In what some have termed the Year of the Pitcher, this postseason has provided some singularly impressive pitching performances to continue the trend. Add Jonathan Sanchez to the list after his 7 1/3-inning, 2-hit, 11-strikeout Sunday afternoon that put his Giants in line to win the game and go up 2-1 in their NL Division Series with the Braves.

By keeping baserunners off the basepaths and pitching late into the game, Sanchez was the driving force behind the Giants’ win. He added 46.6 percent to his team’s win probability, and since 50 percent is the maximum, the statistic tells the story as well as any other. He got the Giants almost all the way there on his left arm alone.

Sanchez joined Game 1 starter Tim Lincecum as the only Giants in postseason history to strike out double-figure batters. Sanchez was, as usual, effectively wild (105 pitches, 69 strikes), but his bread and butter was the offspeed stuff away. The lefty got eight swinging strikes on 40 offspeed pitches, good for a 20 percent whiff percentage that blew his 4.69 percent on fastballs out of the water.

Traditionally, this is the case — offspeed stuff garners more whiffs across baseball — but Sanchez used the weapon almost artistically. He began all but three at-bats with fastballs, but he ended most at-bats with offspeed pitches: Ten of his 11 strikeouts were on sliders.

Fortunately for Sanchez, the Giants’ offense did just enough. Though the offense scored the fewest runs of any National League playoff team during the regular season and seemed as if it might continue to be this team’s Achilles’ heel, the Giants pushed across three runs with the help of some shoddy Atlanta defense. Two of Brooks Conrad’s three errors in the game helped contribute to Giants runs.

Coming through in the clutch was the key at the end of the game, which swung wildly in each direction. In the bottom of the eighth inning, pinch hitter Eric Hinske hit what most Atlantans may have considered the game-winning home run off Giants reliever Sergio Romo. Down the right-field line and barely fair, his home run was worth a whopping 57.8 percent in win probability added, as the game swung from 28.8 percent likely for the Braves to 86.6 percent in one big moment.

As an aside, a bit of gamesmanship from the retiring Bobby Cox may have led to Bruce Bochy taking Sanchez out of the game. After the Giants lefty gave up a single, Cox showed righty Troy Glaus as the pinch hitter. Bochy went with the right-handed Sergio Romo in relief in order to exploit the platoon advantage. Cox pulled Glaus and went with lefty Hinske. The rest is, as they say, history.

But the Giants were not done. Freddy Sanchez, 0-for-3 with a walk before coming to the plate in the ninth inning, faced fireballer Craig Kimbrel, closing for the Braves with Billy Wagner hurt. Sanchez was down to his final strike before lacing a single up the middle. Then Aubrey Huff, in the single most tense and important at-bat of the game, drove in the tying run and swung the pendulum back close to 50 percent by adding 34.9 percent of win probability with his bat. One batter later, Conrad’s error on Buster Posey’s grounder sent the Giants to within one win of taking the series.

Jonathan Sanchez got the team most of the way there, but without Mike Fontenot, Freddy Sanchez, Aubrey Huff, and — yes — Brooks Conrad, the Giants would have been a tough-luck losers.

Being the manager of a major league baseball club is an interesting job, because while the general manager selects the players, there are only a few moments when a major league manager can show his stuff. When he fills out the lineup card, a manager makes his most indelible stamp on the game. In a similar vein, his bullpen usage also provides a record that we can follow. In these moments, we are provided a window into the manager’s way of thinking. We know which players he thinks are currently his best options. With these facts in mind, and inspired by Jerry Crasnick’s look at managers on the hot seat, let’s look at the five worst managerial decisions this year.

5) Mike Scioscia shuns Mike Napoli
Some managers make poor decisions but slide by, perhaps by the grace of their resume. Angels manager Mike Scioscia has consistently run out Jeff Mathis at catcher over Mike Napoli to the frustration of fantasy baseball players alone it seems. This was a curious decision given Napoli’s eminently useful batting line (.249/.317/.478) versus the one Mathis has been showing (.196/.218/.294), but catcher defense is notoriously hard to put a number on, so the decision could be justified to a degree. The situation got a little more ridiculous, though, when Kendry Morales went down for the season and Scioscia cited Napoli’s performance with runners on base — which came in an extremely small sample size — as the reason he wasn’t getting regular at-bats at first base. Now even Juan Rivera, who has never played first base in his life and has a .249/.301/.403 line that doesn’t stand up to Napoli’s, is getting time at the position.

4) Tony La Russa buries Colby Rasmus
In St. Louis, manager emeritus Tony La Russa has made some interesting decisions over the years, and many have been lauded by the statistical community. Hitting pitchers eighth can actually benefit a team in a very small way. But playing inferior players over young stud Colby Rasmus — that decision seems borderline petty. By his comments to the media, La Russa seems to be trying to get Rasmus to hit the ball the other way, when Rasmus is showing great pull power as it is. Just look at Cito Gaston — who hasn’t complained that every single one of Jose Bautista’s 43 home runs has been pulled — for comparison. La Russa has consistently shown an aversion to playing Rasmus, who has started only 93 of the club’s 138 games, but the outfielder has turned in an impressive .268/.352/.501 line with great defense, despite the lack of confidence from his manager.

3) Don Wakamatsu goes gaga for Griffey
More often, when the manager gets it wrong, he’s sure to hear about it. Mariners fans were in disbelief when Ken Griffey, Jr. was penciled in as the starting DH most of the year when Michael Saunders could easily have pushed Milton Bradley to DH and provided excellent defense and more offense than the aging star. Here we are, three months later, and Griffey is no longer on the team, Bradley has undergone knee surgery after one of his worst years, and the Mariners’ DH position has put up the worst batting line in the American League (.187/.261/.328). In fact, that’s not far off of the combined line for pitchers in the National League (.105/.134/.120). Hyperbole aside, this was the kind of move that could get a manager fired, and Don Wakamatsu was indeed axed.

2) and 1) Jerry Manuel embraces Frenchy and Fernando
Finally, we come to one manager that may have achieved the double-whammy. Jerry Manuel is beginning to feel the heat in New York, and for good reason. For a good portion of the season, Manuel used Fernando Nieve as his setup man. He really liked Nieve, using him so often he was once on pace for close to 80 innings. It wasn’t until Nieve had made 40 appearances and his ERA reached 6.00 that he was banished to the minors. Young fireballer Bobby Parnell would have been a better option — but perhaps we can blame Omar Minaya for leaving Parnell in the minor leagues for so long.

On the other hand, Manuel squarely gets the blame for one of his lineup decisions. Jeff Francoeur has his uses — against left-handers he’s a decent option, which is apparently why the Rangers traded for him last night, and of course he owns that golden arm. But Manuel ran him out there for over 440 plate appearances, in which Frenchy racked up exactly zero WAR by hacking away at any pitch that didn’t hit the dirt. In about 300 fewer plate appearances, Francoeur’s backup, Chris Carter, has managed to rack up 0.2 WAR by walking more, striking out less and showing just about as much power. If Manuel leaves New York, it won’t all be Omar Minaya’s fault.

Sometimes a manager gets it right and usually receives little fanfare. For instance, Joe Girardi has run Brett Gardner out there in left field despite an up-and-down major league resume before this season. All Gardner has done is shown himself to be the second-most valuable Yankee by wins above replacement (WAR). He’s done this by providing a spark plug on top of the lineup — stealing 37 bases efficiently and walking over 13 percent of the time — and also by playing great defense in center and left.

Going into the season, the Texas Rangers were in turmoil. The team’s owner was bankrupt, the slow roll towards an auction was set in motion and adding salary did not seem to be an option. Most preseason indicators had the Los Angeles Angels winning the AL West — six division titles in a row will earn you some respect.

Perhaps everyone should have noticed what a nice, young core the Rangers had put together — Elvis Andrus, Nelson Cruz, Ian Kinsler, Derek Holland and Neftali Feliz, among others.

Now, those same turmoil-laden Rangers have better than a 90 percent chance to make the playoffs.

Seems the only question left is: Can this be sustained?

Though the Rangers’ rotation had given up the fourth-fewest runs in 2009, there was a sense they couldn’t repeat that success. The 2009 starters were third-worst in the American League in both FIP (4.71) and strikeouts per nine (5.67). There were areas of concern among the individual pitchers: Scott Feldman hasn’t struck out five batters per nine innings for his career (the major league average has been close to seven recently), Rich Harden hasn’t stayed healthy his entire career, C.J. Wilson was coming out of the bullpen, Colby Lewis was coming from Japan — and the fifth spot was a crapshoot.

In 2010, the strikeouts are up (6.84 per nine), and the recent addition of Cliff Lee seems to have added an ace to a generally competent group of starters.

Wilson and Lewis in particular have stepped up to provide stability and a strong core. With five legitimate pitches, perhaps Wilson was always suited to starting. His velocity and strikeout rate have dipped in the move from the pen to the rotation, but his groundball rate is superb. Lewis discovered his control and his slider in Japan, and on the backs of those two developments has evolved into a strong No. 2 for the Rangers.

It’s still offense that drives this Rangers team. Their batters feature the league’s fifth-best wOBA and have scored the fourth-most runs in the American League. Beyond the streaking young position players mentioned previously, Vladimir Guerrero found the fountain of youth, Josh Hamilton recovered from his injuries and Michael Young is showing the second-best isolated power of his career.

Of their regulars, only Andrus, Julio Borbon and Jorge Cantu are below average offensively. Two of those guys play premium defensive positions well, which has kept their overall value in the positive all year. It’s a balanced team.

Their schedule is pretty favorable too: They’re 10-3 against the Seattle Mariners this year and have six left against them, while their final 43 games are against teams with an average winning percentage of .484.

In comparison, the Angels have a tough road to climb. If the Rangers slumped and played a game under .500 baseball from here on out (25-26), the Angels would have to go 33-18, or a .647 winning percentage. Not only is that a 105-win pace, but the Angels’ opponents from here on out will also feature an average record of .498.

Rest-of-schedule particularities aside, the Rangers have scored 33 more runs than the Angels and given up 83 fewer. They have a significant lead in wOBA (.334 to .317, where .324 is average) and are neck-and-neck in FIP (4.24 to 4.23, where 4.14 is average). They own an eight-game lead, just acquired a veteran ace and all the depth they need, and have 25 games left at home, where they play at a .631 pace.

Yeah, these guys look like a lock.

This is the time of year when general managers are constantly conversing with other GMs and reassuring fans that they’re looking for the “right deal” or a “win-win situation.” The elusive goal is a deal that works for both sides, but that’s obviously easier said than done.

So let’s take a look at some notable trade-deadline deals in baseball history and separate the talk from the truth. John Smoltz for Doyle Alexander and Jeff Bagwell for Larry Anderson were both stinkers and are often cited as some of baseball’s worst, but both were completed in August and were waiver deals. Because of the rules of waiver trades, any team in baseball could have blocked them. In other words, all 28 teams not present in those swaps are somewhat at fault for letting those trades go through.

Instead, we’ll be focusing on deals in June and July — true deadline deals. Using the wins above replacement (WAR) that each team gave up, we can quickly appraise some of the most lopsided deals of the past 25 years. In this context, all WAR values are rest-of-contract numbers. When Mark McGwire was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1997, he had only two months of his contract left. Let’s not burn the Oakland Athletics for those 70 home runs in 1998. For prospects, the value is the WAR accumulated during their cheap, arbitration-controlled years.

Now, on to the trades.

1. The Montreal Expos traded Cliff Lee, Brandon Phillips, Grady Sizemore and Lee Stevens to the Cleveland Indians for Bartolo Colon and Tim Drew in 2002.

WAR received: 2.4
WAR forfeited: 55.8

This is the most classic blunder, and the worst blemish on Omar Minaya’s résumé. It’s not that Colon didn’t help — he accrued 10 wins and 2.3 WAR over the second half of the season. It’s just that the Atlanta Braves were too good that year, and the Expos finished 18½ games back in the division. And look at the prospects Montreal gave up in the deal: Phillips didn’t quite blossom in Cleveland, but he was still arbitration-controlled when he broke out with the Cincinnati Reds; Sizemore and Lee combined to put up 49 WAR before they signed free-agent contracts (Andy Pettitte’s career WAR is around 49, just for reference). At first, it might have seemed like a win-win deal, but Cleveland ultimately snatched a much larger share of the success.

2. The Seattle Mariners traded Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek to the Boston Red Sox for Heathcliff Slocumb in 1997.

WAR received: 0.6
WAR forfeited: 40.4

Close behind Minaya’s blunder was the straight-up robbery performed by the Red Sox in 1997 when they turned their passable closer, Heathcliff Slocumb, into two franchise cornerstones in Varitek and Lowe. The duo gave the Red Sox great production at key positions before their arbitration years ran out. Considering that Slocumb gave the Mariners only 0.6 WAR the rest of that season, this move qualifies as one of the worst trade-deadline deals of all time, and a warning about the limits of what one should give up for a reliever.

3. The Boston Red Sox traded Brady Anderson and Curt Schilling to the Baltimore Orioles for Mike Boddicker in 1988.

WAR received: 10.8
WAR forfeited: 43.3

The Red Sox were on the other side of the deal, but it was hardly as poor of a swap as the Mariners’ disaster. Boddicker was actually a decent starting pitcher — he even won 17 games for them in 1990. Of course, Anderson accumulated 28.6 WAR (of his 36.2 career WAR) during his arbitration-controlled years in Baltimore. Had Schilling put together more than 0.3 WAR in Baltimore (he was traded to Philadelphia and had 14.4 WAR before signing his first free-agent contract there), this deal would be more widely remembered as a stinker.

4. The Arizona Diamondbacks traded Abraham Nunez, Vladimir Nunez and Brad Penny to the Florida Marlins for Matt Mantei in 1999.

WAR received: 2.7
WAR forfeited: 12.6

As proven time and again, teams most easily get burned when they give up starting pitching prospects, especially when they only get a reliever in return. Mantei was actually a decent closer for the Diamondbacks for a couple of years, and none of the other prospects Arizona gave up did Florida any good, but Penny alone was worth the deal. New York Mets fans might have expected to see the infamous trade of Scott Kazmir (15.6 RoC WAR) for Victor Zambrano (4 RoC WAR) here, but this one was far worse because Mantei was just a reliever.

5. The New York Yankees traded Rich Balabon, Troy Evers and Jay Buhner to the Seattle Mariners for Ken Phelps in 1988.

WAR received: 1.1
WAR forfeited: 12.6

Yankees fans, particularly Frank Costanza, will remember Buhner as one who got away. Phelps put up 17 home runs and a sub-.250 batting average in less than a full year at DH before moving on. The position player equivalent of not trading starting pitching prospects for relievers is not trading position player prospects for designated hitters.

It’s easy to forget the trades that work out for the buyers, but they are not rare. Take the Cliff Lee trade in 2009. Lee gave the Phillies an invaluable 2.4 WAR (and an NL championship) last season, and is still providing value on that contract, albeit for his fourth team in two years. The book isn’t closed on the prospects the Phillies gave up, but so far they have only provided 0.3 WAR of value to the Indians. They have some arbitration-controlled years left, but Carlos Carrasco, Lou Marson and Jason Donald all seem like bit parts right now.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from all of this is not to give up decent prospects for relievers and designated hitters. That shouldn’t be too hard for the GMs to remember.

Roy Oswalt wasn’t supposed to be this good at age 33. Listed at 6-feet and 192 pounds, Oswalt seemed like a guy who might break down from the rigors of starting every five days — a guy who wouldn’t have a long career.

And, at the start of this season, it certainly looked like he was declining. From 2005 to 2009, his ERA rose from 2.94 to 4.12; last year, he had a career-low in innings (181.1) and strikeouts (138). So it was forgivable to expect a mediocre year.

But the advanced statistics tell a different story: While Oswalt’s overall strikeout was down last year, his whiff rate was higher than it was in 2007. His walk rates have remained strong. FIP, a statistic that strips out batted-ball luck and produces a defense-independent number on the ERA scale, shows a tale of sustained above-averageness. Going into this year, Oswalt wasn’t quite the pitcher he used to be, with FIPs in the low 3s, but he was still a solid pitcher without any obviously declining peripheral statistics.

Now, coming off last night’s complete-game, one-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates, it looks like Oswalt has been reborn. His 8.43 K/9 this year is the second-best of his career and 1.5 strikeouts per nine more than last year. His current FIP is the best he’s put up since 2006. He’s talking less about retiring as he did with Buster Olney in 2006, and more about where his team will trade him so that he can compete for a ring.

But figuring out how he’s doing this isn’t easy. Looking at his pitching mix, you can see that he’s used his changeup more this year (12.0 percent), which is twice as much as he has over his career (5.9 percent). It’s strange that using the changeup more would be a good thing, because by linear weights — the FanGraphs’ statistics that evaluate single types of pitches by outcomes — his change-up is not a great pitch. It’s been worth 18.9 runs below average over his career (compared to his fastball at 122.2 runs above average). But is using the changeup now suddenly leading to more strikeouts?

We can tell by linear weights that, even though the changeup is again eliciting below-average results this year (-2.2), the rest of his pitches have put up stronger results with its increased usage. This is where our toolbox comes to an end of sorts. So we have to speculate: Is it because the changeup, though below-average, is setting up the rest of his pitches better? Is it something in the movement of the pitch, or the speed?

It’s not yet in our power to know why Oswalt is striking out more batters, especially since his swinging strike percentage (9.3 percent) has been no different from his career number (9.5 percent). But it does look like the slight change to his mix could be a big factor.

Perhaps the tortoise had something on the hare –- he knew how to walk. A select group of players this year are taking the tortoise’s path to success by increasing their walk rates significantly. In particular, improved plate selectivity is working well for Josh Willingham, Justin Morneau and Franklin Gutierrez, and is the reason why their fast starts should be believed.

Morneau’s big season is similar to another player who recently rode an increase in walks into a huge season. Between 2008 and 2009, Adrian Gonzalez saw his walk rate increase 6.9 percent, which compares favorably with Morneau’s 6.7 percent increase in the same category this year. Gonzalez’s corresponding career-best OPS was not all driven by the walks alone -– Gonzalez also put up a career-best slugging percentage last year, just as Morneau is doing this season.

A quick glance at the table above shows that improving your walk alone is not the magic key to success. For every Morneau on this list, there is a struggling Jason Kubel to serve as anecdotal evidence in that regard, although even he has shown signs of coming around lately.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to notice the success stories. As measured by ISO (isolated power, or slugging percentage minus batting average), Colby Rasmus, Willingham, Morneau, Aaron Hill and Kevin Youkilis are all enjoying years more powerful than their career rates. In fact, the average 2010 ISOs of the 10 men on this list are 6.2 percent better than their career ISOs.

The theory is pretty simple: By being more patient, these guys are getting into good hitters’ counts and getting better pitches to swing at. When they don’t get the pitch they’re looking for, they simply wander on down to first base, helping their team by avoiding outs. Increasing walk rate isn’t the only way to improve, but as we’re seeing from these notable spikes in patience, it is certainly one way to make yourself a better player.

John Lackey has never been a strikeout artist. He’s never struck out 200 in a season nor reached the hallowed ground of recording one K per inning for a season. But this year, it’s getting a little ridiculous. He’s striking out batters at a career-low rate (5.58 per nine innings) and he’s getting battered around the park, such as he did in a 5-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers on Sunday. This isn’t what the Red Sox thought they were buying with their $85 million.

Normally, when a pitcher has an unexpected bad start, the traditional “luck” statistics (batting average on balls in play, strand rate and home run rate) tell the tale. But in this case, they don’t. Lackey has a .308 batting average on balls in play (which usually ends up at .300 across baseball) and has stranded exactly 70 percent of runners, which is also right around league average. He’s even giving up the standard amount of home runs per fly ball (8.5 percent this year, usually around 10 percent across baseball). It’s not a case of poor luck, it seems.

Looking at batters’ swing rates when they step in the box against Lackey doesn’t help much, either. Batters are reaching at offerings outside the zone about as often as usual. It seems that Lackey is missing the zone a little (45.2 percent in the strike zone, 50.4 percent career) and batters are making more contact than usual (84.1 percent contact rate, 80.3 percent career). But why are batters making more contact with his pitches?

He hasn’t lost any velocity. His fastball and curveball are within 0.2 mph of their career levels. The slider and changeup have actually gained oomph, but perhaps that is part of the problem. The difference between his fastball and changeup has gone from 8.2 mph for his career to 7.1 mph this season. But Lackey throws the changeup only around 5 percent of the time, so that effect probably isn’t huge.

The answer may lie in Lackey’s curve in the end. At FanGraphs, we keep a statistic that tries to put value on the results of each type of pitch in a pitcher’s arsenal. By using game state statistics before and after a slider, for example, we can assign value to that pitch. Looking at Lackey’s career, his fastball (plus-27.6 runs career) and curve (plus-51.8 runs career) have always been his best pitches. His slider has usually been around scratch or better (plus-6.4 runs career).

This year? His fastball (plus-1.1 runs) and slider (plus-1.2 runs) have been doing fine. For only the second time in his career, however, the curveball is currently negative (minus-1.6 runs). Though neither the horizontal movement, vertical movement nor the velocity numbers show anything really unique about his curveball this season, the pitch is just not providing good results for Lackey this year. Why? It’s hard to know, but don’t be surprised if we start to hear murmurs about him tipping his pitches.

On Sunday, Lackey threw the curve 31 times. It actually resulted in a strikeout three times, so it wasn’t terrible, but the curve also resulted in three singles and Ramon Santiago’s two-run homer. If you’re wondering what Lackey is lacking, it seems it’s his signature curve.

On the heels of Ryan Ludwick’s somewhat innocuous 1-for-3 performance Sunday against the Reds, it might seem odd to focus on the Cardinals right fielder today. But there was a lot of intrigue in those few at-bats, and a lot of food for thought.

Ludwick’s strong season to date has garnered some notice. He is batting .290, he’s walking more than 10 percent of the time, and he has an isolated power above .190. These all are benchmarks he met back in the halcyon days of yore (aka 2008, when he also hit 37 home runs), but fell short of last year. So what has changed?

For starters, manager Tony La Russa has him hitting second this year after usually batting him fourth or fifth the past two seasons. The stated reason for the switch was to get Ludwick more fastballs while hitting in front of Albert Pujols. So far, so good. Thus far, Ludwick is seeing fastballs 57 percent of the time, which is the most he’s seen in five years. In Sunday’s win against Cincy, 10 of the 13 pitches Ludwick got were fastballs.

This would seem like a silly new strategy because Ludwick crushes fastballs. A statistic on FanGraphs measures a batters’ effectiveness versus each type of pitch and produces a runs above average figure for each offering. In his career, Ludwick has been most successful against the fastball, to the tune of 53 runs above average. Compare that to his success against the curve (plus-3 runs) and the change (plus-7.8 runs), and you get a sense of how much he enjoys the fastball. His run-producing single Sunday came on a fastball.

So why are pitchers throwing him the fastball? Convention wisdom says that Pujols lurking in the on-deck circle has something to do with it. Fastballs find the strike zone 54.1 percent of the time across baseball, compared to 44.7 percent of the time for curveballs and 42.9 percent of the time for changeups. (Thanks to Daniel Moroz of Beyond the Box Score for those numbers.) If pitchers are worried about Pujols coming up next, it makes sense they’d want to make sure not to walk Ludwick and use a pitch that they could command against him.

Lineup protection is an easy explanation for all the fastballs Ludwick is seeing, but there has been research that shows that lineup protection is a myth. Whether you are inclined to believe J.C. Bradbury or conventional wisdom of lineup protection, the bottom line is that Ludwick is seeing more fastball this year. And that’s a boon to his bottom line.

On Saturday, the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets played one of the classic National League games of all time. After 20 innings and 652 pitches, every player on both rosters — save Oliver Perez, Chris Carpenter, Brad Penny and Adam Wainwright — had been used. Position players pitched two full innings and one (Joe Mather) took the loss for Tony LaRussa’s team.

Along the way, there were plenty of swings in momentum. At FanGraphs, we use a statistic called “Win Probability Added” to measure the change in likelihood of a team winning as events unfold. For example, when Skip Schumaker hit a double to open the second inning, he added 6.1 percent to St. Louis’ chance of winning the game.

As you can see by the accompanying game graph, there were some single plays that stand out. Some of these swings in win probability were directly due to managerial decisions, and now that we’ve had a day to digest this epic game, it’s still hard to understand what La Russa was thinking with some of his decisions in extra innings.

Perhaps his most harmful was the decision to double-switch out cleanup hitter Matt Holliday, because it allowed the Mets to intentionally walk Albert Pujols and take advantage of the situation. Even with Holliday under the weather, choosing to have the pitcher’s spot due up behind the game’s best hitter is simply a poor choice.

On two separate occasions (in the 12th and 14th innings), the Mets took advantage of Holliday’s absence by intentionally walking Pujols to load the bases. Both times, La Russa chose to let a relief pitcher swing the bat in situations where an out would decrease their odds of winning by 15.4 percent, a staggeringly high total for one play. La Russa left actual hitter Bryan Anderson (and his career .362 on base percentage in the minors) on the bench while his pitchers flailed away.

Even if you think Anderson isn’t much of an offensive force, the gap between he and a relief pitcher at the plate is enormous. The average major league pitcher got on base just 18 percent of the time last year, and as relievers, Jason Motte and Blake Hawksworth bat infrequently, so that even overstates their abilities. With two chances to win the game, La Russa chose to let two of the worst hitters in the sport swing the bat.

Even still, those plays may not have been the biggest errors of the night. Ryan Ludwick’s caught stealing in the 19th inning cost his team 21.6 percent in win probability. Had he been ruled safe, the Cardinals odds of winning would have increased by just 4.2 percent. In other words, he would need five successful steals in that situation to cancel out just one caught stealing, and Ludwick had a career 57 percent success rate prior to the attempt. Henry Blanco, the Mets catcher, has thrown out 43 percent of all base stealers in his career. The odds were simply not in Ludwick’s favor, and getting thrown out was a huge blow to the Cardinals. It was yet another bad decision on a night full of them. The Cardinals threw away three great opportunities to win, and eventually, the Mets won by default.

Maybe you heard that some guy named Jason Heyward made the Atlanta Braves’ Opening Day roster. It could have something to do with the sound of the ball coming off his bat, which was a daily discussion at Champion Field in Orlando, Fla. Or maybe it was all those cars that Heyward dented with his devastating drives over the right-field wall.

But more likely, it had to do with how Heyward — despite being all of 20 years old — has dominated every minor league station and seems ready for the majors. While toying with minor league pitchers, he constantly showed his trademark patience — he had 105 walks to 138 career strikeouts, an elite strikeout-to-walk ratio for a young prospect. He also showed more power as he advanced, an excellent sign for his future.

There have been some recent prospects who came to the majors with similar pedigrees at this young age. But a quick scan of their debut seasons might be reason for pessimism regarding Heyward’s upcoming season.

Player	        AB	BA	OBP	SLG	HR	R	RBI	SB
Miguel Cabrera	314	.268	.325	.468	12	39	62	0
B.J. Upton	159	.258	.324	.409	4	19	12	4
Justin Upton	140	.221	.283	.364	2	17	11	2
Delmon Young	126	.317	.336	.476	3	16	10	2

Not quite the list that an Atlanta Braves fan would want to see. But this is why age factors so prominently in the appraisal of prospects — the fact that Miguel Cabrera could come up at age 20 and even put up a slightly above-average season at the plate meant that his future was bright. But if he put the same season up four years later, there would not have been much reason for excitement. So the fact that Heyward will create an entry for himself on this list is almost as important as his results.

But there are also reasons to expect better from Heyward. His minor league walk-to-strikeout ratio (0.76) is miles better than Miguel Cabrera’s decent 0.5 minor league number. His .190 career minor league ISO (slugging percentage minus batting aveage) is barely bested by Justin Upton’s .193 and Delmon Young’s .200. So to put Heyward’s skills in focus, relative to other recent young debuts, he’s got plate discipline better than Miguel Cabrera along with power comparable to Justin Upton.