Game 6 debacle difficult to shake
There’s a romance to the game of baseball, or at least there was, until the analytics people put a stranglehold on it.
They’ll never quite have the full grip, for it’s a game that cannot be destroyed. Even as bookish types emerge from the world of economics and datadriven management to control how the games are played, we just finished watching a postseason filled with dazzling athleticism and excruciating drama. Through it all, it felt like baseball of the highest order.
Right up until the final game, that is.
If you were confused about the influence of analytics in baseball, Game 6 of the World Series brought it home like a hurricane. For the Tampa Bay Rays, just two wins away from a championship, this was not a game played in real time. It was played hours, days, even months before. Nothing they actually witnessed — right there on the field, at pointblank range — could alter their prearranged plan.
There will always be people who defend manager Kevin Cash’s decision to change pitchers in the sixth inning, and you recognize them immediately, for they know nothing about the soul of sports, the revelations of intense competition, the thrill of reacting to the unexpected on pure instinct. But let’s be clear, as we let KNBR baseball maven
Marty Lurie explain what he thought about Cash removing starting pitcher Blake Snell with an absolute masterpiece in progress.
“Worst World Series move by a manager in history,” tweeted Lurie, who has made a detailed study of each one. “Not even close or debatable. That’s baseball today.”
In case you missed it — perhaps a good thing, as it spared you from becoming ill — Snell was pitching the game of his life. The Dodgers had spent the entire postseason making a shambles of every pitching staff they encountered, relentlessly crushing the ball to all fields and getting home runs from nine players in the World Series alone. All of a sudden, against Snell’s nasty lefthanded stuff, they went silent. Like, pindrop quiet.
Snell’s outing was essentially a swingandmiss portrait of dominance: nine strikeouts through 51⁄ innings, and as
3 Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said afterward, “We just weren’t seeing him.”
Normally, when you get upset about a pitcher being removed too early, you can admit to some hardhit balls, a costly walk or two, some sign of an impending shift. The Rays, like far too many teams in the game, are flatout terrified of a pitcher having to face the heart of a batting order a third time. Snell, in fact, hadn’t been allowed to pitch past the sixth inning over the course of his past 31starts. It was a plan that worked as Tampa Bay buried the opulent Yankees by seven games in the American League East and stormed into the playoffs.
Big problem, though: This wasn’t a midseason outing against Kansas City. These were the Dodgers, one of the finest teams assembled in recent years, and it was survival time in the World Series. The top three hitters in the L. A. lineup — Mookie Betts, Corey Seager and Justin Turner — had gone a collective 0for6 against Snell with six strikeouts. Who in their right mind expected them to start crushing line drives off Snell the third time around? At least give the man a chance to show some vulnerability.
What happened upon Snell’s removal, after a harmlesslooking single to center by Austin Barnes, was the sweetest brand of justice. Cash brought in a reliever, Nick Anderson, who struck scouts as a clearly fatigued pitcher after giving up at least one run in his past six outings. Eight pitches later, Snell’s 10 gem had become a 21 deficit that proved impossible to overcome.
At his home in Reno, Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow had been watching the postseason with fervent hopes the Dodgers would go down. That’s how it works in the land of orange and black. On a postgame show years ago, after a convincing L. A. victory at Pac Bell Park, Krukow was asked to pick his player of the game — and he chose someone who hadn’t even played. Anything but give the Dodgers credit.
When Cash made that move to the bullpen Tuesday night, “I was appalled,” Krukow said in a phone interview. “I got up from my seat, walked outside, took about 10 hits of fresh air, came back inside and told ( wife) Jennifer, f— this. I’m rooting for the National League now.”
As Krukow has emphasized for years, “What happened before, whether it’s a week ago or last year or whatever, has nothing to do with the game at hand. That whole sixinning plan had zero to do with Game 6. This was an offense that had not been shut down all year, and they were ( getting dominated). When they took that guy out — it was so inflammatory to what this game is about.
“When Madison Bumgarner had that great relief outing in Game 7 ( five innings of shutout relief to close out the Giants’ 2014 World Series win), they kept coming up to him in the dugout, like, ‘ Are you all right?
You OK?’ Finally he got tired of it. He basically said, ‘ You want to win this game, doncha?’
“Well, Tuesday night was Blake Snell’s chance to tell his manager that. But Kevin Cash had made up his mind before he went out there. He went with the spreadsheet ahead of what was happening on the field. In doing so, he singlehandedly took the momentum from his dugout and put it on the other side of the field. There’s something completely wrong about turning your back on the obvious, and common sense gets shoved into the bat rack somewhere. It’s complete insanity.”
Fans can take heart in the likelihood that Game 6 is not the future, not on a widespread basis.
“Analytics aren’t going away, and it’s still an incredibly wonderful game,” Krukow said. “But we just watched a team completely sold out to the devil. Look, we’ve seen how analyticsheavy teams should be managed. We’ve watched Dave Roberts ( Dodgers) and Gabe Kapler ( Giants) manage from the gut, adjusting to what’s in front of them. I think most teams realize that, and they’ll continue to feel that way, especially after Tuesday night. I think this will serve us well in the preservation of guys having a career night.”