In the World Series, starting Friday between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay, many fans will have the same thought in many a crisis moment.
“Why???”
Why on earth are they doing that?
For example, with the Brewers’ 100-RBI star Brice Turang coming to bat with the bases loaded, why might the Rays relieve their ace Drew Rasmussen with 34-year-old journeyman Cam Booser who once retired from baseball for four years to be an acoustical ceiling carpenter?
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Are they crazy?
Why would the Brewers be happy if the Rays used as many left-handed hitters in their lineup as possible against Game 1 starter Jacob Misiorowski, even though he is right-handed and has thrown 105 mph?
Shouldn’t right-handed hitters be terrified?
We’ll try here to help explain some of the possible puzzlers in what could be called The Brainiac Classic. The Rays have 39 people in their analytics department, all frying their big brains trying to get any edge. The Brewers have 46 analytics wizards! (They’ve also got 144 scouts between them.) Both of these teams, although small-market, are among the top spenders on baseball science, per MLB Network.
For comparison, the Washington Nationals, whose new regime emphasized such methods in ’26, plan to increase their analytics department from 19 to more than 30 by next season. The bare-bones Baltimore Orioles front office has 12.
The analytics revolution has a hundred manifestations, from the weights you lift to add two miles per hour to your fastball; to a new grip to make your slider travel in a different plane; to the way a hitter divides up the strike zone into “lanes” in search of prime pitches to hit because he knows he can’t “cover” every pitch in every location.
In this fascinating but sometimes paralyzing maze of data, let’s start with just one illustration that shows how small-market teams, like these, create value at all 26 roster spots to battle clubs with two or three times their payroll.
For example, take Booser versus Turang.
Second baseman Turang owns a Platinum Glove as the game’s best fielder at any position. He once stole 50 bases. He can bunt or blast.
Booser was lousy in college, rotten in the minors and even after forsaking acoustical ceilings, was still awful in his comeback with the Amarillo Sod Poodles.
Yet, if they meet, Turang will have very little chance. At least in Analytics World.
Why?
Last winter, Tampa Bay got Booser for nothing and sent him to their Rays pitching lab. They overhauled his pitch usage and modified the shapes of his secondary pitches. He tripled the use of his redesigned cutter — from 20% to 60% in the first two pitches of at-bats, when modern hitters tend to hunt fastballs. The new cutters made his decent mid-90s fastball look faster. Once ahead, he erased hitters, especially lefties, with breaking stuff.
Thus reinvented, Booser ate AAA alive with a 1.80 ERA. In 43 games as a Ray, his ERA was 1.98. Lefties batted .123 and slugged .323, which would be bad if a pitcher tried to hit. In six games this postseason, his ERA is 0.00.
Not bad for a guy who, before he retired in ’17, had endured a broken femur, Tommy John surgery, a torn labrum and being hit by a car.
Turang, on the other hand, is a marvelous player but endures the curse of many of the best left-handed hitters in MLB history: He isn’t nearly as good against lefties as against righties.
Neither was Ted Williams, whose OPS was 229 points lower against lefties than righties. His slugging average dropped from .666 (not far from Babe Ruth) to .495 (close to CJ Abrams).
Williams is an extreme case. But Lou Gehrig, as well as contemporaries like Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani, Bryce Harper, Freddie Freeman and Brewer Jonathan Aranda all have lower career OPS marks by 120 to 160 points.
This season, the gap for Turang was 282 points! He slugged a pathetic .313 against lefties. And that is all lefties, not a specially created Frankenstein like Booser who held lefties to a .123 batting average and .388 slug.
If Turang homers in that matchup, every computer in MLB will explode. (I’ll just smile. As Turang showed by homering off lefty Tarik Skubal in the NLCS, analytics are percentages, not prophecy.)
Throughout history, the average left-handed hitter’s OPS drops by 80 to 90 points against lefties. The average right-hander’s OPS only falls versus righties by about 40 to 50 points.
Why is this? Standard answer: 90% of us are righty. If you’re a righty but can’t learn to hit righties, even though the ball looks like it’s coming near your head, you quit baseball. Many lefties see few lefties on their journey. Less familiarity equals less mastery. Until, oops, 25% of MLB pitchers are lefties.
MLB has known about this handedness-factor since at least 1914 when George Stallings, the manager of the Miracle Braves in Boston, platooned at every outfield spot. Others, like Casey Stengel and Earl Weaver, loved platoons and playing for late-inning matchups.
But these days, finding edges, especially if you are “poor,” is almost a religion, especially in constructing superb bullpens with interlocking, complementary parts like the Rays and Brewers.
Milwaukee’s southpaw DL Hall held lefties to a .173 slug, while righty Abner Uribe negated right-handed slug to .182. Lefty Aaron Ashby and righty Trevor Megill just get everybody out.
The Rays have two bullpen mind-benders whose excellent change-ups and splits — which break away from the bats of opposite-handed hitters — give them “reverse splits.” To make matters more confusing, one of them is a lefty who pitches like a righty (Ian Seymour), and the other is righty closer Bryan Baker, who, statistically, might as well be a lefty.
Who the devil should be your pinch hitter?
The Brewers also have Kevin Kelly — a side-arming righty who knocks 208 OPS points off righties. You can bet the Rays star Jackson Chourio, who hit 201 OPS points lower against righties this year, will see Kelly in a crisis.
In this era, switch-hitters or hitters who have no “handedness” weakness are especially valuable. The current rule that relief pitchers must either face a minimum of three batters or finish an inning forces managers to look for “pockets” in the other lineup where at least two of those “minimum three hitters” are favorable matchups. If a star hitter has no right-left weakness, he’s a pocket-buster.
In that flaw-free category, the Brewers have Jake Bauers and William Contreras. The Rays counter with Junior Caminero and, this year, Yandy Díaz.
Amid all this complexity, sometimes simplicity matters most. The Dodgers’ Max Muncy was asked why his team had so much trouble with the Brewers bullpen. “They all throw 100 with great breaking stuff,” he said.
Got any more dumb questions?
My favorite outlier in this series is the hardest thrower of all: Misiorowski.
The Miz’s fastball appears to rise and also has an elite 11.2-inch arm-side “run.” Combine that with his 6-foot-7 height, his 7-foot-6 stride and his fairly low arm angle and you have a pitch that appears to explode up and away from lefties. After heavy doses of that, his breaking pitches yield high swing-and-miss rates.
Will that Miz, who held lefties to a .114 batting average with no power, be the one we see in this World Series? At 24, he’s never had this many starts before and his fastball’s velocity, rise and run have all ticked down slightly — not much, but measurably in a Statcast era. Is that why so many Padres and Dodgers fouled off so many pitches in his postseason starts, getting him out of the game in the fifth inning both times?
In the NLCS, the Brewer bullpen got more outs than its starters. In this whole post-season, Ashby, Megill and Hall have a 0.00 ERA in 23 1/3 innings. Can the Brewers keep getting perfection by the beer-barrel-ful?
If the Brewers’ (only) three trusted starters, The Miz, Robert Gasser and Logan Henderson, are close to their first-rate regular-season form, then the spirit of Bob Uecker may not rest uneasy for much longer. If they don’t, this could be a long, tight, IQ test of a World Series for anybody who watches it from anywhere.
Even the top row.
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