Still room for art in late trading
It requires a minimum of 297 outs for a team to win a World Series — 11 playoff wins, at 27 outs apiece — and the path by which you get there is half science and half art.
The science has never been more attainable, with the evergrowing mining and understanding of advanced analytics guiding the way teams construct and deploy pitching staffs in October to secure those outs.
But then sometimes your closer goes kaput.
And that's when it becomes an art.
Last fall, the Houston Astros were fighting for a championship as they watched their closer, the sturdy, dependable Ken Giles, slowly fall apart. By midway through the American League Championship Series, he was basically unusable. They were forced to get artistic.
When they closed out the New York Yankees in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, it was with starter Lance McCullers throwing four shutout innings of relief. And when they outlasted the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 7 of the World Series, it was Charlie Morton, another starter, handling the last four innings.
"We've got to get 27 outs, one way or another," Astros manager A.J. Hinch said then. "I don't care who gets them. Our guys don't care who gets them."
What we are seeing now, at the cusp of the 2018 Major League Baseball trade deadline, is a lot of contending teams applying a lot of science to the task of roster-building. Many of the pitching moves that have been made, and many of the ones still to be made ahead of Tuesday's deadline, can be distilled to the outs those teams still need to secure in August and September, and especially the ones they might need in October.
The New York Yankees face 10 more regular-season games against the Boston Red Sox — the team they trailed by 4 ½ games in the AL East entering the weekend, and a team that has hit about 70 points of OPS lower against left-handed pitching this season than against right-handers. And in a span of 48 hours last week, the Yankees added a pair of all-star lefties, closer Zach Britton and starter J.A. Happ.
The Red Sox, meantime, facing those same 10 regular-season games against the Yankees — and theoretically, as many as seven more in October — added a starting pitcher, Nathan Eovaldi.