How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

Good news for the Cubs as they watch their ace, Jake Arrieta, finish off a complete game. He has been just as good with four days’ rest throughout his career as he has with five days off between starts — and far better in 2015 after four days off than after five. Bad news for the Cubs: Arrieta would need to sit out until Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the Cardinals to get four days’ rest. Last year’s NL wild-card-winning ace, Madison Bumgarner, also didn’t pitch again until Game 3 of the division series, but his rotation mates stepped up and helped him lift the Giants to the NLCS.

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.