The ALCS' Familiar, Unusual Suspects

Wade Davis throws a cut fastball that goes 96 miles per hour. It is dangerous, it bites, and is so seldom seen as to be almost mythical. It's a chupacabra of a pitch, except it is real. According to Fangraphs, Davis is one of only four pitchers that cracked 95 mph with a cutter 10 or more times this season; among that quartet, only the Yankees' Dellin Betances pairs it with a harder four-seam fastball.

It makes sense, then, that Davis has entrenched himself as perhaps the most devastating reliever in baseball over the past two seasons. His 0.94 ERA this year is more than half a run lower than Betances' second-place 1.50 mark; amazingly, this amounts only to marginal improvement over last season's league-leading 1.00 mark. Davis' 0.97 ERA the past two season is the lowest ever for a pitcher with more than 100 innings pitched. Also, Davis' two-year FIP of 1.72 ranks second only to Aroldis Chapman, while his two-year 5.0 fWAR ranks third, behind Betances and Chapman. It's almost demeaning to call him the best reliever remaining in these playoffs, true though it may be. Davis floats on another plane altogether.

Like so many prominent players and both teams in this ALCS, it would have seemed unlikely that Davis would be here just a few seasons ago. Davis began his career as the rare Rays starting pitching prospect who couldn't, a fastball-slider type whose front-of-the-rotation potential bled out due to terminally high walk rates and frivolous pitch counts. That Kanas City nevertheless expected him to be a staff mainstay when they acquired him in the James Shields trade—GM Dayton Moore forked over an estate tax of prospects to get Davis into the deal—was seen at the time as an LOL Royals moment among so many during that time. Davis flopped as expected, notching a 5.67 ERA in 24 starts in 2013, but he learned and honed his cutter along the way. By September, he was reassigned to the bullpen, and that last month foretold the carnage to come: a 0.90 ERA in 10 innings. He faced 36 batters and allowed three hits. And we were off.

Davis is far from the first junked starter to salvage himself into a late-inning reliever, even one this superlative. Baseball is not linear or logical, and high-profile reclamation cases are all over every roster in the game. What makes this ALCS so anomalous, though, is how many of those players will play pivotal roles. More than ever before, this series will belong to redeemed castoffs and reborn washouts.

There's some of this on the senior circuit, too—Jake Arrieta is a thing, now, and Bartolo Colon has come back from oblivion more times than anyone can count—but the NLCS fundamentally boils down to the Cubs' battalion of bats against the Mets' armada of arms. It's a battle between two farm systems performing precisely as imagined. The Royals, then, had their vaunted lineup arrive on time, instead of after a series of professional near-death experiences.

Alex Gordon, for instance, became the game's premier all-around left fielder only when he was five big league seasons and a position change removed from the burden of being George Brett's heir at the hot corner. Mike Moustakas may finally be ready for that role himself, something that only began in earnest last October after overhauling his approach at the plate. Eric Hosmer has oscillated between prodigy and bust a couple of times now, which means his stellar 2015 campaign has mostly gone unnoticed; still only 25, his .297/.363/.459 line reaffirmed his place as a lineup cornerstone. Davis is Davis, and Edinson Volquez has cheated mediocrity for a second consecutive season in the rotation, posting his highest fastball velocity (93.7 m.p.h.) since 2009, back when the Reds could discuss him as the future without getting laughed at.

He'd fit in even better on the Jays, who built much of their core on players plucked from other teams' Goodwill donations. You've heard the Jose Bautista story by now, the winding tale of a bad player cut loose by bad teams until he found a swing and a home in his northern exile. Edwin Encarnacion was nobody's idea of a star in Cincinnati, a third baseman who hit at a marginally above average rate and fielded leagues below that. In 2010, the Blue Jays lost him to Oakland on a waiver claim, then got him back when the A's cut him loose a few weeks later; his OPS marks in the last four seasons are .941, .904, .901, and .929. The bizarre Josh Donaldson trade is not the finest moment of Billy Beane's tenure as Oakland GM, but don't forget the improbable preamble that made it possible, in which the A's acquired him as a peripheral piece the Rich Harden trade. Donaldson, a former first-round pick, spent six years in the minors and moved off catcher before finding success at 27. And Toronto's totem in this whole run is R.A. Dickey, who bombed so thoroughly as a conventional pitcher that he had no choice but to become the last steward of the knuckleball; since then, he's won a Cy Young Award and written a best-selling book.

Collectively, these players have amassed scores of All-Star appearances and that Cy Young, and soon might add an MVP Award to the mix if Donaldson, the expected favorite, takes home the hardware. Odds are that several of them will be protagonists in this series; it's reasonable to presume that one could be named ALCS MVP. They've arrived, spectacularly if not quite on schedule, as the most important players on the best teams in the American League.

It's something to remember when Davis' carnivorous cutter goes on its next feeding frenzy. The journey that brought him here doesn't make the pitch any more or less formidable, but it does add a touch of enchantment to the spectacle of hitters flailing before its implausible velocity. It always arrives right on time.