The book on the 2015 season is still being written, but when it is finished, at least a chapter or two will need to be devoted to Statcast. This year will likely go down as the one in which granular batted-ball data went mainstream. More data has been made public, and discussion of exit velocity, launch angle and even route efficiency has permeated the airwaves of even the most old-school broadcasts. All of the numbers, in and of themselves, mean very little. Only with the addition of context can they become meaningful.

A couple months ago in these pages, I detailed some of the limitations of the newly publicly available data. Today, let’s update those findings with an examination of the year-end data.

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It’s tough to get an athlete to say much of substance in a postgame press conference. Without the benefit of a personal, one-on-one setting, and without much time for the player to gather his thoughts and reflect on his personal performance, more often than not a reporter simply could pick the cliché responses they’re most likely to hear out of a hat and arrive at a close approximation of the real thing. I’ve found this to be especially true of a starting pitcher who’s just suffered a loss.

“[Insert pitcher name here], what was giving you trouble tonight?”

“Mostly fastball command. Just wasn’t locating my fastball.”

It’s a boring answer, one that a beat writer hears something like 100 times over the course of a typical season, but it’s also an answer with which it’s usually hard to argue after a starting pitcher struggles through a start. If you really had to boil down the art and science of pitching to a one, most important thing, you might pick fastball command. Pitchers throw their fastball more than any other pitch, by far, and without fastball command, a pitcher will almost always end his night with a high number in the walks or hits column of the box score.

If there’s something you know about Gerrit Cole, it’s that he’s one of the very best pitchers in baseball, largely because he has an amazing fastball. By average velocity, it’s the third-hardest heater in the league. By PITCHf/x run values, it was the second-most valuable fastball in the league. Cole complements that fastball with a great slider and a good changeup, but he largely lives, and subsequently dies, by the fastball.

In Wednesday’s 4-0 Wild Card loss to the Cubs, it was the latter.

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When you see Jake Arrieta’s final line – 9 innings, 4 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks, 11 strikeouts — it’s actually kind of hard to believe, but as dominating as the Cubs ace was on Wednesday night, the Pirates actually had a chance to beat him. Arrieta was amazing, but he wasn’t quite perfect, and in the sixth inning, the Pirates put together a legitimate rally.

The inning started with pinch-hitter Travis Snider driving a hard grounder up the middle for a leadoff single. Gregory Polanco smoked a line drive right at third baseman Kris Bryant, but Bryant’s circus act catch meant that it simply turned into out number one, but then Arrieta gave the Pirates a gift by hitting Josh Harrison with a curveball, putting a runner in scoring position for the first time all night. And then Andrew McCutchen hit a laser to shortstop that Addison Russell couldn’t handle, allowing everyone to advance safely, which loaded the bases and brought the tying run to the plate.

Down 4-0, having only had two baserunners prior to the inning, a Pirates team that looked unable to put anything together against Arrieta suddenly was one swing away from tying up the game. Starling Marte, the team’s cleanup hitter, stepped to the plate. While not a traditional slugger, Marte hit 19 home runs this year and is capable of driving the ball, especially if he can sit on a fastball.

Marte is somewhat of the cliche of a raw baseball player; he crushes fastballs and struggles with soft stuff that moves. For his career, he’s hit .313 with a .521 slugging percentage against four-seam fastballs, and .294 with a .423 slugging percentage against two-seam fastballs. For comparison, he’s hit .198 against curves and .260 against breaking balls, with less power than he produces on fastballs. Marte is, essentially, a fastball hitter.

So unsurprisingly, Arrieta started him with a slider, but he missed his spot and bounced the ball in the dirt, allowing Marte to easily take ball one. With the bases loaded, Arrieta decided to challenge Marte, and gave him the fastball he was certainly looking for. And Marte crushed it.

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Yordano Ventura wanted more movement on his pitches, so he changed his arm slot. He got more movement in some ways, and less in others. He also pitched much better after he dropped his arm slot. It’s tempting to draw a direct line from one fact to the other, but it’s not that simple. There’s at least another huge factor here, and it comes from Ventura’s (secretly) nastiest pitch.

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It’s always an oversimplification to reduce a baseball game to the starting pitchers, but reduce we do anyway. In our defense, the starting pitchers are always the most important players in any given individual game, so it’s not like this comes out of nowhere. But you can see this taking place with tonight’s NL wild-card game. It’s a game between two excellent baseball teams, two teams who deserve to play in full playoff series, but to a lot of people, the whole story is Jake Arrieta. To others, it’s both Arrieta and Gerrit Cole. Everyone understands there will also be hitters, but the game might as well be a pitch-off.

Almost literally anything can happen, but my read of the consensus is that the Cubs have the edge and Cole will need to match Arrieta’s zeroes. With that in mind, this seems like a game likely to be decided by a very narrow margin. With that in mind, any sort of advantage could end up being a hugely significant advantage. You know what could constitute an advantage? Knowing what the other guy is going to throw. I can’t speak to every pitch, but both Arrieta and Cole do at least have their tells.

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Episode 601
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he builds off a thread from his most recent appearance and discusses the real-live duties attached to the various job titles in a major-league front office.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 1 hr 17 min play time.)

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In a way, it felt like the Yankees were lifeless. Few fans expressed surprise when the team was ultimately shut out, given the way the offense had gone of late. The season is over, but it’s over by a narrower margin than it might seem. The Astros scored their first two runs with two swings, and the third scored on what could be best described as an accident. Neither team on Tuesday was dominant, and you can only wonder how it might’ve gone had the Yankees gotten another break or two. That’s the sort of thinking that gets people talking about the strike zone.

It was a story during the game, and it remained a story after the fact. Here’s a post by Dave on the matter. Perception was that Astros pitchers worked with a more favorable zone than Yankees pitchers did, and while a few pitches here and there didn’t make all of the difference, they certainly could’ve made some difference. Based on the evidence, it does indeed look like the Astros benefited more. A quick glance at the Brooks Baseball zone charts shows me the Astros benefiting by six or seven strikes, comparatively speaking. That’s a big enough margin to notice, and it deserves an explanation. Those of you in favor of an automated strike zone might well want to just skip the rest of this.

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Carlos Beltran’s season ended last night in the same way it’s ended in each of the last 18 seasons he’s spent time playing Major League Baseball: without a championship. Beltran, one of the greatest postseason hitters of all time, with 16 home runs and a 192 wRC+ in 223 plate appearances, did what little he could against Dallas Keuchel, producing one of the three New York Yankees hits. Beltran, along with Adrian Beltre, are reminders that no matter how great a player is on the field, even in an age of great parity and multiple playoff berths, a World Series championship is far from certainty.

Beltran has had a Hall of Fame-caliber career on and off the field. With just eight more home runs, he will become the fifth player in MLB history to record at least 400 home runs and 300 steals (Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez, Andre Dawson). His 66 wins above replacement sit comfortably among the top 100 position players of all time. He has used his wealth and fame to start a baseball academy in his native Puerto Rico that has already produced more than 10 MLB draft picks even as Beltran himself continues to produce on the field. After a disappointing 2014 season and disappointing start to 2015 that had this author worried he was finished, Beltran hit .295/.357/.505 with a wRC+ of 134 following the month of April and added a few more WAR to his career ledger.

While Beltran’s exit is disappointing for those hoping he wins a ring before he retires, he’s not even the most accomplished player in this postseason without a title. Beltre debuted in 1998 just like Carlos Beltran and, over the last 18 seasons, has accumulated more than 10,000 plate appearances, coming close in 2011 to a World Series title but never getting over the hump. Among active players, only Alex Rodriguez has stepped to the plate more times than Beltre. As for performance, no active player has been more accomplished than Beltre without winning a title.

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