At the end of perhaps the most thrilling back-and-forth Game 7 in World Series history, with one out in the bottom of the 11th inning and the tying run on third base, Alejandro Kirk hit a chopper to shortstop. Mookie Betts raced over to second base to force out Addison Barger, and while running through the bag, fired a perfect strike into the outstretched glove of Freddie Freeman. The Dodgers’ second game-ending double play in as many nights didn’t just clinch the 2025 World Series, it made them the first team to win back-to-back championships since the 1999–2000 Yankees.
Dating back to their days in Brooklyn, the Dodgers have won nine championships, but this is the first time they’ve done so in consecutive seasons. Twice before, they had returned to the World Series as reigning champions only to lose, first to the Yankees in 1956 and then to the Orioles in ’66. Neither of those attempts to repeat involved surviving multiple playoff rounds before that. This time, the 93-win Dodgers went 13-4 in the postseason, first sweeping the 83-win Reds in the Wild Card Series and then defeating three of the four teams that finished with more wins: the 96-win Phillies (3-1 in the Division Series), 97-win Brewers (4-0 in the League Championship Series), and finally the 94-win Blue Jays (who themselves dispatched the 94-win Yankees in the Division Series). Despite being outpitched, outhit, and outscored in the World Series, the Dodgers outlasted the AL champions, with two of their four wins coming in extra innings, the last of those by deploying three of their four series starters in relief and by pulling off three of the 12 most impactful plays ever in terms of Championship Win Probability Added, namely Miguel Rojas’ game-tying home run in the top of the ninth (12th, +34.9% cWPA), Will Smith’s go-ahead solo shot in the top of the 11th inning (fifth, 41% cWPA), and Betts’ double play (fourth, +46.2% cWPA).
Once upon a time, winning back-to-back titles wasn’t uncommon. From 1903 through 2000 — a span of 96 World Series (none in 1904 or ’94) — 10 teams won two in a row, two won three in a row, one won four in a row, and one won five in a row. That’s 14 teams who won at least two World Series in a row (not double-counting any of them), and 21 times in which the World Series winner was the same as the year before. Here’s a breakdown, divided into (roughly) 20-year increments that fortunately don’t split up any back-to-back championships:
This postseason, FanGraphs is continuing its tradition of writing report cards for the on-field decisions made by playoff managers. Excluding the managers who lost in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, we cover every round of the playoffs for all eight managers. It’s detailed enough that I’ve begun enlisting some help. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch, Aaron Boone, Craig Counsell, Rob Thomson, and Dan Wilson. Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Yesterday and today, I’m taking a look at John Schneider. The Blue Jays played enough games that we decided to split his report into two. Michael Baumann will follow with a review of Dave Roberts. It takes a village to get the kind of in-depth coverage we aspire to provide you.
Our goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.
I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Trey Yesavage and Addison Barger were also excellent this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. George Springer is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.
I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. For instance, I’ve increasingly come to view pitching decisions as a trade-off between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think there’s almost no pitching decision that’s a true no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. I tackled the offensive portion of Schneider’s managing yesterday, so now it’s time for the pitching part of his report card. Let’s get to it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »
At the conclusion of the ALDS, I wrote an article about Aaron Judge’s postseason. Across seven games and 31 plate appearances, the Brobdingnagian slugger ran a 253 wRC+ with a slash line of .500/.581/.692. If you set a minimum of 30 plate appearances, then that 253 wRC+ ranks 14th among all postseason performances. That last sentence contains a good bit of statistical misdirection; that 30-PA cutoff eliminates most of the players in postseason history, but it’s still low enough to let an outlier like Judge shine. Still, my goal was to highlight how brilliant Judge had been while also trying to create a framework for putting postseason numbers in context. The tiny sample sizes make that really hard to do, and that was part of the point. But Judge wasn’t the only player who excelled this postseason. In that same Divisional Series, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. got 20 plate appearances and batted .529 with a 324 wRC+. Ernie Clement put up the exact same 324 mark with a .643 batting average over 16 plate appearances. I didn’t mention them in the article because of those smaller sample sizes, but I planned to keep my eye on them. They didn’t disappoint.
Guerrero batted .385 with three home runs in the ALCS, running a 250 wRC+. As you may have heard, he had a pretty good World Series, too. He batted .333 with two homers and a 192 wRC+. Put it all together, and Guerrero slashed .397/.494/.795 with eight homers, 18 runs scored, and 15 RBI in the playoffs. He got intentionally walked six times. Should we watch all eight of those homers? Of course we should. There is no excuse too slight to watch all eight of those homers.
Over the entire postseason, Guerrero posted a wRC+ of 241, leaving him just 14 points behind Judge. Going back to our minimum of 30 plate appearances, that’s the 25th-highest mark of all time. But Guerrero didn’t just leave Judge’s 31 plate appearances in the dust, he set an all-time record with 89. His sample was nearly three times bigger, and he was still just 14 points behind!
As we established, over those extra 69 plate appearances in the ALCS and World Series, Guerrero continued his excellent play, so it’s time for an update. Let me show you the graph I made a few weeks ago to show you how much of an outlier Judge was. The red circle is Judge. The green dot is Barry Bonds’ absurd 259 wRC+ performance from the Giants’ 2002 World Series run. I’ve added an orange dot to highlight where Guerrero was at that point.
“This certainly makes Judge look a bit less spectacular,” I wrote at the time. “He’s up toward the top of the heap for a player around 30 plate appearances, but he’s not standing out from the pack the way Bonds did. According to this chart, the most impressive performance in postseason history is undoubtedly Randy Arozarena’s magical, homer-filled 2020 run with the Rays, all the way to the right.” At that point, Guerrero was higher than Judge in raw wRC+, but he was at roughly the same place on the trendline. He was right near the top, but at the 20-PA mark rather than the 30-PA mark, which made it a bit less impressive. Well three sublime weeks later, we can now update this graph. Judge, Bonds, and Arozarena are no longer highlighted. The only dot I’ve highlighted is Guerrero’s and it’s not hard to see why. He stands alone. There’s a brand new dot in town.
What we’re essentially illustrating with this graph is weighted runs created – removing the plus from weighted runs created plus. The higher and further to the right you are, the more runs you’ve created. We’re turning this back into a counting stat in order to look at the players who have put up the most offensive value in a single postseason, and Guerrero just set the record. Here’s the top 10:
If you want to argue about the best single-season playoff hitting performance of all time, you have plenty of metrics to choose from. Without a PA minimum, the highest postseason wRC+ of all time belongs to Jim Mason, who homered in his one postseason plate appearance with the Yankees in the 1976 World Series. Because the league had a paltry .681 OPS that year, his home run was weighted more heavily than the three other players who homered in their only postseason plate appearance. He has a career postseason wRC+ of 1,432, quite a bit better than his regular season mark of 53.
If you set a minimum of 15 plate appearances in order to include players from the time when the World Series constituted the entirety of the postseason, then you’ve got Lou Gehrig’s 419 wRC+ when the Yankees swept the Cardinals in 1928. Gehrig went 6-for-11 with a double, four home runs, six walks! He made just five outs in four games and ran a slash line of .545/.706/1.727.
If you’re interested in win probability added, then the Cardinals get their revenge in the form of David Freese’s absurd 2011 run. His 1.91 WPA puts him on top. He was impossible to retire, and because he was batting behind the triumvirate of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and Lance Berkman, who combined for an on-base percentage of .444, he was always coming to the plate with runners on base in high-leverage situations.
But if you’re just talking about sustained excellence, then the answer is clear. The crown once belonged to Bonds, then Arozarena. It now belongs to Guerrero.
I’m still coming down from the high of what I think we can all agree was a terrific World Series. It’ll go down as one of the best of the 21st century; it had star power, shocking twists, unlikely heroes, the whole nine yards. The guys who plotted out the ludicrously dramatic football depicted in Friday Night Lights are probably like, “Guys, cool it, you’re pouring it on too thick.”
The last game and a half especially, I was genuinely stressed out over the outcome, which is not something that usually happens when I have neither a partisan dog in the fight nor the obligation to write off the game. Read the rest of this entry »
“I mean, we get that there’s extra time kind of baked in there when he’s either on the plate – when he’s either at the plate – JORDAN!”
That’s how it started. If you’ve ever wondered how a standard manager-umpire interaction goes down, well, now you know. It starts with the manager screaming the umpire’s name at the top of his lungs and waving an arm. In the bottom of the fourth inning, as John Schneider attempted to manage the Blue Jays to victory in Game 7 of the World Series while enduring an in-game interview, Justin Wrobleski started Andrés Giménez off with a fastball high and tight. It both looked and sounded like the ball might have clipped Giménez’s elbow, so midway through a measured critique of home plate umpire Jordan Baker for pausing the game while Shohei Ohtani switched from hitter mode to pitcher mode, Schneider signaled to Baker that he wanted to pause the game for a moment to check the video.
The video room told the Blue Jays not to challenge. The ball had missed Giménez. A ball and a strike later, Wrobleski lost control of yet another fastball, and Schneider once again asked Baker to pause the game. Visibly upset, the manager crossed his arms and stuck out his chin while he waited on word from the replay room. This pitch was more high than inside, and despite Giménez’s best efforts, it had once again missed him. He had tried the classic move of earning a hit-by-pitch by letting his elbow drift out over the plate in the process of turning back toward the catcher and (ostensibly) away from the pitch. Then, realizing that he’d still be a few inches shy of the ball, he just stuck his arm out artlessly. Well, it was only artless in the respect that he’d dispensed with subterfuge. The ball was slightly above his arm, so he tried to close the distance by raising first his shoulder, then his elbow, then his wrist, and finally his fingers. He was popping and locking, artfully, and when that didn’t get him high enough, he hopped a few inches into the air. Had he made contact with the ball that way, Baker would have been forced to keep him at the plate, just as James Hoye did when Aledmys Díazleaned into an inside pitch in Game 1 of the 2022 World Series. Giménez looked into the dugout with a frown, and Schneider followed suit. Read the rest of this entry »
Hagen Smith has a promising future on the South Side. Drafted fifth overall in 2024 out of the University of Arkansas, the 22-year-old left-hander in the Chicago White Sox system is No. 81 on The Board with a 50 FV. Currently making up lost innings in the Arizona Fall League — he missed six weeks this summer due to elbow soreness — Smith has been described by Eric Longenhagen as possessing “a killer fastball/slider combo.”
The erstwhile Razorback’s go-to breaker — a pitch our lead prospect analyst has assigned a 70 on the scouting scale — isn’t notable solely for its bat-missing attributes.
“No, not at all,” Smith replied when asked if his slider grip is fairly standard. “I actually don’t hold any laces on the ball. My first year of college — it was a start in Omaha — I was warming up in the outfield and just kind of tweaked the grip. That’s what it’s been since then. I really don’t know why it works as well as it does. I mean, it’s a good pitch metrically, but outside of that I guess it just plays well off of my heater. It comes out of the same tunnel, and it also helps that I can throw it slower or harder when I want to.”
The Fall Classic has traveled near and far, but wherever they are, the Dodgers have relied heavily on Yoshinobu Yamamoto to lead the team to victory, and on Friday night he delivered once again. Following a three-game swing in Los Angeles, the World Series returned to Toronto for Game 6. And though back in their home and native land, the Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers 3-1, meaning Canada’s team will face L.A. in a decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.
The faster we’re fallin’, we’re stoppin’ and stallin’,
We’re runnin’ in circles again.
Just as things were lookin’ up, you said it wasn’t good enough,
But still, we’re tryin’ one more time.
Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman had the first seven batters he faced looking like they might be in over their heads. His splitter was working exactly as intended — presenting as a center-cut fastball, then diving in too deep for the hitter to make contact — and leading to a ton of swing-and-miss. As he worked deeper in the game, Gausman mixed in his slider more, which earned him some quick outs on weak contact. For the most part, he cruised through his six innings and 93 pitches. For the most part. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the third article I’ve written about cleat cleaners. So far as I can tell, that’s three more articles than anybody else. As a result, I have spent the past two seasons completely in the tank for cleat cleaners. I’m incapable of turning on a game without assessing the situation on the mound. What color is the cleat cleaner? Can I tell which brand it is from the shape? Most importantly, how dirty is it? It’s rare to get a shot of a pitcher using the cleat cleaner, but you can still tell whether it’s being used. The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. The cleat cleaner will be filthy. The weird rubber mat that cleans cleats with cleats of its own is now staked as firmly in my heart as it is to the backslope of the pitcher’s mound.
That brings us to Monday night (and Tuesday morning). Game 3 of the World Series was a thrilling, exasperating showcase for baseball. More importantly for our purposes, it also gave the cleat cleaner a chance to shine – or to do whatever the opposite of shining is because you’re completely covered in mud – on the game’s biggest stage.
The cleat cleaner does not normally get much time in the limelight. Pitchers most often avail themselves of it right before the start of the inning. They throw their warm-up pitches, circle around to the back of the mound, take a few calming breaths, clean their spikes, then climb up to the summit and set themselves. If the broadcast has come back from commercial in time, this routine is rarely considered worth documenting. At any given time, only one shot can make it onto your television, and at least as far as directors are concerned, there’s almost always something more interesting to show than a man cleaning his shoes. Even when we do get a shot of the pitcher cleaning his cleats, we rarely see the actual cleat cleaner. The camera usually shows the pitcher from the waist up. In fact, we got one of those shots in the very first inning on Monday night. Here’s Max Scherzer using the cleat cleaner before he faces Shohei Ohtani to start the game.
Hmm. That wasn’t very satisfying, was it? As usual, you can’t see Scherzer’s feet at all. Rather than force you to take my word for it that he was using the cleat cleaner, I’ve recreated his lower half utilizing an innovative new CGI technology known as iPhone Video of Me Wearing Jeans and Baseball Cleats in My Bedroom.
Now you get it. From that shot alone, Game 3 was already a victory for all of us cleat cleaner fanatics. We actually got to see someone using the cleat cleaner during the World Series. But the cleat cleaner was just getting started. This was an 18-inning game that featured a staggering 609 total pitches. That’s not just the highest total of the season; it’s 137 pitches more than the game with the next-most pitches (Game 5 of the ALDS between the Tigers and Mariners). And each individual pitch wreaks havoc on the mound. For an example, we need look no further than the very first pitch of the game. Here’s Tyler Glasnow getting ready before he warms up for the first inning. He absolutely tears in to the mound.
The mound is made out of clay, and before every game, the grounds crew shapes and tamps it into smooth perfection, then covers it with a layer of soil conditioner. Some pitchers like the pitching rubber to be flush with the dirt, but most want to be able to wedge their cleat into a hole next to the rubber. Glasnow belongs to the latter camp, and he’s not hesitant about dredging a trench in order to get things just how he likes them. The clay goes flying every which way, and then he spanks his foot onto the mound in order to dislodge it from his cleats. All this happened before Glasnow even started his warm-up tosses. By the time the game actually started, the picture-perfect manicured mound was nothing but a cherished memory. And with every single pitch, the cleats grab some more clay and send it flying. Here’s a closeup of the very first pitch of the game. I’ve added some arrows to help you notice individual clods of mud.
You can see a small clod go flying when Glasnow raises his front foot. More clods go flying when he pushes off with his back foot. Some fall off from above when he whips it around. Others go skittering across the mound when he lands. And this is just the tabletop. We can’t see whatever destruction he causes at the front of the mound when his front foot lands. This is just one pitch, specifically the first pitch of the game, when the mound and the cleats are at their most pristine and least likely to stick. But cleats are designed to grab hold of the earth. That’s their whole job, and like so many of us, they have trouble letting go. Once there’s clay on the cleats, the remaining clay on the mound wants to stick to it too. It builds up.
If you’ve even played a game in rainy conditions, you know that it’s really uncomfortable to have your cleats fully packed with mud. It’s not just that you can’t get as much traction. It’s also that mud and clay make your shoes really heavy. You feel stuck. If you’re a pitcher, your entire delivery depends on balance, and all of a sudden, you’re trying to perform your carefully rehearsed, repeatable delivery with your balance completely out of whack. That won’t do, so you head to the cleat cleaner and make a deposit.
The cleat cleaner is exactly like the bottom of a shoe. It’s just a flat surface full of spikes designed to grab hold of big chunks of earth with maximum efficiency. If you forgot your spikes one day, you could absolutely strap the cleat cleaner to the bottom of your sneakers. It would work just fine, and you’d certainly turn some heads. When you consider the similarity between them, you realize that the relationship between the cleat cleaner and the cleat is as one-sided as you can imagine. In that sense it’s truly a selfless tool. It’s like watching a chimpanzee grooming another chimpanzee, but instead of eating the bugs it finds, it just settles them into its own fur. One day, grounds crews will invent an even bigger cleat cleaner, but until then, we get to watch the dirt build up all game long. Here’s a GIF that shows the cleat cleaner during the first pitch of every half inning during Game 3.
It sort of looks like one of those time-lapse videos of a swarm of ants devouring a piece of fruit from a nature documentary. Scherzer did a number on the cleat cleaner in the third inning, and Mason Fluharty, who replaced Scherzer in the fifth, tracked in a bunch of mud after firing his warm-up pitches. By the 15th inning or so, you can barely even see the top. It’s just a pile of mud.
It’s not just that the cleat cleaner gets completely full. Look at the havoc inflicted over the entire area. The Dodgers logo fades into nothing. Clods of clay are absolutely everywhere. That happens all over the field. Here’s a still from the 18th inning. The low angle allows you to see that the entire home plate area and much of the grass in its vicinity is covered in crumbs of mud.
After the game, the grounds crew has to remove every one of those crumbs. The home plate area and basepaths need to be perfectly smooth, and an accretion of clay would kill all the grass. They rake, they scoop with shovels, they pick them up by hand, sometimes they vacuum. And then they have to refill all the divots, which requires a tremendous amount of tamping, also by hand. It’s hard work. The tamp is a heavy tool. You raise it, you slam all that heft down into the earth, and you do it again until the ground is flat.
Brett Davis-Imagn Images
But that’s after the game. For the most part, the grounds crew just has to watch as the damage to the field that they just spent all day perfecting accumulates during the game. And this was an especially long game. For comparison, here’s a split-screen between the first pitch of the game and the 609th. On the right, you can see the few crumbs that Glasnow scattered across the top of the mound while excavating and warming up, but that’s it. The field is a lush, perfect carpet.
By the last pitch of the game, it’s a war zone. The left side of the frame is pockmarked and scarred. It’s covered in shrapnel. Every one of those little dark spots you see is a clump of clay that someone’s cleats yanked straight out of the field and then deposited elsewhere. I turned the contrast way up just to illustrate just how many of these clumps get spread out across the field over the course of the game.
It’s a whole lot, especially around the mound, because pitching deliveries are violent. They have hard starts and stops that send the clay flying all over the place. But the real dark spot is around the cleat cleaner, and by the 12th inning, I had noticed that it was in shambles. It was almost completely full of mud. I was ecstatic (and not a little sleep-deprived). The cleat cleaner was doing what so many of us try and fail to do for our whole lives. It achieved its full potential. Every once in a while, the grounds crew will come out and replace the cleat cleaner when it gets completely full, especially on a rainy day.
Scott Taetsch-Imagn Images
That didn’t happen on Monday. The cleat cleaner just kept getting more and more full. By the 14th inning, you could barely see its spikes at all. The clay was just piled on top of it. It was literally being buried. Here it is in the 17th inning. If the clay weren’t so much darker in color than the soil conditioner, you might not even know it was there. It’s just a lump of earth.
This is what it looks like when a cleat cleaner dies a hero. It’s cleat cleaner Valhalla. It was all downhill from there. Pitchers kept trying to clean their cleats, but the device was so completely buried that they tended to pick up just as much dirt as they deposited. The problem was, the game was still going on, and as it was the 17th inning of the World Series, they kind of needed to be at their best. That brings us to Will Klein.
Klein was pitching the game of his life. He threw a total of 5 1/3 major league innings during the regular season and had made just one appearance during the postseason. He had never once thrown more than three innings in a single outing over his five years in professional baseball. And on Monday, he delivered four scoreless innings of one-hit ball. It was a fairytale, except that his glass slipper was completely swamped in mud. During the 18th inning, cameras caught Klein going to the overloaded cleat cleaner three times, and because he was still slipping during his pitches, each time was a bit more violent than the next.
With two outs, after falling behind Tyler Heineman, 2-1, Klein decided that going Mortal Kombat on the helpless cleat cleaner was bringing diminishing returns. He finally gave up and went back to the old methods. As organist Dieter Ruhle played the theme from The NeverEnding Story, Dodgers ball boy Branden Vandal raced out to the mount with the trusty baseball standby of a couple of taped-together tongue depressors. The right-handed Klein cleaned off his left cleat himself, then realized there was no way to clean off his right cleat with a glove on his left hand. He handed off the tool to Vandel and leaned on the ball boy’s shoulder while the latter scraped off the accumulated clay and dirt with vigor. Klein gave Vandel a tap on the shoulder to say, “That’s clean enough,” and Vandal hustled back to the dugout. The righty retook the mound and struck out Heineman to end the frame.
Anything goes in the playoffs. Klein is a perfect example, a young player being asked to perform far beyond any reasonable expectation under the most intense pressure of his entire career. As it turns out, if the game goes long enough, the same gets asked of the cleat cleaner.
When Bo Bichette sprained the posterior collateral ligament of his left knee on September 6 in a home plate collision with Yankees catcher Austin Wells, both the ramifications of his injury and the upcoming World Series were mere abstractions. Bichette remained in that game, postgame X-rays ruled out a fracture, and at the time a cut on his left shin appeared to be the worst of the damage he sustained. While the Blue Jays were not only atop the AL East at the time but also positioned as the league’s top seed, the team — as you’ve heard a million times by now — hadn’t played in a World Series since 1993, and hadn’t won a postseason game since 2016.
Seven weeks later, Toronto is matched up against the defending champion Dodgers, and after missing the final three weeks of the regular season and the Blue Jays’ first two playoff series, the 27-year-old Bichette has been shoehorned into the lineup, albeit under significant limitations. An experiment with him playing second base for the first time in six years has largely worked, and on Tuesday night, Bichette — slotted as the designated hitter with George Springer sidelined by “right side discomfort” following a violent swing in Game 3 — contributed a key hit in a 6-2 victory that helped the Jays rebound from their 18-inning loss the night before and even the World Series at two games apiece.
Bichette’s hit came during Toronto’s four-run seventh inning. Leading 2-1 thanks to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s third-inning homer off Shohei Ohtani, the Jays opened the seventh with a single by Daulton Varsho and a double by Ernie Clement, spelling the end of the two-way superstar’s night on the mound. Lefty Anthony Banda took over for Ohtani, allowed an RBI single to Andrés Giménez, collected a pair of outs that nonetheless brought home Clement with the Blue Jays’ fourth run, and intentionally walked Guerrero. To the chagrin of every Dodgers fan, manager Dave Roberts then called upon right-hander Blake Treinen, who entered having allowed 14 earned runs in 11 2/3 innings over the past seven weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
I honestly have no idea how many tag plays take place over the course of the average baseball game, but whatever that number may be, it felt like Game 3 of the World Series quadrupled it at the very least. We saw seven players thrown out on the bases. We saw challenges on plays at all four bases. We saw baserunning blunders, huge throws, and perfect relays. We saw aggressive sends that turned out well, and aggressive sends that led to players being thrown out at the plate by laughable margins. We saw pop-up slides that flew too close to the sun. We got a tutorial on the home plate blocking rule. We saw maybe the first ever umpire-induced pickoff. We saw the next day’s starting pitcher pull up with a leg cramp while running the bases in the bottom of the 11th inning. We saw multiple players get tagged out by a glove that caught them squarely in the Jonas Brothers. We saw the game’s 469th-fastest runner come in as a pinch-runner for the 606th-fastest runner. I could keep going.
At this point, I should mention that the litany you just read may or may not be my fault. Somewhere around the seventh inning, Meg Rowley asked me whether I might like to write about anything I’d seen during the game. I said there had been a couple interesting tag plays, so maybe it would be fun to write about them. Go back and reread the first sentence of this article. That’s when I wrote it, in the seventh inning, before like a dozen other absurd baserunning plays happened. This is how the baseball gods punish hubris, and there’s no way to delve into all these plays in one article. Even if there were, I wouldn’t be in any shape to write it, because I watched the entire 18-inning game and got like four hours of sleep last night (read: this morning). Instead, we’ll be taking a jogging tour of the tag play highlights, pointing out a few fun facts and then skating on to the next destination. Read the rest of this entry »
