Author Archives: Jeff Kallman

Unknown's avatar

About Jeff Kallman

Member, Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and the Society for American Baseball Research.

A 2-1 Dodger advantage feels more like 3-1

Posted on by
Reply

At any angle, from any view, Walker Buehler overpowered the Rays Friday night.

“They’re more of a manufacturing team than a pure slugging team like Atlanta might be,” said Walker Buehler, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Game Three starting pitcher, before he actually went out and pitched against the Tampa Bay Rays. “You never know what lineup you get. We’re trying to figure out what they may do against you and work off that.”

Buehler then went out and hung a “Closed for Repairs” sign outside the manufacturers’ plant. The Rays don’t exactly have all the time in the world to put the repair crews to work.

The fixings will probably begin with otherwise stout Rays starter Charlie Morton. The same guy who flattend his old buddies from Houston to help the Rays win the pennant in the first place. The Dodgers slashed five runs on seven hits out of Morton in four and a third innings while Buehler refused to let the Rays catch hold of his full-zone fastballs or force him to work off-speed. Making it feel as though the eventual 6-2 final was a lot worse than a four-run deficit usually is.

Buehler does that when he’s on. He even takes a no-hitter into the fifth when need be. With one slightly off-the-charts outing the righthander suddenly turned the World Series from anyone’s to win to the Rays’s to lose. The Dodgers’ 2-1 Series advantage felt more like 3-1 when it finally ended.

“That might be the best I’ve ever seen his stuff,” said his catcher Austin Barnes after the game.

Buehler didn’t just expose the Rays’ continuing postseason flaw of striking out when they can’t and don’t make contact. The Rays have now done what no postseason team in history has accomplished, striking out 180 times.

They also have 113 hits, making them the only postseason team in history to hit 67 fewer times than they’ve struck out. In the middle of that, they went ten straight games—Game Four of their division series through Game Two of this World Series—with more strikeouts than hits.

Buehler’s thirteen punchouts also left the Rays striking out nine times or more in ten straight postseason games and a twelfth postseason game this time in which they struck out ten times or more. And, with thirteen hitters getting K’ed three times or more in single games.

“It’s like . . . people always say, ‘Why don’t they just hit the ball the other way when they shift?’” said Rays manager Kevin Cash Friday postgame. He laughed like Figaro, that he might not weep. “It’s hard enough just to hit the ball.” Against Buehler, whose three hits surrendered seemed like momentary lapses into generosity, it was impossible enough.

Against Morton, alas, with his fastballs not finding their intended destinations and his breaking balls left a little too readily over the plate, for a change, he might have been fortunate that seven hits were all the Dodgers could get. Begging the question as to why Cash, who normally thinks nothing of such moves when he smells trouble, left him in as long as he did this time around.

Sure Cash thought nothing of hooking Morton in Game Seven of the American League Championship Series at the first sign of trouble in the top of the sixth. And the world went bonkers over that. Since when does a manager that fearless not get his bullpen working and his man the hell out of there when he’s in the hole 3-0 with two out but two on in the third—the first of whom got there as a hit batsman off the foot?

“All three of the Dodgers’ hits have come with two strikes,” tweeted ESPN’s Jeff Passan after the third. “And all three have been on pitches Charlie Morton left over the plate. Dodgers lead, 3-0, and they’re doing it against a pitcher whose opponents hit .170/.207/.284 vs. him with two strikes this year.”

The Dodgers now have 87 runs this postseason. Fifty of them have come with two outs. “There’s two outs, but you can still build an inning, not giving away at-bats,” says the Mookie Monster, one of four Dodgers to knock in at least a run with two outs Friday night. “That’s the recipe. That’s how you win a World Series.”

“I’m always fascinated by Kevin Cash’s pitching decisions,” tweeted The Athletic‘s Jayson Stark after the fourth inning. “Last Saturday, Charlie Morton had 66 pitches and a 2-hit shutout in the 6th – and Cash took him out. Tonight, he was down 5-0 with 78 pitches through the 4th – and got left in. Much quicker hook when Cash has a lead.”

Much harder for Cash to get away with bass-ackwards thinking, too. Not a single Rays bull poked his nose out of his stall before and after Max Muncy lined a two-run single to center. It took until the fifth—after Dodger catcher Austin Barnes dropped his safety-squeeze RBI bunt and Mookie Betts’s full-count, followup RBI single made it 5-0 in the fourth—before the Rays bullpen gate finally swung open.

Did you guess what happened from there right? If not, here it is: Four Rays relievers kept the Dodgers to a single run and three hits in their four and two-thirds innings work. They walked only two and struck out four. In other words, the Rays’ bullpen did what the Rays’ bullpen normally does. They just started four and a third innings too late Friday night.

It doesn’t discredit the Dodgers’ hitters to suggest Cash might have let them break into the house—only beginning with Justin Turner’s one-out, high line home run in the top of the first—and steal all the jewels and cash they could carry. The only thing the Dodgers swiped once Cash finally reached for the armed guards was Barnes catching hold of a John Curtiss slider that didn’t slide as far under the middle as it was supposed to slide and sending it over the center field fence in the top of the sixth.

Get the feeling the Dodgers are turning brand-new Globe Life Field into Dodger Stadium II? They’re not just pitching as though it’s their own vacation home, but they’ve hit one more home run in sixteen postseason games there than the Texas Rangers hit in thirty irregular season games in their brand new house.

Delayed security is not the best idea when you’re up against a Buehler who’s hell bent on making sure nobody got into the Dodgers’ house except Manuel Margot with a one-out double and Willy Adames with a two-out RBI double in the bottom of the fifth.

“Being a big-game pitcher and really succeeding on this stage, there’s only a few guys currently and throughout history,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts postgame. “He’s in some really elite company, and I’m just happy he’s wearing a Dodger uniform.”

With Friday night’s flush and the prospect of facing Buehler in Game Seven if the Series goes that far, the Rays would prefer he wear a police, fire, or military uniform right now. Those they can handle. Buehler they couldn’t. When he finished the fifth his lifetime postseason ERA stood at 2.34 and his 2020 postseason ERA alone stood at 1.88. And his streak of nine straight postseason gigs with a minimum six strikeouts and two runs allowed or less became the longest in Show history while he was at it.

“I think the more you do these things the calmer you get,” said Buehler postgame. Not about any records but just about pitching up when you’re striking for the Promised Land. “I don’t want to keep harping on it, but I enjoy doing this. And I feel good in these spots.”

As for World Series games pitched with ten or more punchouts, no walks, and no bombs surrendered, Buehler became only the eighth pitcher to have one. The previous Magnificent Seven: Sandy Koufax (1965), Bob Gibson (1968), Tom Seaver (1973), Randy Johnson (2001), Roger Clemens (2001), Cliff Lee (2009), and Adam Wainwright (2013).

Tampa Bay left fielder Randy Arozarena hit an excuse-us solo homer off Dodger closer Kenley Jansen with two out in the ninth. He’s now hit as many home runs in this postseason (eight) as he did when he was finally past his COVID-19 bout and saddled up for what was left of the irregular season. He also set postseason records with what’s now 52 total bases and 23 postseason hits as a rookie.

Turner had to settle merely for his first postseason bomb since 2017 and for tying Hall of Famer Duke Snider on the Dodgers’ postseason homer list with his eleventh. Barnes also slipped into the record books. Only one man previously had ever homered and squeezed a run home in the same Series game, and that was more than half a century ago.

We take you back to Hector (What a Pair of Hands) Lopez, New York Yankees outfielder, off Cincinnati Reds pitcher Bob Purkey in the deciding 1961 Series Game Five. Barnes is thus the only catcher ever to turn the single Series game bomb-squeeze trick. Roll over Bill Dickey, and tell Yogi Berra the news.

If only Arozarena’s bombings had better timers. Only four of his eight postseason bombs so far have either tied a game or given the Rays a lead. The rook whose 1.340 OPS in the first three rounds widened as many eyes as his home runs has a mere .885 OPS in the Series thus far.

The Rays overall are only hitting a .206/.250/.381 Series slash. They’ve actually struck out at the plate six fewer times than the Dodgers, but they’ve been out-hit by five, out-homered by three, and out-scored by seven. With Morton’s ghastly 10.38 Game Three ERA and Game One starter Tyler Glasnow’s grotesque 12.46, you have to remove them to find the Rays otherwise with a 2.10 Series ERA. Remove Dylan Floro and Dustin May from the Game Two equation, and the Dodgers otherwise have a 2.20 Series ERA thus far.

Timing is everything in this Series. The Rays’ inability to find theirs at the plate against Buehler and Clayton Kershaw, the Dodgers’ finding and finer tuning theirs against Morton and Glasnow, and Cash’s timing off twice on charging his bulls, are three major reasons why the Dodgers holding a 2-1 Series lead feels more like a 3-1 lead going into Saturday night.

This is what the Dodgers saved Julio Urias for. You may have heard a little chirping after he didn’t appear even in a bullpen stir during Game Two, when the Dodgers couldn’t beat the Rays at their own bullpen game. They’d better hope he isn’t too well rested; he hasn’t pitched since he closed out NLCS Game Seven with three shutdown innings last Saturday. And he’s going up against a by-necessity Rays bullpen game with Ryan Yarbrough possibly opening and possibly going three.

That’s the game the Rays usually master. Now it’s the mastery they need desperately enough.

What you should really think about the Wild Thing

Posted on by
Reply

With Joe Carter (29) leaping around the bases, Mitch Williams walked dejected off the mound but never flinched talking to the press after Carter’s ’93 Series-winning home run off him.

One thing baseball fans of longstanding can tell you from experience alone (so they think, often as not properly) and sabermetrics can tell you from deep analysis is this: Things are never as they seem to be. Today’s anniversary of only the second World Series-ending-and-winning home run is a classic case.

To this day the only thing anyone sees or remembers about that 1993 Series is the Philadelphia Phillies’ half-crazed closer Mitch Williams serving the slippery fastball the Toronto Blue Jays’s Joe Carter jolted for a three-run homer. They see the careless goat even before they see the heroic bombardier.

They see Williams being reckless and Carter hopping, skipping, and jumping around the bases, losing his hat somewhere between first and second and barely caring. They don’t see the actualities that made Carter’s bomb happen in the first place.

Maybe they were too influenced by Williams’s pre-93 Series reputation as a wild oat. Maybe they read the late Jay Johnstone’s third and final book, Some of My Best Friends are Crazy, and noticed Williams was the first such friend Johnstone discussed.

And maybe, especially, they noticed a crack from Williams’s former Chicago Cubs pitching staff mate Rick Sutcliffe, who’s made a nice second career as a television baseball analyst. “I pitch like I’m sitting in an easy chair,” Sutcliffe said, “and [Williams] pitches like his hair is on fire.”

Wrote Johnstone of the mulleted Wild Thing—who once claimed he heard his father order him off the roof of their house and obeyed by diving off with Dad catching him—“Mitch comes off the mound with the same reckless abandon and, so far, has suffered no crashes worse than Will Clark’s base hit to win the [1989] National League Championship Series.”

Those words were written and published in 1990. Three years later, Williams crashed like a 747 with its engines ablaze. And Dad wasn’t there to catch him. Hell, this time Dad might have set him up for it, if you consider pitching coaches to be their charges’ father figures.

You’d get why then-Phillies pitching coach Johnny Podres might urge Williams to try a slide-step delivery with the Phillies leading by a run and Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson aboard with a leadoff walk. The better to try keeping the Man of Steal from his usual grand theft.

Except that the slide step altered Williams’s deliveries, particularly his fastballs, causing them to rise where he didn’t want them and keeping them from going down when he wanted them down. Since Podres couldn’t make a second mound visit without forcing Williams out of the game, neither he nor Phillies manager Jim Fregosi thought of sending Williams a sign to shenk the slide step.

After a fly out by Devon White and a base hit up the middle by Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, setting up first and second, Carter checked in at the plate and Williams had him thinking breaking ball on 2-2. “The only reason I hit it fair,” Carter said in due course, “was because I was looking for a breaking ball the whole time. I wasn’t way out in front of the ball. I guarantee you, if I was looking fastball, I would’ve swung and missed or hit a foul ball.”

You know what happened next. Williams slide-stepped forward as he threw, pulling himself rightward, breaking his tumble with his glove hand. The fastball arrived above Carter’s knees and departed over the left field fence. Sending Carter into Toronto and World Series lore and Williams even further into Philadelphia and World Series infamy than the fun-loving reliever was already.

“I knew I made a mistake,” the Wild Thing would say in due course. “That fastball was down and in, right in Carter’s nitro zone. I wanted to throw it up and away, which I could’ve done if I’d gone with my full leg kick. But the slide step altered my delivery and I ended up rushing the pitch.”

Williams would say plenty more after the bomb detonated. He faced the postgame press and answered every last question thrown his way, even the dumb ones. “Ain’t nobody on the face of this earth who feels worse than I do about what happened,” he said straight, no chaser. “But there are no excuses. I just didn’t get the job done. I threw a fastball down and in. It was a bad pitch. I’ll have to deal with it.”

He turned out to be a better man than the Phillies teammates who stood by their man in the immediate wake but threw him under the proverbial bus as soon as the uproar stopped roaring. For one thing, it turned out that Williams was hit with death threats after his blown save in Game Four . . . and spent a sleepless night with his shotgun cradled in his lap just in case.

““We wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for Mitch,” said Phillies first baseman John Kruk. “He’s not afraid to take the ball and I like a guy like that on my team,” said center fielder Lenny Dykstra, the likely ’93 Series MVP until Williams’s ill-fated slide-step fastball. Seemingly within minutes of offering those got-your-back comments, some Phillies offered knives into his back instead.

“I love the guy,” said Dykstra, according to William C. Kashatus’s study of those ’93 Phillies, Macho Row. “He’s a great competitor and I’m sure he wants to pitch here again, but for his sake I hope he doesn’t have to . . . he’ll probably never be able to pitch in Philly again.”

Dykstra was the epitome of subtlety compared to pitcher Curt Schilling—who’d gained national attention for both his bold Series pitching and for being caught on camera in the Phillies dugout with a towel covering his head whenever Williams took the mound.

“What if we win and go to the postseason again next year?” Schilling asked. Heaven help us, he answered his own question right then and there. “We’d still be going in with the mentality of ‘Can he do it?’ Mitch was tired at the end of the season. It was a question of whether he was able to. Mitch gave his all every time out there, but, in the big leagues, it’s not a matter of giving everything and wanting the ball. It’s a matter of success.”

You guessed it. Nobody bothered asking why Podres and Fregosi didn’t even think to take the slide-step off when they had all the evidence in front of them that it wasn’t working. As if you just couldn’t get three outs after Henderson might have stolen second. As if you couldn’t get even Molitor to hit into a game-ending, Game Seven-forcing double play.

The Phillies ended up trading Williams to the Houston Astros. Williams might have gotten a standing O the first time he returned to Philadelphia—maybe his refusal to look for the nearest rug under which to crawl after the fateful pitch had something to do with that—but he was still coming to the end of the line. After three sad seasons with the Astros, the California Angels, and (very briefly) the Kansas City Royals, Williams retired.

The bad news is that he’d trade barbs with the like of Dykstra for years to follow. Dykstra once told a radio interviewer Williams was a barrel-finding joke; Williams shot back that you could have better conversations with trees than with Dykstra.

Last spring, after baseball shut down and postponed itself over the coronavirus, assorted broadcast networks plus YouTube elected to show particular classic games. Game Six of the ’93 Series was one of them. The Phillies were not amused when MLB Network itself showed it.

“Oh, not to be Mitch Williams, now that winter’s here,” Thomas Boswell wrote after Williams and Carter ran into each other so dramatically, in a Washington Post column republished in Cracking the Show.

For the rest of us, it’s still autumn. But winter came early for Wild Thing . . . does baseball have eighteen goats to match Williams? . . . When the bullpen phone rang with the Phils leading, 6-5, when Williams saw the top of the gaudiest lineup in baseball awaiting him to begin the ninth, did he want to plead nolo contendere?

Williams pled no such thing. Turned out he was the Philthy Phillie with the least splainin’ to do. Dykstra and fellow Macho Row-ers Dave Hollins, Pete Incaviglia, and Todd Pratt were named eventually in the Mitchell Report and other documents as using or being tied otherwise to actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances.

Dykstra’s post-baseball legal issues and temporary life in the calaboose—he once jabbed Williams at a joint comedy roast with a crack about prison being “a fantasy camp” compared to playing behind the Wild Thing—are documented to a fare-thee-well. When Dykstra’s libel suit against former Mets teammate Ron Darling was thrown out of court, the judge’s ruling included observing formally that Dykstra had a long-time reputation as a creep.

Meanwhile, like the late Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson, who converged so fatefully in Game Six of the 1986 World Series, Williams has since forged a friendship with Joe Carter. “Really, since the home run, we’ve been tied at the hip,” Carter told the Toronto Star in 2012, when he and Williams joined for Carter’s golf tournament to raise money for at-risk Canadian children.

I’ve always known what type of guy Mitch is. He’s a great guy and the great thing about baseball is not just the sport itself, but the people you meet. Lives are going to be crossed, paths are going to be crossed a lot. It just so happens we’re kind of intertwined now and I thought it would be a great gesture to bring him back here because he is a fun guy to have around … he really is.

“Geez, the night it happened I said, ‘If I’ve got to give it up to somebody, I’d have preferred to give it up to a class guy like Joe Carter’,” Williams told the Star that 2012 day.

Beware the rush to plant and keep the ridiculous goat horns aboard whichever poor soul turns out to commit the mistake that costs either the Tampa Bay Rays or the Los Angeles Dodgers the World Series now playing out of Texas. The goat business is nebulous enough and has long deserved to be put out of business. You get the impression far too often that Joe and Jane Fan are thirstier for goat’s milk than hungry for a hero sandwich.

Try to remember, instead, Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s favourite recollection of Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully—Scully’s habit before any World Series he’d broadcast was to slip into church and pray, “not for a win,” Koufax said, “but there would be only heroes in the World Series, no goats. He didn’t want anybody in the future to be tarnished with the fact that they lost the World Series for their team.”

While you’re at it, think of all the so-called goats who proved better people than those preferring they spend eternity in boiling oil. Players such as Johnny Pesky, Ralph Branca, Tom Niedenfuer, Bill Buckner, and Yu Darvish. Managers such as Gene Mauch, Tommy Lasorda, John McNamara, Grady Little, and Terry Collins.

Men like Williams, who never thought once of running and hiding when there wasn’t a jury on earth that would rule him unjustified, who proved a stronger man than the teammates who proved his fair weather friends. When you replay ’93 Series Game Six today, remember that, especially.

No, Commissioner, you KEEP the universal DH

Posted on by
Reply

Commissioner Rob Manfred, donning a mask to attend a World Series game in Globe Life Field.

If it isn’t broken, call the repairman. If it is broken, it’ll fix itself. So seems to be the thinking (using the term very liberally) of Commissioner Nero. Apparently, he’s in no hurry to keep the universal designated hitter, but he’s in a big hurry to keep permanent the over-expanded postseason.

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Steinberg, whose team is now playing in the World Series and is one of baseball’s most innovative, has it right about innovation actual and alleged when he likes to say, “Break a window, don’t burn down the house.” Rob Manfred seems to prefer burning down the house to save the broken window.

The DH would have “broken” the window in 1891 if then-Pirates owner William Chase Temple had his way. Yes, I’m going there again. The concept that drives today’s stubbornly ancient-school National League fans came originally out of a National League owner’s head.

Temple was fed up pitchers being unable to hit. Not “unwilling,” unable. So he proposed what we know as the DH. Temple’s contemporary and friend Albert Spalding wanted to see and raise. Spalding thought the pitcher’s lineup spot should have been erased entirely with eight-man lineups otherwise. Window-breaking? Spalding would have busted three for the price of one.

“Every patron of the game,” wrote Sporting Life about Temple and Spalding’s thoughts, “is conversant with the utter worthlessness of the average pitcher when he goes up to try and hit the ball. It is most invariably a trial, and an unsuccessful one at that. If fortune does favor him with a base hit it is ten to one that he is so winded in getting to first or second base on it that when he goes into the box it is a matter of very little difficulty to pound him all over creation.”

No need to review the history of the DH idea in detail. Suffice to say here that Temple brought it to a vote and lost in 1892. In 1906, Philadelphia Athletics owner/manager Connie Mack (whose pitchers hit a whole .201 that season) proposed it to see it go nowhere. The National League proposed it again in 1928 and the American League rejected it then. It took traction at last when the high minors adopted it in the 1960s and impressed Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley enough (as well it might considering his 1972 A’s pitchers hit a whopping .165) convinced his fellow AL owners to bring it in.

Looking for ways to make the pandemic-shortened irregular 2020 season as painless as possible, Manfred decided this would be an experimental season. The universal DH was one of the experiments. Would you like to know how it went? The batting slash line for major league pitchers all 2010s long is .130/.161/.165. The batting slash line for 2020 designated hitters is .231/.316/.408.

It gets better. Want to know whose DHs did the best this season? The Atlanta Braves. In the National League. With a .316/.411/.589 slash line. And, a 1.000 OPS. Hitting more home runs than everyone else (17) except the Minnesota Twins (19). Getting more base hits period (73) than everybody else’s DHs. With the highest DH batting average on balls in play (.403) by 44 points. Did I mention Braves DHs knocked in the most runs (55) of any team’s DHs?

Want to know how many National League teams’ DHs finished in the top ten for collective OPS around the 2020 Show? Six. (The Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, the New York Mets, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the San Diego Padres, and the St. Louis Cardinals.) The top ten in DH on-base percentage is even-up between NL and AL teams (five each) with the Braves at the top. Braves’ DHs led a pack of five NL teams in the top ten for batting average at that lineup slot. They also led all teams’ DHs with 37 walks.

I’m going here, too: my Real Batting Average metric. RBA = total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches. Look how the National League’s DHs measured up against the American League’s:

2020 Real Batting Average – DHs
  PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
National League 3724 1338 366 25 26 54 .486
American League 3768 1347 377 17 26 46 .481

The National League DHs batted five points higher in RBA than the American League despite batting 44 fewer times. (They took a lot more for their teams, too, if you noticed the hit-by-pitches.)

Do you still miss those .128-hitting pitchers with their .178 RBAs? Are you ready to listen to Thomas Boswell this time, if not a) almost two years ago; or, b) when I cited him again in June?

It’s fun to see Max Scherzer slap a single to right field and run it out like he thinks he’s Ty Cobb. But I’ll sacrifice that pleasure to get rid of the thousands of rallies I’ve seen killed when an inning ends with one pitcher working around a competent No. 8 hitter so he can then strike out the other pitcher. When you get in a jam in the AL, you must pitch your way out of it, not ‘pitch around’ your way out of it.

If you want to yell your head off at Commissioner Nero, there are better reasons. Bawl him out from San Diego to Boston and back about that ridiculous three-batter relief pitching minimum and, even more, against that free cookie on second base to start each extra half inning.

Rant your heads off against a permanently-expanded postseason. Sure it might have been mad, perverted fun to see the 29-31 Houston Astros meet the likewise 29-31 Milwaukee Brewers in the World Series this month. Only because it would have made a further chump out of Commissioner Nero seeing regular (well, irregular) season losers playing for that piece of metal.

Bellow like Falstaff that the real issue with postseason baseball’s ratings declines are and have long enough been saturation. Bad enough the era of the second wild card made for potentially-exhausting maximum 43 postseason games a year. Slightly worse was this year’s sixteen-team postseason making for a potential maximum 65 games (if each series went the distance) and an actuality of 52 postseason games so far.

Even fans such as myself who think there’s no such thing as too much baseball get wrung out by that. The good news is that, this time, championship won’t be diluted. The two best teams in 2020 baseball—when all was said and done about COVID-19 infections, disruptions and scheduling contortions—are going at it in the World Series. That’s now. Does Nero really want to risk a future full of losers playing for the Promised Land?

Or would wiser heads who aren’t sound asleep while Nero burns the house down in order to put a trash can fire out willing to suggest what I’ve suggested until I’m bluer in the face than the Rays’ jerseys. Dump the bloody wild cards. Give the winningest division champs a round-one bye and let the other division winners play a best-of-three. Let that winner meet the bye winner in a best-of-five League Championship Series. Leave the World Series best-of-seven and return it to its proper primacy.

As Groucho Marx once said, it’s so damn simple a child of five could do it. And, sit back, watch the tanking teams run out of excuses to tank because you either win or be gone, watch all those “competitive” teams realise they can’t settle anymore for stirring the blood and delivering the thrills, chills, and spills fighting to the last breath to see who finishes . . . in second place.

Now, somebody send for a child of five. (Thanks again, Groucho.) Then, send him or her to Nero with instructions to keep the universal DH. Which did you one of the biggest favours baseball was able to do for you this otherwise pandemically-putrid year. Even if you didn’t know it and didn’t want to hear about it.

The Blake and Brandon Show

Posted on by
Reply

Blake Snell, meet Sandy Koufax.

Realistically, the Tampa Bay Rays didn’t have to come into World Series Game Two wearing hazmat gear Wednesday night. Losing Game One didn’t mean rolling over and playing dead for the Los Angeles Dodgers no matter how formidable the Dodgers looked winning.

Especially on a comparative off night for the Mookie Monster, an on-night and then some for slumping Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe blasting his way out of the funk, an off-night for the Dodgers’ bullpen, and an off-the-charts night for Rays starting pitcher Blake Snell concurrent to a kind of typical night for the Rays’ bullpen.

All of which collaborated on a Series-leveling 6-4 Rays win in Globe Life Field that inspired the pandemically-mandated sparse live human crowd to make enough noise that they sounded like 111,000 instead of the approximate 11,000. Didn’t  that sound refreshing after an irregular season full of cardboard cutouts in the seats and canned noise in the ballparks?

Snell, the tall lefthander who sometimes resembles a tree waving in the heavy wind when he delivers, made World Series history in Game Two. He became only the second pitcher ever to pitch four no-hit innings with eight or more strikeouts in a Series game. He joins a Hall of Fame lefthander named Sandy Koufax, who did it in Game One of the 1963 Series. Rather splendid company to join.

What else did Snell have in common with Koufax? Going four and two-thirds innings before surrendering their first hits and staked concurrently to a 5-0 lead.

Koufax struck Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle out and got Roger Maris to pop out behind the plate. Then, he surrendered three straight singles before striking Hector Lopez out pinch-hitting for Hall of Famer Whitey Ford. This being 1963, the days of wine and roses, and nobody thinking pitchers threw inhuman pitch volumes, Koufax went all the way, struck a then-Series-record fifteen out, and probably threw about 160-180 pitches or so before he was finished.

Snell got Cody Belllinger to ground out to third baseman Joey Wendle behind shortstop in an infield shift and struck A.J. Pollock out swinging on one of his biting sliders. Then, he walked Enrique Hernandez, threw a 2-1 pitch to Chris Taylor that disappeared over the right field fence, walked Mookie Betts, and surrendered a base hit to Corey Seager on a hanging slider.

This being 2020, the days of whine and coronavirus, and especially about thirty times more smarts about pitching and what individual arms and bodies will or won’t allow, Rays manager Kevin Cash remembered his usual script and got Snell out of there in favour of Nick Anderson.  Anderson struck Justin Turner out after starting behind 2-0 for the side.

And more than somewhere in this favoured land, the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, even in isolation. But the old-school grumps fume not just over the “early” lift of Snell—whose 88 pitches in four and two thirds a) might have been 189 pitches if he’d gone nine in theory; and, b) were less efficient than Clayton Kershaw throwing ten less in an inning and a third more in Game One—but the “early” arrival of Anderson.

Isn’t he the actual or alleged closer? Who the eff brings his closer in in the goddam fifth? An older grump, to whom purists were as anathematic as bunts when it came to trying to, you know, win, has your answer.

Casey Stengel thought absolutely nothing of reaching for fresh pitchers as early as needed if the other guys got ornery enough. He did it with Joe Page to send that skintight 1949 pennant race to the absolute final day; he did it with Bob Turley in Game Seven of the 1958 World Series. “Casey’s reasoning,” his biographer Robert W. Creamer recorded, about that’ 49 game when Allie Reynolds walked his way into third-inning trouble before surrendering an RBI hit, “was that it was a ninth-inning situation. He needed a stopper, right now.”

Just ask Buck Showalter and Mike Matheny. Showalter blew a trip to a 2016 American League division series and Matheny lost a 2014 National League pennant because you were “supposed” to save your closer for the “save” situation. Even if he’s damn well the best pitcher on your staff that year.  Edwin Encarnacion’s Toronto Blue Jays and Travis Ishikawa’s San Francisco Giants would still like to thank Showalter and Matheny for going by The Book.

Koufax got off a lot more easily than Snell. Taylor’s blast made Game Two’s score the same as Koufax’s final score, 5-2. The ’63 Dodgers staked Koufax’s lead in the second inning with a double, two singles, and a three-run homer (John Roseboro), and in the third with an RBI single.

STATS Perform records that Snell was the 62nd pitcher in World Series history to take a no-hitter into the fifth and only the second who didn’t make it out. The first? Ralph Branca,  in 1947 Series Game One. After four no-hit innings of his own, the Brooklyn righthander got pricked by Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio with a leadoff single. Then it was walk, hit batsman, two-run double (by Johnny Lindell), walk, and day over for Branca as the Yankees went on to win.

The Rays Wednesday night had Snell in the black right out of the chute, especially against this year’s collection of Dodgers who make a normal point of abusing lefthanded pitching to the point of human rights violations. They had a .990 team OPS and one home run every 14.7 at-bats entering Game Two.

Tighten your slack, dial long distance.

Lowe picked an even better moment to break himself out of the horrific postseason batting slump that belied his standing as possibly the Rays’ best irregular season hitter. He batted with one out in the top of the first, got himself into a juicy 3-1 count against the Dodgers’ rookie opener Tony Gonsolin, and hit one over the center field fence.

If Dodgers manager Dave Roberts’s plan was to get two innings out of Gonsolin, the Rays reminded him of the best-laid plans that go to waste in the second. Manuel Margot walked on five pitches, stole second with Joey Wendle at the plate, tagged to third on Wendle’s deep center field fly out, and Roberts went to the pen sooner than probably planned.

Dylan Floro escaped trouble the hard way. Margot running on contact when Willy Adames grounded one to short was a dead pigeon at the plate. Floro really dodged trouble when Adames took off for second as ball three to Kevin Kiermaier went down and well enough away, heaving heavy relief when Seager kept the tag on Adames as he came off the base in his slide and the initial safe call was overturned.

Floro held fort in the third with a lot of help from Seager, who threw Kiermaier out on a grounder and caught Mike Zunino’s pop back in shallow left field. Roberts played the matches then and brought lefty Victor Gonzalez to take care of lefthanded Rays designated hitter Austin Meadows, who popped the first pitch to shallow left where Turner and Seager ambled out to short left but Seager raced past Turner for the catch.

The Rays struck again in the fourth. A one-out walk to Randy Arozarena, whose home run bat seems to have cooled off considerably over the first two Series games, and a force out at second thanks to Dodger second baseman Enrique Hernandez bobbling Ji-Man Choi’s first-pitch grounder. Roberts lifted Gonzalez for rookie Dustin May, and Margot more or less snuck one through the open right side away from the infield shift for a base hit.

But there was nothing sneaky about Wendle banging a two-run double past Betts and off the right center field wall. Then Lowe wrecked May and the Dodgers again in the fifth. With two outs, and Joe Kelly throwing in the Dodger bullpen, Meadows lined a long line single to right center and Lowe launched an 0-2 fastball off the top of the left field fence and gone.

The middle infielder carrying a grotesque 6-for-56/19-strikeout slump into Game Two couldn’t have broken out of that mire better if he’d sent three line drives right down Dodger throats. “Yeah, those felt really good,” he told reporters post-game. “It felt great to kind of get back and contribute to the team. They’ve been doing so well for the past month. It felt really good to get back and actually start doing stuff again.”

“Lowe” in his case rhymes with “wow,” which is what his bombs induced out of teammates and spectators alike. All he had to do to fix himself was touch base with his longtime hitting counselor Hunter Bledsoe and heed Bledsoe’s reminder to take the slack out of his batter’s box posture.

“The reason Brandon has a cool moment like this is because of the fact that he’s unwilling not to,” Bledsoe himself told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “People can pout. They can blame. He just works, man. And at the end of the day, regardless of what happens, it’s a hard game. And you can trust in that. It might not be on the time schedule we want, but eventually it will pay off.”

Wendle’s sixth-inning sacrifice fly off Kelly provided the sixth Rays run. Dodger catcher Will Smith made it 6-3 when he rocked Anderson for a one-out launch over the left field fence in the bottom of the sixth. Seager spoiled Pete Fairbanks’s otherwise fine relief outing with a leadoff blast in the bottom of the seventh. But Rays lefthander Aaron Loup cleaned up with two outs the second of which caught Bellinger, of all people, looking at strike three just above the dead middle of the plate.

Loup got the first two outs of the ninth without breaking a sweat. He struck late-game entry Edwin Rios out and retired late-game Dodger catcher Austin Barnes on a fly out to left. Then Cash went to Diego Castillo and Taylor looked at two strikes before swinging for strike three and the game. Did you know this was the first time a relief pitcher ever nailed a one-out World Series save coming into the ninth with two outs and nobody on?

Dodger fans spent a lot of the evening wondering why Roberts didn’t open with Julio Urias. That’ll be Urias completely fresh to start Game Four, after Walker Buehler starts against Charlie Morton in Game Three. Roberts has had his blindspots during his postseason managing life but he’s not entirely addlepated.

Before anyone else gets any more ornery about Cash lifting Snell in the fifth, listen to Snell himself. “I’m not gonna be mad at Cash. He’s got to manage. I’ve got to play,” he said post-game. “But I know I have to do things better, to make it harder for him to come out and pull me. I made it easy there with the walk, the homer and then the walk. You know, you can’t blame him for that. He’s trying to win a World Series game.”

If Cash ends up having to try winning a Game Six, that’ll be Snell fresh and ready to go. That’ll also be Roberts and the Dodgers likely, for now, to face a choice between opening with Gonsolin or with May. Think about that, too.

A calm, objective look at the Mookie Monster

Posted on by
Reply

Mookie Betts about to take a low-five from third base coach Dino Ebel after his sixth-inning Game One bomb.

The Mookie Monster is catching more than a few waves of adulation and hype lately. Making three National League Championship Series-altering or sustaining catches in the final three games, then doing something even Babe Ruth never achieved in a single World Series game, does that for you.

“He does things on a baseball field that not many people can do,” says Game One winning pitcher Clayton Kershaw, “and he does it very consistently, which I think separates him from other guys.”

On Tuesday  night, Betts let a couple of other Dodgers take the defensive spotlight gladly in return for drawing one walk, stealing two bases, and hitting a home run. Ruth drew three walks, off one of which he stole second and third, in Game Two of the 1921 World Series.

This Series is only one game old, and Betts hit as many home runs Tuesday night as Ruth hit in the entire ’21 Series—one. No, we’re not comparing Mookie Betts to Babe Ruth just yet, other than to say he has something else in common with the Bambino.

Betts, too, is a former Boston Red Sox star. Betts was traded away while Red Sox Nation was still seeing him in prime time; Ruth was sold before Red Sox fans got to see his complete transition to full-time position playing and his two prime periods—in a very different game—of 1920-24 and 1926-31. And Red Sox Nation isn’t the only baseball outpost still wondering just what the Red Sox were thinking when dealing Betts.

The Ruthian mythology held for too long that then-Red Sox owner Harry Frazee dumped Ruth purely to finance his musical hit No, No, Nanette. (How a 1919 sale finances a 1925 stage production should have escaped thinking people.) Frazee did need money, but not for one of his theatrical productions. He also didn’t need the headaches that came with Ruth, behaving even then like a law unto himself.

Fast forward a century. A very different Red Sox ownership is about as financially challenged as the Saudi royal family. They’re facing Betts hitting free agency after the 2020 season and making little apparent effort to sign him. Betts himself spoke often enough about pondering his market value in that 2020 free agency class. The Red Sox didn’t want to lose him for nothing in return.

Fair enough. But why the Red Sox made no effort to keep their arguable franchise face will be debated at least as long as the old and discredited Curse of the Bambino endured. No matter what the Red Sox didn’t do otherwise last winter to keep the team from collapsing to the basement even in a pandemic-altered year, the Olde Towne Team isn’t likely to go even half as long before its next World Series triumph as they did between selling Ruth and 2004.

“The Red Sox’s payroll issues were not inconsequential,” writes The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, never mind that allowing that the Red Sox doing nothing to re-tool their pitching staff probably did as much to sink them as trading Betts. “The team needed to infuse young talent. But every rational argument club officials make pales in comparison to the importance of keeping a homegrown star, a franchise player, a role model for your organization and a potential Hall of Famer.”

Their loss is the Dodgers’ gain, even if the Red Sox did get some decent young talent in return and rid themselves, while they were at it, of the rest of David Price’s contract before Price’s decline added further miseries. Betts already had a taste of World Series conquest in 2018, even though he didn’t hit well at all while playing solid defense that postseason.

“He does all the little things right,” said Dodgers center fielder Cody Bellinger to Rosenthal, Bellinger having delivered a couple of key postseason hits and defensive gems himself. “You can really learn from that when a guy’s that good and wants to win and continues to do the small things that go unnoticed by a lot of people. It’s really special.”

The guy Betts is being compared to most now hasn’t even gotten more than one quick postseason taste in his rookie season. The Los Angeles Angels aren’t exactly in the poorhouse financially. They’re in the poorhouse in baseball terms, though, since they seem almost terminally unable to build a team their franchise player and the game’s best all around, still, can be proud of.

Once the Mookie Monster cranked his act into overdrive starting in NLCS Game Five, the concurrent subject became Mike Trout, his lack of postseason credentials, and even why Trout is therefore an overrated hype. The foolishness there only begins with the roll of Hall of Famers who either never got to strut in the postseason, came up too short when they got several chances, but still shook out as their generations’ best.

It only continues with ignoring that Trout wasn’t responsible for such ultimately backfiring moves as the Albert Pujols contract—which became an albatross mostly because of Pujols’s injury issues impacting his once-unshakable plate discipline—and the utter failure to develop credible pitching on both ends of the game. That may or may not have only begun with doing little to nothing to keep Zack Greinke beyond his second-half 2012 rental.

Trout’s loyalty to the organisation that brought him forward is nothing but admirable in a business for which loyalty is and has always been a disposable commodity. The only difference between pre- and post-free agency “loyalty” is that pre-free agency teams were under no such obligation and liberal to the point of libertine when it came to “loyalty” to most of their players.

A guy doesn’t sign an extension equivalent to the economy of a small country if he thinks he’s been done dirty off the field. Even nice-guy Trout has his limits, though. He said not too subtly this year that he’s tired of the Angels losing. But when the game’s all-universe player says he’s fed up with falling short and shorter, will the Angels listen at last?

The show Betts is putting on this postseason is as staggering as the 99 Cent Store-budget Tampa Bay Rays bumping, grinding, flying, and diving their way to the American League’s best irregular season record and into the World Series in the first place. But if Betts’s partisans really want to go there with the Trout comparisons, well, you asked for it.

Betts has seven seasons in the Show. Here they are next to Trout’s first seven. First, looking conventionally:

First Seven Seasons BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
Mookie Betts .301 .373 .522 .895 135
Mike Trout .310 .420 .579 1.000 178

Well, I tried to warn you. And, in absolute fairness, Betts’s line is astonishing for a leadoff hitter, which I’ll take a different crack at shortly.

Now—sorry, can’t resist—look at the pair using my Real Batting Average metric, which I think gives you the complete look at a player at the plate. (It also does what the traditional batting average fails to do: treats hits as they should be treated, not treating all hits as having equal value—which they don’t.) Total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances:

Real Batting Average PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Mookie Betts 3875 1786 395 26 33 21 .583
Mike Trout 2012-2018 4538 2171 684 86 43 63 .671

Again, Betts has a remarkable profile for a leadoff hitter. But granted that distinction versus a guy who bats second much of the time and third almost as much of the time, the Mookie Monster isn’t quite the Millville Meteor just yet. (Since you went there: Betts does have a Most Valuable Player award—to Trout’s three that should have been four.)

On the other hand, it might be a lot more prudent and accurate to compare Betts to the first seven seasons of another leadoff man of certain renown.

Real Batting Average PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Mookie Betts 3875 1786 395 26 33 21 .583
Renowned Leadoff Man 4445 1639 674 24 20 23 .535

The leadoff man of certain renown is Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson. Did you figure for even one milli-second that there but for the grace of his life of crime on the bases would Henderson come up short of Betts? That the Mookie Monster in his first seven seasons is actually better at the plate than the Man of Steal?

Maybe you didn’t before, but you ought to now. Especially since Betts has a slightly better knowledge than Henderson of what to do when his bat takes unexpected time off and becomes a one-man version of the Rays’ collection of aerialists, acrobats, high-wire walkers, and tumblers.

It’s enough to make the Dodgers’ spanking new $396 million man the biggest bargain of the year. Just don’t ask Betts. All he’s ready to do is tell you the most important thing he did in Game One, and it wasn’t the jolt he hit the other way that landed in the right field seats in the bottom of the sixth. For him, it was the double steal that led to him scoring on an offline throw from first base an inning earlier.

“I think it just kept the line moving,” he told reporters. “It was a good play there, and I’ve gotta give credit to the hitters that came up after for driving in runs and keeping constant pressure. It just showed that we don’t have to hit home runs to be successful.”

Not even when it’s the aggregation that led the National League in bombs this irregular season and last full season. It ought to make for one hell of a World Series show going forward.