Monthly Archives: October 2023

ALDS Game Two: From blowout to squeaker

Posted on by
Reply
Mitch Garver

Mitch Garver’s third-inning grand slam proved the difference maker as the Orioles turned an  early blowout into a squeaker of a win for the Rangers Sunday.

Until this weekend, the last time the Orioles were swept in a series was in May, by the Blue Jays. During the regular season, the Orioles were a .642 team on the road. Now, they’re on the threshold of an American League division series sweep, but they’re counting on that traveling mojo to overthrow a Rangers team that won’t be overthrown without a fight.

Not after the Orioles turned a 9-2 blowout in the making into an 11-8 squeaker in Game Two Sunday. Not after the Orioles couldn’t do better than Aaron Hicks’s three-run homer with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Not after the Rangers battered them for nine runs in the first three innings, including and especially Mitch Garver’s grand slam in the third.

Not after the Oriole bullpen was so deeply deployed following a Game One loss that saw theirs ranks pressed into duty after four and two thirds. Today’s travel day from Baltimore to Arlington may not necessarily give them relief. Not facing a Rangers team that hasn’t played at home in a fortnight but hit 53 home runs more at home than on the road during the season.

“We just came up a little bit short today, but that built a lot of momentum going into the next game,” said Orioles leftfielder Austin Hays after Game Two. “Nobody laid down. We didn’t give away any at-bats. We continued to fight. We were able to get into their bullpen and work on those guys a little bit. I feel good moving forward, but we know we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

That’s a polite way to put it. They played .500 ball against the Rangers in six regular season games, but they blew their home field advantage to open this division series. A team that hasn’t seen home in a fortnight can be presumed hungry to put an end to this set as soon as possible, by any means necessary.

The Rangers proved that when they started Garver, a backup catcher who played in only half the regular season games, and sent him out for his first postseason appearance this time around. In a game the Orioles opened with a 2-0 lead after one full inning, but the Rangers slapped rookie Orioles starting pitcher Grayson Rodriguez silly with a five-run second, Garver checked in at the plate with one out followed by three straight walks.

Orioles reliever Bryan Baker left the pillows loaded for his relief, Jacob Webb. On 3-1 Webb elevated a fastball, and Garver elevated it six rows into the left field seats.

Rangers manager Bruce Bochy—who came out of retirement to shepherd the Rangers after all those years and those three World Series rings managing the Giants—said pregame that it was “just time to get [Garver] out there.” Garver may have given the boss the most expensive thank-you present of the postseason thus far.

“He’s got big power,” Bochy said postgame, “and that’s big at that point in the game. Really was the difference in the game.”

So were the eleven walks handed out by eight Orioles pitchers, including a postseason record five to Rangers shortstop Corey Seager. So were the mere three hits in thirteen Oriole plate appearances with runners in scoring position, which explains a lot about how the Orioles actually out-hit the Rangers (fourteen hits to eleven; .973 to .891 game OPS) but fell three short in the end.

Also in too-vivid contrast were the fruits of each team’s trade deadline moves. Or, in the Orioles’ case, lack thereof. The Rangers moved to bring future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer into the fold but also added starter Jordan Montgomery and reliever Chris Stratton in a deal with the Cardinals.

The Orioles moved to bring another Cardinal pitcher, Jack Flaherty, aboard at the deadline. But Flaherty, once a glittering Cardinal comer, hasn’t been the same pitcher since a 2021 oblique injury and a 2022 shoulder injury. He pitched his way out of the Oriole rotation and now looks to be the long man out of the bullpen.

He got a shot at showing what he could do in that role when it looked as though it would be just mop-up work Sunday. The good news: He surrendered only one run (on Garver’s double play grounder in the fifth) in two innings’ work. The bad news: He contributed to the Oriole walking parade with three of his own, including two in the fifth.

Some say the Orioles standing practically pat at the trade deadline instead of going for any kind of impact deal may yet come back to bite them right out of the postseason, especially after their own pitching depletion (losing top starter John Means and closer Félix Bautista especially) late in the season. Others fear the Orioles were more concerned with their usual penny pinching plus censoring a lead broadcaster over a positive graphic the team itself fashioned for a broadcast.

Montgomery handled the Orioles well following the two-run first, at least until he surrendered a pair in the fourth on an RBI single (Jorge Mateo) and a sacrifice fly (Ryan Mountcastle.) But when Orioles rookie star Gunnar Henderson greeted him with a full-count leadoff home run and Hicks followed with a base hit, Montgomery’s day ended and the ordinarily wobbly Ranger bullpen took over.

That bullpen kept the Orioles quiet until the bottom of the ninth, when Brock Burke handed Henderson a one-out walk and Hays singled him to second. Bochy reached then for José Leclerc, and Hicks—the erstwhile Yankee who never really found his best footing in the Bronx—reached for a one-strike service and drove it into the right field seats.

It was a little vindication for Hicks the day after he blew a hit-and-run sign in the Game One ninth, leaving Henderson a dead duck on the pond when he was thrown out at second, before Leclerc finished the 3-2 Rangers win. After his up-and-down Yankee life, Hicks looked like an Oriole blessing after he signed in May following his Yankee release. After Sunday, he looked like an Oriole hope once again.

An Oriole hope is just what Baltimore needs now. But Ranger hopes won’t exactly play to an empty house come Tuesday. At the end of the former, survival. At the end of the latter, a chance to play for the pennant.

NLDS Games One: The Atlanta Chop Slop, the Los Angeles funeral parlour

Posted on by
Reply
Truist Park

Trash talk? Have at it. Trash the field over a call going against you? What was this, Braves fan?

Neither the Dodgers nor the Phillies expected simple National League division series this time around. Not with both teams coming in with what some call patchwork pitching. But one came out looking better in their Game One while the other came out looking like the remnant of a nuclear attack.

The Phillies and their pitching managed to keep the Atlanta threshing machine from threshing Saturday afternoon, winning 3-0. Starting with a first-inning nuking of future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, the Diamondbacks laid waste to the Dodgers Saturday night, 11-2. On the arms of big enough bats and a starting pitcher who was usually close enough to Dodger batting practise.

Letting starter Ranger Suárez go no more than three and two thirds, knowing they’d have a day off between Games One and Two, the Phillies went to a bullpen game, essentially. And that bullpen finished what Suárez started, shutting the Braves out over the remaining five and a third. The Braves who hit a record 307 home runs on the regular season looked as though they had paper towel tubes for bats.

None more glaring than the founding father of the 40/70 club. Ronald Acuña, Jr. went 0-for-3 with a walk, and his evening’s futility included an embarrassing called strikeout in the fifth, when—with first and third and one out—the second Phillies reliever of the evening, Seranthony Domínguez, planted a fastball right on the low inside corner.

Small wonder that Braves manager Brian Snitker could and did say, postgame, “I think it was more their pitching than our hitting.” Indeed.

Braves starter Spencer Strider pitched boldly enough, striking eight out and scattering five hits in seven innings’ work. But the Phillies still pried two runs out of him, both with Bryce Harper the big factor. First, Strider threw wild enough trying to pick Harper off first in the top of the fourth, enabling Bryson Stott to single him home with the first run. Then, Strider threw Harper enough of a meatball to disappear into the Chop House seats behind right field with one out in the top of the sixth.

“Strider, man, he’s one of the best in the game. You know he’s going to come at you and throw his best at you,” Harper said postgame. “So just trying to get a pitch over and was able to get the slider up and do some damage.”

Except for Acuña’s surprising silence, and the eighth-inning catcher’s interference call with J.T. Realmuto at the plate and the Phillies with the bases loaded, enabling the third Phillie run home, the Braves at least looked stronger in Game One defeat than the Dodgers did. Even Strider, who became the first postseason pitcher ever to lose twice against a team against whom he’s well undefeated in the regular season.

The Diamondbacks didn’t let Clayton Kershaw—all 35 years old of him, with possible lingering shoulder issues plus eight days of rest leaving him with little enough to offer—get out of the first alive. Their 35-year-old journeyman starter Merrill Kelly, who didn’t turn up in the Show until age 30 in the first place, manhandled them for six and a third after the Snakes bit Kershaw deep in the first.

For the regular season’s final two months, with a 2.23 ERA over eight starts, Kershaw seemed to tell age and his shoulder alike where to stuff it. Then Kershaw took the ball Saturday night. What’s the saying about too much rest being as hazardous to a pitcher as too little rest can be?

Ketel Marte opened with a double to the back of left center field, and Corbin Carroll began showing why he’s in the Rookie of the Year conversation with a prompte RBI single. Tommy Pham—the same Tommy Pham who called out the lack of work ethic among second-tier Mets teammates with whom he played before the trade deadline—rapped a short single to left for first and second.

Then Christian Walker, a veteran first baseman who hadn’t been anything much special before 2022, hit one so far to the back of the left field bleachers some wondered how the ball didn’t leave the ballpark structure. Just like that, Dodger Stadium resembled a funeral parlour. And, just like that, Kershaw resembled the corpse for whom the audience came to mourn.

A ground out by Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. and a walk to Alek Thomas later, Evan Longoria sent Thomas all the way home with a double to deep center field, hammering the final nails into Kershaw’s coffin.

“Embarrassing,” the lefthander said postgame. “You just feel like you let everybody down. The guys, a whole organization, that looked to you to pitch well in Game One. It’s just embarrassing, really. So I just feel like I let everybody down. It’s a tough way to start the postseason. Obviously, we still have a chance at this thing, but that wasn’t the way it should’ve started for me.”

Kershaw’s postseason history is a direct contrast to the regular-season career that guarantees him a place in Cooperstown. Until Saturday night, enough of that sad history came by way of leaving him in too long or by circumstances above and beyond his control.

Entering Game One with a 5.49 ERA against the Dodgers lifetime but a 7.03 ERA against them when pitching in Dodger Stadium, Kelly pitched six and a third shutout innings before turning it over to a bullpen that kept the Dodgers to one hit. The bad news: the hit was a two-run triple by Will Smith off Miguel Castro. The good news: The Snakes could afford such generosity by then, since it cut an 11-0 lead by a measly two runs.

Kelly’s keys included forgetting how the Dodgers treated him like a piñata in regular season play. “I’m watching our guys beat up on one of the best pitchers that we’ve ever seen in our lives and watching them do it in the first game I’ve ever pitched in the playoffs,” he said postgame. “I felt if I gave those games any attention I was going out there behind the eight-ball before I even stepped on the mound.”

This time, Kelly went out there with a six-run cushion, then saw it padded to nine by a three-run second including Carroll leading off against Dodger reliever Emmet Sheehan with a drive into the right field bleachers. Kelly was now comfortable enough that he could have pitched from a high-backed leather office chair and incurred no damage.

The only thing that should have and apparently did embarrass the Braves was the Truist Park crowd throwing drinks onto the field after catcher Sean Murphy’s mitt grazed Realmuto’s bat by a thin hair. You could hear it on replays that didn’t exactly show it too clearly, but Murphy’s lack of challenging the call affirmed it.

Trea Turner—who started a spectacular double play with Acuña (leadoff walk) on third to end the bottom of the eighth, diving left for Ozzie Albies’s ground smash and backhanding to second baseman Stott—scored on the interference. The rain of drinks into the outfield annoyed both the Braves and their manager.

“There’s no excuse for that,” Snitker snapped postgame. “It’s scary because those water bottles, when they come, they’re like grenades. It could really seriously injure one of our players.”

That’s what the miscreants don’t stop to think about. Against a team whose fan base is usually considered one of the worst in the game. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding: the clergyman pronounces the happy couple husband and wife before telling the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.”) Be better, Braves fans.

Only the silence in Dodger Stadium following the Diamondbacks’ early and often abuse of Kershaw and Sheehan kept the big National League division series headlines elsewhere from reading, “Chop Slop.”

Billy Eppler and the invisible injured list

Posted on by
Reply
Billy Eppler

Billy Eppler leaves the Mets to hunt a new GM, while MLB investigates his use/misuse/abuse of the so-called phantom injured list.

Something is further amiss in the milieu of the Mets than just the sunken season that compelled manager Buck Showalter’s scapegoating. It may not be limited to the Mets alone, but with general manager Billy Eppler resigning—possibly before he, too, might have been shown the door—it’s the Mets drawing the headlines on it.

First, it came forth that Eppler all but strong-armed Showalter into continuing to write Daniel Vogelbach’s name into the lineup, against just about every piece of evidence saying Vogelbach didn’t truly belong there. Then, it came forth that Eppler was under baseball government investigation over what’s known as the phantom injured list.

Even with the medical advances of this century, it’s bad enough that (you guessed it) baseball medicine could still be tried by jury for malpractise. The phantom injured list—basically, placing underperforming players on it to keep them out of the lineup, while still paying them and granting their major league service time, though possibly denying them certain incentive-based chances—could be called another kind of malpractise.

That would be the kind that calls honest competition into further question that such things as tanking have it already. The kind that compels some baseball people—former Phillies manager Joe Girardi, notoriously enough—to admit they’re not always forthcoming about real injuries the better to keep valuable intelligence out of opposition sights. Never mind that teams can usually tell when the other guys have a likely wounded warrior.

The Mets had 28 real IL placements in 2023. This didn’t even make the Mets the Show’s worst such infirmary roll: the Giants, who dumped manager Gabe Kapler for being unable to maneuver a dubious roster built by president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, had 46 IL members. Right ahead of the Reds’ 45 and the Angels’ 42.

By contrast, the healthiest reported 2023 teams were the postseason-reaching Astros (14), the postseason-missing Guardians (17), the postseason-missing Mariners (18), and the postseason-reaching Diamondbacks (also 18).

Teams are supposed to provide medical documentation and approval when they place players on the injured list. The New York Post broke the news that, when MLB investigators informed the Mets that Eppler was being probed over the phantom IL, Eppler elected to resign rather than “potentially become a distraction” as new PBO David Stearns settles into his new job.

“Stashing healthy players on the IL can aid a team competitively,” the Post said, in an article under the joint bylines of Mike Puma, Joel Sherman, Jon Heyman, and Mark W. Sanchez. “Designating healthy players as injured can enable clubs to keep those players under team control rather than risk losing them to other organizations.”

A day before that story broke, Puma reported that Showalter and Eppler clashed over Vogelbach. Showalter likes to use the DH slot as breathers for his position players but also didn’t like Vogelbach’s skill set limits. None of which seemed to matter to Eppler, who continued insisting that the lefthand-swinging Vogelbach remain the DH against righthanded pitching.

It’s one thing to allow a less than perfect physical specimen a place in the lineup at all, but it’s something else to let him stay there if he can’t deliver. Physically, Vogelbach can be described politely as making Babe Ruth resemble Mike Schmidt. His most apparent skill set, his on-base ability, shown well after the Mets acquired him from the Pirates before 2022’s trade deadline, disappeared drastically enough amidst the 2023 Mets’ dissipation.

But Vogelbach lacked power and didn’t hit consistently enough with or without power to convince Showalter he belonged in the Mets’ lineup, no matter how gifted he is at working out walks. His bulk also made him less than mobile enough that playing him at first base or elsewhere could have been considered giving aid and comfort to the opposing lineup.

Fair disclosure: At 6’4″, I once packed 325 pounds. I’ve since lost in the neighbourhood of fifty pounds, striking to return my weight to 225. I empathise with Vogelbach in that regard. But I haven’t played baseball since age 15, when I discovered the hard way I wasn’t any kind of good at it anymore.* And I’m not the guy a GM forced a manager to put in the lineup.

At points in the season’s first half, where the Mets’ more formidable plate presences struggled, Vogelbach’s presence in the lineup looked even more suspicious. There were thoughts public and private that the Mets might move Vogelbach at the 2023 trade deadline, but Puma says when the move didn’t happen Showalter began “questioning openly” why Vogelbach was still a Met.

“Not only was Vogelbach still on the team,” Puma wrote, “but (a) source indicated the manager was told by Eppler to keep him in the starting lineup.” For what purpose? For Eppler to save face over dealing for Vogelbach in the first place?

Marry that to MLB investigating Eppler’s use, misuse, or abuse of the phantom IL, and maybe, just maybe, you have a prospective case of Eppler resigning before Stearns—who’d first said he looked forward to working with him—might be forced to throw him out on his none-too-ample derriere.

Just what the Mets didn’t need now. They hired Eppler in the first place after interim GM Zack Scott was charged with DUI. Scott replaced Jared Porter, after Porter was exposed as having sent sexually explicit text messages to a female reporter. The Mets have to be hoping Eppler’s eventual successor comes at minimum and remains scandal free.

That may prove child’s play compared to the issue that finally compelled Eppler to show himself the door out. It will not do, either, for anyone to confine their curiosity about phantom IL use and abuse to trying to determine who blew the whistle on Eppler. Maybe it’s time to look at all teams and the phantom IL, not the Mets alone.

Maybe it’s long past time that baseball’s entire medical culture was given a full and proper investigation. For the sake of player health, and for the sake of honest competition. And in that order.

—————————————————————————————————-

* At 15, I discovered I couldn’t hit fair unless the foul line ran perpendicular to the back point of home plate. I’ve had long enough legs but you need more than that to run. Even if I could hit one fair, it would have taken me longer than Bartolo Colon to run the bases if I hit one out. Without hitting one out, I could have been the guy who’d get thrown out at first from the bullpen.

That was the wild card week that shouldn’t have been

Posted on by
Reply
Bryson Stott

Bryson Stott’s grand slam Wednesday, and Royce Lewis’s two bombs Tuesday, were the most fun of this week’s less-than-fun wild card games.

Well, that was fast. Four wild card series, four sweeps. A grand total of two runs scored by both the American League’s losing teams. The National League’s managed to score sixteen between them, but the winners scored 22 between them to the AL winners’ 16. Lovely.

Except for a very few moments among two wild card series winners, saying those winners shot the proverbial fish in the proverbial barrel is something like saying the sun arose, the sky’s blue, the tide’s rushing in, and the television cash kept pouring into MLB’s kitty, properly competitive baseball be damned.

The wild card idea for baseball was dubious from its birth, of course. But the arrival of three wild cards per league has now hit rock bottom. And don’t ask if baseball’s postseason could possibly become any weaker. Someone in the commissioner’s office might hear you and plant the appropriate seed in Rob Manfred’s garden of weeds

Bad enough that the race for the wild cards is a house of cards where legitimate pennant race competition is concerned. Go ahead and say it, go ahead and say you find nothing wrong with the thrills and chills and spills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish . . . well enough in second or even third place to qualify for championship play.

Go ahead and tell me the Rays looked like a fourth-best-regular-season-record team in getting thumped and stumped by the eighth-best Rangers in their own sorry excuse for a ballpark. Go ahead and tell me the ninth-best Blue Jays looked like a worthy postseason team after getting shoved aside by the AL Central champion Twins—the Show’s eleventh-best team on the season.

Go ahead and tell me the thirteenth-best team on the season, the Marlins, had any business being in the postseason with key pitchers injured after getting destroyed by the Phillies. Tell me the NL Central-winning Brewers looked like baseball’s fifth-best regular season team when they got dumped by the twelfth-best Diamondbacks, who may yet receive their own come-uppance from the NL West beasts out of Los Angeles.

The most excitement these wild card games delivered was the Twins’ Royce Lewis becoming the first number one draft pick ever to clear the fences in his first two postseason plate appearances ever, and Phillies second baseman Bryson Stott putting a still-reachable Game Two out of reach with a sixth-inning grand slam to the rear end of the lower right center field seats.

The most ginned up controversy came in Game Two of one of the American League sets, when Blue Jays manager John Schneider lifted his seemingly cruising starting pitcher José Berríos after three shutout innings. Schneider had only been very public saying he was going all pitching hands on deck (minus Game One starter Kevin Gausman) for a game he had to win to stay alive. You expected him to think of less when he’s facing win-or-be-gone that early?

How many stopped to ponder that the Blue Jays bats going missing in action did more damage—well, far more lack of damage—than Schneider lifting a pitcher who might have had maybe two more innings in him during which there was a reasonable chance of him showing how he gets torched as soon as the opposing order’s third time around arrives?

And what about Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., coming off a fine if not superstar regular season, getting careless on second with two out in the top of the fifth and Twins starter Sonny Gray finishing his fifth shutout inning by picking Guerrero’s tail feathers off second cleanly with second and third and Bo Bichette at the plate?

The Twins weren’t exactly causing traffic jams at the plate themselves, not with five runs scored across the set and three courtesy of Lewis. But the Blue Jays’ offensive inertia did far more to cost them than lifting Berríos could have done. This was baseball’s ninth-best regular season team getting pushed, shoved, and bumped home by baseball’s eleventh-best team.

That’s also why the Brewers are going home for the winter sooner than they planned. They needed far more than Christian Yelich and Willy Adames to swing and didn’t get it. And they have other issues to face, too. Their manager becomes a free agent and their two best pitchers—both under one final coming year of team control—may not be getting paid what their worth if they stay in Milwaukee. There may have gone the Brewers’ window for awhile, after winning an NL Central that some say nobody else really wanted to win.

Maybe it’s finally time for the Show’s government to start thinking of four-division leagues, and thus a postseason in which nobody gets to the dance unless their butts were parked in first place when the regular season ended. Maybe it’s time that, once agreeing upon that, each league’s divisions are placed into a pair of conferences with regular-season interleague play sent the way of stone bases once and for bloody all.

Maybe it’s time for best-of-three division series, best-of-five conference series, and the return of the best-of-five League Championship Series. Keeping the World Series prime at a best-of-seven.

Think about it. Commissioner Pepperwinkle and his minions will still get all the postseason games and postseason television money they could fantasise about. But this time, it’d be on behalf of far more honest competition, far more honest pennant races, and nobody on the edges of their seats waiting to see who finishes . . . second and even below.

When the best news of wild card week proved to be Mets general manager Billy Eppler resigning—maybe to duck being canned over forcing now-former manager Buck Showalter to use still-struggling, still-portly Daniel Vogelbach in the 2023 Mets’ lineups, despite his bat proving he didn’t deserve to be there so often, maybe out of Eppler’s need to justify the 2022 deal that brought him aboard in the first place—you know this year’s wild card sets were flushed.

Because we baseball fans, even those attention-deficit fans to whom Commissioner Pepperwinkle seems to pay the most attention anymore, didn’t sign up to see what we saw this week. Not even Lewis and Stott could acquit that.

Starting postseason life with two bangs

Posted on by
Reply
Royce Lewis

Sometimes things line up too perfectly to pass up on those opportunities.—Royce Lewis, here rounding third off the second of his AL wild card series-opening home runs Tuesday.

Children who grow up with dreams of baseball have numerous supporting fantasies. Rest assured, once they realise they can play the game well, they dream of making the Show. Many of them then dream of going number one in the draft, with or without the glandular signing bonus. Many of those dream of going number one, making the Show, then making the postseason for the first time and making . . .

Waves? Big splashes? Broken precedents? All the above? Ask Royce Lewis, the Twins’ infielder who slotted as the team’s designated hitter for Game One of their wild card set against the Blue Jays Tuesday. The same guy who hit grand slams in back-to-back games against the Guardians in July.

He faced formidable Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman in the bottom of the first with one out and Edouard Julien aboard (leadoff walk). He worked the count full. Then, he turned on a pitch in the middle of the inside part of the plate, and it sailed on a high line into the left field seats. Game One wasn’t ten minutes old, and Lewis put the Twins up 2-0.

Two somewhat quiet innings later, Lewis checked in against Gausman again. This time, he opened the inning. This time, he didn’t wait for the count to get full. This time, Gausman’s 3-1 service came right down the pipe. This time, the ball took a flight the opposite way, banging off the top of the right field wall, making it 3-0, Twins, turning Target Field temporarily into the world’s largest outdoor nuthouse.

Two plate appearances. Two swings. Two bombs. There have been 58 number-one draft picks since Rick Monday went number one to the then-Kansas City Athletics in 1965. There have been a number of big boppers among them. Only three of those number-ones became Hall of Famers. (Harold Baines, Ken Griffey, Jr., Chipper Jones.) Four, if you count Hall of Famer-in-waiting Joe Mauer.

Not a one of them began any postseason life they had with even one home run, never mind two, never mind hitting the first bomb of any postseason, never mind being responsible for every run scored in their team’s postseason series-opening win, which the Twins won 3-1. The lone Toronto run: Kevin Kiermaier singling Bo Bichette home in the top of the sixth.

“That’s a God thing,” Lewis said postgame. “I’m just blessed to be part of it. It felt like I was blacked out the whole game. My heart was racing.” He keeps blacking out like that and the Twins have an excellent chance of going places other than home prematurely this postseason.

Wherever Lewis’s career goes from here, he’s got bragging rights forever on every fellow member of the Number One Club. He also has the honour of being the man most responsible for ending the Twins’ most peculiar negative achievement, stopping their postseason game losing streak at eighteen. Not to mention only the third player ever, regardless of draft position, to open his postseason life with a first-inning home run, joining Evan Longoria (Rays, 2008) and one-time Twins favourite Gary Gaetti (the eventual 1987 World Series winners).

Eighteen straight postseason games lost over nineteen years, under three different managers and with several franchise icons in the mix, from Mauer to Johan Santana to Torii Hunter to Byron Buxton. It took a guy whose first couple of seasons in the Twins’ fatigues have been disrupted rudely by injuries and who was freshly recovered from a hamstring injury to step up Tuesday and bring his demolition kit to the park with him.

“We just wanted to put an end to something that was very unfortunate to our beloved fans,” said Twins starting pitcher Pablo Lopez, who pitched five and two-thirds strong innings before Kiermaier’s steak single ended his day. “Our fans have been so great to us—they support us, they root for us no matter the situation. It felt right. The way I see it now, we have a new streak going.”

“I thought the place was going to split open and melt,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli—who has a pair of postseason home runs on his own resumé, including in the 2008 World Series for the Rays. “Honestly. It was out of this universe out there on the field. The fans took over the game. They helped us win today.”

The Twins’ fielders took over when the fans didn’t. There was center fielder Michael Taylor stealing a prospective game-tying double from Matt Chapman with a flying leap against the fence in the top of the second. There was, especially, Kiermaier’s chopper in the fourth, sneaking away from onrushing Twins third baseman Jorge Polanco.

Bichette on the run from second thought he had a shot at scoring. Plantaar fasciitis-addled shortstop Carlos Correa thought otherwise. He yanked himself running to his right, picked the ball barehand as Bichette headed down the third base line, threw off balance, and managed somehow to get the diving Bichette out by about the full length of a catcher.

“If you like watching the biggest players making the biggest plays in the biggest games,” Baldelli said, “then you should go watch that play. It was fantastic.”

Lewis had the fantastic franchise wrapped up in the first and the third, though.

“Some people believe in fate,” he said. “Some people believe that the things we do today drive what we do tomorrow. But sometimes things line up too perfectly to pass up on those opportunities.”

He had two pitches line up just that perfectly as ironclad evidence.