Just as we all predicted in the run-up to the World Series, relief pitching had a hand in determining the outcome. Though starting pitchers contributed admirably to relief efforts (two-thirds of a scoreless inning for the Astros, six scoreless for the Nationals), real relievers had to take the stage occasionally. And after you strip out those innings by starters, a trend emerges.

The Nationals bullpen was bad. That’s no shock — they were bad all year, and they were facing one of the best hitting teams of all time. Strip out Patrick Corbin’s four innings of lights-out relief, and Joe Ross’ two scoreless innings earlier in the series, and the balance of the bullpen recorded a 5.51 ERA, with as many walks as strikeouts. They allowed four home runs in only 16 and a third innings. Fernando Rodney’s line looks like a work of comedy — two innings, no strikeouts, six walks. It was more or less what every Nationals fan feared going into the series.

But if the Nationals bullpen was bad, the Astros bullpen was a full-fledged disaster. When the Astros needed relief innings, one of the best bullpens of the regular season simply wasn’t up to the task. Over 21 and a third innings, they recorded a 5.91 ERA and a 5.37 FIP. They kept their heads above water on the non-contact front, with 24 strikeouts and only 13 walks, but also gave up four home runs. Eight Houston relievers appeared in the series, and seven of them allowed runs.

But even that grim statistical record undersells things. Houston’s bullpen also allowed three unearned runs, while Washington’s pen allowed none. That leaves the Astros with a 7.17 RA/9 out of the bullpen, a number that almost doesn’t look like a baseball statistic. The Astros bullpen put together a 3.75 ERA in the regular season, and a 4.24 FIP. As recently as the ALCS, they’d looked like a cohesive unit, with a 4.12 ERA and 4.80 FIP — not great, but enough to get by against the fearsome Yankee offense. In the World Series, it all crumbled. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

***

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Nationals’ well-earned World Series victory, the Nationals players they’re happiest for, the a strange, all-road-wins series, the brilliance of Zack Greinke, the decisions of A.J. Hinch (including a bad bunt, pulling Greinke, using Will Harris, and not using Gerrit Cole), Max Scherzer’s high-wire act, the futures of the Nationals and Astros, the free agencies of Cole, Stephen Strasburg, and Anthony Rendon, Scott Boras owning the offseason, which franchise without a championship will be the next to break through, and which team deserves to be named the team of the decade, then close by discussing bat-carrying, playing loud, and an upcoming brief break for Ben.

Audio intro: The Kinks, "Salvation Road"
Audio outro: Lou Reed, "Halloween Parade"

Link to Ben on the future of the Astros
Link to Ben on playing loud
Link to Ben on the World Series free-agent trio
Link to Ben on World Series rosters sticking together
Link to order The MVP Machine

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

8:05	David Laurila: Hello fellow baseball fans. Let’s get this thing started.

8:05	Dan Szymborski: Greetings chatters and chatees.

8:06	Dan Szymborski: The end. The end of baseball.

8:06	David Laurila: Don’t know what we’re going to see tonight, but I’m rooting for a nail-biter with no ump-show controversies.

8:07	Dan Szymborski: Unless he’s signed with a team, no way King Felix doesn’t get to throw out a first pitch in this case.

Read the rest of this entry »