This piece, written by Baseball Prospectus’s Matt Trueblood, forms part of the main site’s comprehensive coverage of the postseason, “Playoff Prospectus”.
There was a wealth of strategic intrigue surrounding Game 1 of the World Series before it even began. Jon Lester started for the Cubs, so there was the now-familiar chatter about how Cleveland planned to use his difficulty in controlling the running (if it can even be fairly called that) against him. Kyle Schwarber returned to the Cubs’ lineup after a sojourn of some six months, from an operating table to a grueling rehabilitation process to the Arizona Fall League, but there was some uncertainty as to how ready to return he really was, and where Joe Maddon could place him in his lineup in order to maximize Schwarber’s impact.
On the Cleveland side, there were the dual questions of how deep Terry Francona would let starter Corey Kluber pitch–knowing he’s possibly planning to bring his ace back on short rest for Game 4–and of how many outs he might get from Andrew Miller. We got answers to all of those questions, and some of the answers were even interesting. None had much impact on the final score of the game, as things turned out, because variance swamps everything in a short series, and sometimes “variance” is just a fancy word for “whichever team’s ninth-hitting, no-hit catcher happens to run into one with multiple runners on base, because they’re both going to get a chance.”
Roberto Perez hit a three-run home run to ice a 6-0 Cleveland win in the bottom of the eighth. David Ross half-swung at a slider to leave the bases loaded in the top of the seventh. So it goes.
Because best-of-seven series titles are rarely awarded after a single game, though, let’s dig into what else we found out, and how the tactical elements of the game played out in Game 1. Firstly, with regard to Lester’s famous yips and Cleveland’s eagerness to make him pay for them: nothing much came of it. Francisco Lindor spent most of the game on base, it seemed, but after successfully stealing second base in the first frame, he was caught trying to do the same in the third.
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Lead photo courtesy Ken Blaze—USA Today Sports.