OVER-ANALYTICS
Series skippers leaned too hard on advanced stats
No one, not even the man himself, has any idea right now who Brian Cashman will hire as the next Yankee manager. All we know is what we hear from people familiar with Cashman’s thinking, that it’ll be someone well versed or adaptable to analytics. More precisely, as one person told me last week, “an A.J. Hinch/ Dave Roberts type.”
After watching this just completed World Series, however, one could not blame Yankee fans if their response to that analogy was a collective “Yikes!”
I understand why, after both led division-winning teams to 100-plus win seasons, Roberts and Hinch went into the World Series acclaimed as the new geniuses in baseball. And maybe they really are and just got afflicted with the same spate of postseason unorthodox madness that got hold of Joe Maddon last October.
If you ask me, Roberts in particular, managed the Dodgers right out of the World Series. He blew Games 2 and 5 for sure and could easily have been the primary culprit in Game 7, for not getting Yu Darvish out of there soon enough, had the Dodger hitters not been so hopelessly inept at hitting with runners in scoring position. In explaining why he yanked his starter Rich Hill after just four innings and 60 pitches in Game 2 … or brought gassed out reliever Brandon Morrow into Game 5 for the third time i n three days … or relieved Clayton Kershaw after a pair of two-out walks in the fifth inning of Game 5 (you’re paying this guy $33 million a year and you’d rather have Kenta Maeda get the final out in the fifth inning of a World Series game?), Roberts essentially offered up the standard analytics “probability factor” reasoning.
Like so many managers in the age of analytics, especially in the postseason, Roberts (except fatally in Game 7) couldn’t wait to get into that bullpen, again, and again, to the point that twice he had to use his closer, Kenley Jansen, who’d had only one six-out save in his entire career, for more than one inning. And can anyone tell me what Jansen was doing pitching in the seventh inning of Game 7? What was Roberts going to do if the Dodgers had somehow tied the game up? Bring in the same flotsam and jetsam, Josh Fields and Brandon McCarthy, as he was left with in his disastrous Game 2?
Hinch likewise showed an itchy bullpen finger, lifting Charlie Morton, leading 1-0 with one out and a runner on second in the seventh inning of Game 4, and Lance McCullers after just 2.1 innings of Game 7. Ordinarily one might find justification for both of those moves except for the fact the Astro bullpen was mostly fried. That’s why I was surprised when, in Game 6, with the Astros down only 2-1, Hinch elected to pinch hit for Justin Verlander after a leadoff walk by Josh Reddick in the seventh.
“Whatever happened to the sacrifice bunt?” I asked myself. But then I remembered: The analytics crowd hate bunts! They’re wasted outs! And doesn’t the data show teams have a better chance of scoring a runner from first with no outs than a runner from second with one out?
Except in this case, with no bullpen behind him, the idea was — or should have been — to keep Verlander in the game for as long as possible. He’s a big boy. It was his last game of the season and presumably he knows how to bunt. Sure enough, the next inning the Dodgers’ Joc Pederson hit a back-breaking homer off Joe Musgrove, as 3-1 suddenly seemed like 10-1
It’s why I wondered when Morton was methodically mowing the Dodgers down from the sixth inning on in Game 7, if Hinch was thinking to himself: “How am I gonna get this guy out of here? He’s getting too many outs!”
In my opinion, Maddon’s 2016 still holds the distinction of the worst managed World Series in history and the Cubs won last year in spite of him. But Roberts, the prototypical “probability factor” analytics manager, made a good run at him this October, while Hinch, managing on instinct, may have saved himself, riding Morton, unwavering as he did, all the way to the finish line in Game 7.
Of course, in the end it was easy for Hinch to resist going to his bullpen. He’d already burned it out.