Managers search for hurlers who will lose games
HAVE you watched “Squid Game”? It’s about 456 misanthropes gathered to destroy one another by destroying themselves. It’s ghoulish, violent, bloody but strangely compelling as a morality tale.
If it didn’t have subtitles — it’s a South Korean series — I’d swear it’s based on MLB’s current crew of numbers-mesmerized, zombie managers.
While the news here has been about retaining spreadsheet-stricken, bullpen roulette-addicted and presumed puppet Aaron Boone after the
Yankees’ postseason oneand-done, it’s hard to miss that Boone has hardly been alone this October, same as last October, the one before that, and for the last, oh, 10 years.
The Rays’ Kevin Cash — yet again — the Red Sox’s Alex Cora, the Braves’ Brian Snitker and Dodgers’ Dave Roberts have all battled to find just the right reliever to lose the game the previous pitcher was winning.
The Braves-Dodgers NLCS has been flabbergasting, like watching managers fight over a hammer with which to knock themselves out. The latest saga in a sustaining epidemic of selfdestructive lunacy.
In Game 3, Snitker pulled reliever Tyler Matzek for no apparent good reason. The Braves were winning, 5-2, and Matzek had pitched the seventh, allowing no hits and striking out two. Leave it alone. You can’t improve on perfect, right?
But the analytics gremlin jumped into Snitker’s head. He yanked Matzek for Luke Jackson . In one-third of an inning Jackson allowed four earned runs, turning the Braves into 6-5 losers.
The 8¹/2-inning game included 14 pitchers and ran 4:15 — enough senselessness to have once caused a national calamity. But the sense-defying abnormal has become the normal. And they’d all do it again ... and again ... and again. ➤ Fox is now starting to copy the worst elements of ESPN, especially its rotten grasp of easily verified history.
During the ALCS we were shown a graphic claiming that Cora has “Five straight postseason series wins, tied [with
Casey Stengel] for most to start managerial career.”
Did it matter that the only postseason series Stengel could win was the World Series? Nah.
Nor did it matter that the graphic, having passed through several hands en route to appearing on national TV, was misleading by significant omission. Stengel managed nine years in the NL before he was hired by the Yankees, his NL teams never finishing better than fifth. And Cora’s “streak” doesn’t include a missed postseason in 2019.