Tag Archives: Torey Lovullo

ASG: As (almost) usual, show biz yields to baseball

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Jarren Duran

Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran hoists the clear bat awarded the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player. His tiebreaking two-run homer held up to give the AL the 5-3 win.

God help us all, everyone. The All-Star break began with a pre-Home Run Derby singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” Monday night (by country star Ingrid Andress) that made youth cringe and elders think wistful thoughts of Roseanne Barr. It ended with a tenth American League All-Star Game win in eleven seasons.

In between, of course, was much to ponder and much to dismiss as patent nonsense, which seems to be far more the norm than Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, who initiated the game in 1933, might have imagined.

Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm could be seen having to labour to keep from laughing (presumably, that he might not weep—or wish to commit manslaughter) when Andress tackled “The Star Spangled Banner” as though too well besotted. It turned out that appearance was everything: She copped the following day to being drunk and having enough issue with it to seek rehab and recovery.

Wish her well, but demand to know why nobody in baseball’s administration noticed she was drunk as she took the mike in the first place.

That was then: The Derby rules were, a participant had ten outs to hit as many homers as they could, the hitter with the most such bombs advanced, and that was that. So simple that, in fact, even Mark Belanger (human Electrolux at shortstop, but a spaghetti bat who hit three fewer homers in eighteen major league seasons than the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays hit in the first half of 1965) could have done it.

This is now: Round One—three minutes or forty batted balls, whichever came first, followed by an old-style three outs to hit as many bombs as possible. Round Two—the top four floggers moved to a bracket-like semifinal. Round Three—the two semifinal winners head to head. The net result: Teoscar Hernandez (Dodgers) defeating Bobby Witt, Jr. (Royals), who nearly forced a playoff with a ICBM-like blast stopped only by the left center field fence.

Some of us still wonder why we’re supposed to tolerate three-hour long Home Run Derbies but arise armed against two and a half hour-plus real baseball games. Or, why we had three-minute commercials aboard Fox’s All-Star Game telecast Tuesday before seeing supersonic relief pitchers blowing the side away in order in a minute and a half if that long.

Perhaps commissioner Rob Manfred might have an answer to that one. At least he has a sort-of answer to the question (posed by The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner) of when the ever-more-hideous generic All-Star Game uniforms of the past several years will be disappeared in favour of returning the fine old tradition of All-Stars wearing their own uniforms and thus representing their teams.

“I am aware of the sentiment and I do know why people kind of like that tradition,” Commissioner Pepperwinkle told Kepner. “There will be conversations about that.” The proper two-word answer to that, of course, is, prove it. About knowing why people (more than kind of) like that tradition and holding serious conversations about it.

Well, take the proverbial pause for the proverbial cause. That very first All-Star Game featured the American League representatives wearing their own teams’ home uniforms with the National League wearing road threads, as modeled below by Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett:

Gabby Hartnett

Behold now this year’s threads for each league:

Yes, we have seen far worse for generic All-Star uniforms.

Except for each league’s colour scheme, is it really that radically different from the 1933 NL haberdashery? Now, this year’s threads would look far nicer if the American League jersey was done with red-on-white (the AL was the home team in Globe Life Field) and the National League was done with blue-on-gray (since the NL is the visiting team). And worn over either white (home) or gray (road) pants.

My normal position is to be all-in on returning to the practise of each league’s All-Stars wearing their own teams’ uniforms, representing their teams and fan bases, as their forebears did for so many decades. If Commissioner Pepperwinkle insists ultimately upon keeping generic league uniforms, this year’s style just might be the right way to go, switching the core white and gray each year depending upon which league is the All-Star host.

The wherefores of this year’s uniforms mattered less when the game got underway, and rookie NL starting pitcher Paul Skenes (Pirates) got to face Aaron Judge (Yankees) after all, thanks to Judge’s teammate Juan Soto wringing himself into a walk. The bad news: Judge forcing Soto at second with a grounder to third for the side.

AL manager Bruce Bochy (Rangers) was well aware of the marquee appeal of Skenes versus Judge while penciling Judge into his cleanup slot. But he sent three lefthanded swingers with impeccable on-base credentials up against the righthanded Pirate phenom to open, hoping precisely to get that marquee match without sacrificing his best chances to start winning the game.

Joe and Jane Fan insist, “This is just an exhibition, dammit!” Maybe they’re right. Maybe the metastasis of regular-season interleague play to a full-season thing has left the All-Star Game bereft of meaning, as opposed to such artifices as the period when postseason home field advantage went to the league who won the Game..

But maybe a Hall of Famer in waiting who’s won four World Series as a skipper knows, however the game’s been kicked around like a commissioner’s plaything for too damn long, that himself, his NL counterpart Torey Lovullo (Diamondbacks), and the players on both sides, actually do play this particular game as baseball, not show business.

Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani detonating a three-run homer in the third inning. “To be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”—Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. Ohtani is now the only player in Show history to earn a pitching win in one All-Star Game and a home run in another All-Star Game.

So Bochy got Joe and Jane Fan their marquee matchup the old fashioned way, and Skenes came out of it on top, but Bochy’s diligence left him the only manager in major league history to win a World Series and an All-Star Game in each league. And, the first since Hall of Famer Joe McCarthy to manage an All-Star Game at home the season after he won a World Series.

Putting baseball ahead of show biz has enriching payoffs, of which Commissioner Pepperwinkle seemed as unaware as both managers were reminded soon enough en route the American League’s 5-3 win Tuesday.

Lovullo got the first such reminder when Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) faced Tanner Houck (Red Sox) in the top of the third with nobody out, two men on, and sent a 2-0 splitter a few rows back into the right center field seats. (The last Dodger to hit one out in All-Star competition? Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, 28 years earlier.) Bochy got his in the bottom of that inning, when Soto shot a two-run double to center and David Fry (Guardians) singled him home to tie the game at three after another Judge ground out.

Two innings later, Lovullo got the reminder that ended up counting for the game, when Jarren Duran (Red Sox) batted with two out and one on, took a strike from Hunter Greene (Reds), then caught hold of a Greene splitter and sent his own message into the same region of seats where Ohtani’s blast landed.

“It won’t hit me until I try to go to sleep tonight,” Duran told The Athletic postgame. “Who knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

A guy in his fourth Show season who entered this All-Star Game leading it with ten triples and the AL with 27 doubles, then detonated what proved the winning bomb Tuesday, deserves to sleep the sleep of the just. So does the rookie whose first two months in Show have made him a name and an arm to reckon with as it was, without giving him the additional gift of being an Ohtani teammate even for just one game—thus far.

“I tried to enjoy the three hours I had on a team with him,” Skenes said postgame, “because that’s probably only going to happen once a year. It was really cool to watch him do that, really cool to watch him go about his business and get to meet him and all that. You know, he’s—I don’t know of any hitters I’ve faced that’s better than him in my career. So, to be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”

The only thing better for either would have been an NL win, of course. Nobody had to tell Skenes it was neither his nor Ohtani’s fault the NL came up two bucks short Tuesday.

NLCS Game Seven: Don’t worry. Be happy.

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Arizona Diamondbacks

The Snakes start the pennant party after Phillies pinch-hitter Jake Cave flied out to end NLCS Game Seven.

So this is what the World Series will hoist. One team who got there with a bang—or several. One team who got there with whispers, almost, belying the pre-strike warning of the reptile that gives them their name.

It’s not that the Diamondbacks really intended to get to the World Series on the quiet side. But if the Rangers bludgeoned their way to the Series with back-to-back demolitions of the Astros in Houston, the Diamondbacks pried their way to the Series with four wins that could be called cool, calm, collected by comparison.

“We were silent, and we made damage,” said their shortstop Geraldo Perdomo, after the Snakes more or less nudged the Phillies home for the winter with a 4-2 National League Championship Series Game Seven win. “Be happy and enjoy what you do. That’s all. That was the message.”

Go ahead. Cue that ancient Bobby McFerrin hit. Don’t worry. Be happy. It wouldn’t be the worst theme song you could attach to a pennant winner.

The biggest lead by which the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies this set was a four-game margin in Game Six in Philadelphia. They won the National League pennant Tuesday night with a win in which it was harder to determine which was more profound, a small pack of squandered Phillies chances or a thick enough pack of quiet Diamondbacks opportunity seizings.

It was almost as though the smiling Snakes snuck their way to the World Series in the end. From their first Game Seven run scoring on a soft grounder the Phillies couldn’t turn into an inning-ending double play in the first to three of the least noisy fly outs finisher Paul Sewald got the Phillies to hit to end it.

Come to think of it, it was as though the underestimated Arizona gang wasn’t even fazed when Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm hit Diamondbacks starter Brandon Pfaadt’s first pitch of the second inning into the left center field seats. Pfaadt certainly wasn’t. He got second baseman Bryson Stott to fly out to the center field track, then struck catcher J.T. Realmuto and right fielder Nick Castellanos out swinging to prove it.

Pfaadt only looked shaky two innings later, when Bohm wrung him for a one-out walk, and Stott doubled him home to give the Phillies what proved a very short-lived 2-1 lead. Realmuto followed with a line single to left sending Stott to third which brought Castellanos to the plate.

The guy who began looking like Mr. October during the Phillies’s division series dispatch of the Braves and continued when he homered during his first plate appearance of this NLCS had gone 0-for-21 entering this plate appearance. Pfaadt struck him out swinging. Then the righthander shook off a four-pitch walk to left fielder Brandon Marsh to strike spaghetti-bat center field sweeper Johan Rojas out on three pitches.

And again the Diamondbacks didn’t resemble a team of no-names whose postseason days were going to be numbered by Philadelphia’s comparative star power.

Third baseman Emmanuel Rivera started unfurling that evidence with a leadoff line single up the pipe in the top of the fifth. Shortstop Geraldo Perdomo bunted him to second, perhaps ill-advised considering the wasted out and second baseman Ketel Marte’s swinging strikeout to follow.

Enter Corbin Carroll, the rookie about whom it’s very fair to say the Diamondbacks world revolves these days. After scoring that first run in the first, and in the middle of a 3-for-4 night, Carroll shot a base hit into center to send Rivera home to re-tie the game and push Phillies starter Ranger Suárez out of it.

Then catcher Gabriel Moreno greeted reliever Jeff Hoffman with a base hit after Carroll stole second, enabling the rook to be run number three before Moreno was caught trying to stretch to second. Meanwhile, Carroll also spent his evening tying a postseason rookie record for hits in a winner-take-all contest.

Most teams run out of an inning when they could do more damage might go into mourning at that point. Not these Diamondbacks. Their reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply shook off Kyle Schwarber’s bottom of the fifth-opening double to get Phillies shortstop Trea Turner to ground out to third and Bryce Harper, the dangerous convert to first base, to fly out to the track in left.

That was enough to prompt Snakes manager Torey Lovullo to get Mantiply the hell out of there and bring Ryan Thompson in to lure Bohm into a pop out Marte caught at the back of the infield for the side.

You could almost hear the still-underestimated Diamondbacks—who swept their way to this set in the first place by pushing the Brewers out of the wild card series and the oh-so-superior Dodgers out of a division series—thinking, if not whispering, “We do this kind of stuff to them all through the pictures.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Two innings later, the Snakes delivered what proved to have been one of the least dramatic knockout punches of the entire postseason. After José Alvarado relieved Hoffman for the Phillies with one out, Perdomo singled to left and Marte doubled him to third—making Marte owner of the longest postseason-career-opening hitting streak at sixteen.

Up stepped Carroll. Proving he could do things the quiet way as well as any other way, he lofted a sacrifice fly to left for the fourth Diamondbacks run and the final run of the game. Don’t worry. Be happy.

Then came Zack Wheeler, the Phillies’s Game Five starter who pitched like an ace when they needed it most to take a 3-2 NLCS lead, to pitch an inning and a third’s spotless relief. During which Harper lost the grandest opportunity to overthrow the Diamondbacks for good when he batted in the bottom of the seventh.

Cristian Pache pinch hit for Rojas with one out and walked off Diamondbacks reliever Andrew Saalfrank. Schwarber worked out a full count walk. Exit Saalfrank, enter Kevin Ginkel for the Snakes, and Turner flied out to bring Harper to the plate. The guy who sent the Phillies to the World Series last year with that eighth-inning homer in the mud hit one out to center field this time, but with not enough to avoid landing in center fielder Alek Thomas’s glove for the side.

“Just missed it,” Harper lamented postgame. “Not being able to come through in that moment, just devastation for me. I feel like I let my team down and let the city of Philadelphia down, as well. That’s a moment I feel like I need to come through.”

He was hardly alone. These Phillies who’d bombed the Diamondbacks in a 10-0 Game Two blowout scored a grand total of four runs in three of their NLCS losses and went 1-for-7 with men in scoring position in Game Seven alone.

“I would say frustrated is the correct word,” said Castellanos, maybe slightly less for himself than for his team. “Just because the potential of this team is so much greater than going home before the World Series. Last year, when we lost Game Six, there was a lot of, ‘All right, we got here. Now we can build off that.’ Knowing how we feel about this team and coming up short from the year previous, it’s a disgusting feeling, honestly.”

When pinch hitter Jake Cave flied out to right against Sewald to end Game Seven, the Phillies may have been more voluminous in their self-criticisms than the Diamondbacks were celebrating their first pennant since 2001. And the clubhouse celebration has been described politely as mayhem, from drenching general manager Mike Hazen to first baseman Christian Walker passing out the cigars.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

It doesn’t mean you have to stay silent in the end. It also doesn’t mean the Snakes will count themselves out no matter how monstrous the Rangers might look. Maybe they figure that, if they could finally dismantle the big bad Phillie phloggers there’s no reason to fear the Texas wrecking crew. Yet.

“We were coming here to play our best baseball,” Lovullo said postgame about his and his team’s pre-game thinking, “and that’s been the messaging, and it’s been very consistent throughout the course of the year. Today is going to be our finest hour, and I just wanted to make sure that they knew that’s how I felt.”

“The Brewers were supposed to beat us,” Thompson said. “The Dodgers were supposed to beat us. The Phillies were supposed to beat us. They’re gonna say that the Rangers are supposed to beat us, too. We’ll see how it goes.” He could afford to be sanguine, since the Rays released him earlier this season but the Diamondbacks took a flyer and he rewarded them by becoming one of their key bullpen bulls.

And Lovullo could afford to be just a little self-congratulatory. Knowing that famed sports talking head Chris (Mad Dog) Russo swore to retire from radio if the Diamondbacks got to the World Series, Lovullo couldn’t resist. “I would love to see him quit if we won today,” the manager said before Game Seven began. “There’s nothing better than a wise guy New Yorker saying something and then having to chomp on those words.”

Except maybe a manager who shepherds the guys the world doubted to baseball’s biggest dance. Or, a team that finally doesn’t let the insane asylum known as a Citizen’s Bank Park crowd intimidate them out. Just don’t ask the Snakes to explain how they pulled it off. “I don’t even know if there is an explanation,” Carroll said. “It’s just magic.”

But you might ask Harper. “Watching them prior to this series, I don’t think anything scared that team,” he said graciously. “I don’t think they had any doubts in their minds of coming back here and playing in Philadelphia. I don’t think that team is scared of any situation or any spot.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

If that’s what got the Diamondbacks to the forthcoming World Series, don’t knock it. Baseball has enough too-serious-for-their-own-good teams as it is. Just try to picture most of this postseason’s vanquished (the Phillies aren’t exactly a gang of mopes, after all) approaching things that Diamondbacks way. Not to mention a lot of the teams who couldn’t make the postseason in the first place.

They’d sooner toast each other with castor oil martinis than be caught thinking, Don’t worry. Be happy. And where are those guys now?

NLCS Game Two: Was it loud enough?

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Merrill Kelly

Arizona pitcher Merrill Kelly leaving NLCS Game Two in the sixth inning and hearing it from the Citizens Bank Park crowd whose sound he underestimated. He ended up bearing the least of the Phillies’ destruction on the night.

Maybe nobody gave Diamondbacks pitcher Merrill Kelly the memo. Maybe he missed the sign completely. Wherever Kelly happened to be, if and when he was warned not to poke the Philadelphia bear and his native habitat, he learned the hard way Tuesday night and the Diamondbacks whole were dragged into class.

Maybe the Braves sent him a message he never saw. You remember the Braves. The guys trolling Bryce Harper after their second division series game, when Harper got doubled up on a very close play following an impossible center field catch to end the game. They learned the hard way, too. They’re also on early winter vacation.

Before this National League Championship Series even began, Kelly was asked whether the heavy metal-loud Citizens Bank Park crowd might have a hand in the field proceedings. He practically shrugged it off, though in absolute fairness he wasn’t exactly trying to be mean or nasty.

“I haven’t obviously heard this place on the field, but I would be very surprised if it trumped that Venezuela game down in Miami [in the World Baseball Classic],” said Kelly, a righthander whose countenance bears a resemblance to comedian Chris Elliott and who’s considered a mild-mannered young man otherwise. “When Trea [Turner] hit that grand slam, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced—at least baseball-wise, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an atmosphere like that so I hope that this isn’t louder than that.”

That grand slam jolted Team USA into the semifinal round. By the same Trea Turner who’d start Kelly’s Tuesday night with a jolt, hitting a one-out, one-strike pitch into the left center field seats in the bottom of the first. 

Kelly may not have been trying to be snarky, but The Bank let him have it early and often, first when he was introduced pre-game time and then when he took the mound for the bottom of the Game Two first. Loud, clear, and unmistakeable.

The only things Kelly faced louder and more clear than that were Turner’s score-starting blast, the one-ball, two-out laser Kyle Schwarber sent off Kelly’s best pitch, a changeup, into the right field seats in the third, and the 2-1 skyrocket Schwarber sent into the right center field seats leading off the bottom of the sixth.

“He’s really effective because he has a plus-plus changeup,” Schwarber said postgame. “He threw it 2-0 and kinda gave me the window. That’s what it looks like coming out of there. I think that was the first strike [on a] changeup I saw. [The home run pitch] was a little bit more down and away. But, I mean, it came out of the same height. So those are things that you look for.”

“They’re good big-league hitters,” Kelly said of the Phlogging Phillies postgame. “That’s what good big-league hitters do. They don’t miss mistakes.” Neither did The Bank’s crowd, serenading him with “Mer-rill! Mer-rill” chants at any available opportunity. But Kelly actually pitched decently despite the bombs. He only surrendered three hits, but walking three didn’t help despite his six strikeouts.

He’d also prove to have been handled mercifully compared to what the Phillies did to the Diamondbacks bullpen in a 10-0 Game Two blowout.

Once they pushed Kelly out of the game, with two out in the sixth and Turner aboard with a walk, they slapped reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply with a base hit (Bryson Stott), a two-run double (J.T. Realmuto), and another RBI double (Brandon Marsh). Just like that, the Phillies had a four-run sixth with six on the board and counting.

Then, Mantiply walked the Schwarbinator to open the Philadelphia seventh. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo reached for Ryne Nelson. One out later, Harper singled Schwarber to third, Alec Bohm doubled them home with a drive that hit the track, Stott hit a floater that hit the infield grass between Nelson plus Diamondbacks third baseman Evan Longoria and catcher Gabriel Moreno, Realmuto singled Bohm home and Stott to third, and Nick Castellanos sent Stott home with a sacrifice fly.

This time they didn’t need Harper to provide the major dramatics. He’d done enough of that in Game One, hitting a first-inning, first-pitch-to-him, first-NLCS-swing, first-time-ever-on-his-own-birthday nuke one out after Schwarber hit his own first-pitch bomb. That game turned into a 5-3 Phillies win. On Tuesday night, they turned the Diamondbacks into rattlesnake stew.

They made life just as simple for Game Two starter Aaron Nola as for Game One starter Zack Wheeler. Wheeler gave the Phillies six innings of two-run, three-hit, eight-strikeout ball; Nola gave them six innings of three-hit, seven-strikeout, shutout ball. It was as if the Philadelphia Orchestra offered successive evenings of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major—featuring Isaac Stern one night and Itzhak Perlman the next.

“It’s a little more hostile and a little more engaging,” said Turner of the Bank crowd after the Phillies banked Game One. “I think [Kelly] can maybe tell you after tonight what it’s like, but I wouldn’t put anything past our fans. Our fans have been unbelievable. They’ve been great. I don’t know what decibels mean, but I guess we did something cool for AC/DC concert level decibels the other night . . . I would just wait and see and we’ll see what he says after [Game Two]”

“They’re up all game on their feet from pitch number one till the end,” said Nola postgame. “I feel like you don’t really see that too much around the league. That just shows you how passionate and into the game they are. They know what’s going on, and that helps us a lot.”

That was not necessarily what Lovullo wanted to hear before or after the Game Two massacre ended. “Everybody’s talking about coming into this environment,” he said, audibly frustrated, “and I don’t care.”

We’ve got to play better baseball. Start with the manager, and then trickle all the way down through the entire team. We’ve got to play Diamondback baseball . . . Diamondback baseball is grinding out at bats . . . driving up pitch counts, catching pop ups . . . win[ning] a baseball game by just being a really smart, stubborn baseball team in all areas.

That assumes the Phillies will just roll over and let them play it. The wild-card Diamondbacks who steamrolled two division winners in the earlier rounds to get here in the first place looked like anything except an unlikely juggernaut after getting manhandled in Philadelphia. They shouldn’t take the Phillies for granted once the set moves to Chase Field, either.

The Phillies might have been a one-game-over-.500 road team on the regular season, but they beat the Diamondbacks in Chase Field three out of four—a couple of weeks after the Snakes beat them two out of three in The Bank. Until this NLCS it was a little over three months since the two teams tangled. It certainly didn’t phaze the Phillies.

“I still think we’re real confident,” said Kelly. “I think there was a lot to be said about us after the All-Star break about how bad of a slump that we went into. I’ve seen in this clubhouse, I’ve seen from these guys that we haven’t gotten rattled all year. And I don’t want us to hang our heads and pout about it this time.”

But let’s say the Diamondbacks iron up and find ways to neutralise the Phillies’ offensive bludgeons and pitching scythes which, admittedly, might require a kidnapping or three. Let’s say they win all three games at Chase. They might become the only team to be at a disadvantage with a 3-2 series lead.

Because guess where the set would return then. And, unless my prowling has missed something this morning, Kelly didn’t have one word to say about that crowd after Game Two came to its merciful end. It must have been more than loud enough for him.