The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

by Ben Lindbergh

Porcello, who was pitching out of the pen between starts, threw his sinker more often than any other pitch during the regular season. Statistically speaking, it wasn’t one of his better pitches—his four-seamer and slider were better—but it helped him induce contact and create quicker at-bats, allowing him to stay in games longer. In a playoff relief role, though, he wouldn’t need to be economical; he’d only need to miss bats. “Three best pitches, three best locations, and just live or die by that,” Bannister says. “You’re not a sinkerballer anymore, you’re Rick Porcello, the eighth-inning setup guy.” His first playoff appearance of 2018, a short but sweet hold in the eighth inning of ALDS Game 1, marked the first time in his ten-year career that he’d ever appeared in an MLB game without throwing a sinker. ALCS Game 2 was the second. Porcello got Tony Kemp to ground out with a curve, struck out González with a four-seamer, and then ended the inning by convincing Carlos Correa to chase and swing through a slider down and away. As he walked off the mound, he screamed and pumped his arms. “I thought that was a defining moment of the whole run,” Bannister says. Before then, “the narrative had always been we were one reliever short, or the bullpen was the vulnerability of our team, and seeing Rick step up and be that stopgap… was just such a boost for the entire team. At that moment, we were like, ‘We’re going to do this.’”