Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 11/1/19

FanGraphs | Ben Clemens: Unsurprisingly, the bullpen was a big reason as to why the Nationals won the World Series. While the Astros had a collective bullpen RA9 that hovered around 7, the Nationals got stellar performances from Sean Doolittle, and especially Patrick Corbin in Game 7, that helped seal the deal.

Baseball Prospectus | Rob Arthur ($): Though the World Series renewed calls for a “robot ump,” there are still technological challenges to getting that off the ground. One are the NULLs that get thrown by these systems, we see that with Trackman and Statcast now. Another thing would be transparency about how this objective strike zone is formed, which as we’ve seen with the ball construction, could be an issue if there are unknown inconsistencies behind the scenes.

The Ringer | Ben Lindbergh: Deciding the “team of the decade” for the 2010s, largely because no team truly dominated it in both regular season (like the Yankees and Dodgers) and in the playoffs (like the Giants). Yet if you were probably to choose a hybrid it’s the Astros, and more convincingly so if they won this one. But baseball has been shaped by their run for both and definitely for bad, and it has defined pretty much every facet of our sport heading into 2020.