There has been much criticism of Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash for removing his ace pitcher, Blake Snell, in the sixth inning, after Snell had given up a strongly hit ball from a relative scrub, Austin Barnes. The analytics showed Snell's earned run average from the sixth inning forward was a whopping 12 runs a game, compared to 2 or less runs a game before the sixth inning. The Rays' manager, Cash, faced a decision in what was a do-or-die game for The Rays: (1) keep his pitcher in to face the first three Dodgers in the lineup, who were normally formidable, but who, in this game Snell had recorded seven of eight strikeouts against, and who were hitless; or (2) remove Snell for one of his better relievers, Nick Anderson.
Adding to this was one thing we heard over and over again from the Fox TV announcers, which was these top Dodgers' batters learned to adjust by late innings to any starting pitcher--and any pitcher who pitches long enough. I am also certain--certain!--Cash knew what the Dodgers did to Justin Verlander in Game 6 of the Houston Asterisks vs. Dodgers 2017 World Series, which was to score two runs off Verlander in the sixth inning--after Verlander had dominated the Dodgers nearly as strongly as Snell was doing in this Game 6.
Well, we know what happened. Cash, who had been making great managerial switches and moves throughout the series, keeping the underrated Rays in the series against a formidable Dodgers' team, decided to remove Snell for Nick Anderson. And the Dodgers scored two runs in the inning anyway, taking a lead the Rays had held since the first inning, 2-1. It is worth noting how Cash had opened Game 6 with a change in the lineup order, moving his star hitter to second spot, and putting in a reliably good hitter, who usually batted lower in the lineup, into the first spot. I said to The Mother at the start of the game that Cash wanted to get The Rays on top in the first inning, and rely on Snell for a good five or six innings. It worked for Cash, as the new number two hitter hit a first inning home run, and Snell was already showing he was on fire against the tinder Dodger bats.
I go into this because I don't want to hear how the Rays lost because of Cash's decision in the sixth inning of Game 6. If one is to compare managerial decisions throughout the 2020 World Series, Cash is far more the reason the Rays were even in the hunt. Cash made no managerial judgment errors at all, and had managed his team with a quiet confidence and determination that made this team believe they could beat anyone--and had beaten the Yankees in a long series and the Asterisks, seeking redemption, in a long series, before facing the Dodgers. Meanwhile, Dodgers' skipper, Dave Roberts, made several poor managerial moves in the Series, which had turned what Los Angeles Times sports writers thought would be a Dodgers' sweep into a nail-biter. In Game 6, Roberts decided to start an unreliable rookie, Tony Gonsolin, instead of going with the steady and effective veteran, Rich Hill. Then, with a quick home run in the first inning against Gonsolin, and then Gonsolin having a shaky second inning, where the Rays may have blown open the game, Roberts realized he was wrong. Roberts then brought in Dylan Floro, who got the last out against the Rays' superstar, which shows The Rays had already gone through the order in 1.2 innings. One would have thought, Roberts is now going to leave in Dylan Floro for the third inning. Nope. Going with these ridiculously overrated left on right and right on left matchups, Roberts essentially wasted Floro, and Floro never came back on the field after Snell quickly mowed down the Dodgers in the bottom of the second. Instead, Roberts finally put in Hill, showing why I and probably a couple of million Dodgers' fans were right that Hill should have been the starter. Hill went on to pitch two innings of no-hit, no-run ball, something more likely to have happened had he started. Instead, the Rays were up 1-0 going into the sixth inning, and Snell pitching like Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller in the first five innings.
So, there's those managerial decisions from Roberts. Now, let's talk about Game 4, which the Rays should never have won. Roberts, defying analytics that should told him likely washed up reliever, Kenley Jansen, was unable to hold a one-run lead, put in Jansen in a one-run lead situation in the ninth inning. Roberts wanted to give Jansen confidence, after a solid performance in an earlier game when the Dodgers had more than a one run lead (and note Jansen gave up a home run in that short relief appearance). And we know what happened there. Yeah, yeah, the Dodgers committed two errors to end that game in favor of the Rays, but there is no way Julio Urias or Rich Hill or Dylan Floro or another good pitcher would have let a non-entity player like Brett Phillips hit any ball out of the infield in that ninth inning crunch time. Also, I don't hear anyone criticizing Roberts for removing still strong ace, Clayton Kershaw, in the sixth inning of Game 5, when Kershaw had clearly found a groove, and should have been allowed to finish the sixth after recording two easy outs--but I was screaming at Roberts while at The Folks house watching the game. Had the Dodgers lost that lead and game, I know people would have woken up that Roberts had been making poor managerial moves, and I even said on FB that if the Dodgers lose this World Series, Roberts would be fired. Not for removing Kershaw alone, but a series of moves.
It is ridiculous to think the entire Series goes against The Rays because of Kevin Cash's still-reasonable move, when Cash knew Snell better than anyone in the park, and couldn't afford to take any chances--particularly with Snell's weak sixth and later innings. The announcers and baseball writers were already going to blame Cash if Snell faltered, as, again, there was so much chatter about the Dodgers' hitters being able to adjust to any pitcher's moves as a game wore on.
What is NOT ridiculous, however, is the fact we are in a baseball era that should be called the Reliever Era. Nowadays, no starting pitcher in Major League Baseball ever goes past the fifth or sixth, and maybe seventh inning, and the entire statistic known as Complete Games for a pitcher is a distant memory. Remember the days when Ferguson Jenkins would win 25 games in a season, and pitched at least 20 complete games? That was a real statistic, and now....a pitcher may get a complete game once a season, if at all.
I found myself thinking about this as I first watched, on YouTube, the seventh game of the 1965 World Series between the Dodgers and the Minnesota Twins. At one point early in the broadcast, Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers' announcer, said the starting pitcher for the winning team in all six games of that World Series pitched a complete game. And then, in Game 7, Sandy Koufax, the winning pitcher for the Dodgers, pitched a complete game, too. Last night, and this morning, I watched the nearly one hour documentary just released on YouTube (for some reason, the last minutes of the 2018 reunion day at Dodgers Stadium are missing; too bad) about the crazy, amazing Dodgers' team in 1988, which defied all odds and defeated the Oakland Athletics, after defeating a "mighty" (Tommy Lasorda's word) Mets' team in the NL Championship Series. And what do we see there? Orel Hershiser's astonishing pitching, where the man Lasorda called The Bulldog, pitched two complete games in the series, plus a relief appearance to get a save in a game. Lasorda left in his star pitcher to complete a game, whether he had a shut out or whether he had given up a few runs.
We see something else in the Dodgers' 1988 championship run, which is the brilliance of Tommy Lasorda's gut-level managing. Lasorda remains, in his 90s, a character, and he is not a smart guy in any intellectual sounding sense. But, Tommy Lasorda knew and knows people, and he knew and knows baseball. He was a genius at knowing how to rile up or calm down a player to give confidence in that player to perform at his best. There was an old saw back in the 1980s that "Gene Mauch was the dumbest smart baseball manager and Tommy Lasorda was the smartest dumb baseball manager." Mauch could quote Shakespeare and was well read. Tommy? Anti-intellectual to the core. Yet, we know who we'd rather have managing a ball club any day of the week: Tommy, hands down. Mauch never won a World Series and Tommy won two. And I frankly don't remember second guessing Lasorda on anything except Lasorda letting then-ace reliever Tom Niedenfurer pitch to the St. Louis Cardinals' slugger, Jack Clark, in the 1985 National League Championship Series. Tommy never lived that down. I don't know any Dodger fan in real time who thought that was a good decision. I was visiting relatives in NJ at the time and was screaming, "No! Walk him! Walk him! Don't pitch to him!" And then, Boom! Sigh.
The Dodgers of 2020 were the team which was supposed to win the 2020 World Series. They had the best record in baseball (The Rays had the third best, behind the Dodgers' division rivals, the San Diego Padres). The Dodgers were the 1988 Oakland A's in 2020, and The Rays had begun to look like the 1988 Dodgers, with improbable wins and timely hitting that was amazing. Yet, The Dodgers prevailed. And to think The Rays' loss should be blamed on Kevin Cash is ludicrous, when considering he clearly out-managed my admitted hero (I have loved him since his playing days) Dave Roberts. Before this series, I used to defend Roberts, especially when we learned how the Houston Astros/Asterisks and likely the Boston Red Sox cheated their way through the 2017 and 2018 World Series against the Dodgers. And the fact a now older, and less stellar, Kershaw pitched extremely well in this year's playoffs, proves to me how The Boys in Blue would have won at least the 2017 World Series if the Asterisks hadn't cheated. I therefore think the Dodgers were ready and determined to win this year, and, despite Roberts' various bad managerial moves, the Dodgers prevailed as they are a truly deep team in nearly every category.
Yet, watching the documentary, I remain struck by how much Lasorda managed by instinct and gut, and not analytics. And I was also struck by how Kirk Gibson, not Lasorda, first decided he could bat, and that it was Gibson, not Lasorda, who had studied the scouting report on the A's ace reliever, Dennis Eckersley. Gibson knew, if he got Eckersley to 3-2 count, Eckersley would likely throw an inside slider. Unlike the Asterisks and BoSox, Gibson did not know for certain Eck would do that. It was sorta like an analytic and a gut, wasn't it? :). Anyway, Gibson also knew he had no leg strength, so he had to hold and swing the bat in a manner which relied only on upper body strength. In other words, Gibson scripted himself into the Hollywood ending that has become the key moment in all of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers's history--and even Dodgers' announcer, Vin Scully, was scripting the ending as one hears him say, after literally waiting two minutes to let the visuals and sounds unfold in the pandemonium at Dodgers Stadium: "In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."
Back in that moment, I was sitting in Berkeley, CA with the legendary labor organizer, and 1930s Communist, Clyde Johnson, then about 80 years old. Clyde was rooting for the A's, which for him was the home team. As Clyde and I watched Gibby get up to the plate, and then quickly, but weakly, foul off two pitches, looking terrible, Clyde said to me (and after so many years, I must paraphrase), "You know, if Gibson just uses his upper body, I think he can hit a home run to right field." I looked at Clyde in disbelief and said, it's an 0-2 count and Gibson looks horrible. Well, Gibby worked the count to 3-2, and then, Bam! The famous home run to right field. After a moment of shock, I jumped up screaming, and Clyde was laughing. He then said he felt bad for his team, but he admitted he loved how he was a prophet and loved that I was so happy. The next day, I was at my wife's friends' house in San Mateo, for a World Series Watch Party, and Hershiser mowed down the A's, yes, in a 3-hit complete game shutout, 6-0. It was hard then to show any positive emotion as these people were all expecting their A's to bounce back and beat these imposters who did not even belong in the World Series that year. These people were in shock and deeply depressed.
I have another personal story about that series, which happened about a week later. I was in a deposition in downtown Los Angeles and was sitting next to a lawyer from O'Melveny & Myers, a nationally top rated law firm. People in the room began talking again about the Dodgers' victory and Gibson, and, somewhat meekly, he said he was at Game 1, the game Gibby hit his history-changing home run. He then went on to say that, because he had to complete preparing a summary judgment motion, he left the game in the eighth inning, when the Dodgers had just scored a run to make the game 4-3. The Gibson home run occurred in the bottom of the ninth with Mike Davis on second base. We all laughed and said, You couldn't stay on a Saturday night, and just go in Sunday morning to finish the motion? He replied, Well, the motion was on my mind, and I figured, how were the Dodgers ever going to come back against Eckersley? The fellow went on to be a partner at O'Melveny, and I think may have finally retired, though he was around my age (He was obviously more successful than I was...).
When I think of the 1988 Dodgers now, I have to say Vin Scully is correct that these 1988 Dodgers were at least as improbable as the 1969 New York Metropolitans, also known that year as The Miracle Mets. But there is something more mechanical about baseball management these days, with managers especially quick to pull starting pitchers and treat them like glorified relievers. The managers, and with oversight during the game from the front office, runs upon a cold numbers-based analysis, not a Tommy Lasorda's warmed gut or a Kirk Gibson's personal determination. While one can say, even under analytics type decision-making, Snell had pitched less than 80 pitches, and had not played a full 162 game season in this pandemic, Roberts was managing the same way, when, in Game 5, he pulled Kershaw at a time Kershaw had shown he was in a groove and dominating. A Tommy Lasorda would never have pulled either pitcher, and, as noted above, in the 1965 World Series, managers routinely let starting pitchers pitch a complete game. When Roberts pulled Kershaw, I was screaming at Roberts that he was nuts. However, the Dodgers held on in Game 5 despite that quick-pull of Kershaw. Had Nick Anderson squelched the Dodgers in the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 6, we may be hearing how Kevin Cash was a genius for timely removing Snell and replacing him with Anderson. But, instead, The Rays were not able to hold on in Game 6 after Cash's quick-pull of Snell.
In the end, baseball is about teams, and a series of games, not really a single moment. Gibson's home run would not have made much difference if the Dodgers didn't have the hottest pitcher of the 1980s, We cannot emphasize enough how Hershiser really led that team in the last month of the season, and into the playoffs, and that he pitched two complete games in that World Series, and even hopped in to do a save--again, with Lasorda's gut decision-making. In the documentary, we learn Lasorda began calling Hershiser "Bulldog" when he was a young pitcher, and did so in an ironic bait to demand Hershiser perform with more confidence. When he first came up to the big leagues, Hershiser was apparently afraid to directly challenge batters. The nickname stuck, and Hershiser became a guy who competed with the frenzy of a bulldog on a burglar's leg.
It is my take that this year, even analytics-style decision-making cannot change the fact the 2020 Dodgers, unlike the 1988 As, were a determined bunch who had lived through frustrating losses in 2017 and 2018 in World Series play, and were not going to let a World Series loss occur again. They had already come back from a 3-1 deficit to the Atlanta Braves, who really looked strong during the last part of the shortened season, and rolled through the playoffs till the Dodgers showed up. So, congratulations to my Boys in Blue, and, as Bob Costas said in one of his discussions about this recently ended series, I admit I felt relief as much as joy in the Dodgers' World Series Championship win. :)
