Astros-Rays Breakdown: Gerrit Cole Dominates

          

  

     The success of a 107-win team that features some of the best talent across all parts of the diamond ultimately came down to the success of one player: Gerrit Cole.

            In two starts in the ALDS, Cole went 2-0 and pitched 15.2 innings, struck out 25 batters allowed only six hits and held batters to a .118/.167/.196 slash line. That my friends, is domination.

            Against pitchers not named Gerrit Cole, the Rays actually faired kind of well. They got to Ryan Pressly for two runs on four hits in 2/3 innings of work. They scored 10 runs on 12 hits, including six extra base hits and four home runs, in game three. They struck for 13 hits in a 4-1 win game four. I would classify that as good hitting. But then came Cole in game five.

            Cole pitched eight innings in game five, struck out 10 batters and allowed only two hits. He threw 74 strikes on 107 pitches, a 69% strike ratio, and according to baseball-reference.com, Cole forced 52 swings and misses combined in his two ALDS appearances. I hope this stresses how much Cole dominated the Rays in this series.

            The Astros also held Austin Meadows and Avisail Garcia, the Rays’ top two hitters, to a combined 8-for-36 (.222 average) with only two extra base hits despite four RBIs between the two. The two hitters that propelled the Rays lineup for most of the season kind of fell flat during the postseason. It isn’t the worse production, especially for the amount of runs they created, but when considering the entirety of the team’s offense, I don’t like the overall production from the Rays.

In six games and 195 at-bats, the Rays hit to a slash line of .231/.298/.431. That’s especially troubling when knowing Willy Adames batted .385 in 13 at-bats with two home runs and one double and three runs. The Rays had pockets of offensive production, but it was a generally scarce showing. Most of that probably comes from the dominance of Gerrit Cole as I explained at the top of the article, because the team did hit pretty well when not facing Cole. But these don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The Rays’ hitting stunk against Cole and they faced Cole often. He was the main reason why the Astros won the ALDS.

Cardinals-Braves Breakdown: Bullpen Usage at Fault Again?

Like I did with the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins playoff series, I have done so again with the St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves. This Cardinals-Braves series was much harder to data mine however. Unlike the Yankees and Twins, these two teams matched up extremely well on paper. No team had a sure advantage over the other and it showed too. Every game except game five was decided in the late innings and by three runs or less. One could theoretically saw the Cardinals won because of complete luck. Yadier Molina, who hit .143 in the series, got ahold of a fastball over the plate to tie game four and later got just enough of another ball to win the game. Nothing too statistical about his two at-bats other than pitch location. Same goes for Mike Foltynewicz inability to hit the corners in game five, especially after he pitched seven shutout innings in game two. He missed by fractions of an inch in most cases. But I did find a couple things that did turned the tides in favor of the Cardinals. The Braves failed to capitalize on a couple bullpen matches worth mentioning because they could have caused a win in game one, which would have theoretically caused a Braves sweep.

The Braves held a 3-1 lead in the top of the eighth in an eventual 7-6 loss in game one. In this 3-1 situation, the Braves went to Luke Jackson out of the bullpen. Generally, this makes sense because of conventional wisdom. Jackson has pitched mostly in high-leverage situations during the regular season. Humans develop habits and breaking those habits can sometimes lead to lower productivity. Habit would dictate that Jackson enters in the eighth and then Mark Melancon, the closer, would enter for the ninth to earn the save.

Statistically, this decision doesn't make much sense though. Jackson has drastic lefty/righty splits. Lefties hit to a slash line of .157/.222/.324 against Jackson, while righties hit .331/.396/.449. They also have driven in 31 runs, versus 13 runs by lefties. In game one, Jackson faced four righties before facing a single lefty, in which he gave up three hits, including one home run. Just by looking at the splits, it didn't make much sense to use Jackson except for conventional wisdom and the habit the team had created. It gets a little worse though. Jackson entered the game with four days rest, which you can probably guess, is when Jackson pitches the worst. On four days rest, in 2019, Jackson has pitched four times and allowed hitters to go 5-for-14 with one home run and four runs scored, a .357 batting average against. In order, from zero days rest to three days rest against Jackson, batters have hit: .329, .253, .211 and .185. That holds up throughout his career too, where, in order, hitters have hit: .302, .309, .194, .258, .339. Not the best usage of Jackson, or at least the best matchup to reduce the most amount of risk, especially when the Braves willingly used Sean Newcomb in that game. Newcomb had held righties to a slash line of just .230/.306/.393, which drops to .217/.285/.363 when pitching with no one on base. Say the Braves went straight to Newcomb and win that game. It becomes a three-game sweep and they don't allow the Cardinals to do what they did in games four and five.

Other than that one decision, this series seemingly came down to a hanging pitch or an outcome so impossible to predict because the data suggests that it shouldn’t have happened, like Foltynewicz’s inability to hit corners in game five. Game four came down to the fact that Molina got a hold of a fastball over the plate that tied the game. He later got ahold of another ball just enough to send it deep enough to score a run. Otherwise, the Braves seemingly were in control of the series outside of these three cases. Interesting how, in a series with thousands of inputs, comes down to three results, two almost impossible to predict.

Yankees-Twins Breakdown: Twins Failed to Minimize Opportunity and Faced the Consequences

          

  

     Every week, Greg Bedard, arguably the best Patriots writer out there, writes an article breaking down the Patriots game from the previous week. He runs through the film, goes through each play and then picks apart what when right and wrong and highlights some top plays that led to the outcome of the game. His coverage inspired me to do so for the MLB 2019 playoffs.

            Doing a thorough analysis of each series requires a little more than just skimming through the box scores and deciding X went wrong or X went right and therefore decided the series, so in doing so, it might take a little longer than the next day to do so for each series. That is my hope, to get to each series. Baseball is a little different than football too. Although formation is important in baseball, a series is less about the angle a defender took to a ball or location of a pitch than it is for a football game. Most of the analysis feels like it will come from certain appearances or usage than a pitch. Without further ado, let’s break down the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins, a series that ended in a Yankees sweep.

            New York Yankees vs Minnesota Twins

            In this sweep, the Twins seemed like no match for the Yankees. They won each game by four or more runs and utterly dominated games one and two with their offense. It doesn’t take a rocket science to understand that the Yankees went into the series with an elite offense, outranking at least in the top five in most offensive categories and above the league average in every category. That carried into the postseason. With postseason teams averaging four games in the post season, the Yankees played only three and outhit the average in some of the most important categories (23 runs vs. playoff average 16, .293/.403/.525 slash line to a playoff average of .239/.313/.409). So, the Yankees held the advantage over the Twins just by stepping into the batter’s box.

            What interests me though, is how bad the Twins’ pitching, who ranked as one of the better staffs during the regular season, pitched throughout the series. They had the worst pitching out of any playoff team, ranking last in ERA (7.56), last in BAA (.293), 5.67 walks per game vs a playoff average 3.25, and 7.67 runs allowed per game vs. a playoff average four. I chose these stats because they create an even playing field for all teams. If I compared total runs against, the Nationals gave up the most, but have also played the most games in the playoffs. Same with strikeouts, with the Twins striking out the least out of any divisional series team but also playing the least amount of games. The Twins bullpen was atrocious, which was surprising due to how good some of those pitchers were during the regular season. For instance, Tyler Duffey allowed four runs in just 1 2/3 innings after just 16 in 57.2 innings during the regular season (2.50 ERA). Zack Littell could only get one out in two appearances, allowing two runs after pitching to a 2.68 ERA in 37 innings and 29 appearances during the regular season.

            One matchup stuck out like a sore thumb in which I think explains what went wrong the most for the Twins in this series. In game one, down by only one run in going into the bottom of the sixth, so a pretty influential part of the game, the Twins went to Cody Stashak out of the bullpen. Stashak wasn’t the worst pitcher for that situation at first glance. In the regular season, Stashak had a 3.24 ERA, 3.01 FIP, and gave up only 0.4 walks per nine and struck out nine batter per nine. He had sported a 1.93 ERA in his last nine appearances (9.1 innings pitched during that span) while striking out 12. However, batters tend to hit Stashak hard. Batters hit Stashak at a .289 rate with 12 of 29 opponents’ hitting going for extra bases (.475 slugging). The Yankees had hit Stashak the hardest out of any team other team in baseball too. In only two innings of work against the Yankees, Stashak had given up four hits to the Yankees. Makes sense that the best hitting team would give Stashak troubles. To make matters worse, Stashak had troubles against the top half of opponent’s lineups. Against Stashak, opponent’s number one batter hit .273 with a .455 slugging percentage in 11 at-bats. Fourth and fifth hitters went a combined 11-for-27 with four doubles, one triple and one home run against Stashak. Who do the Twins use him against? DJ LeMahieu, the Yankees’ number one batter, who hits a home run to dead center field, followed another homer by Brett Gardner of Stashak to break the game open again at 7-4 Yankees. The Twins would not get any closer for the rest of the game.

            The same thing happened in game two when the Twins brought in Duffey to stop the bleeding going into the third inning, in which he then gave up four runs on two hits and one walk in a seven-run inning for the Yankees. Duffey was worse on the road than at home throughout the season and even if that doesn’t necessarily mean causation, because Duffey does have good numbers in many different situations, including in high leverage situations, it shows that the Twins’ bullpen just couldn’t execute against the best hitting team in baseball. Duffey should have been better statistically, but failed to locate pitches, giving the Yankees too much opportunity to strike. Even if the pitching staff minimized all the risk they could, their manager didn’t reduce risk enough on his end. He put his pitchers in some situations that come with added risk. Against the best hitting team in baseball, it makes sense that any opponent would have to minimize any opportunities for the Yankees to get ahead. The Twins failed at that and it resulted in a sweep.