FanGraphs Baseball

This week’s article is related to last week’s on a similar topic — and, much like that first article, begins with the premise that you’re the manager of major league club (congratulations!) and your team has qualified for the playoffs.

In that first piece, I argued that, under some conditions, you would slightly increase your chances of winning the ALDS/NLDS by employing the “save the ace” strategy, where you start your number-two pitcher in Game 1 and your ace in Game 2. Whether you choose this strategy or the conventional one of starting your ace in Game 1 and your number-two in Game 2, last week’s article assumed that all of your starting pitchers are rested and at your disposal at the beginning of the LDS. If you were fighting a close division or wild-card race (or perhaps both of these) at the end of the season, however, then this likely would not be the case, since you would have stuck to your regular five-man rotation until possibly even the final game of the regular season.

So this week, we will look at starting pitching in the final regular reason game, tiebreaker games, and wild-card game.

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Daniel Norris began this season fighting for a rotation spot with the Toronto Blue Jays. At just 21 years of age to start the season, the Blue Jays prospect, who made news in Spring Training for living in a van, made the rotation. After struggling through a dead arm period, however, he was sent back down to the minor leagues while the big-league club struggled through the first half of the season. When David Price moved from the Detroit Tigers to the Blue Jays at the trade deadline, Norris was the headlining prospect heading back to Detroit. Both Toronto and Detroit have managed the left-hander’s innings this season — he’s recorded just 145.2 of them between the minors and majors this season — but on Tuesday, Norris suffered through three innings’ worth of pitches in just a single frame, requiring 54 pitches to get through the first inning against Texas.

The pitching scouting reports that local broadcasts put up on the screen are not always illuminating, but the final point in the graphic for Norris’ start was rather ominous.

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This Sunday, Clayton Kershaw has a shot to become the first pitcher to rack up 300 strikeouts in a season since Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling turned the trick back in 2002. He needs just six strikeouts to get there, so theoretically he could do it by the end of the second inning. He and his Dodgers brethren will be squaring off against the Padres, one of the strikeout-ingest teams in baseballs this season, so he’s got a real good shot to get there, even if his innings are capped. So let’s for a moment say that he does. How would he stack up against the other members of the 300 K club?

First, how many players are in this club? Thanks for asking: there’s 14. Of the 14, five have done it only once (Bob Feller, Mickey Lolich, Mike Scott, Steve Carlton and Vida Blue) and nine have done it multiple times (Curt Schilling, J.R. Richard, Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Rube Waddell, Sam McDowell, Sandy Koufax and Walter Johnson). Overall, these 14 players have hit the 300 K mark 33 times. Kershaw would be #34. You can see the whole list, via the Baseball-Reference Play Index, right here.

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For whatever reason, people enjoy ranking things. A perfectly rational species would be okay with measures of quality, but humans are really into ordering things and arguing about the ordering of things. It explains why we often find ourselves arguing about which pitchers qualify as aces. Definitions vary, but lots of us get caught up in determining the best 10, 15, or 30 pitchers, implicitly suggesting that pitchers 11, 16, and 31 are demonstrably differently than the pitchers above them on the list.

Of course, that’s after you get over the fact that we lack an agreed upon definition of “acehood.” We can all appreciate that it’s some blend of quality and durability, but the exact nature of the definition is fluid. In a basic sense, we want to know how good a pitcher is and of we can count on him to be that good for a significant number of innings. In other words, something like a pitcher’s WAR over the previous three seasons might a good place to start the ace conversation.

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To think, there used to be real conversations about whether the Cubs should start Jon Lester or Jake Arrieta in a potential Wild Card Game. I don’t want to shortchange Lester, who’s a terrific pitcher in his own right — one of the better pitchers in the National League. But Arrieta is just on one of those runs. If you want to play along and say something stupid like “Arrieta’s on a run that he’s earned,” then that would be exactly three fewer earned runs than Arrieta has allowed since the beginning of August. Roll your eyes all you want, but don’t pretend like that sentence wasn’t effective.

There’s a certain detectable sense of dread. The Pirates and Cubs are guaranteed a one-game playoff to determine who advances to the NLDS. The only question is where it’ll be played, but the odds-on favorite at the moment is Pittsburgh. People have complaints about the one-game-playoff format. Some of them are legitimate, even given that playoff series don’t do much better to crown the deserving ballclub. But this is what we have, and it’s exciting, and it just means the Pirates get the misfortune of facing Arrieta with everything on the line. He’s an opponent who feels unbeatable. I don’t want to take anything away from Gerrit Cole, but it feels like it’s lopsided. There’s no one in the game pitching better than Arrieta has.

Arrieta just faced the Pirates, in Chicago. He got himself pretty deep into a perfect game. A week and a half earlier against the Pirates, Arrieta gave up two runs (one earned) in eight innings. In early August, he blanked the Pirates over seven frames. In the middle of May, he gave up one run in seven innings. Toward the end of April, another one-run, seven-inning outing. It’s not like the Pirates haven’t had chances. Arrieta has just been that dominant. The Cubs have lost just one of his past 17 starts; in that game, they got no-hit. Arrieta is officially an adversary you worry about.

The attention is on the Pirates. It’s on how they intend to win this seemingly unwinnable game. Buster Olney just talked to some people in the industry about what the Pirates are supposed to do. The general message is that the Pirates are up against it. There’s nothing as psychologically daunting as an ace, and Pirates fans can just think back to last October’s one-game playoff, against Madison Bumgarner. He never seemed to even give them an opportunity to advance. It’s true: Arrieta could well take over the game. He could literally win it on his own, like he did the other day, with seven shutout innings and a homer. But history, at least, isn’t quite so pessimistic. The Pirates’ odds aren’t as long as they seem.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

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After we finished talking about his changeup and what he learned from Felix Hernandez, after we finished talking about command for the Hardball Times Annual, after we talked a little about his slider and his sinker, after we talked about a few hitters, even after I’d said goodbye and shook his hand, Zack Greinke hovered. He wasn’t done. He had noticed something about pitching inside and wondered if the numbers agreed.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Houston at Arizona | 21:40 ET
Keuchel (226.0 IP, 66 xFIP-) vs. de la Rosa (185.2 IP, 104 xFIP-)
The Angels and Astros, currently separated by a single win, currently feature a roughly 25% probability of producing the same regular-season record and necessitating the addition of a one-game playoff for the right to appear in the normal, regularly scheduled one-game playoff.

By way of comparison, and to better illustrate the likelihood of such a contingency, here are some events which have occurred less than a quarter of the time in 2015:

• Aramis Ramirez — or any of other 25 qualified players, actually — finished an at-bat with a base hit.
• Right-hander Shelby Miller, despite all manner of proficiency, recorded a win for his start.
• Your grandfather left sufficient gratuity for service at a restaurant.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Television.

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Sometimes we here at FanGraphs like to zig when others zag. Or there are times when others zag and we zag too and then before they can say “Hey you’re zagging!” we switch back to zigging. Lots of virtual ink has been spilled recently on Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts and both are well deserving of the attention they’ve received for reasons discussed more on this site and others. But [looks both ways] [leans in] they are not alone. There is a third prospect in Boston with a high ceiling who has been overshadowed by Betts and Bogaerts. His name is Blake Swihart. Three days ago he hit two home runs in Yankee Stadium and when a 23-year-old catcher hits two homers in Yankee Stadium, well, that seems like as good a pretense as any to assess him and his season. So there’s our pretense. Assessment time!

Despite his youth, the switch-hitting catcher spent the majority of the season in Boston. But that wasn’t the original plan. Swihart came into the season slated for duty in Triple-A as he’d spent all of 71 plate appearances over 18 games above Double-A, but all of a sudden catchers started going down. First, starting catcher Christian Vazquez needed Tommy John surgery and the organization promoted backup Ryan Hanigan and picked up Sandy Leon from Washington to back him up. Then two months into the season Hanigan broke his hand and the organization was out of options. Swihart got the call.

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Let’s just be real here and leave the analysis aside for a moment: it’s difficult to picture the Blue Jays losing. They got smoked yesterday, but only after clinching their division, so their lineup was missing its starters. That can be forgiven. Their overall run differential is better than second place by nearly 100. They have baseball’s best record since the All-Star break. Since beginning the little flurry with the Troy Tulowitzki trade, the Jays have won three-quarters of the time, and not even the Cubs have been able to keep up. Aggressiveness at the deadline took care of seemingly all the team’s problems, and now Marcus Stroman is back and starting and looking terrific, and this has been present the whole year:

The Jays are what’s been classically defined as “stupid-good,” one of the few teams in the American League playing like it ought to. It’s no mystery why they’ve succeeded, and now that a berth in the first round has been clinched, it’s at last time to look ahead. The Blue Jays feel like a super team. Especially given how they’ve played the last few months. So, what’s historically happened with teams like this?

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