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.

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Five times, the Washington Nationals faced elimination from the 2019 postseason. Five times, they trailed in those games. And five times, they prevailed. The Washington Nationals are World Series Champions. They were 19-31 in the late days of May. They were down 3-1 in the Wild Card Game with Josh Hader coming in. They were down 3-1 in Game 5 against the Dodgers. They were down 2-1 yesterday, coming back to Houston after scoring just three runs in their three, first-ever World Series home games, and they were down 2-0 entering the seventh yesterday. But the Washington Nationals are World Series Champions. That’s how the story of the 2019 season ends.

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The game already promised to be a monumental one. It was a Game 7. It was a showdown between two of the game’s longest-tenured and best pitchers, Scherzer vs. Greinke: Max Scherzer, the overpowering madman risen from the grave of debilitating neck pain to pitch in the biggest game of his career, and Zack Greinke, the big acquisition of the trade deadline, the player who had once nearly left baseball due to anxiety now calmly preparing to take on the most anxiety-inducing situation in baseball. For the first time in history, all six previous games had been won by the road team, the Nationals and the Astros stunning each other and their home crowds by turns. The series win expectancy flipped over and over on itself. Now, though, it was a matter of one game.

Right from the outset, Greinke was masterful. He retired the side in the top of the first on just eight pitches. A slider for a lineout snagged by Alex Bregman, a changeup and a slider for a pair of weak groundouts. A swinging strike on a 68 mph curveball. And for six innings, the game was exactly that: Greinke’s. He controlled the edges of Jim Wolf’s pitcher-friendly strike zone, controlled the infield with his sure-handed fielding of each of the many balls hit his way, as if to accentuate the degree to which the game was steady in his grip. Through six innings, the Nationals managed just a single hit and a single walk. Any lead, with that kind of performance ongoing, would seem like a clear path to the championship.

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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.

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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:

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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 »

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 »

In a World Series that has been notable for its lack of drama — one lead change in five games, and the largest average margin of victory in at least a decade, as Tony Wolfe discovered — Kurt Suzuki owns the biggest swing of the bat. The 36-year-old backstop’s seventh-inning home run off Justin Verlander in Game 2, which broke a 2-2 tie, produced the highest WPA of any single play thus far, at least by our measures. Suzuki has been sidelined since the middle of Game 3 due to a right hip flexor strain, and at this writing, it’s not clear yet whether he will be able to help Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals in their quest to stave off elimination.

On Monday, Suzuki participated in on-field workouts and told reporters that he had been potentially available in an emergency during the two games that he missed, and that his condition was improving: “It feels better, obviously. I got some treatment and stuff like that, and it’s progressing… Going to do some stuff today and we’ll figure out more tonight after we get into Houston about tomorrow. Everything is looking good so far.”

Though he was behind the plate for just 17 of Strasburg’s 33 starts during the regular season — a situation that owed something to a bout of right elbow inflammation that limited the catcher to five September starts, only one of which was paired with Strasburg — Suzuki has caught all four of the 31-year-old righty’s postseason turns. The results have been stellar, as Strasburg has delivered a 2.16 ERA with 36 strikeouts and two walks in 25 innings. Suzuki’s contributions with the bat during that run have been few and far between; he went hitless in 16 plate appearances during the Division Series, was 0-for-17 in 21 PA for the postseason by the time he collected a single off Jack Flaherty in NLCS Game 3, and is batting just .100/.229/.200 in 35 PA this October.

Other aches and pains may be contributing to his struggles; he needed x-rays on his left hand as well as concussion tests after being hit on the wrist and then on the noggin by a single Walker Buehler pitch in Game 5 of the Division Series. Nonetheless, he’s done the heavy lifting behind the plate for the Nationals, starting 10 the team’s 15 postseason games and eight of their 10 wins. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2012, Stephen Strasburg didn’t pitch for Washington in the postseason after being shut down due to injury concerns. He did make his playoff debut in 2014, and in one start gave up two runs in five innings while striking out just two with a walk and a hit-by-pitch. It wasn’t a great start to his postseason career, but since that outing, Strasburg has been incredible. He made two starts against the Cubs in the NLDS in 2017. He went seven innings in the first one, striking out 10 and walking just one while giving up two unearned runs in a loss. In an elimination game later that series, Strasburg again went seven innings, this time striking out 12 against two walk and no runs in a Nationals victory. That 2017 NLDS gave everyone a taste of what Strasburg could do in the playoffs, and this year, he’s putting together one of the greatest postseason runs of all time with a chance to keep the Nationals title hopes alive tonight.

Strasburg first appeared this postseason in a season-saving relief outing in the Wild Card game in which his three shutout innings kept Washington within range before the offense could make a comeback and advance to the NLDS. Against the Dodgers in the next round, he struck out 10 batters in six innings with no walks and just one run to keep the Nationals from going down 0-2 in the five-game series. Then, in his only blip of the postseason, Strasburg gave up three runs in the first two innings of the deciding game against the Dodgers, but he allowed no runs over the next four as the Nationals won in 10 innings. He shut down the Cardinals with 12 strikeouts and no walks in seven innings in the third contest of a four-game NLCS sweep. Finally, in the second game of the World Series, Strasburg outdueled Justin Verlander and threw 114 pitches in six difficult innings to hold the Astros to two runs. Read the rest of this entry »