Kurtenbach: Fiers was deserving, but Manaea is right call.
OAKLAND >> The A’s won 97 games in the regular season, an incredible number when you consider that the team had the fifth-smallest payroll in baseball this year.
And for that tremendous accomplishment after 162 contests, their reward is one more — a winner-take-all showdown against the team with the lowest payroll in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays, winners of 96 regular-season games.
It’s a battle of baseball’s best bootstrappers — a faceoff of the nerd vanguard.
And it’s going to be loud. Ten thousand fans at the Oakland Coliseum are louder than 40,000 in so many other ballparks across Major League Baseball, so you have to wonder what a full house will sound like today. I bet you’ll be able to hear the cheers across the Bay.
But before the cacophony is too much to handle, here are three thoughts I have on the game:
1. IT HAD TO BE SEAN MANAEA >> I can understand if there is skepticism about the A’s starting a guy who has five starts and 29 2/3 innings to his name this year in the most important game of the season.
But the simple truth is that the A’s had to start Sean Manaea tonight. Maybe the sample size is small. Maybe the moment will prove overwhelming. But Manaea has been the A’s best pitcher since he returned to their rotation — posting an outstanding 1.21 ERA and an even better 0.77 WHIP.
He’s pitching as well as he ever has at the major league level, and he’s gone on some outstanding runs before. The A’s couldn’t leave that form on the bench in a one-game playoff.
That said, it helped that Manaea is a lefty.
The Rays are a super-platoon team, effectively carrying two different nine-man lineups — one for lefty starters, one for righty starters. And while the differences in the lineups are not drastic — by design, of course — Tampa Bay is a worse team against lefties this year, posting an OPS that’s 12 points lower than what it does against righties.
Is that a lot? No. But it’s an advantage, and the A’s would have been foolish to not take any advantage they could get in a winner-takes-all circumstance.
Starting a lefty also limits the effectiveness of the Rays’ best hitter — Austin Meadows. The 24-year-old lefty has respectable splits against lefty pitchers, posting a .837 OPS this year, but he’d much rather face a righty. I expect Meadows to be in the lineup, but he won’t be as much of a threat.
Starting a lefty will likely keep Ji-Man Choi, Brandon Lowe, and maybe even Joey Wendle on the bench to start the game, too. Again, they’re small advantages, but the A’s were smart to take them. 2. TWO DIFFERENT BALLPARKS >> Everyone in the Bay Area knows that the Coliseum is one of the toughest parks to hit the ball out of at night. The air gets thick. Those high green fences seem even taller. It doesn’t matter how juiced the ball might be — a night game at the Coliseum is heaven for flyball pitchers.
But tonight’s game won’t start at night — it’ll start just after 5 p.m. Blame Manhattan.
And the Coliseum during the afternoon might as well be an entirely different ballpark.
It might not be a jokeworthy bandbox like Yankee Stadium or be sterile like the domed and empty Tropicana Field, but hitters know they don’t need to bust a seam to hit one out when the sun is still overhead in the East Bay.
That’s another reason why it was smart for the A’s to start Manaea. Mike Fiers was certainly deserving of the ball — he’s pitched well as of late and he’s been the team’s workhorse all season — but he’s a fly ball pitcher who actually needs fly balls to get outs. The A’s are the best fielding team in baseball, but while the sun is shining, it’s best to not rely on them too much. Manaea has a similar fly ball-to-ground ball split to Fiers, he can strike dudes out — he posted nearly a 25% of Fiers’ total strikeouts in only 15% of the innings.
But the early start also places an onus on the top of the A’s order to start strong. Oakland has heavily relied on the home run to score all year — they were fifth in baseball with 257 round-trippers and led the league in average launch angle, and the lineup is top-heavy.
If Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, and Marcus Semien are to strike against the Rays, it’s best if they do it early.
3. THE RAYS ARE BUILT FOR THE PLAYOFFS ... BUT IS THIS REALLY THE PLAYOFFS? >> Early-game conditions won’t prove all that favorable to the A’s, though, because Rays ace Charlie Morton will start today’s game. The 35-yearold former Astro might be tailor-made to shut down the A’s — Morton threw 13 1/3 innings against the A’s this year, allowing one run, striking out 13, and allowing a .133 batting average.
He’s also coming into the game hot — over his past five starts, racking up 39 strikeouts in 29 2/3 innings, allowing a paltry .311 slugging percentage, and going 5-0 in the process.
Morton throws four pitches — a mid-90s fastball, a slider that cuts more than it sweeps, a rarely-used changeup, and arguably the best curveball in baseball.
With the Rays, the righty took the Astros model — throw your best pitch a ton — and take it to another level. He’ll throw his curveball more than a third of the time, and it’s particularly deadly to left-handed hitters.
The A’s saw the secondmost curveballs in baseball this year, per FanGraphs. The problem is that they were a belowaverage team against the pitch.
Behind Morton, the Rays have an exotic and nasty group of relievers. It might be the best bullpen in baseball, and it will be augmented by Tyler Glasnow, the lanky flamethrower who has found another gear for his triple-digit seeking fastball since returning from injury at the beginning of September.
The Rays have an arm for every occasion in their bullpen. If Morton struggles, Tampa Bay will not hesitate to pull him for any one of a dozen capable relievers.
If the playoffs are all about starting pitching and relievers, then the A’s are in trouble — they can’t come close to matching that kind of depth and effectiveness from Tampa Bay.
In a one-game playoff, they might be able to get by, though.
But Manaea will have to go deep, and it seems necessary that top prospects Jesus Luzardo or A.J. Puk — or both — will have to follow him. Closer Liam Hendricks, who has been a godsend for the A’s bullpen this season, might be called upon for two innings as well.
The Rays might have the better pitching — presumably, at least — but the A’s have a better lineup and way better defense.
So the formula for the A’s is simple but difficult to pull off: sit on Morton’s fastball, force him to throw the curveball for a strike, and try to pick up a few early runs — then hope Manaea can get through the Rays order three times with some help from the defense and then hand the game off to the young flamethrowers and the Australian closer who has locked down so many games this year.
Do that, and the reward will be a plane ride to Houston and a few more nerve-rattling playoff games.