Backseat Managing the Bottom of the 10th Inning in World Series Game 1
What a game. This series has been so hyped that a scoreless tie through four innings felt like a letdown. But then the party got started. In the end, we got everything we wanted: stars, steals, defensive gems and gaffes, and even a walk-off home run to evoke Kirk Gibson. But my beat is writing about managerial decisions, so let’s get a quick 1,100 or so words in on that before it’s time for Game 2. Specifically, I’m interested in the bottom half of the 10th inning in Game 1 of the World Series, and the decisions that led to Freddie Freeman’s colossal walk-off grand slam and lifted the Dodgers to a 6-3 win over the Yankees.
Using Nestor
Hated it. The pitch for why it’s a bad decision is pretty easy, right? Nestor Cortes hadn’t pitched in a month, a trusted lefty reliever was also warm, and the scariest possible guy was due up. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this was the lowest-risk move. There’s not much I can say about the pitch-level data, because he threw only two pitches, but there are myriad reasons to opt for a reliever over a starter in that situation.
A lot of Cortes’s brilliance is in his variety. He throws a ton of different pitches. He has a funky windup – several funky windups, in fact. He changes speeds and locations. That’s how a guy who sits 91-92 mph with his fastball keeps succeeding in the big leagues. But many of those advantages are blunted when you don’t have feel for the game.
Both of the pitches that Cortes threw were fastballs in the strike zone. What did you expect? He hasn’t thrown in a game in a month, and starters have trained their whole lives to start with fastballs. That makes sense because the game starts in a low-leverage state. Cortes came in with the tying run on second base and the winning run on first.
This is a feel decision in the end, and Aaron Boone obviously has a lot more feel for his team than I do. But I can’t shake memories of Michael Wacha coming out of the Cardinals bullpen in Game 5 of the 2014 NLCS — and I’m not the only one who saw shades of that fateful decision in this one. After having missed most of the second half of the season with a stress fracture in his right scapula, Wacha made his first appearance of that postseason with the score tied 3-3 in the bottom of the ninth and his team on the brink of elimination. He looked off, Travis Ishikawa walked it off, and the rest was even year history. I think Cortes is going to be an important contributor for the Yankees this World Series – but I would not have chosen this spot for his return to the mound.
Walking Mookie
I don’t hate it. To set the situation, the Dodgers had runners on second and third with two outs, trailing by one. Mookie Betts was due up, and Freeman was on deck. Boone walked Betts to bring up Freeman, setting history in motion. But should he have walked Betts?
Generally speaking, walking the bases loaded isn’t a great idea. It makes it far too easy to drive in a run with a walk or hit by pitch. Our WPA model thinks that decision cost the Yankees about three percentage points of win probability. That’s a really big swing for a managerial decision; most of the ones I go over here are in the sub-1% range.
That’s the general case. However, in this instance, we have to consider the players involved, and that goes a long way toward making Boone’s decision look better. First, I modeled Betts against Cortes. Betts has fairly close to league-average platoon splits over his career. Cortes is fairly close to average, too. But “league average” is a bad deal for a lefty facing a righty, because righty batters do well against lefty pitchers. Chuck their projections and regressed platoon splits into a model, and I get a projected .395 wOBA, which is pretty close to Betts’s career numbers against lefties.
What does that mean in terms of winning the game? If I throw a completely normal lineup in after Betts, and tell my model the Yankees pitched to him, it spits out a 26.2% chance of the Dodgers winning the game. Our win probability model, which doesn’t have any information about the identity of the batter and pitcher and instead just uses league average, gave the Dodgers a 23.7% chance to win at that juncture. Betts against a lefty: good matchup!
That’s not quite right, because there isn’t an average lineup after Betts, but let’s skip ahead and see how the Freeman/Cortes matchup projected with the bases loaded. Freeman has huge platoon splits across an enormous sample; in his career, he’s been 14.1% better against righties (.397 wOBA) than lefties (.348). Even after regressing his splits a bit back toward the mean, he’s a great hitter against righties and meaningfully worse – though still great – against lefties.
When I plug the Freeman/Cortes confrontation into my model, I get a meaningfully lower projected wOBA – .373 – than the Betts/Cortes clash. Add in the game state, and I had the Dodgers with a 28.8% chance of winning when Freeman stepped to the plate with the bases loaded.
Just one last step to do in our math – we need to go in and change Betts’s odds to account for the fact that Freeman was batting behind him, instead of some chump. That bumps the odds up to 26.7%. As my math consultant Count Von Count would tell you, 28.8 is larger than 26.7. But there’s a confounding variable: Freeman is hurt. He carried a 37 wRC+ across his 33 plate appearances heading into the World Series, and he’d missed four of his team’s 11 playoff games with an ankle injury.
Our projections don’t know anything about Freeman’s health. If he were actually the hitter he’d looked like in the NLDS and NLCS, that would change the matchup completely. Then we’re talking about more like league-average protection for Betts. That would tell you the Dodgers had a 26.7% chance of winning the game when Freeman batted, assuming he was the diminished model of himself.
The decision is too close to call, in other words. Now, with Tim Hill in there, as I would have preferred, things would have been different. Hill is a lefty specialist with huge platoon splits. I wouldn’t let him near Betts with a 10-foot pole. But Cortes is far less specialized; he’s pretty good against everyone. That’s the difference in situations as close as this.
To wrap things up, I would not have used Cortes in the bottom of the 10th. If I did, however, I probably would have pitched to Betts, but I think it’s a close enough call that either decision is defensible. If the Yankees had instead gone with Hill, and still ended up with runners on second and third and two outs, I definitely would have walked Betts to face Freeman. And of course, it’s always worth mentioning that all of these decisions had tiny overall effects on the outcome of the game. Boone might have moved the Yankees’ win probability by a few percentage points with his maneuvering. Freeman moved it by 72-ish percentage points with one swing. The players always determine the outcome, much as we like to rehash managerial decisions.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Great write-up, Ben – thank you.
I’d have liked to see Weaver start the inning with Cousins and Hill up in case.
Will be curious to see when they go back to Nestor.
It’s between him and Gil to start Game 4 maybe in piggyback I’d think
Asking a reliever to pitch in three different innings never happens. Weaver wasn’t an option.
“In the AL Championship Series against the arch-rival Boston Red Sox, Rivera had one of the most memorable postseason performances of his career; in the decisive Game 7, he entered in the ninth inning with the score tied 5–5 and pitched three scoreless innings, his longest outing since 1996.”
If Weaver wasn’t an option on the strength of that arbitrary relief appearance decorum, … 🤯
fwiw, Weaver achieved the appear-in-3-separate-innings-as-a-reliever feat at least 3 times this season by my count.
The idea that a full strength high platoon LOOGY vs. diminished Freeman is almost the same as a diminished low platoon starter vs a diminished Freeman in the middle of an inning is er…counter intuitive
My feeling is bringing in Cortes was a really bad idea, but walking Betts was fine. But if we’re going to dissect something here, what I’d like to see is some discussion of the pitch selection… not that there were a lot of them. Ohtani’s pop-out, with the great play it took from Verdugo, you can probably chalk up to luck — but Freeman was absolutely sitting on the exact pitch and location they served him.
And Freeman even said that he was sitting on that pitch, if there were any room for doubt.
This doesn’t mention the possible Hill vs. Ohtani/Betts/Freeman matchup. Hill’s entire game is low-and-in sliders, which Ohtani and Freeman both crush. Unless someone can make a compelling argument for Tim Mayza, Cortes was the best option Boone had at his disposal. I don’t care that he hadn’t pitched in a month, he’s on the roster and he needs to do the job Boone asks of him. He didn’t.
“Hill’s entire game is low-and-in sliders, which Ohtani and Freeman both crush.”
Hill threw over 400 regular season pitches to lefties. 35 were sliders. And those sliders to lefties were predominantly landing glove-side. edit: out of suspicion I’ve pulled up some of the inside to lefties Tim Hill slider videos – so far 4 out of 4 the catcher was set up outside
Love the excess math here, but the fact is that Freeman still crushes lefties, and this was a real Catch-22 for Aaron Boone. Which MVP do you pitch to? You can’t fault him for avoiding Betts for a hurt Freeman. Although Freddie did hit 2-3 balls well earlier in the game – he was clearly dialed in. I don’t know – you can’t really blame Boone for choosing who to pitch to.
You CAN, however, argue with his decision to call upon Nestor. Not a great move by any stretch of the imagination in that situation.
Irrespective of the injury, Cortes has been far better vs lefties this year (and last year) than Hill. Hill strikes no one out and relies entirely on getting tons of grounders.
I’m not sure Cortes was the right dice, but Hill definitely wasn’t.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand using a reliever who can’t throw the ball past anyone in a situation like that. He didn’t even bother trying one of his funky windups to try and catch Freeman being aggressive….
I can’t remember who said this, but he’s a starter. He gets out there and tries to establish a foothold in the game with first-pitch strikes. I get the sense that Nestor calls a lot of his games. We know that Nestor loves attacking the zone with deception, but necessary to that deception is establishing the expectation (the fastballs). This habit plus no place to put a bat control savant with power.. Nestor also said that he missed his spot.
Here’s another angle worth contemplating:
Had Verdugo made the catch and stayed in play, there would have been runners on first and second, two outs and Mookie due up. It seems unlikely that Boone would elect to walk Betts in this situation, and then would have had Cortes on the mound without the platoon advantage. Would he have rather had Cortes or Hill staring in for the sign? I suspect the answer is Cortes, which may have had just as much influence on the decision to bring in Cortes as who he would rather have facing Ohtani or Freeman.
You never walk the winning runner closer to scoring.
I think catching that ball was clearly advantageous to the Yankees, probably would be with a regular batter but even more so with Ohtani.
What if 1st base is open with 2 outs, and the opponents’ superstar hitter is up representing the winning run?
In other words, if you don’t know he’s going to strike out, would you intentionally walk Mighty Casey in “Casey at the Bat”?
There was also the time Barry Bonds was intentionally walked with the bases loaded and two outs in the 9th while down by two runs, and the next batter got out so that the Giants lost.
Agree (which is basically what I said). Which is why the Mookie vs. either Hill or Cortes match-up is also a critical one to consider when deciding which to bring into the game.
I love The Count!
My take on this is that if you’re going to use Nestor in the 10th at all — if that’s a possibility — doesn’t it make more sense to have him start the inning? That way, he’s got at least a little time to get his “feel” for the game back.
While there are plenty of things to complain about regarding Aaron Boone’s managerial decisions, this isn’t one of them. I get that Tim Hill is a “lefty specialist,” but he’s a long way from Sparky Lyle or even Graeme Lloyd. Calling on Nestor Cortes here isn’t a bad idea; it just should have been done earlier.
The biggest error in this game was Gleyber Torres not moving his feet and getting in a position where Soto’s throw wouldn’t short-hop him. If Ohtani doesn’t get to third on that play, Betts’ fly ball doesn’t score him and the Yankees win 2-1.