Why they lost - San Fran

The checked swing.

 

 

 

Ok you want some more.

Half the offense checked out - San Fran scored the second most runs in the NL this year mostly through a "no-one be bad" offensive strategy. Not that you'd get above average performance from everyone every week, but when someone was bad, some one else was great, and most everyone else was still ok. There wasn't a 3 or 4 or 5 guys all slumping at the same time.  Well in this series there were.  Solano (0-8) Yaz (0-13) Flores (1-12). Wade (1-10) Longoria (2-17) Ruf (1-11 yes the homer was his only hit)  Dickerson and Duggar a combined 0-7 all had rough series and it showed with the Giants scoring 6 runs in the last 4 games.  The whole replacement part theory doesn't work in these instances. Only Bryant was above a .900 OPS for the series.  A lot of bad, very little great.  Compare this to SF vs LA in the regular series. Crawford, Flores, Posey, Wade, Slater all OPS'd over .900 so Yaz, Belt, Rug , Dickerson could all OPS under .650.  That's the way the team worked all year, players picking up players, until this series 

Power outage while standing still - You can maybe survive getting no hits, which LA's staff was the best at keeping you from, if you can walk and/or homer. The LA staff was good at keeping you from those too, just not as much. The Giants had the most homers in the NL this year and the second most walks.  After G1 where they hit 3 homers, it looked like they'd slug their way to the series win. They hit two more the entire series. They only walked 6 times. The Dodgers pitching won the battle against the Giants hitting. With ease. 

Not pitcher perfect With the offense not performing the Giants were gonna have to pitch like crazy and let fate help them win the close games. They did not all pitch like crazy. Gausman had second half issues and DeSclafini showed some inconsistency during the year. Both had bad outings. That was bad but it wasn't a surprise. Leone - lights out since coming back in June and sort of the "next guy up" after Rogers, Doval, and McGee - being terrible was. The Giants had a little margin for error with Webb being so good, but they couldn't take advantage of it.

Taint funny McGee - Jake McGee was the Giants closer all year long, but he sputtered a little late and missed a couple weeks in September putting his post-season use in question. Kapler decided to use Doval, a guy with lights-out stuff, as the closer and McGee as another arm. Looking at the ERAs it's hard to argue but Doval looked pressured in his one "have to win or the season is over" chance in a way a vet like McGee might not have been. Of course use McGee and fail and the complaints are even more obvious. Still we can only know what did happen and Doval was wild and left pitches up.

If you want it in short - this was a world class battle between the best hitters and pitchers in the NL and the Dodgers pitchers bullied the Giants bats. The other battle being more even (Dodgers bats were alive in 2 games, absolutely dead in 3) meant the Dodgers would take this series.

Why they lost - Brewers and White Sox

 You got it from the headline - let's dig in

Brewers didn't do anything to the offense. The Brewers offense was decent this season but it was kind of an illusion. The didn't get hits, they didn't hit for power.  All they did was walk and get timely hits and guess what? Getting timely hits isn't a dependable repeatable skill beyond getting hits in general. Rather than a big move to allow the offense a chance to compliment the pitching the Brewers only brought in perfectly decent Eduardo Escobar. Unsurprisingly they didn't get hits and they didn't hit for power (5 XBH in 4 games) and they couldn't walk enough against a good pitching staff to make up for that. 21 straight innings without a run is going to be pretty much a series killer 

Counsell got too antsy. Dying for some sort of offense in Game 3 Counsell pulled Freddy Peralta, who was doing perfectly well shutting down the Braves, pinch hitting for him in a 2nd and 3rd and one-out situation.  The PH didn't come through and the Braves pounced on Houser who they had seen for two innings in game 1.  Never pull a working pitcher early, I say. 

RP injuries - Suter one of the Brewers perfectly good middle relievers got an oblique strain right before the playoffs. Williams, probably the Brewers 2nd best reliever, punched something in anger and hurt his hand. The combo meant the Brewers would carry a guy they wouldn't even use in the series (he's ok but really on there to eat innings in a blowout - a scenario that never came in this series).  This meant even though they didn't have a lot of relief work early they did use everyone they liked by the time G3 rolled around. So Counsell's early pull was even more problematic. But it all stems from the offense, if the offense had hit better they could have stretched pitchers more.  

White Sox starters went wild. If there was one thing the White Sox pitching staff did only well, not great, it was limiting walks. The Astros were pretty good at getting walks. all in all you'd expect some walks here but nothing crazy. But in 34 innings the White Sox gave up 18 free passes, including 12 in 12.1 IP by the starters. The Astros were going to get hits, that's what they do. They don't have to get walks or hit homers, that's how you might stop them. By giving them walks the White Sox gave them a way to turn those singles and doubles into a lot of runs and a lot of runs early. It also made these games bullpen games for the White Sox. No team is well prepared for 3-4 bullpen games

The White Sox batters didn't wear out the Astros enough.  The Sox were second best at taking walks and the Astros are a wild throwing bunch. The combo should lead to a lot of White Sox baserunners. But they couldn't quite pull it off. No particular villain here. 

Lance McCullers was really good OK OK while I said usually players don't go above and beyond Lance McCullers did. He pitched more innings than anyone in a CS so far (but a very good chance Webb will pass him) and his pitched better than anyone even close, giving up 12 baserunners yes, but only two XBH both to Gavin Sheets, while striking out 9. 

Why they lost - Rays Edition

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.

Monday Quickie - Rules of Engagement

 But you know, funny. Or at least funnier. 

There were two rules things that went on last night that I want to talk to here.

Boston vs Tampa - Dumb rule, ruled right. 

In extra-innings, Kevin Kiermaier hit a ball to the wall that should have scored, would have scored Yandy Diaz to give Tampa a lead.  But the ball caromed off of Hunter Renfroe and went over the stupid short walls in the Boston OF. The umpires got together and sent Yandy back to third even though he was well on the way to scoring. 

The thing is the rule is clear. Much like a regular automatic double, where the ball bounces into the stands or gets stuck in a wall or goes under a tarp, etc., if the ball bounces off a player and goes into the stands it's two bases from the time of the pitch. That's what's implied in the MLB rules and explicitly spelled out apparently, in the umps manual. There are other occasions where the two bases awarded are from the time of the incident, like a throw into the stands, but this is not one of them. There isn't anything to argue here in terms of whether the rule was applied correctly.  Hate it? Fine. Wrong? Nope.

Now should the rule be like this? Why does it exist? Can we change it?  All good questions. 

Why does it exist?  Don't know.  I'm not a baseball rule historian. Twitter bandied about a few ideas.  My thought it probably came from a time where there weren't always full sets of umps and there were games in weird parks late in the evening with no lighting and there was a pretty good chance you couldn't see where the runners were at the moment the ball went out of bounds*. If that's the case, since these things happen quickly usually, you can see how two bases from the pitch seems the best bad solution.

Should the rule be like this? Like I said... it's probably the best of several bad solutions.  I think the less discretion given to the umpires the better. While you open up the ability for umpires to make a good decision, you do the reverse as well. Rules should be as objective as possible to maintain the necessary consistency. 

Can we change it? So in my mind to change it we would have to find a way to change it that isn't "well let the ump figure it out".  I can think of three ways it could be done. (1) change all automatic doubles always to two bases from time it goes out of bounds. There's a lot of umps now and good lighting and mostly normal park - they can see where players are... or can they? They already huddle up for any throw OOB. This would be a lot of ump huddles and they'd still get things incorrect at times. Do you want arguing if a guy was a foot before 2nd or a foot after 2nd when it crossed the plane of the OF fence? I don't, at least not on every automatic double. This kind of extra rule work is exactly what the game doesn't need. (2) If the ball hits the OF wall first before caroming off a player then it's from the location of the players on the basepaths.  I like this one, just because it satisfies the "rule must change crowd" makes a reasonable amount of sense (1-2 extra seconds means more chance runners have gotten around), and it would happen so rarely it wouldn't effect much of anything, or (3) like (1) but we use the guys in the booth to make these decisions. Is this better or worse than 1? I think worse. You'd get more calls right but you wouldn't get ALL calls right and if not what are we doing adding all this time and effort? 

Astros v  White Sox - It's hard to rely on their good intentions

In the 4th inning Yasmani Grandal hit a ground ball to a drawn in Yuri Gurriel at first, he decided to go home to try to catch Robert trying to score from third.  The throw glanced off Gurriel and went past the catcher, scoring the run and giving the White Sox a man on first. 

The rule here is NOT clear, or at least it is not black and white and in fact it goes into two separate grey parts of the baseball rule book, ending with a umpire subjective call. 

The first gray area of the rules is the idea of "basepaths". We think a runner has to run in a straight line from base to base, or at least as best they can. But there is actually nothing in the rules that states that to be the case. With one exception the only time that basepaths actually come into play is when a fielder has a ball in his hand and is trying to tag a runner.  The runners path is set at that time to be a rough straight line from where he is when this starts to the bag he is trying to go to.  As you can tell it's a little fuzzy here and a couple feet in either direction is usually given, but it's there to keep a runner from making fielders chase him out into the OF. 

 The one exception is the last half of the path a runner takes to first base.  He's supposed to be between the foul line and the line in foul territory. This is to stop the runner from trying to take the first baseman out with a body block to have him miss a throw. You've all seen this come into play if you remember the Trea Turner getting called out play in the Series. Trea did what a lot of RHB do and run kind of very close to (or on) the grass until more toward the last few steps when they peel off. This is technically against the rules but no one cares because they aren't trying to hit the fielder. It only comes into play in a play like Trea had where the throw for whatever reason is impacted by his location in the path.

Since there is no thing as a "basepath" a runner can literally run anywhere until a fielder wants to try to tag him, this includes the first 45 ft or so toward first base which Grandal was not in when the ball hit him. So he could not be called out simply for being where he was, which was both feet in the grass which he got to by sort of running toward the classic 1B/2B hole from the left-handed batting box. At this point the umpire must judge why the runner was where he was. If he was there to intentionally disrupt the play he can be called out.  For example on a suicide squeeze the bunter CAN run toward the ball and stand between the ball and home, that itself isn't illegal (imagine if the fielders were on strike and just sat on the ground and didn't move) but assuming the play goes as expected and he impedes the fielders throw home the umpire should rule him out for intentional interference. 

Here umpires have to determine intent and OH MY GOD IT WAS DAMN OBVIOUS HE WAS INTENTIONALLY GETTING IN THE WAY.  I mentioned before his path was not toward first it was toward getting in the way. I mean COME ON 

 

It's HIGHLY questionable coming from the RHB box, from the LHB box it's a joke. And yet the umpires said it wasn't intentional. They got this part of the call completely wrong. This isn't even close and any analyst or person trying to defend it is lying to either both themselves and you, or just you.

*In contrast to a throw where usually the throw is around the basepaths so you can tell where everyone was and award extra bases using that information.