How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

Someone in the announcers booth mentioned that the Cubs’ Kris Bryant tries to hit four fly balls every game in the hope that one goes out of the park (by sheer virtue of Bryant’s size and strength). That argument was strangely sabermetric for announcers who have spent much of the night scratching their heads at anything involving analytics. Statheads have long known that a hitter’s rate of home runs per fly ball tends to regress toward the league average, meaning batters can generally expect some baseline number of their flies to leave the yard as long as they’re hitting enough balls deep in the air. The league average rate, though, isn’t 1 in 4 — it’s more like 1 in 10, with Bryant hitting a home run every six fly balls.

The Pirates ended each of the last two innings by grounding into double plays. Turning double plays isn’t the Cubs’ forte — they ranked near the bottom of the majors with just 121 in the regular season, about three every four games. And Arrieta induced just 15 double plays, in part because so few batters reached base against him to create double-play opportunities. But there’s more to infield defense than double plays, and the Cubs were above average defensively at every infield position. Tinkers, Evers and Chance would be proud.

Things look bleak for the Pirates, with a 2.9 percent win probability as of the top of the eighth. But remember last year’s Royals! They fought back to beat the A’s in the wild-card game last year after falling to a 2.9 percent win probability in the seventh.