Make no mistake, they did
Bad choice by Farrell, poor pitch by Kimbrel
TORONTO — Chris Sale couldn’t have pitched any better than he did yesterday.
Well, actually he could have if only John Farrell and Craig Kimbrel had not stood in his way.
First, the skipper’s interference.
On a day when Sale was the best pitcher in two countries and deserved to be on the mound to pitch the ninth inning after eight prior impeccable, efficient and scoreless innings, the Red Sox manager outsmarted himself.
He decided that for the bottom of the ninth, with a newly minted 1-0 lead, it was time to lift Sale and insert Kimbrel.
Two pitches into the ninth, Kimbrel threw a 97-mph fourseam fastball right into the wheelhouse of Kendrys Morales, who jacked the pitch many, many meters over the center field wall and tied the game.
A mistake move followed by a mistake pitch.
By the end, the Red Sox won, 4-1, in 10 innings.
That helped to muffle the impact of the muffed moves, but make no mistake: Sale deserved so, so much better.
“I’m going to want the ball in that situation 10 times out of nine,” said Sale about wanting to go back and pitch the ninth. “It is what it is. Do I want to? Yeah. But at the end of the day, he’s the manager and makes the calls. Check the book. Craig’s been pretty damn good back there. We ended up winning.”
Sale was at 102 pitches when he was lifted. That’s his lowest pitch total in his four Red Sox starts. He averaged close to 13 pitches an inning yesterday. Had he stuck with that efficiency and mowed through the Toronto batting order in the ninth, his pitch count would have stood at 115. Which would be only four more than his previous start. His first start he was at 104, his second at 108. I suspect he could have handled the increase in workload.
Sale still was mixing his pitches with ridiculous command in the late innings. He struck out the side in order in the seventh. He threw two pitches at 95-plus mph to Devon Travis for the first strikeout of the eighth and a 93-plus pitch to Jose Bautista for his 13th strikeout, which ended the eighth.
In the top of the ninth, the Red Sox scored a run on Xander Bogaerts’ RBI single, an at-bat that concluded with a 1 minute, 55 second video review of Bogaerts’ slide into second. The safe call was overturned. In that time, Kimbrel was ramping up his warmups. And in that time, Farrell convinced himself Sale needed to stay on the bench.
This is how Farrell explained his reasoning.
“It was a tough decision, but one where, we take the lead, we’ve got Craig Kimbrel, who’s thrown the baseball extremely well, he’s been dominant in his own right, he’s well rested,” said Farrell. “After kind of a long inning after we get a challenge review, we score that run late in the inning, felt it was time to turn it over to a guy that was fresh and powerful. Unfortunately, the second pitch goes out of the ballpark.” One more time, he explained. “The innings, the up and down, first time he’s at that point — there will be a time where he’s gonna take the mound in the ninth inning like that — if it’s a day where Craig doesn’t have the number of days rest that he had, the effectiveness and the efficiency that he has been, that’s a different situation,” Farrell said.
This begged the follow-up question: What would Farrell have done if Bogaerts had not given the Red Sox the lead and the game was still scoreless?
“We had talked about it and actually had Kimbrel warming up in the event that . . . knowing that they’ve used their closer already, likely that Kimbrel’s in that game as well,” said Farrell.
Farrell’s reasoning and decision would obviously look far less sketchy had Kimbrel lived up to his end of the contract. He had a 25-game streak of converting saves and had two full days of rest.
Protecting one-, two- and three-run leads is his job, and Kimbrel has no decisions to face like Farrell does — other than to execute pitches like he can.
He had one job to do and he failed at it.
“I threw one bad pitch (yesterday) and it’s a tie ballgame — it sucks, but hopefully it doesn’t happen too often,” said Kimbrel.
“I was just trying to go up — it was more middle,” he continued. “He’s a fastball hitter. You can’t always throw breaking balls to him. I still have to attack him with a fastball, which was right in his wheelhouse and you saw where it went.” Yep, we all saw it. The sight was as distressing as it was unnecessary.
That Kimbrel went on to notch a career-high five strikeouts in his two-inning stint and picked up the win bore no resemblance to the muted joy in this victory.
This game should have ended with Sale on the mound. We’ll never know what he would have done in the ninth. We can only hope Farrell learned the hard way Sale deserves that opportunity the next time it arises.