I want to assure you right away that what follows isn’t sour grapes. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Even if I did, I’d complain on my own time, and not on the job in front of everyone (probably). What follows is about a call, and a controversial one at that, early in Monday’s Game. But I’m not here to talk about  various implications. I’m here to talk about the call’s significance, relative to others, and about the process that contributed to the call. It was, in the end, a call most extraordinary that went Boston’s way.

The Red Sox went ahead 1-0 in the first, as you recall. The score remained the same into the bottom of the third, when David Freese led off with a single. Pete Kozma bunted Freese to second, and Adam Wainwright advanced Freese to nowhere with a strikeout. Matt Carpenter came up with two down, and he worked the count full. In that full count, Jon Lester threw a cutter inside. Carpenter started to first, assuming he’d drawn a two-out walk. Bill Miller, however, called him out, and Carpenter expressed his disagreement. That went about as well as most fairly cordial expressions of disagreement on a baseball field. That is, nothing changed, and the game moved on to the top of the fourth, with Carpenter having struck out looking.

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What happened in the sixth inning Monday night probably mattered. It probably mattered in ways we can’t conceive of, in ways we’d never be able to figure out. Everything, every last thing in a baseball game, is connected, and if you remove one screw, the whole bridge might collapse. No, that doesn’t work. The whole bridge might rearrange itself? No, that doesn’t work, either. Change one thing and you change more and bigger things. There we go. The sixth inning of Game 5 was probably critical somehow.

But people sure aren’t thinking about it today. The sixth inning featured the minimum number of batters, the minimum number of baserunners, and the minimum number of runs. After Adam Wainwright worked a 1-2-3 inning, Jon Lester did the same, and then the seventh inning happened, in which the Red Sox stormed out in front. The sixth didn’t feature any pivotal events, as we understand them. But it did feature maybe the most interesting at-bat of the game. In the top of the sixth, Wainwright threw six pitches to David Ortiz.

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Without doubt, the worst question asked of Mike Matheny in his postgame press conference Monday night was whether or not he thought David Ortiz deserved the World Series MVP award. That question, presumably, came from a trained and experienced professional journalist, and Matheny responded about exactly as you’d think he would. If it used to be true that there are no stupid questions, then I think we can agree it’s true no longer. Humanity has broken new ground. But with all that said, you figure Ortiz does have the inside track at this point. In this paragraph we’re going to pretend to care about the World Series MVP award. Ortiz presently doesn’t have much in the way of competition, but perhaps some consideration could be given to Koji Uehara, and of course plenty of consideration would deserve to go to Jon Lester. For it’s Lester who has now bested Adam Wainwright twice, including once Monday in St. Louis.

In retrospect, Lester didn’t need to be as good in Game 1 as he was. He did need to be as good as he was in Game 5, and thankfully because he was so good, we don’t need to sit here talking about whether he should’ve batted in the top of the seventh. (No.) We can just focus on Lester’s performance on the mound, and he finished with a run and seven strikeouts over nearly eight innings. Ask the Cardinals and they’ll tell you Lester on Monday was the same as he was before. A few have gone on record saying as much, and twice now the Cardinals haven’t had an answer. But I think it should be pointed out things weren’t completely alike. There were plenty of similarities between Game 1 Lester and Game 5 Lester — Lester himself was genetically identical — but Game 5 Lester featured a couple twists.

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One of the points we’ve been hammering home really all postseason long is that starting pitchers tend to perform worse and worse as a game goes on. It’s far from a dramatic effect — a pitcher the third time around shouldn’t be expected to get completely and utterly bombed — but an effect is there, as pitchers make subsequent trips through the order. Starters become less effective, and so it becomes more and more important to put your trust in a fresh bullpen. It stands to reason part of the effect is pitchers getting a little fatigued. It stands to reason another part of the effect is hitters getting multiple looks at a guy. Hitters communicating with one another about what they’ve seen from a guy. The second and third time, the average hitter might be more prepared to punish the guy on the mound.

Let’s assume that it’s true that there’s a benefit to having already seen a guy once in a game. Maybe it’s not, but that would be quite the discovery. It doesn’t take much of a leap, then, to suggest there might be a benefit to having already seen a guy start in a series. Face a pitcher in one plate appearance, and you might be more prepared in the second plate appearance. Face a pitcher in three plate appearances, and you might be more prepared in the fourth through sixth plate appearances. It sounds sensible, meaning this works as a starting point. It doesn’t yet work as a conclusion.

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We begin with some acknowledgements. First, a baseball game is never entirely won or lost based on a single event, a single match-up. Certain events can be of massive importance, but they’re massive because of the context, and the context is established by other events, that would’ve led to different outcomes given different outcomes. So many different things contribute to a game result. An impossible, uncountable number of things, some of them things you’d never consider. Perhaps you’ve recognized that baseball is complicated. This isn’t checkers. Checkers is also complicated.

Second, managerial decisions tend to have their significance exaggerated. As MGL is fond of reminding us, most managerial decisions lead to very minor swings in win expectancy, which of course is the only thing that matters. Certain decisions are worse than others, and some can be relatively major in a good way or a bad way, but at the end of the day it’s still up to the players on the field, and pitchers are always going to have the advantage over hitters, save for the most extreme of circumstances. When managers get ripped to shreds, there tends to be a lot of results-based analysis, and that’s by and large worthless.

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I’d like to share something with you from last Saturday’s ALCS Game 6. We all know now how that game turned out, but in the top of the sixth the eventual result was still a mystery, and the Red Sox were clinging to a tenuous lead. Given that the score was so close, every pitch was important, and when Clay Buchholz got to two strikes against Miguel Cabrera, a fan in the stands tried to get everybody amped. What he wanted was a standing ovation. What he wanted was mounting two-strike applause. Sometimes it works. You know it when you hear it, and it’s a sure sign of a stadium that’s engaged and invested.

Instead of everyone else standing up, within seconds the highlighted fan sat himself down. The crowd couldn’t sustain proper electricity given the game’s deliberate tempo. After the fan, the camera cut next to Buchholz:

Buchholz took his sweet time. Sure, absolutely, you don’t want to make a mistake there to Cabrera, but you’d think it would be possible to realize how not to make a mistake in a shorter period of time. The crowd had a little life, but there wasn’t a lot of noise when Buchholz delivered his next pitch. Cabrera hit it for a single, knocking Buchholz out of the game. Shortly thereafter, the Tigers took the lead in what could’ve and should’ve been a more pivotal frame. Is there a connection between the lack of noise for Buchholz and the Cabrera at-bat result? Would Cabrera have done something else had the crowd been more lively, had Buchholz worked faster? Probably not, no, but by introducing the questions I can lend a little artificial significance to the rest of this article. We’re talking about pace!

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Here’s something you might not have known about the Red Sox: they’re good, especially at the hitting part. Over the course of the regular season, they scored 853 runs in 1439 innings, or about 0.6 runs per. Pitchers facing the Red Sox posted a 5.02 ERA, nearly half a run higher than the next-highest mark. As the Red Sox demonstrated in Game 1, they’re capable of scoring runs in a hurry, which, incidentally, is the only thing they do in a hurry, and this is one of the reasons why the Sox are probably the best team in baseball. That statement should hold true no matter how this series ends up.

Much of the talk after Game 2 is focusing on the top of the seventh, when the Cardinals rallied and took advantage of some defensive lapses to establish a two-run lead. In that frame the Cardinals went ahead 4-2; by that score, the Cardinals were triumphant. But a two-run lead against the Red Sox in Fenway is precarious, no matter how it’s achieved. Better to be ahead than behind, of course, but the Cardinals couldn’t have considered their position safe. They still needed to keep the Red Sox off the board, and that’s where Carlos Martinez and Trevor Rosenthal came in handy.

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The most amazing thing that happened in the first game of the World Series happened when the game was already well in hand for the Red Sox. The first inning was nearly turned upside-down by an embarrassing initial call, and Pete Kozma performed worse in the field than at the plate, and Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina allowed the easiest of pops to drop between them. It was, without question, a weird game, and the Cardinals never got themselves righted, but if you’re in search of the amazing, you look to the bottom of the seventh. When David Ortiz came to the plate, Boston’s chances of winning were just under 99%. When David Ortiz took his curtain call, Boston’s chances of winning were just under 100%. What Ortiz did hardly mattered, in the grand scheme of things, or even in the lesser scheme of things. A not-close game became a less-close game. But what Ortiz did hadn’t been done.

I was looking forward to watching Kevin Siegrist face David Ortiz, as much as you can look forward to any individual matchup late in a five-run game. Ortiz, obviously, has his own presence, which goes beyond the statistics, but Siegrist has been good and lately he’s been throwing harder. In September and October he’s been pushing his fastball to 98 and 99, and between him and Ortiz, I was interested to see who would have the advantage. It could at least mean something for the rest of the series. The at-bat was over in one pitch. Siegrist did throw his fastball.

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