How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

While we wait for the game to start, this Rob Arthur piece on how weird Jake Arrieta’s path to acedom has been is more educational than anything you’ll hear on the pre-game show. Rob looked at how Arrieta’s release point has changed over time, and how much better he’s gotten as he’s changed his mechanics.

Because the MLB wild-card play-in game has only been around for a couple of years, it’s not that impressive when I tell you that we’ve never seen two teams this good meet in this round of the playoffs. But really, these teams are supremely good. If not for this pesky one-off contest, both the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago Cubs would have a better chance of winning the World Series than any of the other National League teams. Instead, only one team will survive, and our Elo formula gives the slight edge to the Pirates (54 percent to 46 percent). But Elo has never seen Jake Arrieta pitch. And it has no idea what it’s like to play in Pittsburgh’s PNC Park with everything on the line. The problem with algorithms is they never know as much as you want them to. So I guess we’ll have to just watch. What a drag. We’ll be here all night live-blogging the game, and by “we” I mean FiveThirtyEight’s Neil Paine, Rob Arthur and Carl Bialik. Grantland’s Ben Lindbergh hopes to stop by too. And one last thing: You can see the live win probabilities for the two teams elsewhere on this page, courtesy of Fangraphs. The fun starts a little before 8 p.m. EDT. Talk to you then.