How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

The Pirates believe in the benefits of pitching inside, and not only when they’re trying to teach Jake Arrieta a lesson. According to ESPN’s TruMedia tool, Pirates pitchers have thrown 35.0 percent of their pitches in the inner third of the strike zone (or off the plate inside) this season, which leads the major leagues. They were tops in that area in 2014, too. Not-so-coincidentally, their pitchers have also led MLB in hit batsmen in both years, with 163 confirmed victims. There’s a purpose to these pitches: As a member of their front office told me last year, the Pirates believe that inside pitches affect some hitters’ performance on subsequent offerings, a theory that was proposed by Clint Hurdle’s coaching staff and backed up by the statheads upstairs. Here’s the really interesting thing: Pirates batters lead the league in being hit by pitches this season, and they ranked second to St. Louis last year, with a total of 167 across the two seasons — almost the same as the Pirates’ pitchers’ tally. It’s tempting to make a connection: Maybe all those beanballs by Pirates pitchers lead to retaliatory beanballs when their batters are up. So does plunking opponents typically get a team plunked, as it did for Arrieta tonight? In the wild-card era (1995 to 2015), the correlation between pitcher HBP and batter HBP on a team level is a weak .15. So while there is some tendency for teams that plunk to get plunked, it’s tough to decipher the causation. One conclusion we can draw: There’s no perfect plunking relationship, at least for non-Pirates teams.

Chicago and Pittsburgh teams have won more than their share of major pro-sports championships — without much help from the hard-luck Cubs and Pirates. The Donovan Index ranks U.S. cities by their rate of winning titles, taking into account how many opportunities they’ve had. So if a team in a 30-team league wins one World Series in 30 years, it’s average, which is scaled as 1 in the index. Pittsburgh and Chicago both are above 1 in the index, with Pittsburgh ranking eighth of 32 cities with at least three pro-sports teams and Chicago ranking 11th. But the Pirates and Cubs have lagged behind the cities’ other pro teams — especially the Cubs, with their two World Series wins and none since 1908. If they hold on to this lead, they’ll be one step closer to making it three titles — which would still leave them by far the most underperforming of Chicago’s five major pro teams.

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.