When Pitchers Implode

There are certain unstoppable forces in this world. Some of them are acts of nature, like hurricanes and tornadoes. There’s also death, taxes, and reality television — inevitable, all of them. In baseball, there’s the bat of Mike Trout and the glove of Francisco Lindor. There’s the fastball of Noah Syndergaard and the cutter of Kenley Jansen. In the baseball present, these are facts of life, threatened only by the natural corrective measures of health and the passage of time.

While these unimpeachable laws pervade the game, there are times when events fail to obey the natural order of things. Times when Jansen’s cutter doesn’t cut or when Lindor makes an error. Or, for example, when the third out of an inning — a frequent occurrence on any given day in a season — appears unlikely to ever arrive.

Two clubs, the Washington Nationals and Seattle Mariners, suffered from this particular sort of chaos this weekend. The Nationals are good. Unfortunately, the pitcher who started for them on Saturday isn’t — or isn’t any longer. The Mariners are also pretty good. Unfortunately, with one of their best pitchers on the mound on Sunday, they failed to produce a third out in the last, most important inning of their game in Anaheim.

Jeremy Guthrie, by all reasonable measures, has had a good career. His outing on Saturday marked his 14th individual year in which he’d made an appearance in the majors. He’s thrown more than 1700 innings and made more than $43 million by playing a game. He won a World Series with the Royals. Guthrie has a reputation of being a standout human being, as well. At age 38, Guthrie has already lived a full and exciting life. His WAR, or his FIP, or his win total, mean little in the face of all of that.

He turned 38 on Saturday. On that same day, he allowed 10 runs in less than an inning — the game’s first innings — of what may very well have been his final start.

The Phillies aren’t a great offensive team. “Great” is a relative term, though. Major-league hitters are all great relative to the human population — and Guthrie, for his past, spent last year putting up a 6.57 ERA against Triple-A batters. So the fact that he even got a start at the highest level this year is an accomplishment. But the Phillies probably represented an easier task for him than, say, the Cubs or the Dodgers. Again, though: big-league hitters can knock around balls over the heart of the plate, and the Phillies did just that. Enny Romero, who follow Guthrie, would offer up some meatballs of his own before the damage was finally done.

Guthrie’s advanced age (for a ballplayer, that is) and the resulting deterioration of his stuff played a role here, but luck did as well. The ball that Cesar Hernandez hit for a leadoff double, for instance, only goes for a hit about 55% of the time. Had that been an out, perhaps the inning proceeds much differently. It didn’t, though, and the resulting offensive explosion was torrential. Even the two outs that Guthrie induced, fly balls from Maikel Franco and Freddy Galvis, were sac flies that brought runs home.

“I was always one pitch away,” Guthrie told the Washington Post. “But that one pitch just never came for me.”

So disappointing to let this team down tonight.This opportunity meant more to me than most in my career.Get the series tomorrow boys. #Nats

— Jeremy Guthrie (@TheRealJGuts) April 9, 2017

One pitch sometimes, indeed, never does come. Guthrie’s career ERA of 4.42 tells that story. The one pitch betrays even the best at times. Just ask Clayton Kershaw, who ceded three home runs for the first time in his life over the weekend.

You might also Casey Fien and Edwin Diaz, who combined to surrender seven runs in the ninth inning on Sunday to blow a game and allow the Angels to sweep the Mariners.

Sometimes, the pitches just aren’t there. Sometimes you walk Ben Revere, who’s only done that in 4.5% of his career plate appearances. Diaz, one of the brightest young stars in all of pitching, walked away with a titanic -.919 WPA for his outing.

He too was unlucky, though. Two of the hits he allowed seemed aided by the baseball gods themselves. Yunel Escobar’s double skipped off the dirt in front of home plate and down the right-field line, even though Diaz had done his job and gotten Escobar to hammer the ball into the ground. Albert Pujols hit a ground ball right towards the Danny Valencia, but it found room under his glove and squirted into the outfield.

Sometimes that one pitch just isn’t there, and sometimes it shows up at the backstop, as it did for Diaz. Sometimes that one pitch is there after all, and it still finds grass. The Mariners are now 1-6, off to the worst start in the game. They’re a talented group. They’ll rebound, and they’ll win more than one game. Like the big inning, that rotting feeling of helplessness lives in that record. It lives in the gut on the pitchers who try with all their might to stop the bleeding and can’t.

Every team will deal with this over the course of the season, and they’ll all deal with it multiple times. The big inning is a fact of life in baseball, just like striking out with the bases loaded, and like the ninth inning fly ball that dies right at the wall into the center fielder’s glove. This isn’t the last big inning that Fien and Diaz will have to meander through.

It may very well have been the last big inning, and the last inning of any sort, for Guthrie. He could, theoretically, latch on as the long man in someone’s bullpen. All teams need arms and innings, and Guthrie, if nothing else, could still yet provide those. It will be laudable if he can soldier on, if he can take the ball for someone one more time, and get outs.

The big inning came for Guthrie, and it came for Fein and Diaz. It is the monster that stalks all pitchers.

It happens to the best. It may have happened for the final time for Jeremy Guthrie.