Archive for category: Baseball

Eddie Rosario’s three-run homer off Walker Buehler in the Braves’ clinching NLCS victory over the Dodgers was one of the greatest at-bats I’ve had the pleasure to witness. It reminded me of a classic home run by David Ortiz, the details of which I can’t recall, except that it was in an even more dramatic, climactic point of an even more important game. Both Rosario and Ortiz had the benefit of being charismatic, personal favorites of mine, and both, of course, were famously former members of the Minnesota Twins. I understood why the Twins let Rosario go after he regressed in 2020 from his peak season in 2019. He was maddeningly erratic in his performance: while he was often the Twins’ best clutch player, steadiness was not one of his virtues, and he would go from throwing out a baserunner to throwing to the wrong base. And he was a streaky hitter with little regard for the strike zone when he swung. Furthermore, the Twins had three young outfielders in the minors, at least one of whom could replace Rosario at a much lower salary. (While the play of Kiriloff, Rooker and Larnach, when not injured, probably justified this decision, the subpar year of Max Kepler made one wish he had been jettisoned instead.)
Nevertheless, I enjoyed Rosario’s style of play and I was sorry that he showed little in the first half of 2021 when he played for the Indians, except to the extent I rooted against Cleveland as a Twins division rival. I hadn’t focused much on Rosario’s time with the Atlanta Braves until the playoffs began and he started getting game-winning hits. By the time he faced Buehler in the 4th inning of Game 6 Rosario had established himself as the hitting star of the NLCS. His hits had been timely and plentiful: with two 4-hit games he set a record, and with 13 hits he was one short of the single-series playoff record, which had been reached only in full seven-game series. The setting, albeit in only the 4th inning, was packed with early drama. The game was tied 1-1; runs had been in short supply all series; and both sides could believe that an early lead would be decisive.
The rally started with two outs. Buehler, the Dodger ace pitching on three-days’ rest, had light-hitting catcher Travis D’Arnaud 1-and-2. A strikeout for out three seemed to be in the cards. But D’Arnaud worked a walk, bringing up the pitcher’s spot. To the amazement of the TV announcers, manager Brian Snitker sent up a pinch-hitter for Braves pitcher Ian Anderson, one of their best pitchers who had been effective over three innings. The pinch-hitter was Ehire Adrianza, another former Twin. Not only was Snitker taking out one of his best pitchers, he was using his primary reserve–in only the 4th inning! With a slow runner on first and two outs, it hardly seemed much of a rally or decisive moment in the game. Yet somehow,  Adrianza, who had made outs in all his previous pinch-hitting appearances in the series, fisted a broken-bat double to rightfield. It was suddenly a moment of drama for Rosario, already 1-for-2 against Buehler.
The at-bat itself was full of drama. Rosario swung and missed at the first two pitches, sinking into an 0-and-2 hole. He fouled off the next offering from Buehler. He didn’t bite on an outside pitch. Then he fouled off two more pitches, barely staying alive. But you sensed, the more pitches he saw, the better chance he would have. With each pitch, the tension racheted up a notch. On Buehler’s seventh pitch, an inside fastball, Rosario turned and drove it down the rightfield line, inside the foul pole, a half-dozen rows into the stands.
There was one moment of drama still to come, when Luke Jackson gave up a single, walk and double to the only three Dodgers he faced in the seventh and Tyler Matzek had to strike out three in a row to maintain a two-run lead, but Rosario’s home run effectively decided the game and gave the National League pennant to the Braves.

The Yankees’ 2021 season came to a fittingly ignominious close with a convincing 6-2 trouncing by the Red Sox in the Wild Card Play-In game last night. I say “fitting,” because the punchless Yankees deserved no more after scoring only 7 runs in their final four “must-win” games and being outclassed by the Tampa Bay Rays, their potential playoff opponent, both in the last weekend and over the course of the season.
The Bombers’ offense came down to two home runs around Fenway’s Pesky Pole, neither of which would have gone out of any other Major League ballpark. On the other hand, Giancarlo Stanton hit two rockets off the Green Monster, both of which would have been home runs elsewhere. Their only “rally”–two hits in a row–started with another infield single by Aaron Judge. I say “another” sarcastically because Judge won the crucial season finale against the Rays with a ground ball to second that was officially scored a single, even though he would have been out by ten feet had the second baseman thrown to first. With one out and the game-winning run coming in from third, the infielder had no choice but to throw home instead. It was still a classic Fielder’s Choice for scoring purposes, not a hit, and I’m still awaiting an explanation.
Judge’s single was followed by what the commentators agreed was the key play of the game. (For me, however, the key play was Xander Bogaerts’ two-run homer in the 1st inning, which set the tone of the game.) Judge tried to score on Stanton’s double off the wall and was thrown out at home plate by a perfect relay from centerfielder Kike Hernandez to Bogaerts. Alex Rodriguez stated definitively that Judge should have been held at 3rd–indeed, he should have known on his own to stop there–and when the play-by-play announcer tried to suggest that the issue was debatable, A-Rod told him he was wrong. In my view, however, it was the right play. Judge was barely out, maybe by half a step. A less than perfect relay and he would have been safe. How many times is such a relay less than perfect? Way more than half, from my experience. Bogaerts had to field the ball cleanly (it came to him on one hop), turn and fire a strike under pressure. All Judge had to do was run. If Judge had stopped at 3rd, his fate would have been left to Joey Gallo, whom A-Rod had continually called the “safe landing strip” for Red Sox pitchers. In other words, they should steer clear of Judge and Stanton and pitch to Gallo whenever they had the choice. Based on his average, the chance that Gallo would get a hit was maybe one-in-five, and marginally better that he would somehow get the run home. As it was, he popped up to shortstop, and Judge would have been stuck at 3rd, unless the next batter hit safely–a one-in-four proposition, going by averages alone. The 50-50 chance, if not 65-35, that Judge had of scoring on Stanton’s double was greater than the odds of his scoring by stopping at 3rd. But A-Rod and the commentators who followed him all claimed that Yankee 3rd-base coach Phil Nevin had blundered.
The other happy takeaway for me was the failure of Gerrit Cole to last more than two innings in the Yankees’ most important game of the year. They paid him gazillions to be the best pitcher in the league, and he wasn’t. This gave me hope, once again, that you can’t always buy the pennant; that no matter how much the Yankees spend, they can be beaten. Conversely, the Red Sox got a dominant 1-2-3 8th inning from Hansel Robles, whom the Twins had picked up on the cheap and who was useless in Minnesota earlier this year. Go figure.

The Twins have said goodbye, for the moment at least, to leftfielder Eddie Rosario, who led the team in rbi’s the last two or three years. It used to be thought that the rbi was the statistic that best indicated a team’s most productive hitter, but not only did the Twins show little uncertainty in releasing Eddie, but no other Major League team offered to pick him up at his projected salary of $10 million. I can’t help but think this means that the rbi has been severely downgraded in this new age of analytics, and I can guess why.

Let’s look at the variable factors that may contribute to rbi totals. How many games did he play? Where in the lineup did he hit? The more at-bats, the more potential rbi opportunities.  We can account for this by dividing rbi’s by number of plate appearances. Not “at-bats,” because a sacrifice fly, squeeze bunt (rare), or bases-loaded walk or hit-by-pitch can produce an rbi without an official at-bat. But not all ABs are created equal. Obviously, someone hitting cleanup after three .300 hitters will have more chance at rbi’s than the number 8 hitter on a weak-hitting team. Maybe a rough corrective would involve factoring in a team’s total runs, so that an rbi for a weak offense will count more than one for a powerhouse, such as the Twins were in 2019 when they set the all-time home run record. I’d like to burrow down more deeply, though, and I wonder whether modern analytic data-collection can go this far.

Every rbi could be categorized for the situation it occurred in: the number of outs and the number and locations of base runners. If a hitter bats in the number of runs in a given situation that the average of all hitters did in that situation in, say, the previous year, his rbi average for that situation, in my proposal, is 1.00. Twice as many, 2.00. Half as many, .500. Computing the average of all the situations he faced would produce his overall rbi average. This would give us apples v. apples comparisons, not apples and oranges. To spell out one example: runners on second and first, no outs would be one “situation.” Bases loaded, one out, another. I would break the situations down by outs for the simple reason that the third base coach is more likely to send a runner home if there are two outs than no outs, so it’s more likely to result in an rbi. And of course if there are two runners on, rather than one, there is the chance for more rbi’s. I don’t know how many permutations there are, but it’s closer to 9th-grade math than infinity.

Is there any need to weigh the scores from the different situations differently, given that the rbi probability is much greater if the bases are loaded than if they are empty? Not at this point in my analysis. For our purposes, a run is a run, and we’re comparing one player against the league average. We’re looking for someone’s value as a run producer, whether in the 1st or 9th inning. But once we’ve given a player his rating for each possible situation, we can massage these data for other purposes, and the one that comes first to mind is “clutch hitting.” MLB tried to quantify this with something called the “game-winning rbi” in the 1980s. It died of its own uselessness because it couldn’t distinguish, for instance, between a bloop single in the 1st inning of a 9-0 blowout and a 9th-inning grand slam in a 4-3 squeaker. So, rather obviously, there are two new factors to consider if we are to put a value on the rbi: inning and game score.

Here the permutations and combinations are pretty close to infinite, so I’ll propose a different test: just as we now have a “quality start” for starting pitchers (a stat with its own problems), we should have “quality rbi’s.” A quality rbi is any rbi from the 7th inning on, or in the last inning of a rain-shortened game, in which the hitter’s team is tied or one run ahead, or results in his team’s being one run behind, tied or ahead. For this statistic, it doesn’t matter where in the order a batter hits. It does somewhat matter how good his team is, for the better team will have more runners on base and, thus, more chances for an rbi. Given the arbitrary nature of this statistic, however–unlike the more pure rbi average, above–I’ll let this unaccounted variable slide. Compared to the nothing that is here now, it is a meaningful marker. And this variable is less of a factor here than in such other recognized statistics as wins for a pitcher.

One last word on rbi’s. At some point in the not-too-distant past, the accepted abbreviation of “runs batted in” became “rbi,” instead of “rbi’s,” presumably on the theory that the plural “s” comes after the “r” for “runs,” not the “i.” I have always considered “rbi” an entity of its own, capable of taking an “‘s” after the entire abbreviation. I still do.