Andrew McCutchen’s Reminder That Baseball Is Cruel

Every baseball player has bad days — it’s an inevitability in a sport so deeply tied to failure. For the most part, these failures are quickly dismissed and/or forgotten. A rough seven-run outing for a pitcher is a day when he just didn’t have “it” or batted balls had eyes. An 0-for-4 game at the plate is barely a hiccup in the span of a 162-game season. But, on occasion, there are days so bad that they elicit sympathy from even the most hardened baseball fans. You know the ones I’m talking about, the games that make you cringe when you check a box score. The games like the one Andrew McCutchen had on Sunday.

It wasn’t all McCutchen’s fault. Eighteen-inning games are freaks of nature which result from a convergence of a great many (un)lucky coincidences. If Mark Melancon had thrown a different pitch to Daniel Murphy in the ninth inning, McCutchen’s day may have ended up much differently. If any hitter for either the Pirates or Nationals had executed just one more quality swing earlier in the game, McCutchen could have been spared. But none of those things happened and, instead, McCutchen stepped to the plate eight times on Sunday and failed to reach base even once.

It’s hardly the first time a player has gone 0-for-8. Since 1913, a hitter has stepped to the plate eight or more times without reaching base or recording a sacrifice 118 times. There’s even some excellent company in this club to which McCutchen now belongs, including seven Hall of Famers and a future Hall of Famer named Jim Thome.

It’s been a tremendously disappointing season for McCutchen. He’s currently in position to set career lows in every significant offensive category: on-base percentage, isolated slugging, strikeout rate, walk rate, wRC+, and so on and so forth. Still, an 0-for-8 day is more of a fluke than an indictment of a player’s abilities at any given time. In fact, a look at McCutchen’s day reveals just how easily it could’ve turned out differently.

First Plate Appearance – 1st inning

The first thing to go against McCutchen was the fact that the opposing starting pitcher was Max Scherzer. There’s only so much a hitter can do when faced with one of the best pitchers in the league, but McCutchen did hang in there admirably in his first plate appearance. He fouled off four pitches while taking the at-bat to the eight pitch – a slider which caused him to do this:

There’s nothing shameful about striking out against Scherzer. What strikes me the most about this at-bat, though, is what happened immediately after the very first pitch – a 95-mph fastball fouled off by McCutchen. Look at this face:

It’s almost as if some part of McCutchen knew what was about to happen that day. There he is staring forlornly at a pitcher who holds his fate in his hands. There is only so much in McCutchen’s control when he steps into the batter’s box and forces both within and beyond his control were about to conspire against him.

Second Plate Appearance – 3rd inning

Another long plate appearance against Max Scherzer… and another strikeout. On the fourth pitch of the at-bat, McCutchen whiffed on what might ultimately be the most attractive pitch he’d see in the game which lasted more than five-and-a-half hours — a 94 mph fastball right over the heart of the plate.

He proceeded to work the count full, but then whiffed on what could have been ball four.

Third Plate Appearance – 6th inning

With Adam Frazier on second and nobody out, McCutchen had a semi-productive failure at the plate. His weak grounder advanced the runner to third base. On the next pitch, that runner would score to give the Pirates the 1-0 lead they would hold until Daniel Murphy’s two-out, game-tying pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the ninth. Of course, the RBI hit which followed was a double off the bat of Starling Marte which would’ve scored Frazier regardless of whether he was on second or third base, but let’s give McCutchen the only tiny semblance of a win he had all day.

Fourth Plate Appearance – 8th inning

With Scherzer out of the game, McCutchen squared off against Blake Treinen only to hit the third pitch to the left side of the infield for a ground out so generic it isn’t even worthy of a GIF.

Fifth Plate Appearance – 10th inning

Down in the count 0-2, McCutchen swung at a fastball up and out of the zone. The result was a foul ball that hung in the air for the eternity it took for Bryce Harper to travel all the way from straight-up right field to make a fine play.

Sixth Plate Appearance – 13th inning

Extra innings mean it’s time for someone to play the hero and, in the midst of his terrible, awful, no-good day, McCutchen nearly did just that. He took a 1-1 fastball from Matt Belisle to the deepest part of center field only for Michael Taylor to calmly convert it into an out.

According to Statcast, that batted ball traveled 385.75 feet with an exit velo of 96.7 mph and a 29.8-degree launch angle. I looked for similar batted balls this season and found 12 with a similar launch angle (29-31 degrees), exit velocity (96-98 mph), and distance (384-388 feet). Of those 12, nine landed safely for extra-base hits (five homers, two triples, and two doubles) and three were caught by the center fielder, including McCutchen’s. He put a quality swing on the ball and hit it in a manner that often results in a knock, but not this time.

Any response, Cutch?

I agree. It isn’t fair.

Seventh Plate Appearance – 16th inning

His next time up, he hit a ball to nearly the same spot in center field except this time he hit it off the end of the bat and it didn’t carry quite as far.

Eighth Plate Appearance – 18th inning

In his final trip to the plate on the day, he came up with a runner on first and nobody out only to ground into a double play, thereby extending his hitless game to a depressing extreme. You don’t need to see the double play, you’ve seen them before. You do need to see his reaction to it:

The very next pitch of the game yielded Starling Marte’s game-winning home run. A struggling former MVP put up about as awful a game as possible, but his team walked away with the win anyway. McCutchen’s day was a complete failure and, yet, in the most basic sense, it wasn’t. He won.

When all was said and done, McCutchen had seen 42 pitches on the day. Forty-two. Just look:

He saw all of those pitches and was unable to find success with a single one of them. It’s a fluke. It’s unfair. It’s baseball. I don’t know if it’s cruel or merciful that the Pirates had an off-day on Monday; either way, it’ll be hard not to root for McCutchen to have a better day at work when he returns to the field tonight.