Game 3 — Tomlin v. Hendricks — Mismatch

Good evening folks Harry Doyle here and welcome to game 3 of the 2016 Major League World Series.

Tonight will surely be an epic evening for Cubs fans. I was getting tweets from my Chicago friends early this morning as they were already having a beverage or two or three. Congratulations on making it to the dance.

OK. Last night I talked about the need for the Indians to wake up the bats as tonights pitching matchup between Tomlin and Hendricks is not favorable for the tribe. Two details to look at.

First — outcome to pressure during the season. Tomlin has a tendency to get behind in the count when trailing and has runners on base. The leads to more pressure and can lead to less positive outcomes. Not good. You can see Hendrick’s ability to stay away from the pressure. Very good. You can read more pressure to performance analysis in this paper. Let’s look at some other data.

Simple arithmetic reinforces the analysis above.

If Hendricks stays in control tonight he is going to keep the hits to a minimum, which is bad for the struggling bats of the Indians. My one concern here is Hendricks’ walks per inning. If the Indians can convert 1 or 2 walks into runs they might have shot at staying in the game.

If Tomlin can pitch his best game of the season the Indians will have chance as long as they get the bats going.

One more thing. We have not seen any homers yet from the Cubs. I could imagine they might be extra pumped to be back home.

I’ll report back during the game. Good luck tonight.

Note: You can build these yourself by plowing through this document and hacking on BigQuery and Datalab. Thanks to my friends at Sportradar for the help.