Overmanaging, 2020.

The 2020 World Series is over, and I'm in a royal snit.

It's Game 6, the Dodgers are ahead 3-2, and Tampa Bay has a chance to win and make the series go to seven, which is what I'm rooting for (I don't have a dog in the hunt, because I disapprove of both teams: the Dodgers, are the despised simulacrum of the organization that abandoned Brooklyn 50+ years ago and Tampa Bay is from Florida, the Nowhere State -- plus it's an American League team, but that doesn't matter this year because for some phoney-baloney covid-related reason both leagues are using the DH. Tampa Bay is ahead 1-0 on a first-inning home run by Randy Arozarena, who has a great short powerful swing and is either the second coming of Henry Aaron and the centerpiece of the best trade in history (the worst for St. Louis) or the most spectacular flash-in-the-pan in major league history. It's the fifth inning, and Blake Snell has been pitching a masterpiece. Nine strikeouts and not a ball hit solidly. He's throwing 95 to the corners and his sinking curve is keeping the Dodger hitters completely off balance. He's looking almost like Koufax, for goodness sake. So what does Kevin Cash, Tampa Bay's manager do?  He takes out Snell and brings in Nick Anderson and two batters later, it's 2-1 Dodgers and the game is over and the Series is over. Removing Snell is the worst decision in baseball history, perhaps in sports history, perhaps the worst of any human decision since the emergence of homo sapiens.

Why was Snell relieved? Because of some bullshit trumpery statistics about pitchers being less effective going through the lineup the third time. Not applicable in this case; Snell had lost nothing off his fastball, he was still hitting his spots, and he was still demoralizing the Dodgers, who looked like dejected losers. Until -- that is, they were invigorated by the prospect of not having to hit against Snell any longer.

Is there a word "overmanaging?"  There ought to be. Both teams were over-managed. Too many pitching changes, too many absurd fielding shifts -- even putting four men in the outfield--, too many pinch hitters. Baseball used to be a players' game, and the job of the manager was to put his nine best players on the field and let them do their jobs, perhaps calling for a sacrifice or a steal or an intentional pass, or replacing a tired pitcher with some ex-starter or never-was from the bullpen. But now, baseball has turned into a manager's game, like (gasp) football. And when it backfires, as it did last night, what a disaster! What does Kevin Cash deserve, besides firing. If I were a Tampa Bay fan, I'd be outraged. I'd want revenge or his scalp, perhaps both.

I'm a baseball fan, and I'm outraged, livid, angry. I wanted to see what Blake Snell could do with the Dodger hitters, third time through. More reliance on his slider, more on the slow stuff? Could he keep getting them to swing and miss at his fastball at the top of the zone, or just above the zone? 

I'm a fan;  baseball should try to please me and the 90% of the spectators in America who knew that Cash was making a major blunder to pull Snell. I didn't watch the end of the game. Left the room. Boycotted.

Baseball is not as exciting as it was in the days of my youth. The players themselves are bigger, faster, stronger, and better trained, so it's not their fault. But because the hitters are so powerful, there are too many home runs. Home runs are only exciting when a batter catches all of it and blasts one 440 feet into the upper deck or 40 rows back into the lower.  There's nothing more boring than a muscular guy swinging under it and popping one up 340 feet onto the short porch. A travesty home run. The fences should be moved back 20 feet and raised to a mandatory 10 or 12 feet. A triple is much more exciting to watch than a Texas League homer. When was the last inside-the-park homer with a relayed throw to the plate, just a hair too late? 

And let's put the statisticians in their place. Tampa Bay is the only team in the league with a professional statistician on the bench -- one who never advanced past T-ball. Is he responsible for the manager's monumental gaffe?  And for goodness sake, let's get rid of the DH. When the pitcher is in the batting order, there's strategy in the game. It becomes a test of intelligence, not just a home run hitting contest. I want to admire a well-executed sacrifice bunt. 

My father had been a catcher in his younger days and had the busted fingers to prove it.  When he was dying, I went to visit him in the hospital. He was watching the Dodgers on the TV.  The next day, when I returned, he wasn't watching. I said, "Dad, there's a Yankee game on the TV; you could watch it."  He said, "Yankees. American League. DH rule. Not baseball."  He died soon after. 

I'm scared that baseball, greatest of all games, has become "not baseball."

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Cash's decision had to be the worst one any primate ever made since the first thing that resembled one emerged from the primordial slime. It had been a pleasure watching the NL LA team lose every year since 1988, and it had been wonderful watching Kershaw, the poor man's Koufax, choke during each postseason. But now both pleasures are gone. I could not have imagined that when I was kid in the 50s rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, I would end up hating a team that called itself "the Dodgers," and that I would root for any team that played against them, even the hated Yankees.

Analytics has not been dissecting the game of baseball. It has been vivisecting it. Blake Snell's stuff was filthier than Trump's mind. It is extraordinary that a set of numbers meant more to manager Cash than the performance that Snell was putting on. If analytics had been around in 1955, Podres would have been removed in the seventh inning, and the Brooklyn Dodgers' franchise, as wonderful as it had been, would possibly have gone down in history as one that never won it all.