Pirate Galaxy » usage or draft preferences or fly-

LONDON -- For years, Andy Murray would whistle through the draws of majors, only to find a larger-than-life legend waiting for him in the final. Murray lost to?Roger Federer?in all three of their meetings in major finals and lost to?Novak Djokovic in five of seven similar showdowns.But Sundays championship match here at the All England Club featured Murray and Milos Raonic, a 25-year-old Canadian playing in his first Grand Slam final.In the critical moments -- and there were only a handful -- a slightly unsteady Raonic?looked like he was, in fact, playing the most important match of his life. Murray, meanwhile, was masterful, winning 6-4, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (2).Afterward, Murray stood on Centre Court, bent at the waist, head in hands. Minutes later, he was still sobbing in his changeover chair.Sundays match marked the first Grand Slam final in which Murray was the prohibitive favorite -- and in front of his home fans, no less. Now 29, he has grown into that legend who always seemed to stand in his way when the title was on the line.?Im proud to have my hands on the trophy, Murray said on court. I played really good stuff today.[Its the] most important tournament for me every year. The wins feel extra special because of the losses.It was the third Grand Slam singles title for Murray, his second at Wimbledon, but the first in three years. After losses on the final day in Melbourne and Paris this season, Murray avoided a third consecutive loss in a major final this year.This was a hugely popular victory -- not just for the throng gathered on Henman Hill. Murray, a native of Scotland, has been embraced by even casual tennis fans in this country as one of their own.After his breakthrough here in 2013, Murray was so emotionally spent he said he didnt really enjoy his feat in becoming the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years.It was just pure relief, Murray explained in his postmatch news conference. Yes, its different. I feel happier this time. I feel more content this time.And dont discount the back surgery Murray underwent that fall. This was his fourth major final since that unnerving event, and the first time hes won.Raonic gets credit for doing most of the heavy lifting coming in, beating the guy -- Sam Querrey -- who beat Djokovic in the quarterfinals and dispatching Federer in an emotional five-set semifinal match.The coaches of the two finalists, winners of a combined 15 Grand Slam singles titles and once bitter rivals, were one of the leading plotlines in the London tabloids.Ivan Lendl recently rejoined Murray with the goal of winning this tournament. John McEnroe was added to Raonics team as a grass consultant for the same reason. Both succeeded in getting their charges to be more aggressive, especially in the service game, and to move forward when the openings presented themselves.Murray was philosophical afterward, talking about learning from his previous losses and not being afraid of failing.I do feel like Im able to, I dont know, play a more offensive game style now than when I was younger because I was so worried about the outcome, Murray said. Maybe my game is a little more exciting when I go for shots that I wouldnt have when I was younger.I still feel my best tennis is ahead of me.Raonic ultimately came to the net 74 times, winning 46 of the points. Murray, 17-for-22, was more judicious -- and efficient.McEnroe, also under contract to provide analysis for ESPN and the BBC, did the BBC prematch show on Centre Court and called the match for ESPN.Milos Raonic is in this situation for the first time, McEnroe observed. He has to go for it.And while Raonic made every effort to serve big and come forward early and often, there was a spark missing. Perhaps he was still physically and mentally drained from that rousing, signature win against Federer.This ones going to sting, Raonic said afterward. Its been a phenomenal two weeks at this tournament. I keep plugging away every single day. Theres nothing I want more than to be back here.This set the Royal Box, which was packed with the British aristocracy -- a seriously pro-Murray audience -- ablaze. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (William and Kate) were on hand, sans their children. Although the Duchess, attending Thursday, revealed that Prince George already has a tennis racket.Prime Minister David Cameron and Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon were also there, along with actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Hugh Grant and Bradley Cooper. There were even some tennis players: Boris Becker, Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert.At one point in the second set, Raonic, who the London tabloids dubbed The Maple Missile, hit a 147 mph body serve -- and lost the point. He also hit a 124 mph second-serve ace. Murray has now won the past six matches between the two.Murray?still has the worst winning percentage in major finals in mens tennis history, at 3-8 (.273). The good news? Murray is inching closer to the 8-11 (.421) mark of his coach, Lendl. Its not a coincidence that Murrays three major titles have all come with Lendl in the coaching box.This fortnight felt like a bracing blast of fresh air hit mens tennis at the All England Club. It was the first Wimbledon final in 14 years without either Federer, Djokovic or Rafael Nadal. Raonic was trying to become the youngest Wimbledon champion since the 24-year-old Djokovic won his first in 2011.Along with Marin Cilic, Stan Wawrinka and a resurgent Juan Martin del Potro, Murray has been able to break through the Big Four wall, albeit sparingly. But this just might be the event that vaults Murray into the role of a legitimate rival for Djokovic.Murray, who admitted he was very nervous before the match, said the role of favorite didnt feel all that different.No different from the other Slams, really, he said. Just a different opponent on the other side, with different challenges, just like Roger and Novak.I think I handled it OK.It appears he did.Air Max 95 Outlet Italia . -- An ugly goal by Nick Bonino helped the Anaheim Ducks overcome the defensive-minded Phoenix Coyotes on a night when their ragged power play continued to struggle. Air Max Italia . But when it comes to determining if Raymond will find a place on the Leafs roster when training camp concludes in a week, well, that decision will ultimately fall to the head coach. https://www.scontatescarpeoutlet.it/ . Ivanovic was leading 7-5, 1-0 when Hantuchova withdrew after falling 0-40 behind in the second game. The match started slowly for Ivanovic, who surrendered her first two serves as Hantuchova took a 5-3 lead. Air Max 90 Scontate .C. -- Manny Malhotra had two goals and an assist, leading the Carolina Hurricanes to a 6-3 win over the Ottawa Senators on Saturday. Scarpe Scontatissime Online . PETERSBURG, Fla.There was a time 10 years ago when it was considered normal to poison your neighbors cat if he (your neighbor) didnt agree with you about statistics in baseball. It sounds absurd, but sabermetrics was the biggest issue in the 2006 mid-term elections. Activists outraged at the inclusion of VORP in school textbooks urged on massive book-burnings outside major league stadiums. The AL Central briefly seceded from the American League. Thousands of fans moved to Canada when they didnt like the general manager their favorite team hired.Ten years later, we live in a world scarcely imaginable to a loyal traditionalist of the time. The four teams in the two league championship series last week were all, according to an ESPN ranking of teams devotion to analytics in 2015, in the top two tiers of statheadiness. The Cubs and Indians, this years World Series entrants, were in the top tier, All-In. The Blue Jays and Dodgers were labeled Believers, and each team has only strengthened its stathead credentials since then. (The Blue Jays, for instance, poached a president and general manager from that All-In Cleveland front office.) The front offices of all four LCS teams trace their lineage to the Big Four stathead fortresses of the late 2000s: The Dodgers top executives are descended from the Rays and As; the Cubs from the Red Soxs; the Blue Jays from the Indians; and the Indians from, well, the Indians. Three of the four even hired employees right out from under me at Baseball Prospectus, where I was their editor. But no hard feelings.This is not going to be some sort of victory lap, I promise. There is no victory because there was nothing to vanquish: The scouts/stats war was always overblown, pretty much every team integrates both traditions proudly these days, the traditionalist wisdom has been validated many times in the past decade, the analytics have been far from infallible, players are not number-generating machines, and this paragraph has been written countless times because it is so uncontroversial to most analytical writers. Today, at least 28 teams could be described as analytical, and probably 30 could be described as traditional. Again, you are not reading a victory speech.But a postseason so dominated by True SABR is a fine occasion to survey postseason baseball in 2016 and see how it compares to the utopian/dystopian vision that partisans on either side might have had for it in 2006. How have these playoff teams differentiated themselves so far?1. The sacrifice buntingSince the playoffs expanded from two rounds to three in 1995, the sacrifice bunt has been a staple of October offense, with teams averaging .39 bunts per game. Ozzie Guillens small ball White Sox in 2005 provided the perfect clash with Moneyball orthodoxy at the time, as Guillens club bunted eight times in just 12 games, compared to the defending champion Red Sox, who didnt bunt once in the 2005 playoffs. But it wasnt just the White Sox. The Cardinals bunted six times, the Angels eight, and the Astros 18 times in 14 games. Those four teams made the league championship series, and the Astros and White Sox made the World Series, inspiring premature obituaries for Moneyball from even fantastic baseball writers:One additional passenger joined the Chicago White Sox on their private plane here and flew off into the sunset with manager Ozzie Guillen, slugger Jermaine Dye and the rest of baseballs champions.That would be the concept of Moneyball. ... The idea that Billy Beane and his Oakland As had discovered the divine formula to success at the expense of traditionalists, scouts and supposed dinosaurs was laid to rest in a postseason that culminated Wednesday night with Chicagos four-game dismantling of the Houston Astros to win the World Series.Since then, the bunt has steadily withdrawn from the game, to the point that Tim McCarver warned gloomily in a 2013 broadcast that we may be in a period where the bunt may be phased out of the game in the next year or two. Not exactly, but bunts per game in the regular season have dropped in each of the past five years, and this was the year that the drought reached the postseason. With just 11 so far, the 2016 postseason has seen just .19 bunts per game, half the established rate. Thats the lowest frequency since 1951, and a 17 percent drop from the most bunt-averse season of the expanded-playoffs era, 1969.Notably, the decline isnt explained by a no-bunts philosophy alone. Consider Game 6 of the NLCS: Dexter Fowler led off the game with a double. There was a time when runner on second, nobody out in the first would be a bunting situation, especially with a pitcher like Clayton Kershaw on the mound. Even Joe Maddon has called for eight bunts in such situations in his career. But with more teams following the stathead idea that the best hitter should bat second, the Cubs had Kris Bryant coming up to the plate, which takes the bunt off the table, throws it in the trash, and takes the can out to the curb for pickup so the dog cant get into it. The rest of the LCS teams most frequent No. 2 hitters this postseason: Josh Donaldson, Corey Seager and Jason Kipnis, stars all. No hitter batting second has laid down a bunt this postseason, which would make it just the second postseason since wild-card play began.More notably still: This is not a uniform boycott! Terry Francona has called for five sacrifice bunts from his position players, which is how many Dave Roberts got from his position players all season. Franconas club was third in the AL in sacrifice bunts this year, just four sacrifices ahead of the oft-caricatured stathead extremists in Houston. Which means two True SABR teams can have completely opposing positions on a tactic like the sacrifice bunt, which is important, and which leads to...2. The bullpen usageYes, youve heard enough about how Francona revolutionized modern bullpen usage by bringing in his best reliever, Andrew Miller, in the fifth and sixth innings of close games instead of saving him for the three-out save situation. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of bullpen usage in this years stathead postseason is not that Francona did it this way, but how other managers didnt do it this way. Each had his own way of using the bullpen.The Dodgers used Joe Blanton and Kenley Jansen in ways that resembled Franconas Andrew Miller usage. Blanton (who, it helps to remember now, was very good this year) entered games in the third inning and (twice) in the sixth. He threw 31 pitches in a clean, five-out appearances in the NLDS, then came back the next day and threw 19 more. Meanwhile,, Jansen entered a save situation in the seventh and entered in the sixth when the Dodgers were trailing in the NLCS Game 6.dddddddddddd Only twice in seven appearances did the Dodgers hold him until the ninth inning. He threw 51 pitches in a game. The Dodgers used 10 relievers in all, three more than any other LCS team, as they treated middle and late innings with extreme -- at times, almost erratic -- urgency.The Blue Jays, the one team in these series with a below-average bullpen, went the opposite direction: They rode their starters harder, limiting their bullpen usage to just six pitchers and just 26 ? innings. (The Dodgers relievers threw 45.) Their top two relievers, Roberto Osuna and Joe Biagini, actually threw a higher percentage of their teams relief innings than Miller and Cody Allen did for the Indians. But Osuna was used in a more traditional way, just twice entering a game in the eighth and never earlier. His more reasonable pitch counts kept him available every day, and the Blue Jays boosted his usage by bringing him in liberally to keep deficits manageable, rather than waiting for him to have a lead to protect.(Its worth mentioning, too, that the Blue Jays bullpen was below average in part because of a preseason decision to move Aaron Sanchez from the bullpen -- where hed been elite -- into the rotation, where hed been poor. Plenty of teams have passed this option up after introducing their top pitching prospects into the majors as relievers, e.g. the Reds with Aroldis Chapman and the Cardinals with Trevor Rosenthal. That the Blue Jays had a below-average bullpen was not their preference, but it was a choice, made to deploy Sanchez in a role in which he might have more value.)The Cubs spent more on their best reliever, Aroldis Chapman, than any other LCS team, but he pitched less than any other teams best. He never threw more than 21 pitches in an appearance, twice leaving games before they ended but always being fresh for the next game. The Cubs instead leaned heavily on matchups -- they were the only team in the LCS to get less than an inning per appearance from the bullpen as a whole -- and on Mike Montgomery, a versatile trade deadline acquisition who had outings ranging from two batters to 16 batters.So whats so interesting about this? In the quarter-century after Dennis Eckersley and Rick Honeycutt pitched for Tony LaRussas world champion As, the trend was consistently toward predictable roles, toward titles, toward a model that was about finding a funky southpaw to be your lefty specialist, an expensive fireballer to be your closer, a less expensive fireballer to be your set-up guy, a fringy starter to be your long man, and so on. Even this year, in the regular season, there was little deviation from these narrow ways of using relievers. There are benefits to that rigidity, to be sure, especially in the regular season, but there are crippling limitations, too, especially in the postseason. If theres something to take from the four teams in the LCS, its that you dont fix the rigid model by putting a better rigid model on top of it. Rather, you create a model that works with the specific personnel in each bullpen and that maintains some flexibility to account for the situation.Unlike the way that, say, Ned Yost managed in the postseason last year. But speaking of Yost ...3. The Yost Influence?Last year, as the Cubs were on the verge of being bounced from the NLCS, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein said this:The only thing I know for sure is that whatever team wins the World Series, their particular style of play will be completely en vogue and trumpeted from the rooftops by the media all offseason -- and in front offices -- as the way to win.That team would end up being the Royals, one of modern baseballs stylistic outliers, managed by one of baseballs least enthusiastic tacticians. The Royals have plenty of statheads in their organization, to be sure, but the influence of these analysts is less apparent on the field or in the dugout than for almost any other team. So, assuming Theo Epstein cant, by law, be wrong, what did he and the other LCS teams take from the Royals?Not that much. Three of these four teams were among the worst basestealing clubs in baseball. No team invested in contact-oriented hitters like the Royals did, with none of the four LCS clubs finishing with one of the 10 best strikeout rates in the majors. Yosts extreme version of bullpen rigidity was not only not followed, but rejected. While Yost rarely made lineup changes and allowed a low-OBP leadoff hitter because it felt right, these clubs valued versatility and platoons and pushed slugging, high-OBP leadoff men like Jose Bautista and Carlos Santana to the top the lineup. While the Royals employed a poor framing catcher who earned his Gold Gloves with a superior throwing arm, all four of these teams carried excellent framers and unexceptional (or worse) throwers.The most persuasive comparisons are in each teams bullpen personnel -- where the Indians and Cubs both spent heavily to get a version of Wade Davis, believing one ace reliever wouldnt be enough -- and in the quick hooks that almost every starter had this fall. But each feels like a stretch to connect to Ned Yost.Its not surprising, though, that four committed stathead teams wouldnt resemble Ned Yost on the field. But its also not wrong to say that they all have more in common with Yost than the groupthink criticism of baseball analytics would allow for. If theres something that these playoffs really taught us, its that 10 years after the Join Or Die culture war reached its peak, there is little sameness in baseball strategy. What makes these four teams progressive has nothing to do with toeing the line on bunts or intentional walks or closer usage or draft preferences or fly-ball pitchers or infield shifts. Rather, its the Cubs launching mental skills programs for their players. Its the Indians trying to study something so tangled as team chemistry. Its the Dodgers running sprinters academies, or training cricket players, trying to find undiscovered talent. Its the Blue Jays -- well, the Blue Jays wont even say what theyre doing, and its that, too.One of the arguments against analytics 10 years ago was that they would make baseball boring. (Ive made the argument, too.) But these have been among the most exciting playoffs in years. That there were teams doing things differently was a big reason why. ' ' '