LOS ANGELES -- You want to know which teams are at the forefront of analytics? Just look around at the teams still playing.
Once upon a time, there was the Oakland Athletics and a sacred tome called "Moneyball." It was about baseball teams winning with statistics. Only it wasn't about that at all. It was about market inefficiency. Then John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox, hired Bill James, made Theo Epstein his general manager, and Moneyball spread to a big market.
We're several iterations past all of that. Things move fast in technology, so fast it can even carry a tradition-based industry like baseball into the digital age. These days, every team is playing Moneyball. All of them, as in 30 for 30.
"At this point, I think everyone assumes that their counterpart is smart," Brewers general manager David Stearns said. "And everyone is doing what they can do to unearth competitive advantages." To call it Moneyball is not right, either. Michael Lewis is still turning out ground-breaking work, but to fully capture what is happening in big league front offices, circa 2018, the next inside look at analytics and baseball would need to be authored by someone like the late Stephen Hawking. It's hard to say what you'd call it. "The Singularity" has already been taken.
Which teams have had the best year in analytics? It's the Red Sox, Astros, Brewers and Dodgers. The top two will meet in the World Series next week. And so on.
The Brewers and Dodgers are analytical mirrors in some ways, at least when you look at statistical traits and how they relate to what James used to call percentage baseball. They are different in some ways as well, because there is nothing cookie cutter about any of this.
Which brings us to the first great lesson of today's impact of analytics in baseball: To a large extent, the analytics are bent to fit the makeup of the roster the team has put together, not the other way around. The teams that are best at this, such as the ones still playing, feast off of competitions that take place behind closed doors.
"There is plenty of competition in-house within each team to come up with a new proprietary technology," Stearns said. "That's where a lot of industry efforts are being turned right now."
Teams avoid shoe-horning players into styles of play that do not fit their talents. Instead, they use analytics to help players turn into the best versions of themselves. The Dodgers and Brewers have had success at doing this time and again, and it has played no small part in helping both teams reach the doorstep of the World Series.
But there are countless other ways that the river of analytics has flowed beneath the surface of this series. Just imagine the machinations of Game 4, five-plus hours and 13 innings of terse baseball in a high-stakes game that could have flipped with any one decision. And there were a lot of decisions.
"It was a 13-inning baseball game," Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. "You're talking about hundreds of decisions. There's always stuff. I think there was some stuff to kind of force their hand with more pitching changes, that I thought maybe could have given us more advantageous stuff later."
Still, to say that this terrific series has been the straight-forward result of a series of complex mathematical computations would be wrong, wrong, wrong. This has been a pure baseball series, replete with drama, strategy, opportunities to second guess and openings for players to make names for themselves by coming through at crucial moments. This series has had a little something for everyone.
Let's try to illustrate this by focusing in on the key moments of the first five games of the series. We'll do this by using numbers. In this case, win probability added (WPA) from Fangraphs. Each play impacts the percentage chance of both teams winning a game, and win probability tallies up all of these positive and negative shifts in percentage.
We'll be looking at the biggest shifts in the series. Some of them have been driven by analytical processes; others have not. There a bit of old school and some new school, and we're all happy to attend.
Big shift No. 1: Game 2 -- Justin Turner hits a go-ahead home run off Jeremy Jeffress. (WPA: .411 for Turner).
We'll begin with launch angle. You've probably heard the term. Here's a random comment from a Facebook baseball discussion group of long-time fans: "Personally, I am getting tired of all this launch angle and exit velocity talk. I personally say see ball, hit ball."
That cranky guy can in part blame Turner, who was one of the early adopters of the practice of focusing on the launch. In doing so, he remade his career, from a utility guy to one of the very best players in the game. In his case, it wasn't really a Dodgers thing. He did it on his own, and now helps to spread the gospel. Recently, after a three-homer game in St. Louis, Yasiel Puig alluded to his teammates and coaches pleading with him to get the ball in the air.
"I'm trying to look for good pitches to hit and trying to hit the ball in the air, like my teammates and my coaches talked to me," Puig said. "They told me I needed to stop hitting ground balls."
Turner was standing nearby.
This is an organizational trait for the Dodgers, but not so much the Brewers. L.A. ranked third in baseball with an average launch angle of 13.6 degrees from its hitters this season, according to Statcast data from Baseball Savant. The Brewers ranked just 26th at 9.7 degrees.
However, the other companion to launch angle is exit velocity -- hitting the ball hard. By that metric, the Dodgers ranked fifth and the Brewers sixth during the season. The bottom line: Los Angeles led the NL with 235 homers, while the Brewers ranked second with 218.
So far in the NLCS, Milwaukee has out-homered the Dodgers 5-2. Los Angeles took Games 4 and 5 to move within a win of a return trip to the World Series without going deep. Turns out, in this matchup, the new school could only take them so far.
Big shift No. 2 -- Game 4: Cody Bellinger hits game-winning single off Junior Guerra. (WPA: .399 for Bellinger).
That Guerra was tagged with the loss was unfortunate, because he was magnificent in his long outing, going 3 2/3 innings with two hits, the one run and four strikeouts. His performance not only gave the Brewers a chance to win in the late innings of Game 4, but it helped Counsell avoid completely depleting his relief staff.
"We got three great performances last night pitching-wise," Counsell said. "Freddy [Peralta], Corbin [Burnes] and Junior Guerra were remarkable last night."
Guerra is just one of several veterans who have improved under the tutelage of numbers-savvy Brewers pitching coach Derek Johnson, joining the likes of Chase Anderson, Wade Miley, Jimmy Nelson and Jhoulys Chacin. This isn't a case of someone like Roger Craig teaching a bunch of guys the splitter, or Don Cooper the cutter. Every project Johnson undertakes is tailored to the player, and informed by numbers.
Of course, the Dodgers have had a lot of success with that as well, especially on the hitters' side of the equation, where Max Muncy and Chris Taylor been rescued from the scrap heap to become impact players in Los Angeles. But they've done it with pitchers, too, such as Ross Stripling and ex-Dodger Brandon Morrow last season.
Still, Bellinger's little single decided the game. But the old-school aspect of that wasn't just that he yanked a game winner into right field. No, after Bellinger had gotten off to a 1-for-22 start in the series, he got going in the most unexpected fashion earlier in the game. With impenetrable lefty Josh Hader on the mound, and the defense shifted for the pull-hitting Bellinger, he reached out and stroked a liner to the opposite field.
Ultimately, that slump-busting hit didn't lead to any runs, but it came into play three innings later when Bellinger ended the contest.
"It was a big exhale for him," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. "He's very results driven. It's a tough pitcher like Josh, for him to stay on the baseball, that's a tough at-bat. For him to reach the outfield grass, I think he was pretty elated about that, and it carried over into the following at-bat."
Not only that, but the hit-it-where-they-ain't crowd rejoiced.
Big shift No. 3 -- Game 2: Yasmani Grandal rolls into a double-play against Jeremy Jeffress (WPA: .283 for Jeffress).
This occurred the inning before Turner's heroics, but at that point, it was another low point in what has been a rough series for Grandal. He was pinch hitting in the pitcher's spot against Jeffress with the bases loaded, one out, Dodgers down 3-2.
This was an old-school, 4-6-3 inning-ending double play. What made it old school was that the Brewers were not in an extreme shift, but were simply shaded toward the pull side of the infield. Grandal's spray charts suggest that's where his grounders tend to go when he's hitting from the left side of the plate. But with the bases loaded, the shift was off. Milwaukee needed to turn two, and did.
The Brewers finished second in the majors in defensive runs saved. They ranked near the top in that category all season, but when they acquired infielders Mike Moustakas and Jonathan Schoop during the season, it forced Travis Shaw, among others, to often play an unfamiliar position -- second base. The Brewers' defense hasn't missed a beat.
"When you're shifting it's a team effort," Counsell said. "You have to play as a team when you're shifting. And that's probably the most challenging part of it. It's a very team-oriented defense. And so, all of our guys have to contribute to that."
The Dodgers do this too, focusing on offensive matchups while Roberts moves his defenders around like chess pieces. Los Angeles was a top-10 team by runs saved. We saw this at work in the Dodgers' Game 5 win. Taylor started in left, moved to center, then to second base and ended up back in left field. Bellinger, Enrique Hernandez and Max Muncy also played more than one position. The Dodgers played airtight defense for the entire game.
Big shift No. 4 -- Game 4: Pinch hitter Domingo Santana hits an RBI double to score Orlando Arcia to tie the game (WPA: .177 for Santana).
This just happened to be the biggest positive WPA shift in the series in a pinch-hitting situation. But the point to make here is that the Dodgers and Brewers both emphasis depth, positional versatility and matchup advantages over playing players for an entire game.
In the NLCS, the Dodgers have had 11 position players appear in all five games. The Brewers have had 10. Eighteen different pitchers in the series have appeared in at least two games. This is like managing All-Star rosters, only with real stakes and with moves being made with the intent to maximize the chance to win. It's just fun.
"The teams that get this far, I think they're going to put together a balanced, deep roster," Counsell said. "Balanced, deep rosters, you're looking for advantages, and it's harder to find advantages in a series like this. And that's just playing against a good team.
"Ultimately it comes down to guys matching up against each other and competing against each other. And you can't capture every advantage or every matchup that you'd exactly like because good teams have answers for them. That's part of playing against a good baseball team. In that sense it is fun, and the fun part is trying to answer all those challenges."
Big shift No. 5 -- Game 5: Lorenzo Cain doubled off Clayton Kershaw, driving in Arcia (WPA: .166 for Cain).
Ironically, the only run that Kershaw allowed on Wednesday provided the biggest probability shift in Game 5. Cain's double plated the first run of the contest. Other than that, it was all Kershaw, who dominated the Brewers with breaking stuff over seven innings.
Kershaw's gem was as old school as it gets. An ace starting pitcher throttled an opponent in a huge game, putting his team on the precipice of a return trip to the World Series.
"It's been a battle every single game we've played them so far, and we don't expect anything different when we go back [to Milwaukee]," Kershaw said. "We're in a much better spot now because of today, and I'm glad I was able to contribute."
While Kershaw was busy putting up an outing that wouldn't look out of place in any era of baseball history, the Brewers tried to bullpen their way through to a win. "Starter" Miley was pulled after walking Bellinger to start the game. "Reliever" Brandon Woodruff worked 5 1/3 excellent innings, but wasn't able to match Kershaw.
"Is it against the rules?" Brewers catcher Erik Kratz asked rhetorically. "Nope."
The game was a microcosm of an old-school versus new-school debate. But the thing is, the roles of these teams could have easily been flipped. The Dodgers and the Brewers both employ any strategy that makes sense, given the situation and the personnel on hand. Sometimes, the strategy is conventional; sometimes it's not.
That all adds up to a beauty of a matchup. It's a matchup that started unfolding months before the teams clashed with the pennant on the line.
"You do try to pay attention to what your competitors are doing," Stearns said. "I personally think it's a little bit dangerous to assume that you can reverse-engineer what your competitors are doing. I don't always think it's that simple.
"There are times when we see a club make a transaction that maybe we don't understand and we spend time looking into it. Try to see what they saw that maybe we didn't see."
The key word in all of that is competition. It starts in the front office, is conveyed in the dugout, and then the most important aspect plays out on the field. It's all baseball. Great baseball.
"It's certainly a challenge," Roberts said. "You get a starter going seven innings, and then you look at the back end of a game to match up against a couple of relievers. Especially in this series, relievers are deployed a lot earlier, especially on their side.
"Our guys, to their credit, are ready from the first inning on. It does make it more challenging, and I've got good coaches around me and the players are in, and prepared. So it does add a little -- it's fun, yeah, sure."