Analytics truly reign
LOS ANGELES — For a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet, the Astros sure looked human last night.
They couldn’t help themselves when spilling out of the dugout after taking an
WORLD SERIES BEAT Chad Jennings
early lead. They high-fived and shouted when they thwarted a potential rally. They jumped all over one another when they got the final out.
This team built on statistics and analytics won its first World Series with guts and emotion, and their 5-1 win against the Dodgers in Game 7 was not only a celebration of a progressive front office, but also of an energetic clubhouse and an easy going manager who brought it all together.
“I think too often we chase what the last guy did, you know?” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. “We saw what made Chicago and Cleveland successful last year, and so we’re compared to how we run our bullpens based on how they did it. Moving forward, I think there are different ways you can go to win games. So, I think, and they’re both right. If you want to (say) there’s some traditional values that are always going to be in our game. There’s progressive growth that can always happen in this game. If you subscribe too much to either, you’re probably going to miss a lot of content that can help you win.”
Three years ago, Sports Illustrated put the Astros on its cover and declared them to be “Your 2017 World Series Champs” because of a front office that embraced new statistics and new methods of roster building. It turned out to be a remarkably prophetic prediction, especially bold considering the Astros were in the middle of their sixth straight losing season
The Astros were seen as ahead of the curve, and this championship surely will be seen as proof that these new models really are the future of baseball. Reality is, advanced metrics have been driving the game for a while. They are not the future, they are the present, and the recent past as well.
The numbers have given us a new appreciation for pitch framing and base running, and they’ve changed the way we think about defensive positioning and lineup construction. They’ve led pitchers to study spin rate, pushed hitters to work on their launch angle, and taught even casual fans to recognize, in the bigger picture, that wins above replacement are more meaningful than runs batted in.
And that’s just a surfacelevel analysis of the stuff these gurus have figured out. Because of the number, we have a better understanding of the what makes the game tick, and if the Astros were ahead of the curve for that statistical revolution, it surely helped them bridge the gap from Sports Illustrated fairy tale to real life championship.
Also an intangible like clubhouse chemistry is the most important reason the Astros won. They won because they’re incredibly good at baseball, and a bunch of smart people put them all on the same roster.
Let’s gladly point out that there’s a reason reading the box score this morning isn’t nearly as fun as watching it all unfold last night.
When the matchups are calculated and the outcomes optimized, the Astros were still a bunch of guys in bright orange jerseys trying to square up a round ball. They were snapping a wrist and rotating a shoulder so that a curveball traveled 60 feet, 6 inches, in an arc, to reach a tiny target, not too high and not too low. They were reading fly balls off the bat, making immediate determinations of where they would land, then chasing them down across faded green grass beneath bright, shining lights.
They were their very best selves in the most important moment of their athletic lives. Think of all the Little League dominance amassed on that field. It wasn’t hard to imagine when they came pouring out of the dugout after George Springer’s home run in the second inning.
Don’t know whether there’s a way to measure the pounce factor, but the Astros most definitely pounced. The game was less than 15 minutes old, there’d been one out recorded and eight pitches thrown, and the Astros already were up 2-0. They pounded Yu Darvish out of the game by the end of the second inning, and they weathered the storm by having tremendous pitching out of the bullpen.
They were on the road, against the team with the most wins in baseball, and they won. There are numbers to tell us how and why, and statistics to explain all the ebbs and flows. But in the end, there was only raw human emotion, and a bunch of baseball gloves flying in the air.