When the seventh inning began, the Astros’ chances of winning the World Series looked good. With a rolling Zack Greinke, Gerrit Cole available out of the bullpen, and closer Roberto Osuna fresh, the Astros had a clear path to getting the final nine outs and celebrating a title for the second time in three seasons. It didn’t work out that way. The Nationals rallied, the Astros were defeated, and A.J. Hinch’s decision making merits some scrutiny. Bad outcomes can cause us to believe the decisions that led to those outcomes were poor, when that isn’t always the case. Let’s take a look.

We’ll start with Greinke entering the seventh, take a quick detour, and then get back to him. After six innings, Greinke had made a total of 67 pitches; he got through the sixth on just eight pitches, including a strikeout of Trea Turner to end that frame. While Greinke’s velocity is not a big part of his game, his fastball velocity was still fine and he topped 90 mph on one of the pitches to Turner. Heading into the seventh, Astros manager A.J. Hinch had a few different options. He could continue on with Greinke, go to Cole, go to Osuna, or go to someone else, like Will Harris or Jose Urquidy.

There are two causes for concern with respect to Greinke, one sort of real, the other self-imposed by the Astros. The Greinke-related issue is that he was about to face the Nationals the third time through the order. He had retired Turner, but Adam Eaton, Anthony Rendon, and Juan Soto loomed. But at this point in the game, facing the order a third time should have been of minimal concern. The “penalty” pitchers often experience is due to two factors. One is the rising pitch count of the pitcher. With Greinke only at 67 pitches, that really wasn’t an issue. The other factor is that the third time through, pitchers often pitch against a portion of the lineup that is disproportionately comprised of the better hitters at the top of the order. While that was an issue for Greinke with Eaton, Rendon, and Soto, it would have been a problem for the Astros no matter who was on the mound. So then the question is, who is the better pitcher, a rolling Zack Greinke or one of the bullpen arms?

Will Harris as reliever and Zack Greinke as starter put up roughly equivalent numbers, with FIPs around three. Add to that that Harris had pitched the night before and Greinke seems like he was a sound choice. Urquidy pitched well in the fourth game of the series and also performed well in two relief outings earlier in the postseason. There’s an argument to be made that as a reliever, Urquidy might be a little better than Greinke as a starter, but it isn’t an especially compelling one. Roberto Osuna also put up similar numbers to Greinke’s in the regular season. The idea behind pulling starters is to replace them with relievers who are better. Greinke at 67 pitches is one of the 10 best starters in baseball, and as good or better than most of Houston’s relief options. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to pull him while he’s still on his game.

That leaves Gerrit Cole. It’s not clear why Cole was only going to be available for the ninth inning if Houston got the lead. He was warming earlier in the game. He was pitching on two days rest, so it’s possible he was only going to be available for an inning, and it seems reasonable to want to put him in at the start of an inning so he can be better prepared for it, but having him only available in the ninth to close out a World Series win is an odd choice and makes one wonder if the decision wasn’t entirely baseball-related. In any event, if Cole could have only gone one inning and needed to start it, then sticking with Greinke to start the seventh was completely reasonable.

Here’s where Greinke’s pitches went to the first three batters in that frame, from Baseball Savant.

Against Eaton, he pounded the outside corner away and induced a groundout. Against Rendon, Greinke threw the hardest pitch of his night at 91.8 mph for a ball, and then missed with a changeup that Rendon crushed. The walk to Soto put the winning run on base, but Greinke caught a bit of a bad break during the at-bat. After a 1-0 whiff on an outside curve, Soto took a change outside. Then, he took a change that should have made the count 2-2, but instead made it 3-1. With the count tilted in Soto’s favor, Greinke threw the same curve that got the whiff earlier, but Soto took the pitch and went to first.

With Howie Kendrick coming up, we are faced with a set of questions similar to those from the beginning of the inning. Greinke was now at 80 pitches and with a walk and a homer, the results said he was getting worse. His velocity against Rendon and the tough break against Soto — one of the best hitters in the game regardless of age, with his 155 wRC+ against righties behind only Christian Yelich, Mike Trout, Cody Bellinger, and George Springer (min. 350 PA v RH) this season — it’s not clear that Greinke didn’t do the right thing by not giving in. Cole seemingly needed a clean start to the inning to enter the game, and that logic might have also been true for Urquidy, who had only come in during the middle of an inning with the Astros once. (That relief outing came in the second inning of a September game against the Angels, and while barely worth mentioning, he gave up a single to the first batter.)

In his piece on the same subject, Michael Baumann discussed the reasons why relieving Greinke and bringing in Harris was defensible, though he did acknowledge Harris’ potential wear as a point against it. That Osuna came in later that inning is another point against it (Osuna is better than Harris), but it’s still not clear that pulling Greinke was the right move. With the lineup through Rendon and Soto, unless Greinke was tired, any issues related to the third time through the order were mostly moot. Howie Kendrick has been a good hitter, but he’s not on the level of Rendon or Soto. With Kendrick and then Asdrúbal Cabrera coming up, leaving Greinke in might have been the best play if Hinch was going to bring in a pitcher other than Gerrit Cole or the best reliever. And if Greinke was tiring, he wasn’t really showing it based on velocity and just pitching Soto carefully.

At that point, the decision should have been Osuna or Greinke; if Hinch thought Osuna wasn’t the best available reliever because he had a few slip-ups in the postseason, then the choice should have been sticking with Greinke. Playing by the numbers doesn’t always require pulling the starter. Relievers aren’t necessarily better than the guy currently on the mound, and even good relievers aren’t usually better than a fresh starter if he’s one of the 10 best in the game. Greinke might have had some so-so outings in the playoffs before last night, and his three strikeouts might not have suggested dominance, but 19 called strikes out of the 80 pitches he threw is an indicator that he was keeping Washington off balance. Was relieving Greinke defensible? Sure. Was it the right call? I’m less certain. It’s usually better to take a pitcher out too early than too late, but in the most important plate appearance of the season, Houston’s fifth-best pitcher threw the pitch that lost the Astros the lead and eventually the championship.

By the time he stepped to the plate with one out in the seventh inning of Wednesday night’s Game 7, Howie Kendrick had already collected his share of postseason heroics, key hits that stood out even on a team featuring an MVP candidate and a precociously disciplined slugger, not to mention two bona fide aces and a $140 million third starter-turned-reliever. Exactly three weeks earlier, the 36-year-old utilityman-turned-designated hitter had swatted a 10th-inning grand slam in the fifth and deciding game of the Division Series, felling the 106-win Dodgers. His 5-for-14, four-RBI showing against the Cardinals earned him NLCS MVP honors, and he’d lucked into a bases-loaded infield single in the rally that swung Game 2 of the World Series. The best was yet to come.

With Houston’s lead freshly cut to 2-1 by Anthony Rendon’s home run, and starter Zack Greinke — who had been brilliant and stifling through six innings — suddenly exiting after walking Juan Soto, Kendrick etched himself into World Series lore by slicing an 0-1 changeup from Will Harris down the line and off the screen attached to the right field foul pole.

Read the rest of this entry »

We talk about work as a cohesive, coherent thing — I am a writer, your dad is a plumber, these are our jobs — but it isn’t really. Jobs are a bunch of tasks and to-do lists and calendar reminders, wholes made up of discrete parts that add up to our work. Part of the work of covering the Astros involves an honest accounting of Roberto Osuna: The pitches he throws and how they play, and also how he came to be in Houston. It means considering the cost of his acquisition, not just in so many Gileses, and Paulinos, and Perezes, but also in the bits of humanity it denied and disregarded. It involves recognizing that the Astros got to the World Series in part by commodifying one of the worst moments of a human being’s life, and putting that chilly awfulness into the context of a game somehow.

That was and is the work of the three female sportswriters who were in the Astros’ locker room on the evening of Houston’s pennant-winning triumph. Only that night, a new task emerged. Part of their work became now-former assistant general manager Brandon Taubman and his venom, the drumbeat of “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so f—— glad we got Osuna!” delivered with cigar in hand. It became locating that venom alongside the purple domestic violence awareness bracelet one of the reporters was wearing, and Taubman’s prior frustration at her practice of tweeting out resources for victims and survivors when Osuna would pitch. These new bits of work added to the queue, one of those reporters, Stephanie Apstein, went about her business, detailing the incident and its context for Sports Illustrated.

And that’s where the trouble started, in this moment when Apstein’s work butted up against Taubman’s notion of his, with his understanding so clearly marking those bits of humanity disregarded as of a different category than Osuna’s fastball. The latter was baseball and the former something else, both not-work for Apstein and the anonymous reporter in the purple bracelet, and a cudgel to wield against these three women. Taubman clearly thought he had gotten the better of a couple of pests, but by denying the validity of these women’s work, women just there to do their jobs, what he revealed was just how much more work the Astros have left to do themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Two Cy Young Award winners have never matched up in Game 7 of the World Series before. Zack Greinke and Max Scherzer are unlikely to win that award this season, but they are still at relative high-points in their careers; Scherzer’s 6.5 WAR ranked fourth among pitchers this season, while Greinke’s 5.4 was not that far behind and put him ninth.

This is the 40th Game 7 in history. Here are the best pitchers ever to pitch in a Game 7, by their WAR in the season during which they started that year’s final game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nationals manager Dave Martinez was ejected from Game 6 of the World Series last night. According to Jayson Stark, his simmering rage was set aflame by third-base umpire Gary Cederstrom telling him to “control your dugout,” which had come alive with criticism of the events of the evening, chiefly the squabble that erupted in regards to Trea Turner being called out at first for interference in the seventh inning.

Normally, a manager getting ejected isn’t incredible news, but everything with “World Series” in front of it becomes more distinct and historic, including the screaming.

To learn how Martinez’s ejection measures up with his equally ejected World Series predecessors, we can find plenty of singular instances dotting history. The first occurred in 1907, when Tigers manager Hughie Jennings was “shooed” away by the umpire for “back talk” regarding a play at second base, according to the St. Louis Dispatch. This characterized the majority of the disputes that ended in aggressive thumb-movements by the umpires over the next two decades in the Fall Classic, except in the case of “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was ejected from a World Series game in 1909 for talking to his third base coach for too long. But to be a part of the golden age of World Series ejections, there’s no question that we have to go back to the 1930s. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals won last night thanks to a great outing from Stephen Strasburg and a big home run from Anthony Rendon in the seventh inning. But just before Rendon’s homer, this play happened, per our Play Log:

Trea Turner grounded out to pitcher.

That description is a little lacking. How about this:

Turner was called out for interference. Dave Martinez got mad at the umpires. Trea Turner got mad that Joe Torre wasn’t doing anything. There was a delay, and at its end, Turner was still out. Rendon hit a homer that reminded everyone of Rasheed Wallace and the Nationals forced a Game 7, but the play and the rule deserve some scrutiny.

We should first address the rule we are talking about. Turner’s offense was not your standard interference call under Rule 6, as that type of interference requires intent like on this rather famous play:

Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Strasburg has apparently decided to defy the notion that two-seamers are out of style in today’s game. Having rarely thrown the pitch from 2015-16, and not at all in 2017, Strasburg bumped up his use of the two-seamer in 2018, and more than doubled it in 2019. This season, pitchers threw the two-seam fastball 14.7% of the time on average; three of Strasburg’s six appearances in October doubled that mark.

That’s a sign he has a lot of faith in the pitch, considering the league wOBA for both the regular and postseason sits at .360.

Strasburg also is using a curveball, with great success, to the tune of a .159 wOBA against. What do these two pitches have in common? Allow me to explain. Read the rest of this entry »

Though the final score was once again lopsided, Tuesday night’s Game 6 was this World Series’ most entertaining game since the opener, even if much of it pivoted upon lengthy debates of rules both written (the seventh-inning interference call against Trea Turner) and unwritten (the bat-carrying homers of Alex Bregman and Juan Soto). Beyond those controversies, Stephen Strasburg‘s 8.1 innings and Anthony Rendon’s pair of late-inning hits headlined the Nationals’ winning effort. The latter also helped rescue what has been something of a dull World Series from some ignominious distinctions.

Rendon’s two-run seventh-inning homer off Will Harris did not swing the lead; the fifth-inning homers of Adam Eaton and Soto off Justin Verlander did that job. Rendon’s blow did divert attention away from the scrutiny over Turner’s path to first base after hitting a dribbler to pitcher Brad Peacock, as well as the long on-field delay for what was actually ruled an un-reviewable judgment call. Instead of having runners at second and third with no outs, the Nationals had a runner on first and one out, and boy, were they — and just about everybody outside of Houston — extremely pissed. The tension ratcheted up a few notches when Eaton, the next batter after Turner, popped up to third base on the first pitch from Harris. Two pitches later, Rendon pulverized a cutter that Harris left in the middle of the plate; that’s a 2019 postseason-high 43.4 degree launch angle for you aficionados of such matters:

The ball-don’t-lie homer stretched the Nationals’ lead to 5-2, and while it produced some mutterings about how the lead should have been 6-2 had the umpires not screwed up the call (as well as some terrible puns), such gripes get filed in the category of what Yankees play-by-play voice Michael Kay calls “the fallacy of the predetermined outcome” — the assumption that the inning would have unfolded in exactly the same manner as it did with that one change; we can’t know how Harris, Eaton, and Rendon would have approached their respective tasks in the parallel universe where two runners were on base. Nationals manager Davey Martinez was still hot enough to get run even after the inning finished. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL East: A division that, if it had ever been noble, would be referred to here as “once noble” now.

That’s a bit unfair; there was some nobility to Atlanta wailing on this Senior Circuit subset for a decade and a half. But these days, it’s been a harbor for a few disappointing Nationals squads (this year’s a notable exception), a weird Mets run, and some airtight regular season Braves teams. Ronald Acuña Jr., Juan Soto, Pete Alonso; some of the game’s most prolific young hitters are bedeviling pitching in the East, and now the division’s newest manager, Joe Girardi, will be strategizing against them.

Announced as the Phillies’ 55th manager last Thursday, Girardi takes over for his beaten-down and very tan predecessor, Gabe Kapler, inheriting team the closest it has been to a winner since 2011 but also one that has continuously found ways to not win. As stories have squeaked out about the team’s 2019 season, it has become apparent that a little structure and a little experience might go a long way in straightening things out in South Philly. There’s star power in Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto, as well as promise in Scott Kingery and Adam Haseley, and Aaron Nola can still be expected to anchor the rotation. And though there are plenty of spots to fill in the months ahead, the Phillies nabbed one of the most popular names on the managerial market, one who is already impacting the division just by accepting the job.

The ebb and flow of managerial hires across baseball is always apparent, if not obvious. There are trends. There are trials. Sometimes everybody’s starting over at once. Sometimes, Bobby Valentine sounds like a great idea. Right now, everybody wants one of those early-40s ex-players ready to be dazzled by a spreadsheet. The Phillies just tried one of those in 2017. Now they’re ready to try something else. Read the rest of this entry »

Through seven minutes after the 8 pm E.T. Wednesday night, when Justin Verlander threw the first pitch of Game 6 to Washington’s Trea Turner, the 2019 World Series had recorded one lead change, zero home wins, and the lowest TV ratings in series history. What it needed, at least from the perspective of a non-partisan observer, was a little action, a little controversy, a little red blood in its veins. It got precisely that. This World Series is going to Game 7 tonight in Houston, and all it took to get there was two lead changes, five RBI from Anthony Rendon, a six-minute “replay” review, a managerial ejection, and quite possibly the best-traveled bats in Fall Classic history. That and 8.1 terrific innings from Stephen Strasburg.

In a moment of what we in the writing business call “foreshadowing,” the very first play of the game — a Turner groundball to Alex Bregman at third base — resulted in a replay review. The call on the field (out at first) was swiftly and uncontroversially overturned, and Turner took his base — and then a second — on his way to scoring the first Washington run of the game on an Rendon single to right (also, as it turns out, a sign of things to come). In a less eventful game, or one in which the final score was reversed, we might make more here of Dave Martinez’s decision to use Adam Eaton (and a bunt) to move Turner over in this inning; as we are consequentialists, we will not.

That first Nationals lead was itself overturned fewer than 10 minutes later, when a José Altuve sacrifice fly and a mammoth Bregman home run in the bottom of the inning put Strasburg on his heels and the score at 2-1 going into the second. Somewhat more importantly, given what was to come, Strasburg took just 13 pitches to get through his inning; Verlander threw 17. The next inning, which was scoreless for both clubs, added 7 and 12 to those totals. The third — also scoreless, though featuring a lively threat from Juan Soto — added 15 and 25, and by the time the fourth inning drew to a close, Verlander had thrown nearly 40% more pitches than his counterpart, and 75 on the game. He was, quite clearly, tiring. Read the rest of this entry »