Tag Archives: Alek Thomas

Not now, Snakes

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Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks fell in this World Series, and losing the final three at their own Chase Field really stings. But . . .

Stop right there. I mean you, everyone who thought “Bill Buckner” the moment Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas over-ran Jonah Heim’s top of the ninth RBI single into an extra Rangers run, two outs before Marcus Semien slammed an exclamation point down upon the season and the Diamondbacks’ fate.

For one thing, the Diamondbacks still had three outs to play with coming at the plate. For another thing, these Snakes were that resilient bunch who usually found ways to overcome when absolutely necessary, no?

Not this time. Just as they couldn’t quite close a Game Four blowout into a possible tie and overthrow, they couldn’t turn a near-eleventh hour Game Five deficit into another tie or overthrow. It hurt even more losing the World Series with a three-sweep at home after splitting the first pair in Arlington.

At last, as Semien’s two-run homer off Diamondbacks finisher Paul Sewald disappeared over the left center field fence in the top of the ninth, that Diamondbacks resiliency failed them even as the Rangers’ equal resiliency hurtled them to the Promised Land in five arduous World Series games.

“I definitely could have done a better job of getting in front of the [Heim] and calming down and just fielding it,” Thomas said postgame, refusing to shrink away, “but I think I rushed it and just didn’t get the glove down. I think I made an error on that two times last year and this year, and I think by now I should learn my lesson on how to go about that ball. But definitely gonna work on that in the offseason, make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Long before Thomas had his moment of ill fate, the Diamondbacks failed to rise to several occasions. Their gallant starting pitcher Zac Gallen took a no-hitter through six innings while his Rangers counterpart Nathan Eovaldi pitched into and out of heavy traffic yet refused to surrender so much as a single run.

They loaded the bases on Eovaldi in the first and the fifth and left them that way. They had to know Eovaldi didn’t have his best stuff to throw and couldn’t do more than four hits despite also drawing five walks on the veteran righthander.

Then the most they could do against the Ranger bullpen was a seventh-inning walk, an eighth-inning base hit, and nothing else to show for it while that pen struck them out five times, including Ketel Marte looking at strike three from Josh Sborz to end Game Five and the Series whole.

“To get a taste of postseason baseball and the World Series,” said veteran Snakes designated hitter Tommy Pham, “if this doesn’t motivate you, I don’t know what will. This is a young team. There’s a core you can build around. And now everybody knows what it takes to get here.”

Pham surely didn’t mean backing into the postseason in the first place, as the Diamondbacks did claiming a wild card slot after finishing well back of the National League West-owning Dodgers on the regular season. Once they got there, though, they swept two division winners (the Brewers, the Dodgers) out of the wild card and division series rounds, then fought the Phillies to a seven-game National League Championship Series conquest.

Then they ran into the Rangers. Except for their 9-1 Game Two win, for the Diamondbacks this was like running into a pack of snake hunters unwilling to show much in the way of mercy. Even when they fought back from a 10-1 blowout in the making to make it 11-7 in Game Three, the Rangers were too much for the Diamondbacks to handle.

These Snakes didn’t have the star power of their 2001 World Series-winning predecessors. They kind of liked it that way, too. “I felt like we’re definitely a bunch of misfits,” said relief pitcher Ryan Thompson after Game Five ended.

That’s what makes us special. We got a bunch of young guys who are hungry, doing it for the first time. We got a bunch of veterans who have been there, done that, but not quite won the whole thing. It’s awesome being able to put our names on the map.

Gangs of misfits have won World Series in the past, with or without star power. The 1934 Cardinals, that shameless brawling Gas House Gang, was one. The Bronx Zoo Yankees of 1977-78 were another. The 2004 Red Sox called themselves the Idiots as though it were a badge of high honour. The 2010 Giants—managed by now-triumphant Rangers manager Bruce Bochy—thought of themselves as a bunch of morons.

What these Diamondbacks had was future star power. Corbin Carroll, Gabriel Moreno, Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, and Thomas himself. You could say it wasn’t their fault the Rangers hunted, pecked, pounded, pricked, and pulverised them. But you’d also have to say these Diamondbacks made enough of their own mistakes to enable that Ranger romp, too.

You credit the Rangers for such seizures. But you hand it to the Diamondbacks for making a showing for themselves before the World Series arrived. In a sane world, ruled by a sane commissioner and group of owners, they wouldn’t have reached the postseason in the first place.

But under the way things are set now, the Diamondbacks made the most of their entry. They left the Brewers looking brewed to a fare-thee-well. They left the Dodgers to a winter of self-re-examination. Then they ran into a Texas chainsaw massacre, more or less. There was no shame in that.

Oh, sure, they looked foolish a few times. Especially when manager Torey Lovullo talked early in the postseason about all those “receipts” the Diamondbacks kept to stick right back up the rears of those who doubted, the cynics who figured they were due for an early and painful postseason exit, the snorters who figured the big bad Phillies would make rattlesnake stew out of them.

They outlasted the Phillies. It wasn’t really easy to do. But the Rangers were another proposition entirely. The Diamondbacks really didn’t stand much of a chance no matter how bravely they hung in for five games, no matter that this Series matched two of baseball’s best defensive teams on the season.

The Rangers were only too happy to stuff those Diamondbacks receipts right back where they came from. But the Diamondbacks have no reason for shame otherwise.

“I’m so proud of what they’ve done,” Lovullo said. “And we have to step back for a minute and tell ourselves that we’ve done a lot of really amazing things this year. And then we got on this really fun ride through the course of the postseason. You just never want it to stop.”

But that’s the problem. They can never rescind the rule that somebody has to lose games.  The good news further is that the Diamondbacks are a comparatively young franchise and lack the kind of snake-bitten history that once plagued such antiquities as the Cubs, the Red Sox, and even the 63-year-old Rangers. And still plagues the Guardians, who haven’t won a World Series since the Berlin Airlift.

Barring unforeseen calamity or brain damage, the Diamondbacks will be back soon enough. For now, let them mourn lost opportunity while celebrating how they got to have the chance in the first place.

NLCS Game Five: All things small and big

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Zack Wheeler

Zack Wheeler pitching almost spotlessly in NLCS Game Five did as much to save the Phillies season as their early running and mid-game bombing did.

Ask, and you shall receive. The Phillies asked Zack Wheeler to pitch like an ace in National League Championship Series Game Five—and he did. They asked their hitters to step up and swing when it mattered—and they did. They asked their bullpen to hold fort—and they did.

Their reward for doing those things was a handy 6-1 win in Chase Field and a trip back to Philadelphia with not one but two chances to punch their World Series tickets. The Phillies, of course, not to mention the throng liable to greet them in Citizens Bank Park come Monday, would prefer it not take that long.

All it took otherwise was for the Phillies to put Games Three and Four behind them, the ones in which their overtaxed bullpen let the Diamondbacks waste a grand start by Ranger Suárez in the former and their overtaxed bull Craig Kimbrel implode them toward a come-from-ahead loss in the latter.

Not to mention Kyle Schwarber starting the Game Five ball rolling in a way you don’t expect of the bombardier who showed up nuclear in the sixth inning, beating one into the ground to take a slow enough roll toward third, a region left open with the Diamondbacks in a slight shift toward second, that he beat out for a leadoff hit.

Not to mention Bryce Harper sending him to third with a one-out single shot right back up the pipe, Bryson Stott lining him home with a single. And, Harper coming home on a double steal while inadvertently colliding with a momentarily-stunned Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno as the throw from Snakes second baseman Ketel Marte to the plate went off it. It was the first time any Phillie stole home in any postseason.

Not to mention Wheeler and his Diamondbacks counterpart Zac Gallen engaging a pitcher’s duel that was noiseless, generally, until Schwarber opened the top of the sixth by turning Gallen’s 2-0 hanging breaking ball into a satellite flying over the Chase Field pool and several rows into the seats behind it. Giving Schwarber the all-time National League Championship Series home run lead with eleven.

Not to mention Harper, one out later, wrestling back from 1-2 into a full count before driving a fastball slightly over the middle of the zone and a little further into the same general real estate where Schwarber’s leadoff bomb landed.

Not to mention J.T. Realmuto abusing the Diamondbacks’ third reliever of the evening, Luis Frias, for a two-out two-run homer in the top of the eighth, which could have been considered repayment for Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas—the hero of the Snakes’ Game Four win with his unlikely eighth-inning, game-tying two-run homer—hitting Wheeler’s first pitch of the seventh over the right center field fence for the only score of the evening for his team.

Not to mention the Phillies bullpen keeping the Diamondbacks off the board the final two innings despite a couple of dicey moments in the ninth, when Evan Longoria drew a two-out walk off Seranthony Domínguez and took second on defensive indifference before Perdomo landed on first after his bouncer hit Domínguez’s leg and deflected to shortstop.

Manager Rob Thomson reached for Matt Strahm. Strahm landed a swinging strikeout on Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll to finish off. The Phillies reached for ways to express how it felt to shake off such a heartbreaker as the Game Four loss.

“I just want to win. That’s it,” said Harper, whose evening included a grand first inning play when he speared Diamondbacks DH Pavin Smith’s hard grounder lunging right and onto a knee before taking it to the pad himself. “Whatever that takes, whatever that’s going to be, whatever that’s going to look like. That was a big game for us. Coming in here and getting one is huge. That’s a good team over there. We took advantage of everything we could.”

Harper also tended Moreno at once after the double-steal collision, perhaps mindful that Perdomo has been under concussion watch before in his career and was caught in the head on a backswing during the D-Backs’s wild card set. “The way he went down,” Harper said postgame, “I was making sure he was good and stable.”

(Memo to: Social media idiots. It wasn’t a dirty play. Harper came straight down the base line without trying to collide with Moreno. Moreno moving from in front of the plate to reach for the throw crossed into Harper’s path, unintentionally but technically blocking the plate without the ball in his mitt, illegally, leaving Harper nowhere to go at that moment.)

The collision to one side, Realmuto seemed less impressed by his own home run than by the double steal that made Harper the second-oldest (at 31) ever to steal home in a postseason game. (Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson at 37 remains the oldest; he did it in the 1955 World Series.) “After what [the Snakes] did to us the last two games, they had all the momentum in the world,” the Phillies catcher said postgame. “So we had to try to do something early in the game to get it back. That was a great call by [Thomson] putting that on.”

The plot was simple. Stott would take off for second and draw Moreno’s throw while stopping just short of the pad. It looked like Stott getting himself caught in a rundown, but Marte winged his throw home almost immediately after Stott stopped with Harper, instructed to “be aggressive” by Phillies third base coach Dusty Wathan, gunning it home.

“It just shows you,” said Phillies shortstop Trea Turner, “how being aggressive and putting pressure on those guys — not just them but everybody in general, to put pressure on the other side is good and it makes things happen.” Make things happen? The Phillies opened by taking a page out of the Diamondbacks’ grinding book and shoving right back before even thinking about the long ball side of their own game.

For all the Phillies’s basepath daring and bomb launching, though, Wheeler had to have been the player of the game for them when all was said and done. “He gave us exactly what we needed with where our pen was at,” said Thomson. “It’s incredible what he does,” said Harper of Wheeler, who threw 21 first-pitch strikes facing 28 batters. “It’s so much fun to watch. I love playing behind him, and it’s incredible. He’s legit, man.”

Now it’ll be up to Aaron Nola to pick up in Game Six where Wheeler left off in Game Five. As for the rest of the Phillies? Who knows what surprises they might bring? Another double steal including a theft of the plate? Another evening of acrobat defense? Another bomb or three?

You almost hope the set goes the full distance, if only to give the Diamondbacks more chances to show the talent might overcome this edition’s general lack of postseason experience. They’re a young team with a lot of upside and a lot of dynamism in their own right. They showed they, too, can exploit mistakes or misfirings in pushing this NLCS to a two-all tie in the first place.

But if they want to hang around a little longer, they’ll have to find a way to beat the Phillies in the Phillies’ own playpen, where the audience never sleeps and the noise rarely lets up before the final out. The Phillies just won their first NLCS road game. Going home, however, means a lot more to them than just scoring a run.

NLCS Game Four: Second verse, worse than the first?

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Craig Kimbrel, Alek Thomas

Diamondbacks pinch hitter Alek Thomas hitting the game re-tying home run off Phillies reliever Craig Kimbrel in the bottom of the Game Four eighth.

“He’ll be available tomorrow,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said of his just-chastened reliever Craig Kimbrel after National League Championship Series Game Three ended with Kimbrel surrendering a game-ending, game-losing RBI single, “and he’ll be ready to go.” Those may yet prove to be the nine most frightening words in the Phillies’ or their fans’ vocabularies. This week, this weekend, and maybe this year.

They may not necessarily bring Kimbrel himself much comfort in his heart of hearts, either.

Let’s be absolutely fair and say what we still can’t bring ourselves to say while we’re busy booing, hissing, and dreaming up new and snarkier insults to spread all over social media. There isn’t a professional baseball player alive who doesn’t go onto the field knowing that one mistake, one errant swing, one misstep, one missed pitch, could turn him into a fan piñata for life, or close enough to it.

Let’s also be absolutely fair and say Cardiac Craig didn’t cost his team the pennant yet. The game he allowed the Diamondbacks to tie so late, before his successor reliever José Alvarado served the RBI hit that broke the tie to stay, did nothing worse than tie this NLCS at two games each. Neither team’s season is over just yet.

But is Thomson just as willing to say after Game Four what he said of Kimbrel after he surrendered the Game Three-losing hit?

All Kimbrel had to do going out for the bottom of the eighth inning Friday night was keep the frisky young Diamondbacks from doing anything about a late and hard-earned 5-3 Philadelphia lead. He wasn’t even asked to finish the game. Just keep it there before Thomson could hand off to, say, José Alvarado for the ninth.

Groucho Marx would say it was “so simple a child of five could do it. Now, somebody send for a child of five.” It’s not impossible that a child of five could have come away with only a little singe. Kimbrel came away deep fried.

For all the gags about his high wire relief style, nobody pretends it’s fun to surrender a late, game-turning home run at all. There isn’t a child alive who dreams of going out to the mound in one of The Big Ones and getting his brains blown out. But it really becomes a microcosmic season in hell when it’s pinch hit by a spaghetti bat whose major league value over two seasons is plus defense in center field, enough to atone for the weak bat with nineteen defensive runs saved above the league average.

The fair supposition was that Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo sent Alek Thomas out to pinch hit for third baseman Emmanuel Rivera hoping only that a lefthanded bat against the righthanded Kimbrel might pick up enough of a hit to push Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. from second to third.

Kimbrel had opened by feeding Gurriel—who’d robbed J.T. Realmuto of at least extra bases with a leaping catch at the fence in the second—a 2-2 fastball to hit into left for a leadoff double. Then, after designated hitter Evan Longoria lined out to left, Kimbrel started behind Thomas, 3-1. It became 3-2 after Thomas fouled one off.

Then, Kimbrel served up a fastball just enough up and off the middle of the plate. It wasn’t a terrible pitch. Nothing on Thomas’s resume through that moment suggested he’d get anything better with it than a line drive base hit the other way, possibly to be stopped before it left the infield.

But the spaghetti bat pulled it, somehow, into the Chase Field pool behind the right field fence. Tying the game at five each. Tying the stomachs of Philadelphia fans in the ballpark and back in the City of Brotherly Love into knots. It wasn’t the game-losing hit by any definition, but those fans could only have thought, second verse, worse than the first.

A called strikeout later, Kimbrel threw Ketel Marte a meatball right down the pipe and Marte rapped it into left for a base hit. Only when Kimbrel plunked Corbin Carroll on the first pitch did Thomson reach for further relief and bring Alvarado in.

Too late. Alvarado fell behind Gabriel Moreno 3-1, then Moreno singled up the pipe to score Marte for the 6-5 Snakes lead the Phillies didn’t overthrow in the ninth. (Yes. It’s more than a little unfair to hang Kimbrel with the “loss” when he wasn’t even on the mound to surrender the hit that plated what proved the winning run.)

Maybe we should say couldn’t. Kyle Schwarber—who’d first put the Phillies on the scoreboard with a leadoff blast in the top of the fourth—hit Diamondbacks finisher Paul Sewald’s first two-out pitch into the right field corner for a double. But Sewald got Trea Turner to strike out swinging for the game.

What happens to Kimbrel in these moments during such postseasons? What happens to any relief pitcher whose line of work includes going into a game tasked with holding a tight lead, escaping a nasty jam, or just finishing off the opposition in the final frame, only to see it blow up in a single pitch?

The best of that profession had to have their moments of doubt. The best of that profession have been broken in the moment, even and especially the biggest moment. Even Mariano Rivera, the Hall of Famer whose closing career postseason statistics would equal a fluke regular season for a lesser talent, suffered the horror of losing a World Series with one pitch to an ancient Diamondback named Luis Gonzalez.

The Mariano shook that one off, picked himself up, and went on with his Hall of Fame career. Kimbrel generally does likewise after an outing, even if he leaves behind a trail of work that tells observers that, even when he comes out alive, it still feels as though his team lost instead of won.

If the moments are too big for Kimbrel, he almost never lets it show. If they’re too big for him, he probably wouldn’t go out there time and again risking a game, his reputation, and maybe his (and his team’s) nervous system. He’s known both off the charts success and off the charts faltering, regular and postseason alike. Since (and especially during) the 2018 postseason, Kimbrel outings leave people feeling often enough as though his teams lose even when they win.

At 35 years old, Kimbrel must wonder to himself how many more such moments (and how many dollars on his contract) are worth the strain. Others, of course, must wonder how many more such moments the Phillies are willing to risk. They’ll have a spiritual advantage getting the set back to Citizens Bank Park, of course. But they’d rather have a series advantage going home, too.

“We’ve got to talk about that,” Thomson said postgame, when the question became changing Kimbrel’s role to come. “Do you put him in a little lower-leverage spot? I don’t know. I’ll talk to him with [pitching coach] Caleb [Cotham], talk through it, and see where we’re at.” That was a far turn from Thomson’s pregame vote of confidence: “I trust [his bullpen]. Has [Kimbrel] scattered the zone at times? Sure. But if you look at our charts, everybody’s had a little bit of a hiccup, but they’ve bounced back. So you’ve got to trust that.”

Some social media mavens raised the name Mitch Williams, the zany and nerve-challenging Phillies lefthander who served up a World Series-losing home run to Joe Carter three decades ago. They thought the Wild Thing got too wild, too crazy, too reckless.

But it turned out that then-manager Jim Fregosi and then-pitching coach Johnny Podres forgot to tell Williams to back away from the slide-step—put on to keep Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson from as much of his usual basepath mischief as possible (a futile hope, of courae)—that altered and rushed his deliveries and his fastballs.

With Podres already having visited the mound, and neither he nor Fregosi finding a sign to send with the order, Williams was doomed when his slide-stepped fastball went into Carter’s wheelhouse instead of up and away where the Wild Thing wanted it and might have thrown it out of his normal delivery.

The three-legged mistake of Fregosi, Podres, and Williams lost the Phillies a World Series. Kimbrel’s high-wire mistake merely tied an NLCS game. “I rolled up in here and cost us two games,” said Kimbrel postgame, clearly not pleased with himself. “The bright side is we’re still tied at 2-2 and we’ve got a game here tomorrow, then we get to Philly.”

Forced to a bullpen Game Four in which the bulls ran short, Kimbrel ran out, and a few early defensive mistakes made life tougher for the Phillies than it should have been, they  need Zack Wheeler to pitch an even better Game Five Saturday than he did enabling the Phillies to win Game One.

They also need Aaron Nola to be his Game Two self in Game Six back home. Their bullpen, whose main men have worked 14.3 innings in this set, needs a huge break. They need to quit underestimating this tenacious crew of Diamondbacks, no matter how silly they’ve slapped Snakes starters Merrill Kelly and Zac Gallen, the latter of whom squares off against Wheeler on Saturday.

They can’t afford to risk Kimbrel tearing it even once more, either.