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“He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.” – Josh Billings

The Cincinnati Reds used an unusual strategy during the 2018-2019 offseason: trying. OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but while last winter’s actual weather was mild, we saw a veritable blizzard of excuses in baseball. As top free agents remained unsigned going into spring training, we heard all sorts of reasoning from teams about why they couldn’t sign this guy or couldn’t afford that guy or why that player over there in the corner was impossible for them to acquire. No, the Reds didn’t pursue Bryce Harper or Manny Machado, but they did make aggressive moves to turn the team into a winner in the short-term, seeing an opportunity in an NL Central where every team had serious flaws. It didn’t quite work out, but many of the reasons they looked like a promising team in 2019 apply to the club in 2020 as well.

The Setup

I appreciated Cincinnati’s ambition last winter, even if I didn’t like every move they made. To be fair, the Reds didn’t go into the offseason intending to please one particularly sarcastic, overweight, middle-aged baseball analyst. But as noted above, there moves were a refreshing departure from baseball’s version of Rasputitsa.

Cincinnati went 67-95 in 2018, and adding 25 wins in one offseason was always going to be difficult. To start with, they needed all of their returning players to be the best versions of themselves. That meant Joey Votto needed to hold off serious decline for another year. Scooter Gennett had to play like an All-Star again. Ideally, Nick Senzel and Jesse Winker would have both been healthy and All-Star candidates themselves. Second-half Luis Castillo would have to become both-halves Luis Castillo. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a recap half-written in my head after six innings of last night’s pivotal Game 2. It focused, as expected, on the pitching matchup of Stephen Strasburg and Justin Verlander; on how, perhaps more unexpectedly, both struggled in the first inning, each giving up two runs; and how they both settled, despite a tight strike zone and a steady stream of baserunners, into the familiar, soothing rhythms of solid-but-not-dominant pitching performances. (There was a little meditation, too, on the already-iconic Verlander leg throw.) Strasburg struck out seven, and Verlander, with his six, cleared the record for the most postseason punch outs of all time.

In the sixth, Verlander pitched his first clean inning of the game, and Strasburg escaped unscathed from a Yuli Gurriel double and an intentional walk of Yordan Alvarez. Through six, and the two teams were knotted at 2-2; Strasburg, with 114 pitches, was surely done for the night, and Verlander would just as surely be coming in for the top of the seventh.

As the broadcast faded to commercial, I settled into my nest of blankets. I know what this game is, I thought, like someone who doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.

***

The seventh inning, for whatever reason, always carries with it a sort of mystique. It’s the time when you rush to grab your last beers, when everyone stretches and you hear the creaking of your sad, aging joints, when the strange little ritual of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is performed. It doesn’t have quite the tension of the eighth and ninth, but the mood is clearly distinct from, say, the fifth; if you’re at the game, you’re probably a little tired, a little out of it, getting a little chilly. On midsummer nights, it’s around the time the sun fades away. And ever since I witnessed the life-changing devil magic of the Jose Bautista Bat Flip Inning, I’ve been unable to stop myself from paying a little more attention when the seventh rolls around. It’s usually normal, just another inning in another baseball game. But you never know. You never know when the fabric of the game will begin to rip — or when it might be rent asunder. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s been a great postseason. But…

Baseball fans have been treated to an excellent month of ballgames. The NL Wildcard was an instant classic, and three matchups in the divisional round went the distance. Washington pitched historically well in the NCLS, and on the other side of the bracket, two of the best teams in baseball battled in an entertaining war of attrition, a back and forth set that climaxed with José Altuve’s walk-off homer in Game 6. Thus far, we’ve been spoiled.

But you’d be forgiven for thinking it hasn’t felt that way. As baseball reaches its annual crescendo, the sport’s collective focus has often drifted away from the games on the field. The partial un-juicing of the ball emerged as a dominant storyline early in the postseason, right alongside the usual complaints about extended commercial breaks and out-of-touch announcers blathering on far-flung networks. Then, as the league championships kicked off, ESPN’s T.J. Quinn released a disturbing piece detailing how Angels team employees not only failed to intervene on Tyler Skaggs‘ drug use but actually abetted it in his final days. Reading the news, you may well conclude that the league itself has lost the ability to sway the narrative in a way that reflects positively on the enterprise.

Unfortunately, the pattern continued; Game 1 of the World Series began under a cloud of a different sort. In the aftermath of Houston’s dramatic, exuberant ALCS win over the Yankees, assistant general manager Brandon Taubman used the occasion to rub salt in a wound. With three women reporters standing nearby, Taubman, cigar in hand, loudly and repeatedly directed a message their way: “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so [expletive] glad we got Osuna!”

On the surface, it’s a curious message: Altuve only had to save the day because closer Roberto Osuna had coughed up a ninth-inning lead. The context, however, is damning. Osuna is only an Astro because the club was able to acquire him on the cheap while he served a suspension for domestic violence. One of the women in question has previously come under fire from Taubman for the timing of her Osuna-related tweets. That she was wearing a purple anti-domestic violence bracelet at the time adds a jolt of nastiness to already reprehensible behavior.

By now you know the details of what followed. How Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein reported the news; that Houston vehemently denied the incident took place, and questioned Apstein’s credibility, when multiple other journalists from other outlets corroborated Apstein’s account; and the Astros’ late and inadequate walk-back of their initial statement. On a day when we should have been celebrating the best of baseball, hyping up Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer, we were instead left to grapple with the worst symptoms of its culture. As the Washington Post’s Barry Svulga succinctly summed it up: “It’s infuriating it’s 2019, and it’s the World Series, and we even need to be having this conversation. But clearly we do.”

In the end, baseball itself rescued the day. It wasn’t so much that a great game made us forget all that transpired in the previous 48 hours — as if anyone with a Twitter feed possibly could have anyway. No, a game cannot simply toss us an escape rope, and we shouldn’t want to move on so soon: Three women were wronged in an incident symptomatic of a broader problem; basic decency demands that we ask baseball to better itself.

What a game can do is remind us why we care in the first place, why we’re bothering with reading and listening and talking about these problems within baseball’s ecosystem instead of anywhere else. For all that was wrong in the last few days, baseball reminded us of its virtues, of why we choose to spend our leisure time in this imperfect space. Read the rest of this entry »

The connection between past and present is more durable in baseball than in other sports, and the link is particularly apparent during the World Series. We’ve had nearly 120 of these now, and the classics are a constant presence in contemporary broadcasts. Seemingly every inning, we hear about great games from earlier eras or learn how X is the first player to do Y in the World Series since 1950-something.

If there’s any problem in this connection with the past, it’s that so much of the discourse focuses on the games from the so-called Golden Era at the expense of more recent history. To an extent, that’s a function of time; however great the 2016 World Series may have been, it’s difficult to place those games into historical perspective. Sometimes, memories must marinate.

But that shouldn’t stop us from trying. Below, I recounted each of the World Series’ from the 21st century, and attempted to rank them from least to most compelling. It’s a subjective list — could it be anything else? — but however you order it, it’s clear that we’ve had our share of great matchups lately. More than anything though, at the dawn of the 2019 World Series, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at the previous 19 matchups. After all, we had a lot of fun back then. It’d be a shame if we forgot the details.

19. 2007: Red Sox over Rockies in Four

Entering the series, Colorado was the best story in sports. With a record of 77-72, the Rockies were 6 1/2 games out of first with barely two weeks to play in the regular season. From there, they took 12 of 13 down the stretch, won a one-game playoff, and swept consecutive series to reach their first championship.

Reality struck immediately. Dustin Pedroia led off the bottom half of Game 1 with a homer over the Green Monster and the Sawx boat-raced their guests 13-1. Games 2 and 4 were one-run contests, but this was ultimately a matchup between the best team in the American League and a .500ish squad no longer riding a historical hot streak, and it felt like it.

Series Minutiae: Bobby Kielty only hit one homer during the regular season and had just one at-bat in the series, but it was a big one: His solo shot in Game 4 proved to be both the winning run in the game and the last at-bat in his big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

On May 23, the Washington Nationals lost a matinee to the Mets in heartbreaking fashion, taking a lead 4-3 with a three-run eighth inning only to give up three runs of their own in the bottom of the frame. The loss dropped the Nationals to 19-31, a whopping 10 games back of the division-leading Phillies. They had been outscored by 40 runs on the season, and Dave Martinez’s seat was getting hot in only his second year as manager.

On Tuesday night, the Nationals will play in the World Series. It’s a change in fortune so extreme that it begs for explanation, and at first glance the explanation is easy. The Nationals have star power but lack depth, the exact kind of team “built for October.” Their starting lineup and top four starting pitchers are phenomenal; the less said about the backups and bullpen, the better. The kind of Nationals team losing 6-4 on a Tuesday afternoon in Queens is simply not the same team playing now.

That’s a convenient explanation, but it’s also wrong. Stephen Strasburg threw seven innings that day, and no regular had the day off. Wander Suero was the only reliever to pitch, and he wasn’t one of the relievers who weighed the Nationals down this year; he had a 4.54 ERA and 3.07 FIP over 71.1 innings, a solid season for a middle reliever.

No, the Nationals sent out their best, their co-ace starter backed by the A-squad, and they lost to a Mets team playing Adeiny Hechavarría, Carlos Gómez, and Juan Lagares all at once. That same team survived the Brewers, outlasted the Dodgers, and walked all over the Cardinals on their way to the first World Series appearance in franchise history. The convenient story isn’t always the right one. Washington simply started playing better.

After that bleak day in May, the Nations went 74-38 to finish the regular season. They outscored their opponents by 189 runs, scoring the most runs in the National League and allowing the third-least. The talent at the top of the roster shone through; the combined brilliance of Strasburg, Max Scherzer, Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto, and all the rest was so great that no amount of bullpen incompetence or lack of bench depth (36-year-old Howie Kendrick played the second-most innings at third base for them this year) could hold the team down.

Shockingly, that 74-38 record wasn’t the best in baseball. The Houston Astros, their World Series opponents, went 74-37 over the same stretch, a scant half-game ahead. They scored four fewer runs than the Nationals and allowed one more. The two hottest teams in baseball are facing off in the World Series, and if you don’t think about it too literally, you could even say they’re constructed from the same blueprint. Read the rest of this entry »

After what was otherwise a fairly quiet affair punctuated by the occasional home run, the Houston Astros won Game 6 of the American League Championship Series 6-4 on a walkoff home run from José Altuve. Houston takes the series four games to two, and avoids a high-stakes Game 7 that would have left Gerrit Cole unavailable in the World Series until the third game.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start for the Yankees as Houston’s first entrant in the bullpen battle, Brad Peacock, quickly dispatched DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge, and Gleyber Torres with seven pitches. Chad Green opened for New York and didn’t perform as well in his half of the inning as Peacock did in his. Green was perhaps fortunate to escape a rather pedestrian slider to Altuve with only a double, but he was less lucky with a high, very inside fastball to Yuli Gurriel, which the first baseman turned on for a home run to give the Astros an early 3-0 lead. That high, inside fastball isn’t usually that dangerous for a pitcher; there were only 13 home runs hit this year by right-handed hitters swinging at a four-seamer in Statcast’s inside and high-inside “chase” zones. Coincidentally enough, Gurriel had one of those home runs, comfortably turning on a sorta-fastball from Trevor Williams. This might have been one of the highest-leverage of those since Kit Keller’s.

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NEW YORK — The Yankees may not win this year’s American League Championship Series. They may not become the 14th team to rally from a three-games-to-one deficit in a best-of seven, or the eighth to do so by finishing the job on the road — particularly against an Astros team with the majors’ best record and an historically powerful offense. But in the wake of a demoralizing Game 4 loss full of missed opportunities, sloppy defense, and the sudden end of CC Sabathia’s career, they met manager Aaron Boone’s immediate goal of sending the series back to Minute Maid Park with a 4-1 victory that featured strong work by starter James Paxton and a four-run first inning against Justin Verlander, featuring a pair of homers by DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks.

“He’s got to go out and pitch well and set the tone for us,” Boone said of Paxton prior to the game, “because we’ve got to get on that plane and go back to Houston.”

The tone early on Friday evening was all too reminiscent of Thursday’s late-inning sloppiness. Second baseman Gleyber Torres, who made errors in each of the final two innings of Game 4, mishandled leadoff hitter George Springer‘s grounder, which had slipped under Paxton’s glove, though the ball was scored a single. Springer then took second on a passed ball by Gary Sánchez, advanced to third on Jose Altuve’s grounder, and scored on a wild pitch. It was an all-too-familiar story for Paxton, whose 29 first-inning runs allowed in 29 starts tied for the major league lead.

That was all the Astros would get from him, however. Both Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel scorched line drives to the outfield —  98.4 mph for the former to left, with Brett Gardner chasing it down, and 96.8 for the latter to center, but right at Hicks — and so Paxton escaped by allowing just one run. He’d failed to get ahead of any of the five batters he faced, gotten just one swinging strike on a total of 23 pitches, and his defense looked anything but sharp. With the Yankees desperately needing length given their plans for an all-bullpen Game 6, it was not an encouraging beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Yankees’ 8-3 loss in Game 4 of the ALCS did not eliminate them, but between their missed opportunities early (stranding five runners in scoring position in the first five innings) and their sloppiness late (four errors over the final four innings), the game had an air of finality about it. Nowhere was that more true than in the case of CC Sabathia, who departed due to a shoulder injury in what will stand as the final appearance of a 19-year major league career that may well be capstoned by a plaque in Cooperstown.

On Friday morning, the Yankees announced that Sabathia had experienced a subluxation of his shoulder joint and replaced him on the roster with righty Ben Heller. The move means that he would not be allowed to be reactivated for the World Series, almost certainly a moot point given the condition of his shoulder, to say nothing of the Yankees’ precarious position. Sabathia, who appeared to be in good spirits during a pregame press conference on Friday despite pain that he described as “pretty intense,” said that he would “maybe get an MRI after we get back from Houston” and that he doesn’t know yet whether he will need surgery.

Dropped into a difficult situation in his second relief appearance of the series and just the fourth of his career — runners on second and third with no outs in the top of the eighth, with the Yankees already down 6-3 — Sabathia was victimized by the first of Gleyber Torres‘ two errors when Yordan Alvarez’s chopper deflected off the second baseman’s right hand as he positioned himself to throw home; Alex Bregman scored on the play, and Alvarez was safe at first. After retiring Carlos Correa on a soft liner to right field, one in which Aaron Judge nearly doubled Yuli Gurriel off second base, Sabathia hit Robinson Chirinos on the left elbow with a pitch, loading the bases. He got Aledmys Diaz to pop up to shallow right, keeping Gurriel from scoring, but after missing inside on a 1-1 cutter to George Springer, Sabathia grimaced, and both manager Aaron Boone and head athletic trainer Steve Donohue came to the mound.

According to Sabathia, his shoulder popped during his last pitch to Diaz: “I just felt like when I released the ball, my shoulder kind of went with it.” In other words, he pitched through a partial separation when he faced Springer, throwing a first-pitch cutter that reached 91.2 mph.

After throwing one warm-up pitch to check if he could continue, Sabathia told Boone and Donohue, “I’m done,” shook his head, and then departed to a heartfelt ovation from the Yankee Stadium crowd as well as both dugouts. The FS1 broadcast showed both Springer and Gerrit Cole paying their respects, then a slump-shouldered Sabathia covering his face with his glove, understandably overcome with emotion but — and maybe this is just a scribe projecting — ever so slightly tipping his cap to the crowd even as he did. It wasn’t easy to watch, and you’re by no means obligated to, but here’s the whole scene: Read the rest of this entry »