Sandy, Don't Re-Sign Daniel Murphy!

Back in 2010, the Rockies' Ubaldo Jimenez, up until then a .500 pitcher with a four ERA, began unraveling the Colorado mound curse. The Dominican righty entered the All-Star break an untouchable 15-1, 2.20.

I remember listening around that time to a baseball reporter -- either Buster Olney or Tim Kurkjian, but in either case a respected and knowledgeable scribe -- discuss at length the changes Jimenez had made in his approach and execution, and the challenge of hitting his mid-90s heat and quality secondary pitches. The reporter extolled the mechanical changes Jimenez had made that had catapulted him to present and future glory.

Had he entered free agency right there, teams would have been waving Woodrow Wilsons at him.

Very nice.

And then the rest of Jimenez's career happened. He went 4-7, 3.80 in the second half, and has authored a 50-58, 4.43 resume since, allowing nearly a runner-and-a-half per inning.

Which brings us to Daniel Murphy, a perfectly good second baseman known for intelligent play and a nice batting average, but not much power or defense. Since his return from injury in 2011, he has produced 13.3 offensive wins against replacement in five years. That's a solid starter. (Baseball Reference says he's given back three wins with the glove during that time, but we're dubious about defensive metrics.)

In the wake of Murphy's sudden liftoff in the playoffs -- a record seven homers in six straight games against the best pitchers the NL has to offer (excluding his own staff) -- the narrative has turned. Suddenly we're scouring Mets lore for the source of this outbreak, and the slight increase in power. (He hit 14 homers this year, one more than in 2013, and recorded a .449 SLG, one point higher than in 2011. The small uptick in muscle accompanied a small downtick in batting safely, resulting in a fairly typical Murphy season.)

Several sources have documented that hitting guru Kevin Long rejiggered Murphy's setup, keeping his hands lower, bending his legs deeper and starting his leg lift earlier. Perhaps as a result, he popped eight home runs in August and September, and then seven more in nine games before entering the World Series. The implication, of course, is that the slugging is now a Murphy trait.

And maybe it is, but that's not the way to bet. Daniel Murphy enters free agency as a 31-year-old future former-keystoner. It's far more likely that we've seen his best than the beginning of something new. One front office wag speculated to Sports Illustrated that his activities in the NLCS had raised his price to five years/$75 million.

To the Mets, that should sound like Bernie Madoff with a stock tip.

Sandy Alderson now has five sterling starters and a golden closer, all 27 or under, around whom to build for future World Series runs. While a $10 million, 280-pound boulder comes off the payroll, the lineup is still wanting, particularly if the straw that stirred this season's drink, Yoenis Cespedes, seeks Bartolo Colon's weight in gold. One way or another, the Mets need to pony up for a reliable middle-of-the-lineup hitter or they could suffocate on 2-1 losses again the way they did through July.

For a franchise with limited resources, a host of arbitration raises to contend with and that one big need, Daniel Murphy on a long, fat contract is not the prescription, particularly if Wilmer Flores can cover the keystone.

Absent a natural replacement, should the Mets re-sign Muphy? Sure, for three years at a reasonable price, while they look for reinforcements as he ages. But breaking the bank for Daniel Murphy? Please. His leg kick isn't that much earlier.

You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

Baseball: you've gotta love it:

• The first pitch of the first game thrown to the home team turns into a four-base error generously credited as a the first inside-the-park home run in roughly a century of World Series. 
• The centerfield defensive replacement and the backup shortstop combine to produce the go-ahead run.
• A Gold Glove first baseman makes a miscue that allows a run to score and appears to cost his team the game. 
• The surprise fourth starter pitches three innings of relief and is the star of the game.
• A pitcher who allowed 24 free passes in 194 innings walks three batters in two innings to lose the game.
• A red hot batter with a record seven home runs in his last six contests off the best hurlers in baseball comes up empty in two games against Edinson Volquez, Chris Young, Luke Hochevar and Johnny Cueto.
• A Cy Young contender allows four runs and three walks in five innings.
• A struggling starter hurls a complete game two-hitter.
• The controversial leadoff hitter with a sub-.300 OBP breaks the record for postseason hits with at least two more games to play.
• The TV crew loses power to their truck so the lords of baseball delay the game while fans in attendance wonder what's going on.
• The vaunted starting staff that was the linchpin of one team's World Series run gives up seven runs in 11 innings. Known for their blazing heat and confounding secondary pitches, they punch out just five batters.

And all that tells us nothing about Game 3. Play ball!

World Series Preview Nonsense

In my newspaper Tuesday; in your newspaper too, most likely; indeed in newspapers across America; is a World Series preview. It is written in that time-honored tradition of matching up players from the two teams at each position and assigning one team or the other an edge.

This is a time-honored tradition just as hitting a woman over the head with a club and dragging her to your cave by the hair is a time-honored tradition. By that I mean, it's obsolete, makes no sense, is counterproductive,  stupid and makes the receiver's head hurt without enlightening them.

Unless Daniel Murphy and Ben Zobrist are going to line up against each other across the line of scrimmage, the idea that one of them is a superior second baseman is irrelevant. (Besides that, the AP listed Murphy as the better player. Zobrist produced an .809 OPS and 2 WAR, according to Baseball Reference. Murphy hit for a .770 OPS and 1.4 WAR. Evidently the last six games are more relevant than the entire season, according to them.)

In addition, it weighs each position equally, as if the gaping yaw between Lorenzo Cain and Juan Lagares is equal to the slight edge David Wright has over Mike Moustakas this year.

Then, it examines the starting staffs and adds a point to the team with the superior rotation. Forty percent of the game gets the Mets a credit equal to having a marginally better DH. The same for bullpens, managers and benches. Defense and speed don't seem to get captured at all, except in the player match-ups.

It's all for naught in a short series anyway, but if we're going to read a World Series preview, could it at least make sense?

The Projector Was Broken: Pre-Season Projections Got Everything Wrong

History will little note, nor long remember, what we say here." -- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address. Voted worst prediction in history.

In February, we examined the PECOTA projections for MLB 2015. Based on everything the computers could crunch prior to the start of the season, this is how Baseball Prospectus stacked up all the teams for the 2015 season. Remember that the projections can't predict trades and injuries. They can't predict much else, as you'll see.

The projections had Washington, St. Louis and the Dodgers winning the NL divisions with the Mets, Giants, Marlins and Padres competing for the Wild Cards. That's two of three division winners and two of four Wild Card contestants.

PECOTA saw the Cubs, Pirates and Braves as .500 teams. To that we say: ha!

On the other hand, it correctly tabbed Philly, Cincinnati and Colorado as bottom feeders.

In other words, the fancy computers with their gigagoogles knew about as much as you did with your biases and half-baked opinions. Not exactly an endorsement for SABR membership. About the only thing we can say about the projection is that it recognized improvement in Flushing.

It gets worse. In the junior circuit, PECOTA struck out looking on a fastball down the middle. It identified last place Boston and Detroit as division kings and named the Of Anaheims as the best team in the league. Its Wild Card competitors were the woeful Mariners and A's, along with Tampa. In other words, oh-for-six.

PECOTA projected the top teams in the Central -- Kansas City and Minnesota, who finished a combined 32 games over .500 -- as the AL's two worst teams, with a combined 141-183 record. It did the same for Texas and Houston in the West.

That's as stinkin' wrong as you can get.

In the East, PECOTA projected the Blue Jays a couple of games over .500 and the Yankees a couple of games under. About the only thing the projection system nailed was that all the machinations in Chicago still left the White Sox as poseurs.

In other words, all the fancy algorithms don't know squat. A blind squirrel could have picked one of the division winners. This is the very point I made in this post  eight months ago.

It's not that the seamheads are stupid, or have nothing to add to the conversation, or to our understanding of the game, quite the opposite. It's that baseball is a crazy game that no one can predict, project, prognosticate, portend, prophesize, augur, foretell, forecast or in any way anticipate. That's what we love about it.

So let's all, all of us including the great scientific analysts of the horsehide, just take a chill pill and dial down the...um...what's the word...?

World Series: It's a Tossup

"Predicting the future is easy. Getting it right is the hard part."

Just as you predicted, the Mets and Royals meet for the World Series title. At season's start, projection systems rated the Mets above average. Indeed, Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system had NY winning the first Wild Card. Alas, it also pegged KC 20 games under .500.

Since those projections were made, each team added some pieces. The Royals nabbed Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist, and over to Flushing went Kelly Johnson, Juan Uribe and most notably Yoenis Cespedes. But they are basically the teams that started the season. Particularly in Kansas City's case, it's hard to argue that their trade deadline pitching acquisition (4-7, 4.76) is responsible for their success.

So if you had this quinella in March, please email me immediately with this week's winning Powerball numbers. One hundred dollars on these two teams to meet in the World Series would have yielded you $78,400. Place your bets!

Which leads to the question, who has the edge? Will this be the first championship for a team since 1985 (Royals over Cards) or 1986 (Mets over Red Sox)?

Who Will Win
The answer, as usual, is, "who knows?" It's a seven-game series. The Phillies took five of seven from the Cubs this year. Whatever else you read here is simply subtext.

That said, the Mets and Royals are both acceptable representatives of their leagues, the Royals because they were the best team wire to wire and the Mets because they took off once Cespedes joined the squad and Matz returned from injury. And Wilmer Flores cried.

The dominant narrative is the Mets' power arms against the Royals' broad skill set and experience. That's a simplification, of course, but it is true that New York is much less balanced then Kansas City. Should any two of the Mets' hurlers stumble, it would likely spell disaster for them. You can't fall behind early against the Royals, especially if Ned Yost has "accidentally" given Ryan Madson the wrong directions to the ballpark.

The Edge Goes To...
Starting rotation is the big edge the Mets have, and much is being made of that. But that would be true of any team against KC because they are purposely constructed backwards on the mound. No team is more lethal than KC if their starters can muddle through two-thirds of the game with a lead. This strategy has worked for two seasons and is particularly effective in the playoffs, given the short leashes starters generally have now. Ignore that at your peril.

One more thing about the Mets' rotation. It is over-rated right now. It is over-rated because its youth and promise account for some of its allure, but the World Series is being played this week. We're all projecting out what deGrom, Harvey, Syndergaard and Matz could be, and the possibilities make us drool (particularly when we recall that Zack Wheeler will join them next year.)  But the Thor who will face Lorenzo Cain had a 3.25 ERA and a susceptibility to gopher balls.

I've debunked much of the home advantage in the playoffs in this post. (Spoiler alert: it comes into play in a seven-game series only if it goes the distance.) But in this particular case, there is a slight edge to Kansas City. No team is woven more snuggly to its home ballpark than the Royals, who value speed and athleticism over pure power in their wide-gapped stadium. Of course, Citi Field is no homer dome either, so some of that small advantage is offset.

There's always talk about it, but there's no evidence that experience is of any value, particularly now that both teams have run the playoff gauntlet. It is worth observing that no deficit appears insurmountable to the Royals, and whether that's a function of team psychology or skill set, it's a good quality to have. 

Rust, on the other hand, is measurably detrimental to playoff teams. The Mets will have spent nearly a week waiting for the Series to begin by the time they get underway Tuesday. Long rest can help an older team with a key player hobbled by injury and a clear ace they would like to line up for three starts. But none of those advantages accrue to the Mets.

Both teams are managed by men who appear to do a great job molding coherent units out of disparate parts. Terry Collins's in-game strategy gets the edge over Ned Yost's because everyone's in-game strategy gets the edge over Ned Yost's. 

Again, absolutely anything can happen on the road to four wins. Noise is just so loud at that level that a few missed notes here or there might not matter. That said, the Royals have some small advantages and I would rate them slightly more likely to win their first World Series in 30 years. Then again, Al Weiss...

Blue Jays-Royals: Forget the Caricature

If you were drawing a cartoon of the President of the United States of America, you'd give him dumbo ears, a long face with a Rhode Island-sized forehead and a mole that nearly blots out his nose. There's some truth in the caricature, but it's blown out of proportion.

It's easy to fall into the same trap with the Royals-Blue Jays series. You will hear a lot of pitching versus hitting about this match-up. For sure, the Blue Jays were baseball's best team on offense, mashing 232 home runs. And it's true the Royals flash leather, particularly in the outfield, and boast a shutdown bullpen.

But it's a much more nuanced series. For one, these are not the 2014 hitless wonder Royals. That team called three infield singles a rally. This team boasts six above-average starters with the bat and the same basepath scorchers who ran opposing teams ragged last season. Three Royals bopped 20+ home runs.

At the same time, KC's starting rotation is more like five set-up men for the vaunted bullpen. Absent James Shields, last year's ace, its ERA has jumped 30 points.

On the other side of the ledger, the Blue Jays are more than wallbangers. Their moundsmen finished fifth best in the AL, anchored by Cy Young candidate David Price and supported by Marcus Stroman, who posted a 1.67 ERA in 27 frames following return from injury. The bullpen of Roberto Osuna, Aaron Sanchez and Liam Hendricks (Brett Cecil and his sub-one WHIP is on the shelf) gave opponents fits, posting a 137 ERA+.

The real contrast between these two teams, besides the admitted difference in home run power, is the bench. Kansas City's cupboard is largely bare. It contains two defensive replacement/speedsters -- Terrence Gore and Jarrod Dyson, and that's it. As a result, manager Ned Yost simply prints out a pdf of his daily lineup each night. Toronto, by contrast, platoons Chris Colabello and Justin Smoak at first, with the backup on any given night serving as first bench option.

The Royals are more narrowly suited to their home park but the Blue Jays have the superior roster. Both teams have shown grit by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory -- the Royals in Game Three and the Blue Jays in the series. There's no telling which starving fan base gets rewarded with a World Series appearance -- and that's the way we like it.

How's That Home Field Working For You?

"There's nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a great big fight." Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, 1988

Oh, that home field advantage! It has catapulted two Wild Cards into the division series and four teams into their League Championship playoffs.

Wait, what's that? It hasn't?

• Road warriors swept the Wild Card play-ins games.
• Road teams have captured exactly half the Division Series wins, not counting tonight's Mets-Dodgers finale. If the home nine wins in L.A., the "advantage" will amount to 5% (a 10-9 record or .526 winning percentage), exactly as noted a fortnight ago in this space.
• Last licks played a role in exactly none of the contests. The team ahead after eight innings won every time.

And while we're inconveniently deflating the long-held myths that have passed for conventional wisdom in baseball, let's examine the myth of the critical first game.

If the Dodgers win their tilt with the Mets tonight, the Game One victor from every series will be watching the League Championship Series on television. Oh-for-four. That's the definition of critical, all right.

Finally, there are those mental calculations people do to predict who will win a series. Specifically, let's look at the ridiculous strategy of comparing pitchers and just assigning the win to the ace.

I calculate that the eight teams in the Division Series would have considered these pitchers aces:
Jacob deGrom - Mets
Clayton Kershaw - Dodgers
Zack Greinke - Dodgers
David Price - Blue Jays
Cole Hamels - Rangers
Jake Arrieta - Cubs
Dallas Keuchel - Astros
Johnny Cueto - Royals

We're having a plumbing problem here. I'm not sure the Cardinals would consider John Lackey their ace and you could make a case for the Cubs' Jon Lester. You could certainly argue against Johnny Cueto, but he was brought to K.C. for just that purpose. So that's three Johns at issue.

Let's see how their teams fared when they pitched:
Cueto - 2-0
Price - 1-1
Keuchel - 1-1
Hamels - 1-1
Kershaw - 1-1
Greinke - 1-0
deGrom - 1-0
Arrieta - 1-0

Greinke and deGrom will split tonight's game, so that's a wash. All told, the team sending its ace to the hill went 10-5. That's superb. It's probably unusual. But in any case, it's hardly automatic. You would love 2-1 odds in your favor for the deciding game, but every third time you would lose.

These are still uselessly small samples. But the point is that when you count something as an automatic, as many people do with the #1 arm, the first game winner and the home team, and it turns out to be a 5% advantage, that's a bit of a myth-buster.

And if you know that's a small sample size, then you know enough to examine a large enough sample -- like playoff games all time. In other words, you examine the facts. And that's when you stop predicting games based on who's got the shorter commute.

The Head Ball Coach Quit On His Team

Here in South Carolina, the state deemed too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum, we're finally over the cop killing of an unarmed black man, the mass murder of nine parishioners in their church and historic flooding that closed more than 500 roads from Columbia to Charleston.

Those stories ended yesterday when the head ball coach suddenly retired. The University of South Carolina, like a lot of southern colleges, is a football team with a university attached. The main purpose of its alumni is to buy tickets to football games.

Now that Steve Spurrier has stepped down without warning, everyone connected with the state, and with SEC football, has spent the past two days lionizing him and his 10-year tenure at the helm of the Gamecocks.

Undoubtedly, Spurrier has lifted the 'Cocks to new heights, including three straight 11-2 seasons in the brutal SEC, wins over arch-rival Clemson and prestigious bowl victories. He has recruited half a dozen of the 10 best players the team has ever produced,. including Jadeveon Clowney, Connor Shaw and Marcus Lattimore. And he retires with the most coaching wins at what locals sadly call "USC." He put the program on the college football map.

What no one seems to have noticed is that the head ball coach has quit on his team. He said it himself: he's leaving because he was frustrated by the 7-6 showing last year and thought the team would be better than the league cellar-dwellers it appears to be this year. He doesn't like the losing and so he has quit.

Just like that. Middle of the season. No heir apparent. Facing a string of tough SEC games.

Imagine if a player decided to quit on the team because it stunk. What would the sports media, the people of South Carolina and Gamecock nation be saying? He lacks character. He's a quitter. He's immature. I'm pretty sure Steve Spurrier would have had some cutting remarks for a juvenile outburst like that.

Is the inventor of Fun 'n' Gun allowed to act like a crybaby just because he's got a legacy? If the 'Cocks, already dealing with the upheaval on the field and in the classroom, go winless in the conference this year, what does that do to recruiting?

The local newspaper is selling Spurrier's departure as selfless, allowing the anonymous assistant coach who succeeds him (without any chance of succeeding) an opportunity to turn the club around. It's plump with speculation about the next big name coach, proposing that South Carolina could lure Bob Stoops from Oklahoma or Mark D'Antoni from Michigan State. They assert that the 11-2 records that Spurrier engineered three-to-five years ago have set the bar higher and will draw a bigger name.

Only someone who has never been to Columbia, SC and is not paying attention to the current state of the team could make such a lame suggestion, and yet residents of that squalid town are the only ones doing it.

No, Spurrier has dropped the team on its head in the middle of the season. He took his ball and went home. He has left South Carolina football high and dry, even after 18 inches of rain. It's as if everyone is wearing a visor -- and has it pulled down over their eyes.

...And E-Manager

Following up on yesterday's post about the Utley case, after charging the ump, the replay and the league with errors, today we add Don Mattingly to the party for a grand slam of misjudgments.

When his two-game suspension was announced, Utley promptly appealed, automatically suspending the suspension. Reports asserted that the suits offered Utley a one-game punishment if he'd drop the appeal -- and he took out that offer with a hard slide too.

So with his star second baseman available for duty at Citi Field, where he has hit well, against Matt Harvey, whom he has hit well, manager Don Mattingly sat Utley for Game Three of the series in favor of inferior performers.

While Chase Utley's lawyer was gathering evidence to dismiss the suspension, his manager made it moot by imposing the equivalent of one. And because Stephen Matz, a southpaw, starts Game Four, left-handed hitting Utley will sit again.

Making it, conveniently, a two-game suspension.

So why do we need a hearing?

E-Ump, E-Replay, E-League

What do you call it when everyone gets every possible decision wrong? A grand slam? Taking the collar? E-ump, E-replay, E-league?

That's the dumpster fire that was Chase Utley's leg-breaking slide into Ruben Tejada at second base in Game 2 of the Mets-Dodgers series.

In case you snuck out of the country for a week to a place without a connection to the rest of the world - let's say you were enjoying North Korea's independence celebrations with that nation's inmates -- here's the rundown: With runners on first and third and one out, Utley slid well wide of second on a grounder behind the bag to bust up a double play.

Under any reading of the rules, the slide was illegal. He wasn't aiming for the base but for the fielder and never came in contact with the bag. He should have been ruled out for interference, irrespective of Tejada's broken fibula.

It was also clearly not malicious. Chase Utley has a 15-year record of hard-nosed but principled play. His efforts helped a run score. He deserves the benefit of the doubt, of which there shouldn't be any.

The ump ruled Utley out on a force, but the replay demonstrated that Tejada, because of his awkward positioning, missed the bag. The anonymous replay umpire from behind the curtain in New York overruled the call but didn't propose interference.

No one seems to know what powers the Great Oz in New York has, but someone should have sent Utley off the field. Indeed, they should have ruled the batter out too, because the illegal slide prevented any attempt at turning two. That would have ended the inning and negated the run.

Then, to compound the mistakes, Joe Torre, now an MLB mucky-muck, suspended Utley for two critical games -- maybe the last two of L.A.'s season. That move implies that Utley committed a purposeful act and gave the Mets ammunition for their cries of "dirty play."

There is no evidence for this decision, but plenty to the contrary. The ump, the replay apparition and the suits all got it wrong. Utley and Howie Kendrick should have been out, the inning should have been over, the run shouldn't have scored. And Utley should have been in the on-deck circle preparing to bat against Matt Harvey in Game 3. Sadly, Tejada's leg is broken either way.

Let's hope the rulings don't have much impact on the outcome of the series.

The Injustice of the One-Game Play-In

Think about packing a box to send a birthday gift to a friend. It has six sides, all of them solid. We want to fill the box as much as possible to maximize the gift. 

We're going to place stacks of flat objects in the box that nearly fill it. Then we're going to squish some fist-sized items the consistency of bean bags into the box. They can be molded to any shape but they still take up room. We're running out of room, but we can tear open a couple of those bean bags and disperse most of the beads before tying back up the bag and stuffing it inside.

Man, we really want to cram more stuff in there. It's a flat fee for shipping, so the more we get in, the better the value. But the box is groaning at the seams. In fact, some of the bean bags are poking above the fold. We'll tape it up best we can. It's pretty jerry-rigged.

We could just bring the gifts to our friend but it wouldn't be the same. Every year since forever we have been shipping a box of goodies and it's a nice tradition we want to keep. We could send fewer gifts too, but that's another great tradition.

And that is the baseball's dilemma in a nutshell, or a box.

Baseball is stuck on a 162-game schedule because it's been that way for 54 years. There's nothing magic about 162 games; in fact, with the elimination of double-headers, they don't really fit between harvests in Northern climes with the populations to support Major League teams. They shouldn't be playing baseball in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee or plenty of other MLB cities in early April or October, particularly at night. But they must. A more sensible 140-game schedule is a non-starter, like Republicans acknowledging that they don't understand science.

So the season spans the months that can barely support a warm-weather sport, and then the playoffs begin and stretch into November, at night, often in places whose winters are debuting. World Series games in those cities are deplorable nonsense. The box is stretched beyond its limit.

Beyond that, baseball has encountered another conundrum. Fans turn tail when their home nine is eliminated in August. It makes for a soul-crushing season and induces them to turn their attention to their alma mater's minor league football team. With the number of baseball teams doubling since 1960, they want more opportunities to get into the post-season tournament. We need to fit ever more into the box.

But the game reveals itself only through the long slog of the season. Any cellar dweller can rattle off a week's worth of wins; any pennant contender can slip up over half-a-fortnight. The tournament, though sometimes enthralling, has lost its ability to determine the "best" team. It merely asserts a champion, whose crown fetches diminishing amounts on ebay.

For the first 68 years of the previous century, the two league winners competed unencumbered by "playoffs" for the World Series crown, with the victor reasonably claiming superiority over all. For another couple of decades, the league split into divisions and each World Series team was forced to defeat its foe from across the Mississippi to earn a slot in the championship. That led to some questionable World Series opponents, but still, they had won a segment of the marathon.

And then the Wild Card, and the playoffs devolved into a series of coin flips. So the regular season is more thrilling but the race to the championship is dishwater. The last teams in are winning the tournament with disturbing regularity. Moreover, the post-season has begun to tear the sides of the box.

To counteract the playoff success of the Wild Card, MLB gave it a twin and ordered a sudden-death play-in. Even more value to the fans and a sense of advantage to the division winners. Alas, the box cannot expand any more. 

There is time for but one game, a winner-take-all. It's that last bean bag, drained of most of its beads. The drama builds but the fairness declines.

After the 98-win Pirates succumbed to Jake Arrieta Wednesday night, voices rose again about extending the play-in to at least three games. But the calendar is inflexible. And so Baseball is pushing up against all six sides of the box. It wants more games than the calendar will hold. It wants more teams in the playoffs but that dilutes the championship. Short playoff series accommodate the seasons but eliminate the best teams more often. Longer series present the opposite dilemma.

The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 

And under-girding the entire enterprise is the constant drumbeat of economics, which is never satisfied with too much and must always demand more, more, more. And so the box is splitting and the sensible course of action -- remove some of the contents -- cannot be considered. 

That is the injustice of the one-game play-in. And it is not going away.

Who *Doesn't* Win the NL Cy Young?

If you were Dr. Frankenhurler and conspired to design the next Cy Young winner you would assemble a creature who could eat innings, keep the ball in the park, miss bats, carve up the strike zone, suppress plate crossings and stand tallest when the pressure mounted.

Your monster would be named Jake Arrieta.

I mean Zack Greinke.

Oh Lord. We only have room for one of them. And we haven't even mentioned Clayton Kershaw.

It looks this year like Dr. Frankenhurler used the same template twice. One of these guys is Cy Winner 1.0 and the other 1.1.

Arrieta (22-6, 1.77) and Greinke (19-3, 1.66) both posted cartoon numbers with laser command and a cornucopia of offerings. Each topped 220 innings. Each fanned at least 200 and walked fewer than 50. Both benefited from defense and luck about equally; both are freakish specimens even without serendipity's side effects.

Each spells his first name with four letters and his last with seven, including three vowels. Freaky similar.

Their "Deserved Run Average," a complicated computation that accounts for everything the geeks can think of and weighs most heavily the components of good pitching rather than the results, favors Greinke, 2.17 - 2.31.

That's the difference of one run every 63 innings.

The trajectory of the two pitchers' years provide the greatest contrast: Greinke the model of consistency, Arrieta the charging bull. By now you've heard that Arrieta allowed four runs after the All-Star break. (That includes one complete game play-in, which doesn't count in the voting.) Batters hit .136 and slugged .172 against him in August and September, because he allowed two doubles, a triple and a homer. In two months of work.

Greinke is defined by his worst month, August, during which he went 4-1, 2.45, allowed a .325 SLG and whiffed six times as many batters as he walked. That was the bad month.

Cy Young voters will be swayed by which shiny object most appeals to them, the big kick or the steady speed. The overall numbers tilt ever so slightly to the Dodger, as if the inventor made one small tweak in the form between creations. But one of these guys won't win the award, and we'll shake our heads and wonder what more the good tinkerer could have done.

It's Mike Trout and It's Not That Close

For the fourth consecutive year -- indeed, for the only four years of his career -- Mike Trout will finish in the top two in the MVP race. Also for the fourth time, he should finish first, ahead of a star with bigger traditional numbers. And for the third time, he might finish second.

Josh Donaldson has produced a monster season for the Blue Jays, hitting .298 with 41 homers and a league-leading 123 RBI. He's scored a league-pacing 122 runs too. His OBP-SLG of .373/.571 places him second in the AL in OPS.

Behind Mike Trout, whose .299-41-90 with 104 runs scored and a .400-.588 OBP-SLG gives him 44 points more of OPS.

Here's the comparison, with league-leading numbers in bold.
Trout            .299-41-90   104R .402/.590/.992 176 OPS+ .353 TAv
Donaldson  .297-41-123 122R .370/.569/.939 155 OPS+ .323 TAv

In other words, Donaldson leads in team events because he bats in the middle of that historically-potent Blue Jays lineup. Trout leads in measures of individual excellence.

Both are superb base runners who have not applied that to base stealing. Donaldson has swiped all six of his attempts. Trout, once a 40-steal guy, is just 11 of 18. That's a ding against Trout.

Both light up the web gems highlight reel. Donaldson is generally considered even more special at his position than Trout is at his, but Trout plays the more critical CF to Donaldson's hot corner.

Factoring in their ballparks and strength of opposing pitchers, Trout has produced 8.7 offensive wins for his team, 13% more than Donaldson's 7.7, according to Baseball Reference. Baseball Prospectus has the gap even wider, and rates Trout the better fielder too.

Sentiment had shifted toward Donaldson as he and Toronto heated up while Trout and the Of Anaheims cooled in August. But the tables turned some in September/October as Trout humped it up and his team hung in the playoff race until the last day. Of course, the performance of his teammates should be of no consequence to a player's MVP candidacy: it's not up to him whether the nine wins he adds are wins 71-79 or wins 87-95.

So a voter could cast his vote for Josh Donaldson for 2015 AL MVP and that would be a perfectly reasonable choice. No one could argue that Donaldson didn't deserve it for the quantum leap he's taken this year following his shocking trade from Oakland. It's just that Trout is clearly the better candidate, not by a significant margin, but by enough that everyone ought to recognize it.

Hey! You Missed A Grand Slam!

Watch the crowd at any Major League Baseball game and you'll notice something relatively new: many of the paying customers are not paying attention.

I viewed three random games on the last day of the season. In the shot from behind the pitcher, where maybe the first two rows behind the catcher were visible, I counted 10 people at the Royals-Twins tilt who were clearly unimpressed by the on-field proceedings. Most of them were engaged in conversation. Two of them were looking at or talking on their phones.

At the Astros-Diamondbacks game, where about 10 people get exclusive seats at ground level behind the backstop, one woman was either reading a book or looking at her phone the entire game. Keep in mind, these are precious seats -- front row behind the plate. These tickets cost $100 or more. And she couldn't care less.

I counted about 14 people in the first three rows disengaged from the Dodgers tilt with San Diego, at the very moment Clayton Kershaw was recording his 300th strikeout, the first time that had been accomplished by anyone in more than a decade.

About now you're thinking, so what? So people pay good money to attend baseball games and miss half the game lost in conversation, staring at their phones, taking selfies documenting their attendance or tweeting about the experience they're not experiencing.

So this: You may have noticed that there has been a hue and cry about MLB extending the protective screens around much of the ballpark following a spate of fan beanings by foul balls, wide throws and flying bats. Major League Baseball has been played for 140+ years, yet all of a sudden the number of these incidents has skyrocketed. Why do you suppose that is? Are batters hitting more foul balls? Increasingly losing the grip on their bats? Are fielders wilder with their throws?

No, the problem is that the people in the ballpark are not watching the game. Instead of sticking out the mitt they brought with them to snag a foul fly, they bring their phone to snag a text and get bonked by an errant projectile.

I'm just back from a business trip to Cincinnati and Detroit, where I made sure to take in games at Great American Ballpark and Comerica Field. Both ballparks are exquisite urban parks molded around their downtown cityscapes.  Great American sits on the Ohio Riverfront, connected to Covington, Kentucky and surrounding Ohio towns by throwback bridges reminiscent of the Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh. It also features neo-smokestacks that spit fire every time a Reds hurler fans an opponent.

Both parks pay homage to their team histories and both feature gigantic, HD video board replete with information about the players on the field. But that's not the main purpose of the video boards.

You see, baseball games are no longer about baseball, or baseball fans. They are about relentless advertising to casual attendees who visit the park for an experience that may include, but is not confined to, and may not even be primarily about, a ballgame. It's phony sausage races and video board competitions. It's blaring music and cheesy interviews from the stands. It's an hour of feting sponsors during the pre-game. (At one point in Cincinnati, General Electric Company, a quarter-trillion dollar business, lauded over the P.A. and shown on the videoboard presenting an oversized check for $7,000 to Muscular Dystrophy. G.E. spends more than that on paper clips each month.)

And it's repeated shots of people kissing and waving and kids dancing, kids dancing, kids dancing.

It's not going to stop, of course, because the teams are filling the stadiums and squeezing every dollar they can from people who pay $75 each to post their birthdays on the scoreboard.

For 100+ years, the zenith of a child's experience at the ballpark was to catch a ball that went into the stands while watching the home nine win. Today, it's getting shown shaking booty on the video board and asking dad on the way home which team won. Fine. But don't cry to me about your broken orbital socket when you get hit by a foul ball you weren't watching.

Why Pitching Stats Are Sketchy: A Case Study From Game 161

"It looks like an infield popup in the boxscore." --Comment about a home run ball snagged by a leaping outfielder.

Besides its towering significance in the standings, still in limbo with a day left in the season, Saturday night's barn burner between the Rangers and Angels was a lesson in how unhelpful even ERA can be, particularly over short stretches like a single season.

In case you hadn't heard, Texas, poised to clinch the AL West before an adoring crowd, broke open a back-and-forth game to establish a 10-6 lead entering the ninth inning. Interim closer Shawn Tolleson, pitching for the fifth straight day, entered the final frame and proceeded to cough up consecutive home runs to Erick Aybar and Kole Calhoun before manager Jeff Bannister correctly cut his losses and handed the ball to veteran reliever Ross Ohlendorf.

After inducing Mike Trout to ground out, Ohlendorf fooled Albert Pujols, who popped up behind first. Poor communication between Mike Napoli and second baseman Rougned Odor led to a collision of gloves and two bags for a hustling Pujols who was inexplicably awarded a double.

Ohlendorf fanned Daniel Murphy, bringing the Rangers to the brink of clinching and reducing the Of Anaheims to playoff life support. He then fooled C.J. Cron into bouncing a 15-hopper to the left of second base that shortstop Elvis Andrus recognized late and failed to retrieve. The Pujols run, which should have been charged to Odor, accrued to Ohlendorf's record.

Next, following a sharp David Freese single, Ohlendorf splattered Carlos Perez's bat on a two-strike pitch. But the ball leaked into shallow center and Cron, who was aboard entirely because of luck, tallied the tying run before a slack-jawed crowd. Charge that run to Ohlendorf.

Up came Johnny Giavotella, who swung awkwardly at a slider and popped a single off the end of his bat, scoring the go-ahead run. Which the record will show was Ohlendorf's fault.

Pitching coach Mike Maddux went to the bullpen after his reliever had failed him, but let's review the record. Ohlendorf allowed one hard hit ball -- Freese's single. His fielders failed to retire Pujols and Cron, and serendipity sang paeans to Perez and Giavotella.  Ohlendorf got ahead on every hitter and made the pitches he wanted. Of his 27 offerings, 21 caught the strike zone.

And yet, Ohlendorf is charged with three runs on five hits, a blown save and a loss in two-thirds of an inning. Those searching for explanations will trot out the old moralizing shibboleths: "he isn't clutch," "he isn't a big game pitcher," "he doesn't have heart," "he chokes," and "he wilts on the big stage," when in fact he faced seven batters and should have recorded six outs. The only missing element of the story is a reliever following him and allowing his baserunners to score.

This outing stands as testament to the need for fielding independent pitching statistics and for measures like Deserved Run Average that separate the results of a pitcher's work from what he can actually control. DRA and its cousins are still relatively primitive and may never achieve their goal of teasing out real pitching acumen, but that is a quest worth the effort.

As a coda to this story, the Rangers did nothing to rescue Ohlendorf in their final at bat. With two outs and Elvis Andrus on first, the runner easily swiped second to place himself in scoring position for a potential tying hit. But Andrus slid past the bag and was tagged out to end the game, and consign Ross Ohlendorf, who did everything his team could ask to salvage the victory, to goat status.

(Double coda: the "winning pitcher" was Jo-Jo Reyes, who threw one seemingly meaningless pitch to record an out in the bottom of the eighth, before Anaheim's Big Adventure began.)

The Too Close To Call

As a young adult, I felt it was my civic duty to investigate every policy issue facing our country and have an informed opinion on each. As I've aged, this need has ebbed, and I'm now perfectly comfortable not having an opinion on some complex issues. I can continue to cast informed votes on representatives and referenda without possessing exhaustive knowledge of every issue upon which they must rule.

When it comes to baseball awards, however, that's exactly the demand we make of voters. They must have a definitive opinion on who is the MVP or the Rookie of the Year, etc. But this year, there is one race in which it's just impossible to distinguish between a couple of candidates.

The AL Cy Young contest pits David Price's Blue Jay brilliance, following a trade from Detroit, against Astro ace Dallas Keuchel, whose season-long excellence stumbled a bit in September.

For the season, Keuchel's 20-8, 2.48 is Cy-worthy. Price is right too -- 18-5, 2.45.

Accounting for ballparks, Keuchel leads in ERA+, 162-161. In other words, the two pitchers allowed the same number of runs.

Price's 4.70 K/BB ratio is slightly superior to Keuchel's 4.24. Pitchers can't control anything as much as they can control walks and strikeouts. So that's a relative feather in Price's ball cap.

Keuchel owns a small edge in WHIP, 1.017-1.076. He's allowing fewer base runners. Because they keep the ball in the park at the same rate, that's one for Keuchel.

Keuchel has pitched 12 more innings, 232-220, which partially accounts for his superior WAR of 7.2 versus Price's 5.9.

The various defensive metrics generally like Houston's defense behind Keuchel better than Detroit and Toronto's defense behind Price. That might partially explain why teams scored 10 unearned runs against Price and only four against Keuchel. Those runs don't show up in ERA. That would seem to tilt towards Keuchel.

But fielding independent pitching measures -- about which you should be a little leery -- suggest Price has "earned" a 2.78 ERA; Keuchel has earned a 2.91.

Now, you make sense of all that. About the only thing we can say about the best pitcher in the American League this year is that it's Dallas Keuchel and David Price. (Oakland's Sonny Gray, 14-7, 2.73, is next best, but he tailed off by summer's end and pretty clearly fell out of the race.) Writers who split their votes are disdained for their indecision, or lack of guts, but in this case I think it's not just defensible, its indicated.

The Myth of Home Field Advantage

The Mets and Dodgers are engaged in a great battle, testing whether their team, or the other team, so dedicated to the proposition of winning the World Series, can long endure. They are met on separate battlefields -- the Mets at Citi Field against Washington and the Dodgers in L.A. versus the Padres. 

A portion of that home field will serve as a final resting place for one team's playoff hopes so that the other team's might live on. 

Is it altogether fitting and proper that they should do this? 

Likewise, the Pirates and Cubs do indirect battle for home field in their one-game play-in. Will people little note, nor long remember, who batted last?

The answer, as even a Phillies fan in Gettysburg can see, is that these are very different questions.

For the season, home teams have emerged victorious roughly 55% of the time. Home cooking, familiarity with the field, a partisan crowd and the final at bat conspire to roughly a 10% advantage. That's not an insignificant edge in a game pitting essentially even teams like Pittsburgh and Chicago in a single, sudden-death tilt.

New York and L.A. are also essentially even, having both played .560 ball this year en route to division titles. But home field conveys so much less advantage to them, even though the Dodgers have won two-thirds of their games at Chavez Ravine and just 45% of their games as the visitor. 

Their series will be five games long. The home team enjoys an advantage if the series goes three or five games. The margin of that edge can be expressed this way: in a 21-game series, the home team can be expected to win 11 times. Not really a game-changer.

In a seven-game playoff, it's so much less significant. In series that end after four or six games, each team will have hosted half the contests. In a five-game set, the lower-ranked team actually has the home field advantage in a 2-3-2 format. 

So home field "advantage" is a small disadvantage in a truncated seven-game series and is a benefit only in the full seven, and even then, worth just 10% in that one game. Because roughly a quarter of series extend to their full measure, homefield accounts for just a 2.5% edge. That's the difference between the Mets at 89-70 and the Dodgers at 90-70, which is where they stand at this writing. Factoring in the home field deficit through Game Five, the total value of the better record is essentially a rounding error.

You'd rather have home field than not, but teams would be much better advised to spend their time arranging their rotations, resting their bullpens, healing the injured and preparing their entire rosters psychologically for the amped emotions of playoff baseball. 

And "analysts" would be better advised to just shut up about home field advantage.