There was a time 10 years ago when it was considered normal to poison your neighbor's cat if he (your neighbor) didn't agree with you about statistics in baseball. It sounds absurd, but sabermetrics was the biggest issue in the 2006 mid-term elections. Activists outraged at the inclusion of VORP in school textbooks urged on massive book-burnings outside major league stadiums. The AL Central briefly seceded from the American League. Thousands of fans moved to Canada when they didn't like the general manager their favorite team hired.
Ten years later, we live in a world scarcely imaginable to a loyal traditionalist of the time. The four teams in the two league championship series last week were all, according to an ESPN ranking of teams' devotion to analytics in 2015, in the top two tiers of statheadiness. The Cubs and Indians, this year's World Series entrants, were in the top tier, "All-In." The Blue Jays and Dodgers were labeled "Believers," and each team has only strengthened its stathead credentials since then. (The Blue Jays, for instance, poached a president and general manager from that All-In Cleveland front office.) The front offices of all four LCS teams trace their lineage to the Big Four stathead fortresses of the late 2000s: The Dodgers' top executives are descended from the Rays' and A's; the Cubs' from the Red Sox's; the Blue Jays' from the Indians'; and the Indians from, well, the Indians'. Three of the four even hired employees right out from under me at Baseball Prospectus, where I was their editor. But no hard feelings.
This is not going to be some sort of victory lap, I promise. There is no victory because there was nothing to vanquish: The scouts/stats war was always overblown, pretty much every team integrates both traditions proudly these days, the traditionalist wisdom has been validated many times in the past decade, the analytics have been far from infallible, players are not number-generating machines, and this paragraph has been written countless times because it is so uncontroversial to most analytical writers. Today, at least 28 teams could be described as analytical, and probably 30 could be described as traditional. Again, you are not reading a victory speech.
But a postseason so dominated by True SABR is a fine occasion to survey postseason baseball in 2016 and see how it compares to the utopian/dystopian vision that partisans on either side might have had for it in 2006. How have these playoff teams differentiated themselves so far?
1. The sacrifice bunting
Since the playoffs expanded from two rounds to three in 1995, the sacrifice bunt has been a staple of October offense, with teams averaging .39 bunts per game. Ozzie Guillen's "small ball" White Sox in 2005 provided the perfect clash with "Moneyball" orthodoxy at the time, as Guillen's club bunted eight times in just 12 games, compared to the defending champion Red Sox, who didn't bunt once in the 2005 playoffs. But it wasn't just the White Sox. The Cardinals bunted six times, the Angels eight, and the Astros 18 times in 14 games. Those four teams made the league championship series, and the Astros and White Sox made the World Series, inspiring premature obituaries for Moneyball from even fantastic baseball writers:
One additional passenger joined the Chicago White Sox on their private plane here and flew off into the sunset with manager Ozzie Guillen, slugger Jermaine Dye and the rest of baseball's champions.
That would be the concept of Moneyball. ... The idea that Billy Beane and his Oakland A's had discovered the divine formula to success at the expense of traditionalists, scouts and supposed "dinosaurs" was laid to rest in a postseason that culminated Wednesday night with Chicago's four-game dismantling of the Houston Astros to win the World Series.
Since then, the bunt has steadily withdrawn from the game, to the point that Tim McCarver warned gloomily in a 2013 broadcast that "we may be in a period where the bunt may be phased out of the game in the next year or two." Not exactly, but bunts per game in the regular season have dropped in each of the past five years, and this was the year that the drought reached the postseason. With just 11 so far, the 2016 postseason has seen just .19 bunts per game, half the established rate. That's the lowest frequency since 1951, and a 17 percent drop from the most bunt-averse season of the expanded-playoffs era, 1969.
Notably, the decline isn't explained by a no-bunts philosophy alone. Consider Game 6 of the NLCS: Dexter Fowler led off the game with a double. There was a time when runner on second, nobody out in the first would be a bunting situation, especially with a pitcher like Clayton Kershaw on the mound. Even Joe Maddon has called for eight bunts in such situations in his career. But with more teams following the stathead idea that the best hitter should bat second, the Cubs had Kris Bryant coming up to the plate, which takes the bunt off the table, throws it in the trash, and takes the can out to the curb for pickup so the dog can't get into it. The rest of the LCS teams' most frequent No. 2 hitters this postseason: Josh Donaldson, Corey Seager and Jason Kipnis, stars all. No hitter batting second has laid down a bunt this postseason, which would make it just the second postseason since wild-card play began.
More notably still: This is not a uniform boycott! Terry Francona has called for five sacrifice bunts from his position players, which is how many Dave Roberts got from his position players all season. Francona's club was third in the AL in sacrifice bunts this year, just four sacrifices ahead of the oft-caricatured stathead extremists in Houston. Which means two True SABR teams can have completely opposing positions on a tactic like the sacrifice bunt, which is important, and which leads to...
2. The bullpen usage
Yes, you've heard enough about how Francona revolutionized modern bullpen usage by bringing in his best reliever, Andrew Miller, in the fifth and sixth innings of close games instead of saving him for the three-out save situation. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of bullpen usage in this year's stathead postseason is not that Francona did it this way, but how other managers didn't do it this way. Each had his own way of using the bullpen.
The Dodgers used Joe Blanton and Kenley Jansen in ways that resembled Francona's Andrew Miller usage. Blanton (who, it helps to remember now, was very good this year) entered games in the third inning and (twice) in the sixth. He threw 31 pitches in a clean, five-out appearances in the NLDS, then came back the next day and threw 19 more. Meanwhile, Jansen entered a save situation in the seventh and entered in the sixth when the Dodgers were trailing in the NLCS Game 6. Only twice in seven appearances did the Dodgers hold him until the ninth inning. He threw 51 pitches in a game. The Dodgers used 10 relievers in all, three more than any other LCS team, as they treated middle and late innings with extreme -- at times, almost erratic -- urgency.
The Blue Jays, the one team in these series with a below-average bullpen, went the opposite direction: They rode their starters harder, limiting their bullpen usage to just six pitchers and just 26 ⅔ innings. (The Dodgers relievers threw 45.) Their top two relievers, Roberto Osuna and Joe Biagini, actually threw a higher percentage of their team's relief innings than Miller and Cody Allen did for the Indians. But Osuna was used in a more traditional way, just twice entering a game in the eighth and never earlier. His more reasonable pitch counts kept him available every day, and the Blue Jays boosted his usage by bringing him in liberally to keep deficits manageable, rather than waiting for him to have a lead to protect.
(It's worth mentioning, too, that the Blue Jays' bullpen was below average in part because of a preseason decision to move Aaron Sanchez from the bullpen -- where he'd been elite -- into the rotation, where he'd been poor. Plenty of teams have passed this option up after introducing their top pitching prospects into the majors as relievers, e.g. the Reds with Aroldis Chapman and the Cardinals with Trevor Rosenthal. That the Blue Jays had a below-average bullpen was not their preference, but it was a choice, made to deploy Sanchez in a role in which he might have more value.)
The Cubs spent more on their best reliever, Aroldis Chapman, than any other LCS team, but he pitched less than any other team's best. He never threw more than 21 pitches in an appearance, twice leaving games before they ended but always being fresh for the next game. The Cubs instead leaned heavily on matchups -- they were the only team in the LCS to get less than an inning per appearance from the bullpen as a whole -- and on Mike Montgomery, a versatile trade deadline acquisition who had outings ranging from two batters to 16 batters.
So what's so interesting about this? In the quarter-century after Dennis Eckersley and Rick Honeycutt pitched for Tony LaRussa's world champion A's, the trend was consistently toward predictable roles, toward titles, toward a model that was about finding a funky southpaw to be your lefty specialist, an expensive fireballer to be your closer, a less expensive fireballer to be your set-up guy, a fringy starter to be your long man, and so on. Even this year, in the regular season, there was little deviation from these narrow ways of using relievers. There are benefits to that rigidity, to be sure, especially in the regular season, but there are crippling limitations, too, especially in the postseason. If there's something to take from the four teams in the LCS, it's that you don't fix the rigid model by putting a better rigid model on top of it. Rather, you create a model that works with the specific personnel in each bullpen and that maintains some flexibility to account for the situation.
Unlike the way that, say, Ned Yost managed in the postseason last year. But speaking of Yost ...
3. The Yost Influence?
Last year, as the Cubs were on the verge of being bounced from the NLCS, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein said this:
The only thing I know for sure is that whatever team wins the World Series, their particular style of play will be completely en vogue and trumpeted from the rooftops by the media all offseason -- and in front offices -- as the way to win.
That team would end up being the Royals, one of modern baseball's stylistic outliers, managed by one of baseball's least enthusiastic tacticians. The Royals have plenty of statheads in their organization, to be sure, but the influence of these analysts is less apparent on the field or in the dugout than for almost any other team. So, assuming Theo Epstein can't, by law, be wrong, what did he and the other LCS teams take from the Royals?
Not that much. Three of these four teams were among the worst basestealing clubs in baseball. No team invested in contact-oriented hitters like the Royals did, with none of the four LCS clubs finishing with one of the 10 best strikeout rates in the majors. Yost's extreme version of bullpen rigidity was not only not followed, but rejected. While Yost rarely made lineup changes and allowed a low-OBP leadoff hitter because it felt right, these clubs valued versatility and platoons and pushed slugging, high-OBP leadoff men like Jose Bautista and Carlos Santana to the top the lineup. While the Royals employed a poor framing catcher who earned his Gold Gloves with a superior throwing arm, all four of these teams carried excellent framers and unexceptional (or worse) throwers.
The most persuasive comparisons are in each team's bullpen personnel -- where the Indians and Cubs both spent heavily to get a version of Wade Davis, believing one ace reliever wouldn't be enough -- and in the quick hooks that almost every starter had this fall. But each feels like a stretch to connect to Ned Yost.
It's not surprising, though, that four committed stathead teams wouldn't resemble Ned Yost on the field. But it's also not wrong to say that they all have more in common with Yost than the "groupthink" criticism of baseball analytics would allow for. If there's something that these playoffs really taught us, it's that 10 years after the Join Or Die culture war reached its peak, there is little sameness in baseball strategy. What makes these four teams progressive has nothing to do with toeing the line on bunts or intentional walks or closer usage or draft preferences or fly-ball pitchers or infield shifts. Rather, it's the Cubs launching mental skills programs for their players. It's the Indians trying to study something so tangled as team chemistry. It's the Dodgers running sprinters academies, or training cricket players, trying to find undiscovered talent. It's the Blue Jays -- well, the Blue Jays won't even say what they're doing, and it's that, too.
One of the arguments against analytics 10 years ago was that they would make baseball boring. (I've made the argument, too.) But these have been among the most exciting playoffs in years. That there were teams doing things differently was a big reason why.