Cash just another symbol of baseball’s destruction

NEW YORK — Three years ago, I was sitting in the vistors dugout at Tropicana Field along with another veteran baseball scribe, Hal Bodley, of MLB. com and formerly USA Today. We were talking to a prominent baseball person who shall remain nameless here about the state of the game. “You know what’s really sad,” this third person said, nodding at Cash in the opposite dugout.“Wewillneverknowhow good a manager that guy really is.”

In all likelihood, Cash will be a runaway winner of the American League manager of the year award. He guided the Rays (payroll $74.8 million) to an AL EasttitleovertheYankees(payroll $165.7 million). But throughout the course of the season, during theplayoffsandmostespeciallyin Game 6 of the World Series, Cash made nobones about the fact that he manages strictly by the plan set up by the Rays’ analytics department.

Withone out inthe sixth ofthat fateful game, Cash came to get his ace Blake Snell, who was pitching the game of his life. Snell had just given up his second hit of the game, to the Dodgers’ No. 9 hitter, Austin Barnes, and it was evident just how thoroughly the soul of the game has been destroyed.

As Cash explained, he didn’t want Snell facing the Dodger lineup the third time around, the prime tenet of modern analytics for starting pitchers. It didn’t matter if Snell had thrown only 73 pitches to that point, or that the first three batters in the Dodgers lineup, Mookie Betts, Corey Seager and Justin Turner had previously been a combined 0-for-6 with six strikeouts against him. The stats say over the last five years opposing batters’ slash lines jump from .252/.317/.422 the first two times around the order against a starting pitcher to .269/.333/.463 the third time.

Thoseare thehard,cold facts— which have absolutely nothing to dowithhowthestartingpitcheris pitching to that point, how stressful his pitch count, or perhaps most importantly his heart and his makeup.

“I am definitely disappointed and upset,” Snell said after the game. “I just want the ball. I felt good. I did everything I could to prove my case to stay out there. Then for us to lose, it just sucks.”

So the baseball audience was deprived once again from potentially seeing the kind of great postseason pitching performance which has been all but obliterated. Somewhere up in Baseball Heaven, Tom Seaver and Bob Gibson were looking down and throwing up.

It is no coincidence the five highest paid managers in baseball — Terry Francona ($4M), Joe Maddon ($4M), Bob Melvin ($3.25M), Joe Girardi ($3.25M) and Baker ($3M) — are all what youcalltheirownmen,mostlyold school, who are able to manage as much with their gut as by the numbers. Joe Torre was the first old school manager to sound the alarm when Yankee general manager Brian Cashman began intruding on his turf.

“You can’t remove the human element from the game,” he said.

But more and more they have, turning players into numbers. It got far worse for Girardi, Torre’s successor, and in particular his pitching coach Larry Rothschild, as they found themselves regularly second-guessed by the analytics people for their pitching moves.