The Math Behind Pulling Nathan Eovaldi
Nathan Eovaldi had it all working. Through his first five innings of work, he had a spectacular game brewing: seven strikeouts, two hits, no walks, and no runs. The Red Sox were already ahead 3–0. Everything was coming up Boston.
After a strikeout to begin the sixth inning, Eovaldi faced the top of the Yankees’ order. Suddenly, things got tough. Anthony Rizzo clobbered a home run. Aaron Judge followed with an infield single, narrowly beating out a throw from Xander Bogaerts. Suddenly, the tying run was at the plate — and it was freaking Giancarlo Stanton, who had already doinked a ball off of the Green Monster earlier in the night.
Ten years ago, that would be the introduction to an article about one of two things: either Eovaldi’s heroic stand where he faced down his doom and retired Stanton and Joey Gallo, or the Yankees’ dramatic comeback from a 3-0 deficit. But last night, Alex Cora went to the bullpen.
It wasn’t a pitch count issue, to say the least. Eovaldi had thrown only 71 pitches, carving through the New York lineup with great speed. It wasn’t a handedness issue; Cora went with a righty to replace him. It wasn’t even a homer-proneness issue, a handy thing to keep an eye on when the tying run stands at the plate: Eovaldi induces more grounders than does Ryan Brasier, the pitcher who replaced him, and has allowed fewer home runs per inning pitched, both in 2021 and his career.
This substitution was squarely in the times-through-the-order camp. Rizzo and Judge were the first two Yankees that Eovaldi faced a third time, and the stakes had gone up since those at-bats. When Rizzo strode to the plate, the game’s leverage index stood at 0.66; the results of that plate appearance, on average, would change the two teams’ odds of prevailing by less than a random plate appearance. After the home run, Judge stepped up with a 0.89 LI — again, less impactful than a random plate appearance. After he reached base, though, Stanton’s at-bat ballooned to 1.65, nearly twice as important as the average batter-pitcher confrontation.
In other words, this one really mattered. Against Rizzo, the payoff to choosing the best possible pitcher for the spot was low. Against Judge, that was still mostly true. Raise the stakes, and Cora suddenly made a move. Given that backdrop, it’s reasonable to speculate that he thought Brasier was a better bet to get the next out all along but wanted to give Eovaldi some extra rope, with an eye on preserving the bullpen, if the lead wasn’t huge.
Was Brasier actually a better bet? It comes down to how much of a penalty you think Eovaldi faced. There’s essentially no dispute that the penalty exists: Rob Mains tracked it through time earlier this year and found that it’s always been there, and potentially to a greater magnitude than today. What magnitude, exactly? The most authoritative look at the subject puts that penalty at roughly eight points of wOBA. Conveniently, it also splits pitchers into high-pitch-count and low-pitch-count groups and finds no difference, which means we can mostly ignore the fact that Eovaldi had been efficient through his first five innings.
That gives us a first pass at the stakes of the move: Eovaldi allowed a .298 wOBA to all batters this year; Brasier checked in at .319. This suggests that Eovaldi would still be the better choice. Cut and dry, right?
Unsurprisingly, I don’t think it quite works that way. A few factors combine to make the decision tougher. First, one that might have mattered, though I don’t think it should: Eovaldi has displayed a large times-through-the-order penalty in 2021 — 41 points of wOBA the third time through. That’s exaggerated by facing the toughest part of lineups disproportionately often in that context, but still, that’s a big gap, and it’s cavernous over the course of his career: 65 points of wOBA.
I’m skeptical how much that matters. Splits like this take a notoriously long time to become reliable. For example, hitters have a .359 BABIP their third time facing Eovaldi, compared to .300 and .288 the first two times through. They’ve turned 8% of their infield grounders into hits, as compared to 4.6% the first time and 6.9% the second time. Maybe he’s been worse, but it’s far from clear that you should expect this extra-large gap to continue.
Another point in favor of Eovaldi: he throws five pitches and varies his timing, as you no doubt heard on the broadcast last night. To the extent that the TTOP is about familiarity, you’d expect those factors to give him an edge. I haven’t seen much evidence that a broad pitch mix alleviates a pitcher’s disadvantage, but to the extent that it matters for Eovaldi, it’s to his credit, not detriment.
The reason to remove him comes down to one of two things: the identity of the next batter, and a specific home run penalty based on times through the order. Stanton is a great fastball hitter, but more than that, he’s a low fastball hitter. Eovaldi locates his fastball all around the zone; Brasier is a four-seam, top-of-the-zone type pitcher. Could this matter?
I’m again skeptical for several reasons. First, while Stanton is a good low-ball hitter by repute, he’s also just a good hitter. Since 2015, he has a .551 wOBA when he puts a low fastball into play, but also .548 on mid-height fastballs and .450 on high ones. He’s simply a punishing slugger to any part of the zone. Second, Brasier isn’t better than Eovaldi at avoiding the dangerous parts; 26.4% of the pitches he’s thrown this year have been fastballs in the lower two-thirds of the strike zone, Stanton’s launching pad, compared to 21.5% for Eovaldi. If we’re worried about batter identity in particular, that probably favors Eovaldi rather than the other way around.
One last look: Do starters give up extra home runs their third time through? To check, I looked at home run rates for starting pitchers each time through the order and calculated an expected home run rate for each plate appearance based on the pitcher’s and batter’s 2021 numbers and regressed platoon splits. Then I looked to see how many home runs were actually hit in those appearances:
| TTO | xHR% | HR% | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 3.32% | 3.30% | -0.02% |
| 2nd | 3.37% | 3.47% | 0.10% |
| 3rd | 3.53% | 3.90% | 0.37% |
If you want to get very granular, I suppose you could point to this. A huge chunk of that third-time penalty comes in the form of extra home runs; if an extra 0.4% of random plate appearances turned into home runs, average wOBA would go up by seven points, close to the eight-point penalty cited above. In a spot where a home run is the worst possible outcome and one of the best home run hitters in the game is at the plate, I can see why the Red Sox opted to fight that penalty.
I wouldn’t have done it with Brasier, though. The Red Sox have other, better relievers. He’s more middle reliever than high-leverage arm, and I think that any of the other relievers Boston used in the game would have been a better option. I also think leaving Eovaldi in would have been a better option; even the third time through, I like his odds of suppressing hard contact better than Brasier’s.
In the end, Brasier got an out, albeit when Stanton smashed a laser beam so hard off of the Monster that Judge was thrown out at the plate. It was a 115-mph, 400-foot missile, and it more or less sealed the game.
Was Cora right or wrong? I don’t think it’s so cut and dry. Leaving Eovaldi in or removing him was a move that would only fractionally change their odds of winning. Cora pulled him; were I managing the Sox, I’d have left him in. Neither of us, though, would have wanted Stanton to make the hardest contact of the game, and elevate it no less. That’s why arguing about managerial moves is so fun and yet so inconsequential in the final accounting of things: we’re arguing over single-digit moves in wOBA or fractions of a percentage point of home run rate, while baseball is played on the field and strange outcomes happen all the time.
Was it a good move? I think not. But it was pretty close to a neutral move, and it’s notable that baseball has moved so far toward pulling starters early that teams now might be doing it too often.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Cora was right right right! The Blue Jays would have been in the game instead of the Yankees had Montoya not kept starters in for the third time through. N=1, but compelling, at least for Jays fans.
I got voted down on FanGraphs for suggesting it was a bad idea to let Judge and Stanton hit third time through???
I upvoted you, but I assume the downvotes were for the Blue Jays statement?
He was wrong. Brazier is nowhere near the pitcher Eovaldi is.
I was at the Robbie Ray vs Yanks game and was losing my mind at them not pulling Ray earlier. Not because of the TTOP in a vacuum but because Ray had been giving hard contact all night with the jays getting lucky with hard hit balls hit directly to outfielders and warning track fly balls all night. In that scenario the TTOP would be enough for me not to want to keep pushing my luck. But instead he didnt even have someone warming up when he started getting in trouble. Absolutely inexcusable.
Good piece, and I agree with you that Cora was too eager to pull him. This is the best paragraph for me:
“Ten years ago, that would be the introduction to an article about one of two things: either Eovaldi’s heroic stand where he faced down his doom and retired Stanton and Joey Gallo, or the Yankees’ dramatic comeback from a 3-0 deficit. But last night, Alex Cora went to the bullpen.”
In other words, ten years ago we as spectators would’ve gotten to see the continuation of Eovaldi’s story in this game. We would’ve gotten added tension based on our emotional attachment to a pitcher we’ve seen for five plus frames. In the sixth, facing the order for a third time, with the tying run at the plate in the form of one of the best pure home run hitters in recent memory, Eovaldi would’ve either succeeded or failed, but his story would’ve kept being written by him and him alone.
What we got yesterday instead was Eovaldi’s story being abruptly cut short, leaving his performance feeling incomplete, because neither we as fans nor Eovaldi as the pitcher got to the end of said story. Some reliever none of us watching the game had any real connection to (because he hadn’t pitched yet) came in, threw eight pitches, got two outs, and then was taken out himself for another pitcher. That pitcher was taken out for another one, and then again and again until the game that initially belonged to Eovaldi ended up being diluted into just another unsatisfying story.
In simple terms, this was like if Luke Skywalker died during the initial attempt to escape the Death Star in A New Hope, well before the climax of the story. With the main character (Eovaldi) removed, all of a sudden the stakes of the game were drastically reduced. At least for me, a neutral fan who wanted to watch some good baseball.
Teams play to win the game, and will use any strategy that even marginally improves their chances in elimination game. I wouldn’t expect managers to make decisions based on what will create the best “story” of the night. Yes it’s less entertaining, but the best strategies usually are.
It’s like everyone has forgotten that winning the game is the most important thing. When did this change in mindset happen?
If anything, winning is MORE team-oriented now
Baseball is entertainment. It’s meant to be fun and engaging, and that’s how I look at it. Teams are obviously going to push the game to its limit in order to win as much as possible while being as efficient as possible, but that doesn’t make it a good product to watch as a fan.
Eh… storylines are reactive and always formed only in retrospect. There are enough that (amazingly!) every game gets a storyline by the time the morning paper comes out. Truthfully, they’re not real.
A good example is that quote from the article you pulled, “Ten years ago, that would be the introduction to an article about one of two things…” Well, no not at all necessarily. Eovaldi could have given up two hits got a weak foul fly, a groundout and let in 1-2 runs or some similar nondescript inning end and “the story” would still be about the reliever in the 8th or the offense in the 7th or “Gerrit Cole’s Wild Card Dud” or Eovaldi’s strong start.
While it’s true that pulling him removed the possibility of those two particular storylines in no way did it remove the possibility of fun and engaging baseball.
Oh I’m not complaining that Cora did what he thought was best for the Sox to win, I’m just lamenting the fact that those strategies create a much worse product and hurt the game.
There is certainly a tension between the narrative elements and maximizing winning, but that tension isn’t new, and it has always existed. It might have come in the 7th or 8th instead of the 6th, but it’s always been present, and historically managers have been prone to let the storyline overwrite their good judgement (see: Matt Harvey, etc).
The modern pitcher isn’t throwing a complete game in almost any circumstances, so it’s just a question of when your story gets interrupted.
It’s wild that in 2021 I’m reading on an article on a supposed advanced analytics baseball website saying a manager should’ve left their starter in to face one of the most powerful hitters in baseball history for a third time.
Eovaldi was rolling, his stuff and command were both sharp as hell. The TTO penalty is meant to be applied over large samples; if a pitcher makes 30 starts and you keep him from facing the order three times in all thirty, you’ll be right more often than not. There are cases, however, where a starter is pitching so well that he’ll always remain a team’s best option to get outs, even with the TTO penalty being applied. Yesterday was one of those.
Overall, a good starter is a better pitcher than any reliever a team has. A good starter has the pitch mix, command, and extra skills to give batters trouble multiple times in the same game. That applies to Eovaldi and the Sox pen quite well.
Unfortunately, you’re wrong on this one. You should head back to a lot of the breakdowns around last year’s Snell decision: from a purely analytical perspective, it was right, as was the decision to remove Eovaldi. In both instances, however, the reliever choice which followed appears to be suboptimal, but we gloss over the debate and focus on whether removing the starter was a good idea or not instead.
There was some great work both here at FanGraphs and over at Baseball Prospectus demonstrating that there is no degree of dominance where you can -expect- a pitcher to overcome the TTO penalty. That doesn’t mean he won’t, but there are lots and lots of instances of guys dealing beyond what Eovaldi – or even Snell- were doing, and then getting lit up.
The reality is that there’s basically no such thing as pitching momentum. Every time a pitcher comes out for a new inning, you should essentially recalibrate your expectations for how he’s going to pitch to what they were before the game started. This cuts in both directions – a guy who gets whacked in one inning will routinely go on and pitch well for the following 3-4 innings if allowed to do so (you see this most often with the 1st inning, because thats when the incentive to let the guy keep pitching exists). The only exception is when you can see a marked change in the pitcher’s actual stuff (eg velocity drop or the like due to fatigue or injury) that may change your expectations going forward.
These things run foul of our natural desire to see patterns and storylines and trends, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If your answer before the game to “Should Eovaldi pitch to Stanton the 3rd time through the order with a man on base?” was No, then it just simply doesn’t matter if he was throwing a no-hitter and that guy got on via error or walk: inning to inning dominance is not meaningfully predictive.
That reality sucks, but it’s not gonna change.
Momentum is probably the most inadequately measured concept in baseball analytics.
It’s fair to say that if it exists, it is small, and it is unlikely to be > than the TTO penalty, but it’s heroic to say that it doesn’t exist.
I agree with a lot of the points here. Dan’s as well. The issue with analytics trying to quantify momentum is that it is very hard, if not impossible to do. How are you going to quantify what batters or pitchers have “momentum?” Maybe some pitchers never feel momentum, whereas other pitchers do. Some pitchers might pitch better under pressure, some pitchers might pitch worse. When you use a sample size of the whole league in x situations you cannot really separate a few guys and be like “well these guys pitched well under pressure” and “these guys didn’t” because the sample size wouldn’t be big enough and how are you going to differentiate the pressure/momentum moments. A simple x lead in x inning wouldn’t work, because the importance of a game in early May versus the importance of a playoff game is a pretty large gap.
Stanton has always hit well in the playoffs. Maybe he focuses more? Maybe he doesn’t, maybe it is just noise. The odds are it is probably noise. But to say simply that momentum and clutch performers do not exist because the math says they do not exist is also not correct. You can maybe say that we cannot state who is a clutch performer and who isn’t, because across a data set there hasn’t been proven to be any noticeable difference, but that doesn’t mean that certain individuals do not have a next level of focus or performance. Take the NBA playoffs as an example. You can see clear as day that guys are trying much, much harder. Wouldn’t some guys by the same logic be trying harder in baseball? Does trying harder make you better or worse in baseball? All questions I cannot answer, it is probably different with different individuals. Should you be making coaching decisions off of this? Probably not, you should probably be listening to the math. But I have always found it disingenuous when people act as if there are no other factors at play, just analytics.
A good example would be Sosa, today. Seems clear he is putting pressure on himself and messing up. By that logic to me it would seem that some people would perform oppositely, and perform better.
Anyone who doesn’t believe players perform differently when under the gun is absolutely wrong. As a professional athlete who was in the arena it was easy to see who didn’t want to be there. The player who would hit an iron off the tee for fear of hitting a bad drive or would not be aggressive on the 20 footer because there was a chance of 3 putting. I catch a lot of flak here because I know baseball cannot be reduced to numbers. I am not going to claim that Xander Bogaerts is the best defensive SS in the game but last night, when it counted, he performed. Would a premier defender have made that one crucial play? Who can say?
That is very good synopsis of my views about analytics. Positioning defenders, of course it is better to put them where more balls are hit but replacing a very good pitcher with a lesser one simply because the good pitcher is beginning to turn over the lineup a third time is foolish. On Saturday, in a must win game, Cora yanked Houck after 5 innings of perfect baseball! What is happening?
This is a very well written response and something I think a lot of viewers struggle with.
Excellent comment. Eovaldi was rolling. Do people really think the Yankees were discouraged when Eovaldi was out and Brazier was in ? What happened last year when Blake Snell was pitching the game of his life and got yanked ? That didn’t work out too well did it ? When an Ace pitcher is pitching a terrific game, you give him more pitches. Judge had a lousy infield single. Let’s not pretend Eovaldi was struggling.
I would generally agree that if the other team is very happy you made a particular move, it may not be the best move to make.
So basically you are saying that the TTO is a real thing and the majority of the time you would be better off having them avoid hitters a 3rd time. But every now and then the pitcher will overcome the TTO penalty and continue to pitch well even 3+ times through the order.
That’s luck. What you are describing is luck.
I think one factor worth considering is Brasier was a late return from injury and the vast majority of opponent production came in his first few appearances. In his last 8 (of 12) he allowed no runs, 3 hits and 2 walks while striking out 8 and facing 26 total batters. Obviously that’s a tiny sample, but the team also has the benefit of practices to help make their decision.
If his stuff was consistently looking good in practice based on velocity, spin rate, placement and whatever else they might be tracking and if it was consistently carrying over into games it’s not crazy to think the team would be higher on him than publicly available data suggests they should be since they have additional information that isn’t publicly available to better inform them.
I think Cora blew it and got bailed out by Phil Nevin (also, I am among the 98% who learned that Phil Nevin is, or, was, back). Imagine the different takes on Cole, Eovaldi, and Cora/Boone today had the Yankees tied the game…especially in the northeastern press. Goodness.
I think a few things frequently get lost in these times thru the order, pulling a SP earlier in the postseason debates.
First – Ben – I applaud you for comparing Eovaldi’s numbers vs Brasier’s. Too often people get so hung up on a starter being x% less effective the third time thru that they fail to recognize that may still be better than your 4th or 5th best reliever. After all, relievers are just failed starters, right? And you can’t only use your top 3 relievers.
Second – This may not apply to last night’s wild card game since it is not a multi game series, but I think everyone underestimated how gassed a bullpen becomes in playoffs, and that they also suffer a (TTO) familiarity penalty in playoff series. Eovaldi is one of the best starters in all of baseball this year and you’re only going to let him throw 70 pitches per start? That strikes me as under utilizing a valuable asset. And if you plan to use your best RPs 4-6 times in a series then a familiarity penalty also applies to them. Prime example is Tampa repeatedly going to Nick Anderson and Pete Fairbanks in the playoffs last year while routinely pulling their good starters early.
It’s still weird to me how the familiarity penalty for relievers is not something that’s been written about a lot (if at all) on sites like Fangraphs or Prospectus, at least to my knowledge. I mean, logic would say that there are only so many times in a 3+ game series you can go to a reliever before opposing hitters figure out how to use his limited tools against him.
I would imagine that the paucity of matchups to examine would make such a study an exercise in small sample futility.
People have tried but no one has ever found any statistical evidence, even for the most extreme examples (starting pitchers going multiple times in a playoff series against the same team).
There’s just a complete lack of statistical evidence that pitcher familiarity exists over multi-game spans, as contrary to our expectations as that may be. That may mean it does exist but teams just don’t play each other repeatedly enough for it to show up, of course, but you need to take it with that kind of consideration.
This is interesting to read because in the last weeks of the season it always seems to come up regarding pitcher usage (for example, “why did the Brewers give the Dodgers a look at Hader and Ashby in their last series???”)
One thing that we need to try and do is move towards the debate about whether it was the right reliever or not instead of whether it was right to pull the starter.
This instance is very much like the World Series Game 6 / Snell decision, where the statistical evidence suggests that removing the starter is the right decision in a vacuum, but in both instances the manager’s choice of reliever is questionable. Everyone was so embroiled in the Snell decision that the fact that Nick Anderson had sucked for the previous 3 weeks was overlooked, and here Ben only briefly touches on the reality that Braiser was probably not the best choice in the Red Sox bullpen. In a high leverage situation, the best relievers on the Red Sox were a better choice than Eovaldi. He should have been removed, and he should have been replaced with someone better than Braiser.
100% agree with you here and I said the same thing back on the Snell article.
Cora and Cash got half the decision correct. Pulling Eovaldi wasn’t a bad decision, pulling Eo for Brasier was the bad decision. Just like pulling Snell wasn’t a bad decision but pulling Snell for Anderson specifically was.
“This may not apply to last night’s wild card game since it is not a multi game series”
I did wonder if, assessing the change to be a neutral choice, one deciding factor was the benefit of keeping Eovaldi on a low pitch count so that he might be ready for a quicker , fresher turnaround in the LDS.
That smacks a little of getting ahead of oneself, but they had long since chased the Yankees own starter and were never below a 70% win probability since the 2nd.
I think assessing it as a neutral move is pretty close to accurate. However, if the math points to no difference, I would think not pulling Eovaldi would ultimately be the correct move. Any reliever that comes in is going to have to face at least the next batter (Joey Gallo), and Brasier against Gallo is going to be less desirable than Eovaldi against Gallo, since Eovaldi’s platoon splits have been relatively small throughout his career.
If you bring in someone who’s significantly more likely to get the job done, like Barnes, than yeah, I think pulling Eovaldi is the right move. Otherwise, if the math is neutral, I would think you’d want to stick with Eovaldi here.
Why is this comments section full of people complaining about Eovaldi being taken out in a game they won?
Baffling.
I would guess the same armchair managers would be out with pitchforks and torches if he hadn’t been pulled until or after the result was in jeopardy. I don’t care about the aesthetics of it – it’s a one game playoff, you don’t have the luxury of saying oops and hoping you get the next one, instead the formula is get the lead and throw every good arm you have out there to keep hitters off balance and get those last innings.
To clarify – I am much more open to the question of Brasier being the right choice. In fact, I would speculate the correct strategy is to get the lead and work backwards through your bullpen, so you don’t get a Zach Britton situation
“Why is this comments section full of people complaining about Eovaldi being taken out in a game they won?”
A good outcome is not proof of a good process. By this logic, it was a bad decision to start Gerrit Cole since the Yankees lost. To be sure, it is definitely not a clear cut decision either way, but to use the result of the game as evidence that it was prudent to pull Eovaldi is a massive oversimplification.
I am fully aware that outcomes don’t excuse process. The point is that I don’t think it was poor process in the first place and also that people aren’t arguing against bad process that produced good outcomes, they are arguing, as stated in the article, against ambiguously merited process that produced good outcomes, which is a different discussion, and at least people on the one side of the ambiguous line have the result on their side!
The calculus in a playoff game, particularly a one game playoff is simply different from long series or the regular season. Once you get the lead you do not mess around with it, because if you lose it you’ll be seeing all hands on deck from the *other* team’s bullpen and you’re not likely to get it back.
Handed the lead in the middle innings of a wild card game, the smart thing to do is to not play with fire with pitch counts and third-times-through-the-order and having your guy pitching to the *only* player on the other team who was dialed in last night with the tying run at the plate. The smart thing is to do all hands on deck with the best bullpen guys you’ve got, keep hitters off balance, have a plan going in instead of having your coach make reactive decisions or is-he-tired-isn’t-he-tired subjective calls, and execute it. Call it the Rays/Brewers blueprint.
Again, I wouldn’t have gone with Brasier there, I would’ve put my best guy out there, but that’s a different question.
Because I didn’t care about who won or lost, I was watching as a neutral fan. And as a neutral fan, the starter is always far more interesting than any reliever who comes in.
For you. I personally enjoy seeing all of the different relievers. You get to see all kinds of cool deliveries, pitch movements, personalities on the mound…as an NL fan, I never get to see these players, so the opportunity to see as many as possible is amazing.
I do agree the “does he have enough left in the tank” is high drama, and the stuff most of our postseason memories are made of. Will always remember gassed Pedro and the WTF are they doing moment with Matt Harvey, and you’ll probably never get a Smoltz/Morris staredown again. It certainly is possible to go too far in the other direction, where the game basically boils down to who hits the first dinger then a parade of relievers for five innings.
Eovaldi was good, but just as easily could have been been a goat (and not the good kind) like Cole in the span of one more pitch. Let’s not forget he put up a clunker against the Yankees two starts ago and as Cole showed, all it takes is two bad pitches (and the Schwarber pitch was even a ball). Other than Whitlock ,Brasier was clearly Cora’s favorite in the pen towards the end of the season. Not really a surprising choice if you watched the Sox much in September and ass a little “narrative” to Cora’s thinking.
Robles too. Talk about a guy who flipped the script in September. Robles hasn’t allowed a run since 8/29 (13.2 innings) after looking washed both before and right after the trade.
Top of the lineup Eovaldi should be on a batter-by-batter leash. After Rizzo homer was the time to pull him.
Given it was probably reasonable, something extraneous might have been enough to sway my decision here. Cora likes to have flexibility for these series; and after the inning I’m sure he was happy at having kept Eovaldi’s pitch-count low. Anything to minimize the disadvantages of having to win a WC game.
Also, hearing the Yankees “had something” on Eovaldi, and he knew it. But that doesn’t actually happen in real life, right?
If there’s no proof of that, you can only go with the numbers. Google doesn’t have anything about your statement, so it’s probably a dumb fan rumor.
Their “having something on him” amounted to just 4 baserunners over 5.1 IP and 8 K’s. I shudder to think how they would have done if they had had nothing at all!
This seems like a very un-Fangraphsian take…
Its nice and all to look at abstractions at the season-level for individual pitchers and pitchers collectively, but I think one absolutely crucial aspect really hasn’t been sufficiently considered: Eovaldi failed completely against the first two people at the top of the order. Doesn’t that throw all abstractions out the window?
I’d be very curious to see a further analysis that looks at the 3rd time through the order stats after they’ve already faced 2 batters – segmented by whether they got outs or runs.
Hell, forget about 3rd time through, just look at pitcher performance for 1-on, 0 outs, after a home run and single to start an inning.
Or, just look at how everyone fully agrees that pulling Gerrit Cole was a good choice. He hadn’t yet reached his 3rd time through the order, but he had “lost it”. Perhaps so had Eovaldi.
my mistake – 1 out. My points still stand.
If it is a close call, as you describe between sticking with or pulling the starter, then you gotta trust your manager/pitching coach to have a feel for the situation and make the best in-game decision.
Also, it is probable that Evoaldi knew going into the game he’d be pulled at the first sign of trouble the third time through, and so pitched the first 2 times through differently and emptied his tank earlier.
Finally, this is a good pitvcher we’re talking about, not the Cy Young winner who was completely unhittable, so I wouldn’t compare this to the Snell/World Series decision.
I disagree. Eovaldi is a top 5 AL pitcher this year so he is squarely in the Snell camp. The situations are very comparable and I think Cash getting ripped a new arse while Cora was given a pass is directly tied to the subsequent win/loss result. Which is only to say that most baseball fans/talking heads are hypocritical lunatics whose loudest takes are formed entirely in hindsight. Weak sauce indeed.
Really glad Ben posted this today. Regardless of whether you agree with his opinion, Cora’s decision clearly merited a data-driven Fangraphs breakdown.
Can we call it getting Cashed?