Tag Archives: Craig Kimbrel

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.

NLCS Game Three: Cardiac arrested

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Craig Kimbrel

“Some days you get them, and some days you don’t.”—Phillies relief pitcher Craig Kimbrel, gotten but good by the Diamondbacks in Game Three.

Two League Championship Series Game Threes, two postseason juggernauts stopped. One night, the Astros slap aging and rusted Max Scherzer silly en route making the ALCS a 2-1 affair. The next afternoon, the Diamondbacks do what Cardiac Craig Kimbrel all but begs them to do and turn the NLCS likewise into a 2-1 affair.

Until both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks more or less snuck single runs home in each half of the seventh, their Game Three was mostly a pitching clinic. In fact, until Diamondbacks reliever Ryan Thompson wild-pitched Bryce Harper home in the top of the seventh, no scoreless postseason game ever ended its scoreless status that way.

Both starters, Ranger Suárez for the Phillies and rookie Brandon Pfaadt for the Diamondbacks, pitched into the sixth without so much as a peep across the plate on either side.

The bullpens took over and, while a few things got a little dicey between them, they held the tie and threatened to send the game to extra innings. Then Phillies manager Rob Thomson made his big mistake. He called upon Kimbrel to hold fort for the bottom of the ninth.

If this game was in Philadelphia, even the Phillies’s loud and loyal fans would have had the crash carts on double red alert. But in Chase Field, the Diamondbacks’s snake pit, the only thing anyone on that crowd wanted to hand Kimbrel was a loaded triple-decker hamburger smothered in heavy sauce.

This was a little too classic Kimbrel. He fell behind Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. leading off, 3-0, pumped two strikes called on the corner, watched Gurriel foul a pair off, then walked him low and away.

He fell behind Pavin Smith, a late game entry pinch hitting for the day’s designated hitter Evan Longoria two innings earlier, 2-0, Gurriel stealing second on the second pitch.

Then, a swinging strike, followed by a grounder up the middle that Phillies third baseman Bryson Stott grabbed on a slide but left himself no play. With Gurriel the potential winning run now on third.

Next was Emmanuel Rivera, playing third for the Diamondbacks. Kimbrel got his first first-pitch strike of the assignment while Smith took second on fielders’ indifference. A foul strike, a ball low, then a grounder toward third speared by Phillies shortstop Trea Turner, who threw home and nailed Gurriel at the plate.

Back in Philadelphia, the sigh of relief probably crossed three state lines—but the crash carts remained online and on double red alert. With good reason.

Kimbrel started Snakes shortstop Geraldo Perdomo with a ball way off the plate before Perdomo fouled the next pitch away and swung for strike two. This was the first time Kimbrel got ahead of a batter in the inning. That’d teach him. Two straight balls, low, to follow. Ball four to load the pillows. A first pitch strike to second baseman Ketel Marte. A second pitch fastball a little up . . .

Bing! It wasn’t up enough for Marte to miss shooting it back up the pipe for a base hit sending Smith home with the game winner.

Yes, it was only Game Three. Yes, the Phillies still have the NLCS advantage. But, yes, they may have to think twice before deciding they can live with the cardiac side of Kimbrel much longer.

“He just couldn’t find the zone consistently,” said Phillies manager Rob Thomson postgame, “and sometimes that happens to Kim,” Thomson said. “But he’ll be available [for Gamr Four], and he’ll be ready to go.”

Hear me out. This guy has been a great pitcher in the past. Somehow, he still holds a lifetime 2.47 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP), a 0.99 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, and a 3.87-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, not to mention a 14.2 strikeouts-per-nine rate. But his real greatness may well be behind him, even if he was an All-Star in his first Phillies season this year.

Now, let’s look at Kimbrel by dividing his career between his final of three regular seasons with the Red Sox and his seasons since:

Craig Kimbrel ERA FIP WHIP BB/9 K/9 K/BB
2010-2018 1.80 1.81 0.91 3.3 14.8 4.44
2019-2023 3.57 3.68 1.16 4.1 13.0 3.15

Yes, he can still strike the other guys out like a virtuoso. But since leaving Boston he’s walking about one more per nine than before and striking one less out. He’s allowing more to reach base in the first place since leaving Boston. His ERA/FIP were about dead even during those great first nine seasons of his career, but they’re two runs higher since that 2010-2018 term. And, from 2019-23, his FIP (kind of your ERA when the defense behind you is taken out of the equation) is eleven points higher than his ERA.

Since somehow earning six saves despite a 6.74 ERA in the 2018 postseason, Kimbrel has been up and down in October. In 2020, he pitched an inning and a third shutdown relief in the National League wild card game for the Cubs. In 2021, he appeared in three American League division series for the White Sox—and surrendered two earned runs in three innings.

Until Thursday afternoon, Kimbrel this postseason looked great if you didn’t look past the surface numbers. In division series Game One he got the side in order to finish the Phillies’ win—without a strikeout. But he needed Johan Rojas’s spectacular running catch in division series Game Four’s seventh to save him in the Phillies’ win.

He got the NLCS Game One save credit with a swinging strikeout and a game-ending double play—after he walked his second batter of the ninth. Entering Game Three, Kimbrel had an ERA of zero . . . but a 3.71 FIP. But after Game Three, they became 2.09/5.07.

A 5.07 FIP is not conducive to late-inning survival.

“Some days you get them, and some days you don’t,” Kimbrel said, too matter-of-factly, after the game ended. “Today just wasn’t my day.”

Remember: It wasn’t Kimbrel’s fault the Phillies’ usually formidable offense was kept to three hits on the day, or scored their only run of the game on a walk, an infield hit, a double play pushing Harper to third, and the wild pitch enabling Harper to score. But given the chance to push Game Three to extras tied at one, Kimbrel went cardiac once too often.

That may not be a thrill or a chill the Phillies can afford much longer. If at all.

He’ll be available tomorrow, and he’ll be ready to go. Which “he’ll”—the guy who can be as tight shutdown as they come, or the guy who can’t stop the high wire act until the cable snaps under his feet? These Phillies deserve to know, because these Diamondbacks won’t be kind if the wrong one’s ready.

The last of the big boys buried

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Johan Rojas

Young center fielder Johan Rojas making the catch of his life so far, robbing Ronald Acuña, Jr. of a possible Game Four-changing double and saving the Phillies’ NLDS triumph in the bargain Thursday night.

If you consider 100+ game regular season winners the truly big boys, they’ve all been knocked out of the postseason before it even got to the League Championship Series. The 90-game winning Phillies secured that dubious distinction when they sent the Braves home for the winter Thursday night.

And they didn’t need Bryce Harper to do the heavy lifting this time. Nick Castellanos was more than happy to do that when he hit two more solo home runs, this time off the Braves’ best starting pitcher, this time making himself the first man ever to hit two bombs each in two postseason games.

Spencer Strider all but owned the Phillies in regular season play. In postseason play the Phillies puncture him just enough, including in their National League division series Game Four. And, unlike a lot of young men whose ownership thus becomes subject to hostile postseason takeover, Strider didn’t flinch when asked the wherefore.

“I’m not a person that makes excuses,” Strider said after the Phillies punched their NLCS ticker with an emphatic enough 3-1 win. “I’m sure there’s a lot of Braves fans out there that are not happy, and they have every right to be that way. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Me personally, I wasn’t good enough.”

Neither did he flinch when asked whether the postseason system awarding byes to the top two seeds in each league harmed the Braves for the extra week off.

“I think that the people trying to use the playoff format to make an excuse for the results they don’t like are not confronting the real issue,” Strider continued. “You’re in control of your focus, your competitiveness, your energy. And if having five days off (means) you can’t make that adjustment, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”

“We got beat,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said, “by a really good club that has a penchant for this time of year.”

For me, the real issue is letting teams into the postseason at all who give their fans the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place. Forcing the teams who owned the regular season to run the gamut through lesser-performing teams in order to even think about a shot at the World Series.

And yet, it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

Especially between the Braves and the Phillies, finishers one and two in the National League East. Especially since the Braves were the only departing division champions who didn’t get swept out of what’s now their only postseason set of the year.

The Phillies didn’t have easy work to do. Not against the team who hit a record 307 regular-season home runs. But nobody figured anyone, never mind the Phillies, to out-homer these Braves in this division series 11-3, with Castellanos and Harper accounting for 63 percent of those bombs, and Harper himself hitting as many homers as the entire Braves team for the set.

And, with Ronald Acuña, Jr., Mr. 40/70, held to three hits without reaching the seats while walking twice but stealing nothing.

The nearest Acuña got to serious damage was in the top of the Game Four seventh. With Cardiac Craig Kimbrel relieving Jose Alvarado, entering a first-and-second jam, Kimbrel went from 1-2 to 2-2 before handing Acuña something to drive to the back of center field. Citizens Bank Park’s crash carts were on red alert.

Then young Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, who wasn’t hitting much but who was making his bones with the leather (he was worth nine defensive runs on the regular season), ran the drive down and, after one hesitation step at the track, hauled it in on the track two steps shy of the wall . . . and just shy of becoming at least a two and possibly three-run double.

Strider dodged a Harperian bullet in the first inning Thursday night. He had Trea Turner on second with a one-out double down the left field line and off the wall. He tried to pitch around Harper, knowing that Harper needs only one swing to wage nuclear destruction, but after falling behind 3-0, Braves manager Brian Snitker said don’t even think about it, put him on.

For that moment Snitker resembled Casey Stengel the Yankee dominator, as Strider struck Alec Bohm out and got Bryson Stott to fly out to center field for the side. Strider didn’t look overwhelming with two walks and two hits on his jacket in two innings. He needed help from center fielder Michael Harris II again, Harris making a highlight-reel sliding catch of Rojas’s one-out liner to center in the second, then doubling Castellanos off second for the side.

The Phillies’ plate plan included just making Strider throw as many pitches as possible whatever the results. But they wouldn’t say no if an early count pitch looked delicious enough to dine. With one out in the bottom of the fourth, and the Braves up 1-0 thanks to Austin Riley’s solo homer in the top of the frame, Strider served Castellanos just such a slider, and Castellanos served it into the left field seats.

Phillies shortstop Trea Turner saw a similar feast heading his way on the first pitch with one out in the bottom of the fifth, breaking the tie with his own launch into the left field seats. Until then, Turner had faced Strider seventeen times in his career and gone hitless for his effort. What a difference two months plus makes.

One moment, in August, Turner’s struggles were so profound that someone asked, and Phillies fans agreed, to bathe him in cheers just for encouragement his first time up. Now, he put the Phillies in the lead and would finish the set with a 1.441 OPS for it. He also finished a triple short of the cycle in Game Three and became the first Phillie—ever—to have a 4-for-4 game in a postseason set.

An inning after Turner unloaded, Castellanos finished Strider’s evening’s work with another solo homer. This time, Castellanos was kind enough not to do it on the first pitch, hitting a 1-2 fastball not too far from where his first bomb landed.

The Braves had one more shot at forcing a fifth game in the ninth. Marcell Ozuna wrung a leadoff walk out of Phillies reliever Gregory Soto and Sean Murphy singled him to third. Exit Soto, enter Matt Strahm. He got Kevin Pillar to pop out behind second base where Turner hauled it in; he got pinch hitter Eddie Rosario to fly out to left not deep enough to score Ozuna; and, he landed a swinging strikeout on pinch hitter Vaughan Grissom.

That sealed the fate of the Braves who’ve been ousted from two straight postseasons after winning the 2021 World Series. This time, the Phillies pitching staff and defense found a way to keep their regular-season threshing machine from threshing in this set. (Their NLDS slash: .186/.255/.264.) The Braves’ pitching staff and defense couldn’t stop the Phillies from looking . . . almost like the regular-season Braves. (The Phillies: NLDS slash: .275/.373/.565.)

“Obviously, we’re going to have to make an adjustment in the way we handle the postseason and the way that we focus and prepare for it,” Strider said, “but we’re going to get to work the moment we get out of here.”

Like the Dodgers, the Braves had compromised starting pitching. They missed veteran Charlie Morton, dealing with an index finger injury. Also, having Max Fried pitch only once in three weeks prior to Game Two because of finger blistering hurt.

But Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who pinch hit for Harris in the Game Four seventh and drew the bases-loading walk from Kimbrel, handed the Phillies the major credit. “All of them stepped up,” he said. “All of their big offense and their pitching. Their bullpen all stepped up. Their starters all stepped up. Ranger had a tremendous series, Zack (Wheeler) had a tremendous game, (Aaron) Nola, their whole bullpen. Their pitching was unbelievable.”

Wheeler, Nola, and Game Four starter Ranger Suárez have started all six Phillies postseason games thus far. Their collective ERA for the span: 1.54. The Phillies bullpen over the same six games: 1.29 ERA. D’Arnaud may have made the understatement of the postseason through today.

“In baseball, it’s not always the best team that wins, it’s the team that plays the best that day,” said Braves reliever A.J. Minter, who surrendered one earned run in two and a third series innings. “And they played better than us, that’s what it came down to. We’ve just got to come back this offseason and be ready to go at spring training . . . When we won the World Series in ’21, we weren’t necessarily the best team.”

The best team doesn’t always win. You can ask the 1921 Yankees, the 1924 Giants, the 1952 Dodgers, the 1954 Indians, the 1969 Orioles, the 1981 Reds, the 1987 Tigers and Cardinals, the 1990 Athletics, and the 2001 Mariners, among others. Now, you can ask this year’s Braves, Brewers, Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays, too. Those were baseball’s top five teams this season.

But now the number six Astros go to the American League Championship Series against the number eight Rangers, and the Astros will be the only division winner involved in an LCS. The number seven Phillies go to the National League Championship Series against the number twelve Diamondbacks. There’s a reasonable if not ironclad chance that baseball’s seventh or twelfth best team could face its eighth best team in the World Series.

You tell me something isn’t terribly wrong with that picture no matter how much fun the games were to watch, anyway. No matter how much you loved Harper answering the post-Game Two trolling Braves. No matter how much you loved Castellanos’s Games Three and Four demolition or Harper’s continuation as his own kind of Mr. October. No matter how much you loved watching the Phillies’ pitching keep the Braves from truly serious mischief. No matter how much fun we’ll have watching the two LCSes, anyhow.

Just don’t ask commissioner Rob Manfred.

“I’m sort of the view you need to give something a chance to work out,” Manfred said. “I know some of the higher-seeded teams didn’t win. I think if you think about where some of those teams were, there are other explanations than a five-day layoff. But I think we’ll reevaluate in the offseason like we always do and think about if we have the format right . . . It’s Year Two (of the three-wild-card format). I think we need to give it a little time . . . We all want the competition to be the best it can possibly be.”

As the great (and Spink Award-winning Hall of Fame) New York Times baseball writer Red Smith once said of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn dismissing Curt Flood’s reserve challenge out of mealymouthed hand, Commissioner Pepperwinkle really seems to be saying, “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

The All-Scar Game

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Austin Riley, Pete Alonso

Austin Riley’s (Braves, left) kneeling throw to kneeling scooper Pete Alonso (Mets, right) ended the bottom of the All-Star Game eighth with a double play . . . (MLB.com photo) . . .

The best thing about Tuesday night’s All-Star Game? Easy. That snappy eighth inning-ending double play into which Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker hit. He shot one up the third base line to Braves third baseman Austin Riley, who picked and threw on one knee across to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, who scooped on one knee to nail two outs for the price of one, doubling Blue Jays second baseman Whit Merrifield up.

That play preserved what proved the National League’s 3-2 win over the American League in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. They got the second and third runs in the top of that eighth, when Elias Díaz (Rockies) pinch hit for Jorge Soler (Marlins) with Nick Castellanos (Phillies) aboard after a nine-pitch leadoff walk and nobody out. Díaz sent Orioles righthander Félix Bautista’s 2-2 splitter off a bullpen sidewall, then off an overhang into the left field seats.

It meant the first NL All-Star win since 2012. It also meant Díaz becoming the Rockies’s first-ever All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award winner. Otherwise? It meant almost nothing. Because the worst thing about this year’s All-Scar Game was . . . just about everything else.

Mr. Blackwell, call your office. All-Star Game specific threads have been part of it for long enough. They began ugly and devolved to further states of revulsivity. But Tuesday night took the Ignoble Prize for Extinguished Haberdashery. The only uniforms uglier than this year’s All-Star silks are those hideous City Connect uniforms worn now and then during regular season games. Both should be done away with. Post haste. Let the All-Stars wear their regular team uniforms once again.

Who are those guys? They sort of anticipated long ovations for the hometown Mariners’ All-Star representatives. But they didn’t anticipate they’d be longer than usual. To the point where two Rays All-Stars—shortstop Wander Franco, pitcher Shane McLanahan—weren’t even introduced, when they poured in from center field among all other All-Stars. (Rays third baseman Yandy Díaz, an All-Star starter, did get introduced properly. But still.)

Maybe the two Rays jumped the gun trotting in while the ovation continued, but they should have been announced regardless.

While I’m at it, what was with that nonsense about bringing the All-Stars in from center field instead of having them come out of the dugouts to line up on the opposite base lines? Some traditions do deserve preservation. Not all, but some. What’s next—running the World Series combatants’ members in from the bullpens? (Oops! Don’t give the bastards any more bright ideas!)

Down with the mikes! In-game miking of players has always been ridiculous. But on Tuesday night it went from ridiculous to revolting. When Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi took the mound miked up, the poor guy got into trouble on the mound almost at once. He had to pitch his way out of a two-on, one-out jam in the second inning. He sounded about as thrilled to talk while working his escape act as a schoolboy ordered to explain why he put a girl’s phone number on the boys’ room wall.

What’s the meaning of this? We’ve got regular-season interleague play all year long now. The National League All-Stars broke a ten-season losing streak? Forgive me if hold my applause. So long as the entire season is full of interleague play, the All-Star Game means nothing. Wasn’t it bad enough during those years when the outcome of the All-Star Game determined home field advantage for the World Series?

The road to making the All-Star Game mean something once more is eliminating regular-season interleague play altogether.

Elias Díaz

. . . saving the lead (and, ultimately, the game) Elias Díaz gave the NL with his two-run homer in the top of the eighth. (And, yes, the All-Star uniforms get uglier every year. Enough!) (AP Photo.)

Tamper bay. Sure it was cute to hear the T-Mobile Park crowd chanting for Angels unicorn star Shohei Ohtani to come to Seattle as a free agent. The problem is, he isn’t a free agent yet. He still has a second half to play for the Angels. I’ll guarantee you that if any team decided to break into a “Come to us!” chant toward Ohtani, they’d be hauled before baseball’s government and disciplined for tampering.

I get practically every fan base in baseball wanting Ohtani in their teams’ fatigues starting next year. If they don’t, they should be questioned by grand juries. But they really should have held their tongues on that one no matter how deeply you think the All-Scar Game has been reduced to farce. Lucky for them the commissioner can’t fine the Mariners for their fans’ tamper chants. (Not unless someone can prove the Mariners put their fans up to it, anyway.)

Crash cart alert. Cardiac Craig Kimbrel (Phillies) was sent out to pitch the ninth. With a one-run lead. The National League should have put the crash carts on double red alert, entrusting a one-run lead to the guy whose six 2018 postseason saves with a 5.90 ERA/6.74 fielding-independent pitching still felt like defeats. The guy who has a lifetime 4.13 ERA/4.84 FIP in postseason play.

Kimbrel got the first two outs (a fly to right, a strikeout), then issued back-to-back walks (six and seven pitches off an even count and a 1-2 count, respectively) before he finally struck Jose Ramirez (Guardians) out—after opening 0-2 but lapsing to 2-2—to end the game. Making the ninth that kind of interesting should not be what the Phillies have to look forward to if they reach the coming postseason.

Sales pitch. How bad is the sorry state of the Athletics and their ten-thumbed owner John Fisher’s shameless moves while trying and failing to extort Oakland but discovering Nevada politicians have cactus juice for brains? It’s this bad—when the T-Mobile crowd wasn’t chanting for Ohtani to cast his free agency eyes upon Seattle, they were chanting “Sell the team!” when Rooker whacked a ground rule double in the fifth.

Can you think of any other All-Star ballpark crowd chanting against another team’s owner in the past? Not even George Steinbrenner’s worst 1980-91 antics inspired that. That’s more on Fisher, of course, but it’s still sad to think that a team reduced to cinder and ashes with malice aforethought captured an All-Star Game crowd’s attention almost equal to the attention they might have paid the game itself.

Kimbrel keeps the crash carts at bay—so far

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Kimbrel still resembles the old TWA terminal at JFK Airport when he leans to take his signs—but so far he doesn’t resemble the guy who used to force the crash carts on immediate standby.

Ordinarily, a week-old season wouldn’t (shouldn’t) have you either pushing panic buttons or awarding pennants before they’re actually won. Enough fans and social media crawlers hoist up the earliest numbers as though they’re final revelation or final condemnation.

But there’s a spectre haunting no more, for three games worth of the new season, anyway. Craig Kimbrel—the closer whose “saves” too often involved tempting, not being tempted by the devil—is not a spectre any more.

So far. Any temptation the Cubs have had to keep the crash carts on double-secret red alert whenever they’ve had to reach for him is quelled.

For now.

Three assignments. Three innings pitched. Nine batters faced. No hits surrendered. Six strikeouts; a two-per-inning average. He actually punched out the side in his first assignment (against the Pirates), landed two punchouts in his second (also against the Pirates), and landed one in his third (against the Brewers).

The Cubs won Kimbrel’s first two gigs and lost the third through no fault of his own: he worked a spotless ninth, but Brandon Workman came on to pitch the tenth and surrendered a three-run homer for which the Cubs had only an RBI single to answer in the bottom for the loss.

Kimbrel has only one save to his credit for his early effort, simply because in his first gig against the Pirates the Cubs handed him a four-run lead to protect. Kimbrel not only treated his assignment as though the entire fate of the Cubs rested on it, he struck out the side with every batter facing him looking at strike three.

For a moment or two you could have sworn you’d heard assorted Pirates muttering to themselves that they couldn’t reconcile this to the guy who’d become infamous a couple of postseasons ago for running up cardiac surgeons’ bills.

In the second Pirate gig, well, yes, these are still the Pirates, but the Cubs handed him a mere one-run lead to protect. The kind of narrow lead with which Kimbrel once raised temperatures if not blood pressures the moment he arrived on the mound.

He struck Michael Perez out swinging on 2-2. He caught Anthony Alford looking at a full-count third strike. He got Wilmer Difo to line out to shortstop on 0-2 for the side and the game.

“It’s too early to definitively say that Kimbrel is back to his old self after struggling in 2019 and 2020,” says RotoWire, “but it’s certainly encouraging to see him get off to a good start.” They only left out 2018’s postseason. The one which “struggling” didn’t even begin to describe.

When Worcester Telegram writer Bill Ballou first threatened not to vote for Mariano Rivera for the Hall of Fame (under protest ferocious enough he changed his mind), his initial defense included Kimbrel’s incendiary 2018 postseason performances: “When he pitched,” Ballou wrote, “Boston’s victories felt like defeats. In 10-2/3 innings he had an ERA of 5.90, and permitted nineteen baserunners. He was also six for six converting saves — a perfect record.”

That was then, when the Red Sox managed to win the World Series decisively enough, if now controversially enough. This is now: So far this season, Kimbrel resembles the kid howitzer who had a 1.43 ERA, a 1.52 fielding-independent pitching rate, a 14.8 strikeouts-per-nine rate, and a 266 ERA+ in his first four seasons, with the Braves.

“His presence on the mound, throwing strikes, being really aggressive with the heater — that’s Craig Kimbrel,” says Cub center fielder Ian Happ. The knuckle curve he works in isn’t exactly flat or hesitant so far, either.

“My first two appearances have been good,” Kimbrel said after his second dispatch of the Pirates. “I’ve successfully hit my spots and executed pitches how I wanted to. The life and movement on my pitches have definitely been there and with that, I’ve had some success.”

He also said having a normal spring training—as opposed to last year’s pan-damn-ically enforced quick “summer camp” and, more markedly, his midseason 2019 signing that compelled him to try rushing into form, doing him and the Cubs few favours—mattered this time around. It enabled him to iron out the knots without putting himself on the rack.

“I had an opportunity to get into games and work on things without the runs mattering,” he said, “and being more concerned on getting out there and executing what I was trying to do gameplan-wise each and every time instead of worrying about how many runs are getting across the plate. That was definitely helpful. As we saw at the start of spring training, [I] gave up some runs, gave up hits and as we went, I was able to throw more strikes and miss more bats. It was a good six weeks and we’ve gotten off to a pretty good start so far.”

That’s far, far, far away from the look he left after Game Four of the Red Sox’s 2018 division series triumph over the Yankees in four games. When he walked Aaron Judge on four pitches to open that ninth, surrendered a base hit (Didi Gregorius), struck Giancarlo Stanton out, but walked the bases loaded (Luke Voit) and hit Neil Walker with the first pitch before surrendering a sacrifice fly (Gary Sanchez) that shrunk the Red Sox lead to one run.

When Kimbrel got Gleyber Torres to ground out for game and set, Red Sox Nation didn’t know whether to thank him for the escape or kill him for dangling a few too many lamb chops in front of the Yankee wolves.

He “saved” Games Two and Four of that American League Championship Series by tempting the Astro wolves a little too much—well, since-departed (to the Royals) left fielder Andrew Benintendi really saved Game Four with that electrifying diving catch, on Alex Bregman’s sinking liner that would have crawled to the back of the yard for possibly three runs and an Astro win otherwise. And that was after Kimbrel walked the bases loaded again.

That was then; this is now. For now. Whether it proves too good to last no crystal ball can show with certainty. But for the bearded righthander who still resembles the old TWA terminal at Kennedy when he leans in to take his signs, it’s a season start he hasn’t experienced in too long. The Cubs won’t complain. Yet. It’s tricky and pricey keeping the crash carts on double-secret red alert.