‘Gut-wrenching’: Pulling Snell backfires
Kevin Cash’s final big decision of the year effectively ended his team’s season, and it was no different from one thousands of managers have made for more than a century: Send my starting pitcher to the showers, or stick with him?
Yet the drama that unfolded Tuesday night in Game 6 of the World Series, when Cash did not so much as entertain a conversation with Blake Snell before lifting him from what Snell called the best start of his life goes to a fundamental question plaguing baseball far beyond the Rays blowing a chance to force a Game 7 against the Dodgers: Whose game is it, anyway? Does it belong to the front office, which assembled this low-budget and fascinating mélange of players on a shoestring budget, allowing the Rays to overcome their low revenue?
Does it belong to the manager, tasked with pushing thousands of buttons over the course of the season while increasingly asked to act on the whims of the executives in the corner offices?
Or does it belong to the players in the arena, with their limited windows to achieve and their boundless self-belief that enables them to compete at such a high level?
When Cash took the ball from Snell after the lefty struck out 10, allowed just two singles and dominated the Dodgers, it did far more than instigate a chain of events that turned a one-run Rays lead into a season-ending 3-1 loss.
No, it showed that the disconnect from field to front office – even in an organization as respected, successful and copacetic as the Rays – can still exist.
“It was Blake’s game,” center fielder Kevin Kiermaier said of the 2018 American League Cy Young Award winner. “He was dominating. I don’t really care what the numbers say. That was the best I’ve ever seen him throw the ball.”
Well, it was Snell’s game until it wasn’t, until Cash emerged from the dugout and, fearful of his ace facing the great Mookie Betts a third time in the game, grabbed the ball and slapped him on the back and decided the last 11 outs would come from the bullpen.
Snell, the Rays’ best starting pitcher in these playoffs, was, by the sixth inning, the last person the Dodgers wanted to see. Only Sandy Koufax had struck out 10 batters in a World Series game’s first four innings, as Snell had. Only Snell, out of the 17 playoff games the Dodgers played this autumn, had hung five consecutive zeroes against them out of the gate.
And only Snell, despite the Rays’ vaunted “Stable” of 100-mph relievers, possesses a four-pitch mix that shut down the Dodgers in a manner Charlie Morton and Tyler Glasnow and every last Nick, Pete and Diego in the bullpen could not.
So when Cash came to the mound, one out in the sixth, the Rays clinging to a 1-0 lead, Snell having given up just his second hit, a single to catcher Austin Barnes, a sentiment washed over both casual fans and avid observers of the Rays’ decision sciences and even the Dodgers themselves, who could not believe their good fortune.
No way they yank him, right? Believe it.
Yet in this modern era, where games are simulated and doped out ahead of time by front office foot soldiers and scenarios explored with the manager in exhaustive pregame meetings, there is, ever-lurking, the specter of outsmarting yourself.
After winning 66% of their regular season games, and vanquishing a trio of playoff opponents, and pushing a deep and punishing Dodgers team to Game 6 of the World Series, the Rays finally got too smart for their own good.
While Cash clung to the notion he did not want Betts to see Snell a third time, other numbers suggested it was worth a shot. Betts put together an MVP-caliber season for the Dodgers with the oddest of splits – he batted .200 with zero home runs against left-handed pitchers. He’d struck out twice against Snell earlier.
But guts have given way to gospel, performance and perception be damned.
The four-letter word Snell uttered at the sight of his manager coming to get him was likely echoed from Sarasota to St. Pete and back.
What transpired next? That’s almost secondary.
Snell took great pains to call Cash “a helluva manager,” but the sting was palpable. Snell went to school on his Game 2 start with the Dodgers, concocted a plan and was executing it ruthlessly.
“The way I scouted them, the way I scouted myself, I knew what they were looking for, I knew how they were going to adjust that game plan,” Snell said. “And I wanted to keep going. I wanted to go the whole game – that’s all I wanted to do, was empty the tank.
“The outcome sucks,” Snell said before heading into the offseason, “because we ended up losing.”