Game Five of the World Series was about players. In a postseason where we’ve spent endless amounts of time talking about the managers and the umpires, we finally got a game in which the players took total control. From Chase Utley‘s three-run homer in the first inning through Ryan Madson inducing a game-saving double play in the ninth, there was example after example of players making plays, a dearth of mistakes by the non-playing personnel, and when it was over, at least one more game to play.
The drama snuck up on all of us last night. After the Phillies chased A.J. Burnett out in the third inning, giving Cliff Lee a five-run lead, there was an air of inevitability to the proceedings. After he pitched out of a first-and-third, one-out spot in the fifth, allowing just a single run, Lee banged out the next two innings in just 27 pitches, cutting off the path to a Yankee comeback that entailed the Phillies needing to get a lot of outs from their shaky bullpen. When Utley and Raul Ibañez buried Phil Coke even deeper in the Yankee pen with solo homers in the bottom of the seventh, you could hear America flipping to the fourth quarter of the Saints/Falcons game.
The Yankees, though, had a bit more in them. They’d been making better contact against Lee then they did in Game One, and when Lee was let down a bit by his defense in the eighth-Jimmy Rollins was unable to gun down Johnny Damon on a playable grounder-that greater hittability led to two quick runs and his own exit. Lee’s performance might not have worked on a different night-he gave up a number of hard-hit gappers-but with the eight runs in his pocket, it got the job done. He’d gotten the Phillies to the six-out mark, which is about as much as you can ever hope for.
In the spot where they’d been failing, the Phillies pen came up big. Chan Ho Park cleaned up Lee’s mess, getting three outs-including a sacrifice fly-on 11 quick pitches. The extra run set up a save situation and 15 minutes of “who’s coming in?” discussions, ones that only ended when Charlie Manuel summoned Ryan Madson, not Brad Lidge, for the ninth. The decision to get his best reliever into the game was laudable, and perhaps foreseeable after the choice of Park to pitch the eighth. But then Madson fell behind the first three batters he faced, allowing a double to Jorge Posada, a single to Hideki Matsui, and going to 2-0 on Derek Jeter.
The Phillies are still a significant underdog to win this World Series, maybe as high as 7-1. If they do, though, there will be any number of heroes, any number of moments to remember. The 2-0 pitch to Jeter may end up forgotten, but it shouldn’t be. Madson was a bad pitch away from turning what had been a blowout into a game the Phillies would be fortunate to win. If Jeter reaches, the Yankees have their 2-3-4 hitters up with no one out and the tying run on base. The Phillies had their best reliever in the game and their second-best one toweling off. There was nowhere else to go.
Madson threw a 94 mph fastball down the middle, a cripple pitch if there ever was one. Jeter took it, which is proper procedure for facing a pitcher in that spot. He wants to get on base, wants to let the pressure build on Madson, wants to make him work into a tough situation. Now, at 2-1, Jeter had given a little ground, and that ground would cost him. Madson’s next pitch was also a fastball, this a bit better located, in on the hands, and Jeter chopped it towards shortstop. The single biggest hole in Jeter’s exceptional offensive game is that he’s a right-handed ground-ball hitter, and as such, is someone prone to hitting into double plays. The only thing that he can’t do in that spot is hit into a double play, as it would wipe out the tying run at the plate.
Madson beat Jeter. He threw a strike on 2-0 and then a better strike on 2-1, and seconds later, the Phillies were off the ledge, as well as off the potential Lidge. Johnny Damon would add some drama by working back from 0-2 to knock a single on the seventh pitch he saw-reminiscent of his at-bat against Lidge Sunday night-but Madson got ahead quickly on Mark Teixeira and ended the game with his best pitch, a changeup.
The Yankees had gone from dead to damn near a favorite to win the game, and in two pitches, Madson put them away again and gave the Phillies a chance, not a great one, but a chance to win the World Series. When you start the night down 3-1, that’s all you can hope for.
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A.J. Burnett didn’t allow six runs in two innings because the Yankees started him on three days’ rest. He allowed six runs in two innings because he’s A.J. Burnett, and he sometimes shows up with nothing, and the Phillies will kill you if you show up with nothing. Burnett couldn’t put Jimmy Rollins away to start the game, eventually giving up a single after two 1-2 foul balls. Two pitches later-a hit batsman and a home run-the game was 3-1. Shane Victorino may have bunted at the pitch that hit him, and he may have been in the strike zone when he was hit, but there was enough disagreement on both points that you have to let it go. Burnett wasn’t able to get ahead of hitters to the extent that he did last Thursday, and he wasn’t getting as many swing-and-misses or called strikes. None of these things are necessarily related to his being used on short rest, and the rush to declare starting him a mistake-and to project Burnett’s failure onto Andy Pettitte‘s expected start-is hasty. The surprise isn’t that the Phillies smacked Burnett around; it’s that he pitched so well against them last week.
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Chase Utley can play a little bit. He now has five homers in five World Series games, and will get at least one more game to break the tie for the record. John Perrotto has more on Utley today; I’ll just note that maybe it’s time for the baseball world to recognize that he, and not the MVP Award winners on either side of him, is the best player in the Phillies’ infield.
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Alex Rodriguez did it again, driving in the game’s first run and then two more during the team’s abortive comeback in the seventh. Had Jeter managed to make just one out, or Teixeira found his way down to first base, he would have been batting with a chance to tie the game or even to win the World Series, and it’s a measure of how far the story on him has come that every fan in the park knew exactly when he was coming up, and was terrified about the prospect of facing him with their season on the line. Utley may end up as the World Series MVP no matter what happens, but Rodriguez is the Yankees’ top candidate at the moment.
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Derek Jeter is a truly great player who has had an amazing career, but that was a devastating swing of the bat last night, and it’s not that unusual for him. Jeter hit into a huge double play that killed a rally in Game Two of the ALCS, two in the first three innings of Game Three of the 2007 Division Series (in a game the Yankees won) and another in the shutout loss that ended that series. Many of my memories of Jeter are of him making two outs with one swing, but somehow getting praised because he did so with high effort. That DP last night was worse than just about any strikeout you can imagine.
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Phil Coke’s four-batter, two-homer outing was critical in retrospect, and it served to justify Joe Girardi‘s decision to elevate Damaso Marte into high-leverage roles this October. However, Coke was the right choice last night at that spot in the lineup and with the Yankees down by four runs; he simply didn’t get the job done in a very loud, very costly fashion. The Yankees may not need him the rest of the Series-Marte and Mariano Rivera will be used to get Ryan Howard in any game-relevant situation.
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Rodriguez will not win Series MVP hitting .222. Even by the 'good' measurements, Damon, Jeter, CC and Mo are better candidates.
The "3 days' rest" stats your interns came up with last week were pretty bad. If either AJ or CC had tossed a gem on 3 days' rest, you'd be crowing about that. AJ's start doesn't prove anything, but why pretend it's not the clearly bad single data point that it is?
1. Cliff Lee (.593)
2. Alex Rodriguez (.345)
3. Chase Utley (.302)
4. Hideki Matsui (.300)
5. Johnny Damon (.298)
7. Mariano Rivera (.232)
9. CC Sabathia (.132)
35. Derek Jeter (-.084)
Derek Jeter is really a better candidate for MVP?
These figures are based on how a players good and bad plays at the plate or on the mound actually contributed to his team's likelihood of winning (available at Fangraphs). Are they perfect? No (defense isn't included for one), but only someone suffering from myopia could possibly claim that Derek Jeter has been more valuable to the Yankees in the World Series than Alex Rodriguez, just because of his empty batting average.
Of course, Jeter's down on the goat list behind Burnett and Coke.
Utley should probably end up the MVP even if the Yankees win the series. He's been a one man wrecking crew.
He's not Bob Gibson. We all get that. He's also a pretty darn sight above average for his career. So while I can buy your notion that he stunk "because he's AJ Burnett", thought it is debatable, the notion that we should be so surprised he pitched well in game 2 is one that holds no water. Maybe it's also because "he's AJ Burnett," however.
Last night's performance by Burnett hardly proves that my opinion is the correct one. But I think Girardi's strategy takes a big risk where conservatism was called for and maximizes the chances of the Phillies delivering a knockout punch while they're behind on every judge's card.
I think this is overly pessimistic, from the Phillies' standpoint.
Granted those figures come out of midair, but if valid, it would show Philly to have a 15.75% chance of winning two in a row. More like 6-ish to one, but distant.
If I'm wrong, it's because the number's high.
I think 35% is not low under the circumstances.
Hamels on full rest is a mid-level ace, just like he was when his BABIP tricked people into thinking he was the cool-as-ice best pitcher in baseball, and just like he was when his BABIP tricked people into thinking he was the mentally distant mid-rotation guy.
The original BB, K, HR as the only DIPS hypothesis by McCracken has been revised to show BB, K, GB vs. FB as the only DIPS. Pitchers control batted ball rates (though not really line drive rate I have found).
And while it may or may not be true that HR/FB is a sustainable and therefore reliable stat over short bursts, it is absolutely true that a power hitter will hit more homers per FB than a non-power hitter. The Yankees are a lineup made up almost exclusively of power hitters or at least guys with power. The statistical leveling that comes from Jack Wilson's fly balls isn't in the mix here.
So net-net, you have a flyball pithcer who hasn't had location command going up against a power hitting lineup. I'm as big a SABR afficionado as anybody but you do at some point need to take your head out of the stats book and look at what's right in front of your eyes.
I've been researching the Hamels issue ad nauseum for a while, and as I may do another article on it, I don't want to spill the beans here but basically-- the location issue is just WRONG. He's leaving as many balls over the plate as before, he's missing the strike zone as much as before.
Hamels is not a flyball pitcher. His GB% is 43.6% this year; league average is 45%. Of course, that's GB per Ball In Play and NOT per batter. His above average K-rate means he actually allows LESS balls into the air than the average pitcher does per nine innings. Average flyball rate, low ball in play rate-- not a flyball pitcher. That's a good thing too, because the Yankees and Yankee Stadium certainly combined to allow more away pitchers' flyballs into the seats.
I'm watching the games just like you are. My nose is not in any stat book while the World Series is on-- trust me! I see bloopers landing for hits in 2009 and saw line drives landing in gloves in 2008. And I also watch the game enough to know that most balls over the heart of the plate are fouled off are missed anyway. More of them are hit hard than balls on the corners certainly, but try keeping gameday open while the game is going on and check the location of every pitch, not just the pitches that were hit hard. You'll see how many "opportunities" are not taken even by the best hitters.
Your basic premise is that "nothing has changed". That's wrong and the answer's right there in your numbers. 43% GB ratio overall, but 37% since September 1. I didn't do the math but obviously that means it was higher than 43 before September 1. That's not immaterial. If anything, the anomaly isn't that Hamel's has been touched often in postseason, rather it's that he somehow avoided the longball much of September when his FB rate spiked (and has thus far stayed there).
Nothing can happen to prove you or me right at this point. But rather than me "reverse engineering," I'd instead argue that you're hardwired into your conclusions at this point and are doing exactly that.
I'm not hardwired into any conclusions. I use the same rules in analyzing pitchers. I look at strikeouts, walks, and batted ball rates except that I regress line drive rate drastically because it has no year-to-year correlation in my testing. I check for large discrepancies in HR/OFFB and BABIP if there are large differences between peripheral based ERAs and actual ERAs, as well as large discrepancies in pitching with men on and with bases empty, to see if any of those large discrepancies hold in large sample sizes and consider whether there is something reasonable to explain it (i.e. Tim Wakefield is a knuckleballer, his BABIP should be low). For Hamels, you can check my previous article from two weeks ago and see that I also checked a variety of other things.
Hamels has not been all that good in the postseason this year, but it is not a large sample size. His velocity is not down, and his walk rate has not spiked dramatically. There is no reason to assume that the Cole Hamels' line that you would get on November 5, 2009 would look so much more like the numbers he put up during October 2009 as it would look like the average of number he has put up during 2007-2009, the period during which he has put up similar peripheral statistics.
FA-X
2007: 3.4
2008: 1.9
2009: 3.5
FA-Z
2007: 12.3
2008: 12.0
2009: 12.5
CH-X
2007: 7.5
2008: 6.2
2009: 7.5
CH-Z
2007: 7.7
2008: 7.9
2009: 8.2
CU-X
2007: 0.3
2008: -1.7
2009: -0.3
CU-Z
2007: -2.9
2008: -4.0
2009: -3.8
They all look like similar numbers to me, but I have no idea what the variance is on these numbers to know if it's significant. I will say this, though-- if his pitches had less movement, hitters would swing and miss at them less (they have not whiffed less in 2009, slightly more actually) or hit more home runs against them (they hit fewer in the regular season) or hit them into the ground less (they have not). The primary difference in Hamels 2008 and 2009 statistics is singles on line drives and flyballs to the outfield in 2009 rather than line outs to outfielders and flyouts to outfielders in 2008. The same percent (or slightly fewer) balls contacted have even reached the outfield.
While I understand less movement would suggest swinging and missing less, less movement would also suggest that batters could hit the ball more squarely.
I don't know how many GIDPs we've seen in this series, but I know they've been rare. Two K/FB teams, across the board.
They weren't quite in an area where a walk was as bad as a homer (i.e. the 9th inning), but it was pretty close.