Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés (left) must have pitied Angels shortstop Zach Neto caught cold on the suicide squeeze that wasn’t on Tuesday . . .
Ron Washington must have returned to managing with the idea that the job credentials now require he be in shape enough to throw players under the proverbial bus. Even if it wasn’t their fault his orders couldn’t be executed without at least one fatality.
The Angels manager who called for a bases-loaded suicide squeeze Tuesday had only one thought after Luis Guillorme tried to obey orders on a pitch you’d have required a door for making contact: It was all Guillorme’s fault.
Cardinals reliever JoJo Romero couldn’t find the strike zone with a search party. It took the lefthander a full count to strike the Angels’ eighth-inning leadoff man Jo Adell out. Zach Neto went to a full count before doubling down the right field line, before Romero walked Kyren Paris and Nolan Schanuel to set up the ducks on the pond.
Lefthanded-hitting Guillorme at the plate and Neto on third were given their suicide squeeze orders on a 1-1 count. Romero went into his delivery and Guillorme squared to bunt with Neto charging down the line for home. Except the pitch was well out of Guillorme’s reach, and Neto was a dead man.
Guillorme hadn’t been an Angel for a full week. Washington’s postgame comments must have made him feel as though the nearest available cave wasn’t deep enough for him to hide. “He didn’t do the job,” the manager said. “It wasn’t anything I did wrong. He didn’t do the job. I would have rather went to the ninth inning with a 6-6 lead than gone to the ninth inning the way we did.”
Aside from the brain fart that let Washington speak of a 6-6 lead, he was even more wrong about the erratic Romero: “Wild? He was throwing the ball in the strike zone,” the manager insisted. “Why are you making excuses? He was throwing the ball in the strike zone. (Guillorme) did not get the bunt down. Period.”
I’ve watched the video several times. Romero’s slider went at least two full feet or better outside the zone. Unless Washington thought Guillorme had heretofore untapped diving talent—or looked in the moment like the late behemoth Frank Howard (all 6’7″ and airplane-like arm span of him)—the only way Guillorme might have reached that pitch would have been to throw his bat toward it.
The ball was outside far enough that, even if Guillorme could have gotten the farthest end of his bat on it the ball might have ticked foul, forcing Neto back to third. In that instance, any element of surprise (perhaps the key element in executing a suicide squeeze) would have dissipated likewise. Of course, with the way Romero was throwing Guillorme might have gone from there to draw the game-tying bases-loaded walk, but we’ll never know now.
It’s only fair to say Washington’s intentions were the best. He had lefthander-vs.-lefthander with the bases loaded. He had his man facing a pitcher whose money pitch, a sinkerball, might have been ideal for dropping a suicide squeeze bunt if the pitch came to the plate in the zone. He was trying to avoid a rally-killing, inning-ending double play.
Now it’s even money who was further out of the zone, Romero and his pitches or Washington and his vision. All that’s left to determine is whether Washington turned the play into baseball’s first known murder-suicide squeeze.
With Neto heading home full speed ahead, any thought of Guillorme laying off the pitch was futile. Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés had set up for a pitch toward the outside corner and was thus in decent position to snare a ball going as far out of the zone as Romero’s pitch went. He had only to hop up to his left and lay his mitt in front of the ball to take it. It looked almost as though Pagés pitied Neto when he stopped the Angels shortstop cold with the sorry-about-that tag.
Four pitches later—you guessed it, another Romero full count—Guillorme struck out swinging to finish the rally killing. The veteran the Angels picked up in a trade with the Braves earlier this month still took one for his manager after the Cardinals banked the 7-6 win. “He made a good pitch. What else can you say?” Guillorme said of Romero. “I tried to get the bat on it. But he made a good pitch.”
It was made good only because Guillorme tried to reach the unreachable. In further fairness it was only the exclamation point on a day when the Angels were as attractive in the field as ten head of cattle with mad cow disease.
Second inning: Angels starting pitcher Reid Detmers wild-pitched Cardinals right fielder Dylan Carson home, before third baseman Cole Tucker threw home wildly off a ground ball, enabling Cardinals second basman Nolan Gorman to score.
Third inning: Detmers let Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and designated hitter Alec Burleson pull off a double steal with Carson at the plate. The pair of them had one stolen base between them all year until then and weren’t exactly road runners to begin with. Detmers ended up walking Carson and striking Gorman out, but then he fed Pagés a meatball good enough for Pagés to bag his first major league hit—a three-run double.
The Angels fought their way back, somehow, especially when their catcher Logan O’Hoppe blasted Cardinals starter Sonny Gray for a three-run homer in the fourth and left fielder Taylor Ward send Schanuel home with a sacrifice fly in the fifth. Burleson wrecked the five-all tie with a two-run homer off Angels reliever Amir Garrett in the top of the seventh, but Kevin Pillar—he whom the Angels picked up at the junkyard after Mike Trout went down with his knee injury—pulled the Angels back to within a run with a two-out RBI single.
That set up the 7-6 score Washington wanted Guillorme to close back up with the suicide squeeze. The one Guillorme couldn’t execute on a pitch impossible to reach. The one that prompted Washington to throw Guillorme so far under the proverbial bus he might actually have passed below another bus behind it before coming to a skidding stop.
Throneberry Fields Forever 