doom for Cubs…”

In discussing the issue with various Cubs after the game, Rogers noted that Joe Maddon saw it as well.

“In the game there, if that [radar] gun was correct on the field, he might have been down a mile an hour or two, that’s what I saw,” Cubs skipper Joe Maddon said. “And when that happens, the breaker, the commitment to the breaking ball is not as definite from the hitter’s perspective, because they’re able to see everything better.”

Arrieta himself noted that he knew his stuff wasn’t as good.

“I knew the high-end velocity wasn’t necessarily there tonight,” he said. “Threw quite a few changeups to offset that.”

He’s not kidding. After throwing just one change-up total in his previous two postseason starts, Arrieta fired off 10 change-ups against the Mets last night. The change-up isn’t a pitch he features much, as only about 5% of his total pitches this year were changeups. The fact that 11% of the pitches he threw were change-ups last night does suggest he didn’t trust his normal repertoire as much, and was looking for ways to get outs without his best stuff.

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Once upon a time, this was a post about how the Cubs lineup was a good matchup for the Mets pitchers. It’s what I’d planned to write if/when the Mets knocked out the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS, but then Corey Seager forgot to cover third base and Andre Ethier caught a foul ball so that became a thing instead.

Now, here we are. The Mets-Cubs series was billed as a battle between New York’s young pitching and Chicago’s young hitting. There were a couple things in the numbers that initially led me to believe the Cubs might have a neutralizer but, so far, it’s been all Mets.

That neutralizer was fastballs. The Mets pitchers, see, throw a lot of fastballs. Correction: the Mets pitchers don’t throw an unusually high number of fastballs; the fastballs they do throw, though, you notice. Think Jacob deGrom, and you think fastball. Think Noah Syndergaard, think fastball. Matt Harvey pops into your head, you probably think “pitch count” or some similarly annoying storyline, but after that, you think fastball. That’s not to say the Mets’ fantastic young rotation doesn’t have other good pitches, too, but, if you’re like me, it’s the fastballs that stand out.

They all throw them hard, and they all throw them well. Theoretically, a team that stands the best chance against the trio of deGrom, Syndergaard and Harvey is one that can hit the hard fastball. Harvey and deGrom throw 95. Syndergaard throws 97. The Cubs, this year, had the second-best slugging percentage in the league against fastballs 96+. An arbitrary cutoff, sure, but the point is: high heat hasn’t crippled the Cubs. Guys like Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber — can’t just blow it by them. There’s got to be other ways to get them out.

Let’s now turn our attention to Schwarber in particular. Until Daniel Murphy started happening, maybe no other player did more in the postseason to make a name for himself than Schwarber. When he’s hit the ball, mostly, it’s gone a long way. He hit one into a river, and rivers don’t happen inside baseball stadiums. He hit one onto a roof, and that roof now has a shrine on it. Anyone who didn’t know about Kyle Schwarber before, knows about him now.

Same goes for pitchers. You hear about the league adjusting to young players who come up and experience immediate success. The book getting out. Weaknesses in a hitter can reveal themselves by the way the league begins pitching to them.

And now, Kyle Schwarber’s rate of pitch types seen, by month, since entering the league:

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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 2015-16 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents, all of them corner outfielders.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Asdrubal Cabrera / Chris Davis / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / Chris Iannetta / Austin Jackson / Kelly Johnson / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Alexei Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Denard Span / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Matt Wieters / Ben Zobrist.

Marlon Byrd (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Byrd:

• Has averaged 587 PA and 2.4 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.5 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 1.0 WAR in 544 PA in 2015.
• Is projected to record 0.4 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-28 age-38 season.
• Made $8.0M in 2015, as part of deal signed in November 2013.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of final updated 2015 Steamer projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Byrd.

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The postseason always provides some surprising storylines, but this year, nothing has been more unexpected than Daniel Murphy turning into Babe Ruth. The Mets second baseman is mostly known for his extremely high rate of contact — he posted the lowest strikeout rate of any hitter in Major League Baseball this year — but has turned into a super slugger in the playoffs, hitting five home runs in the Mets first seven postseason games. While the team’s pitching staff is their greatest strength, Murphy’s success against the best pitchers in baseball is a big reason why the team is two wins away from reaching the World Series.

But even given his recent power surge, his home run off Jake Arrieta in the first inning of game two remains something to marvel at. Not just because hitting a home run off Jaker Arrieta is impressive, but because the home run was one of the least likely we’ve seen all year.

First, watch the home run for yourself.

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Ben, Harry Pavlidis, and Jeffrey Paternostro review the weekend’s ALCS and NLCS action and preview the pitching in ALCS Game 3.

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Justin Grimm wasn’t credited with a save when the Cubs vanquished the Cardinals on Tuesday. That doesn’t make his contribution any less important. Fourth-inning runs count just as much as late-inning runs, and St. Louis was poised to erase an early 4-2 deficit.

Grimm entered the game after starter Jason Hammel – shaky through three frames – issued a lead-off walk. He promptly induced a chopper, but third baseman Kris Bryant, in his effort to turn two, bobbled the ball. All hands were safe. Through no fault of his own, and with apprehension gripping Wrigley Field, Grimm was in a pickle.

The righty was more than ready. Grimm initially warmed in the second, and he got hot again in the third. When he finally strolled to the mound in the fourth inning, Joe Maddon handed him the ball and said, “Hey, man. Be you. Do your thing.” 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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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