7 things we learned this postseason

Drawing any conclusions from a 37-game sample in Major League Baseball would seem to be a bit of a fool's errand.

But, every year, the postseason yields learning opportunities that carry monumental meaning. Despite the small sample size, each game is being played by the best of the best, and every out gets a team one step closer to the Commissioner's Trophy, additional merchandising opportunities, and a larger share of revenue. Those are enough reasons for front offices and the league itself to learn some lessons from the year-end tournament.

Pace of play needs work

It's time to admit it, folks: Commissioner Rob Manfred was right about something.

The 2019 World Series was the first in history to feature multiple nine-inning games that took more than four hours to complete. That's too damn long.

The games didn't seem to be bogged down by pitching changes, so a three-batter minimum - which seems increasingly inevitable - doesn't necessarily feel like the right fix. However, a pitch clock might be a good idea, along with umpires enforcing that batters stay in their box.

Starting pitching helps, but it isn't everything

There's an old adage in baseball that pitching wins championships. Over the years, that theory has been poked and prodded, with the majority of investigations still finding that elite run prevention typically helps more than elite run creation.

There's no debating that the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals boasted the best starting pitching in their respective leagues during the 2019 season. However, aces from both sides faltered in the World Series. Houston's Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander - who will finish first and second in Cy Young Award voting this season in some order - were both bested by the Nationals in their first appearances of the series. And Washington's Max Scherzer, who's pitched through plenty of ailments in his career, was unable to make his scheduled Game 5 start. That led to a loss, despite Joe Ross' best efforts while filling in.

Want a dynasty? Prepare to tank

These Astros, who've reached two World Series in the last three years, can't yet be considered a dynasty, but they're the closest thing in today's MLB. For now, the San Francisco Giants (2010-14) are the most recent franchise to earn that prestigious title.

While the Giants' sustained excellence didn't involve tanking, the same can't be said for the Astros, who were the laughingstocks of MLB back when San Fran was polishing its hardware. Now, for better or worse, it feels like every single team is trying to copy Houston's recent model.

The economics of baseball are always changing, so time will tell how long this lasts. Perhaps the next collective bargaining agreement will address it - or maybe the success of last year's Boston Red Sox and this season's Nationals will show the value of investing in the on-field product - but we can likely expect to see tanking across the league for the foreseeable future.

Maybe 'bullpenning' isn't the be-all, end-all

After the Royals improbably won the 2015 World Series thanks to outsized contributions from relievers Wade Davis, Kelvin Herrera, and Greg Holland, the best teams in baseball started to assemble their own three-headed bullpen monsters.

The four best bullpens in baseball this year, according to FanGraphs WAR, all belonged to playoff sides: the Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, and Oakland Athletics. The relievers on those teams undoubtedly helped them qualify for the postseason, but none of those franchises reached the World Series. The A's fell to the Rays, the Twins lost to the Yankees, and the Rays and Yankees both got beat by Astros. In fact, a couple of those elite bullpens looked exhausted by the time they reached high-leverage playoff moments.

Meanwhile, the AL-winning Astros owned the eighth-best bullpen in baseball, and the champion Nationals ranked just 22nd.

MLB has no clue what's going on with the balls

Let's quickly recap the last three years: In 2017, MLB teams set a record for the most combined home runs in a single season. The league's homer total dropped in 2018, but then it surged even higher to set another record this year. However, the 2019 playoffs were a different story, as the ball seemed to resemble the 2018 version.

Manfred is insisting that this year's playoff ball came from the same batch used in the regular season - despite evidence to the contrary. So, which ball will we see in 2020? We don't know, and neither does MLB.

Home field disadvantage?

Not only did the road team win every single game of the World Series, but "home-field advantage" didn't seem to be a thing for most of the postseason.

Here's how every team in the 2019 playoffs performed at home (the Milwaukee Brewers are omitted because they never played a home game):

This certainly isn't predictive of anything, but it's definitely anomalous and worth noting. The lesson to be learned, one supposes, is don't take for granted that fan support equals victories.

Catching tandems = new market inefficiency?

Catching tandems aren't exactly new, but a minor trend might be taking over behind the plate, and it was evident in the postseason.

Of the 10 teams that made the playoffs, only the Brewers employed a catcher who played more than 115 regular-season games. The Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals would likely have been in that tier if Gary Sanchez and Yadier Molina stayed healthy all year, but the Nationals, Braves, and Twins all deployed a timeshare to great effect.

Other than Milwaukee, eight MLB clubs featured a catcher who appeared in 115 games or more this season - the Red Sox, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Miami Marlins, Colorado Rockies, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago White Sox - and all of those teams missed the playoffs.

Then, in the postseason, both Kurt Suzuki and Yan Gomes suited up in more than half of Washington's games, while Robinson Chirinos and Martin Maldonado each had at least 20 at-bats for Houston.