I've talked about this several times but I'm a "teams don't win, they lose" type of guy. Rare are performances where someone goes above and beyond to accomplish in games. Far more likely are the times when one team just does what they are supposed to and the other team fails to. This isn't an indictment on those teams - if it were easy to always do what you were supposed to then everyone would do it - but it is a different way of looking at things. In baseball that means looking at a game and seeing players mostly getting hits because of pitches missing spots as opposed to great approaches, or conversely Ks happening more on ill advised swings then a great pitch sequence followed by a killer out pitch.
Playing this out all the way - here are the reasons the Rays lost the series
1) Half the line-up went dead. It's one thing to slump. It's another to watch 4 of your hitters go 8-65 with 2XBH and only 3BBs against a team who's pitching staff is merely ok and not at all top heavy (which can help them - see the Nats in 2019). This was highlighted by Brandon Lowe being especially awful going 0-18 with 9Ks. The fact they consistently scored is pretty amazing but also they should have blown the doors off the Red Sox in the series.
2) Cash accentuated the above problem. In the playoffs there is no room for loyalty or wishy-washiness. If a guy is struggling and looks bad doing it you gotta drop them in the line-up and let them sit there until they figure things out.* Ideally you drop everyone down but it was the Rays 3-4-5 (and 8) struggling so you can only do so much. Still Lowe should have been pulled from the 3 and dropped down to 6 or 7 and something new done in 3-4-5. He WAS pulled from the 3 in Game 3... but Cash inexplicably moved him to the 1**. Lowe promptly went 0-6.
3) The Rays tried to sneak through using a prospect. Shane Baz should be great... at some point, but right now he's an unknown. The Rays were counting on him to give them some innings in game 2 but he stunk giving up 6 hits and a walk in 2 1/3 and setting in motion the big G2 loss that should have been a back breaking Sale failure. Why did they need to do this? Well Tyler Glasnow got hurt but also they traded their good veteran arm Rich Hill at the trade deadline because... well we can come up with a bunch of reasons but money probably does play into it in some way. Hill might have not been any better but he obviously couldn't have lost more.
4) "Relief" pitching failures. But starters aren't what the Rays are about. They are about throwing out 6 guys in relief and getting the job done. Unfortunately for the Rays a big part of relief success is the inexperience seeing a guy. You bring in 5 guys a game in a 3 games series and one batter would be lucky to get 3 times at bat total against a guy. But this starts to fall apart over the course of the season against a divisional opponent - which the Red Sox are. Pretty much each dependable relief arm - spot starter Rasmussen, McHugh, Wisler, McClanahan, had a straight up failure appearance. So something worse than a 1 inning 1 run disappointment but you'll take it type. In a short series where this is what your best guys are doing, you can't survive that.
5) Rays didn't exploit any advantage really. The Rays aren't adverse to a timely steal and the Red Sox aren't particularly good at stopping them, yet they only stole two bases - one of them the Randy steal of home. The Rays take walks and the Red Sox give them, yet the Rays didn't get many. The Rays pitchers strike out guys and the Red Sox can strike out some, yet the Rays couldn't strike out enough. There are certainly things the Red Sox could do to affect all of these but these weren't Sox strengths beating Rays strengths, places there were a question of who might excel, but instead places that were reasonably good bets for the Rays to succeed so the more likely scenario, to me, is the Rays failed. (confirmatory deep dive stats take a while to compile since most sites don't bother keeping them for short series)
*I'll add the caveat if it's THE guy for your team - like Juan Soto this year - this does not apply. You just gotta suck that up and hope he returns to form.
** More insanely he moved Meadows, who was on the bench the first two to 3, and moved the spark plug Arozarena to 6. SIX! If people cared about the Rays they'd be more mad at this awful managing decision.
4 comments:
There was a whole discussion (here I think) about whether a manager makes more than 1 or 2 win difference over the course of the season. Sounds like this was 1 or 2 wins over over a 4-game series. Is there a way to reconcile the two?
I've always been of the opinion (similar to what Harper is saying here) that good managers don't necessarily lead to wins but bad managers definitely lead to losses.
I think the best way to evaluate managers would be to assess runs added/lost based on decisions made a priori (similar to the analysis done here with regard to leaving Scherzer in https://blogs.fangraphs.com/giants-best-dodgers-in-tight-windy-battle/). That could probably tell you who the good/bad decision makers are, but in general I'd still bet managers make the easy "wrong" call much more often than they make the difficult "right" call
Well, remember Ole PBN. He definitely fits the category of "bad managers lead to losses." Not that Dusty was such a great manager either. Maybe a great manager of big egos (which nowadays is perhaps the most important part of the job), but certainly not a tactical genius. I'm still upset that Jayson Werth batted second for an entire series when it was clear to all the world that he couldn't hit the ball.
Grossman - I wouldn't go as far as to say 1-2 wins in the series. If you think of it like when they try to apportion wins a certain part of the loss goes to the managerial decision. But not all of it is that and it doesn't mean not making the decision gives them the win, or that another manager would do something differently. Very few actual decisions can be that clear cut. Like you aren't going to have Dave Roberts PH with Max in the 8th, then send out Pujols to pitch the 9th.
There's a wash out effect to the season as a whole where occasionally great moves will make big differences win or lose, but it gets balanced out by the tons of tiny decisions that do nothing toward win or lose. In any short time period that may not balance out.
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