Since the online mobs wouldn't let go, I guess I'll have to go there. Even if I have an audience of 10. So I'm going there: Lifting Blake Snell was not the biggest mistake Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash made in World Series Game 6 Tuesday night.
He lifted the right pitcher but relieved him with the wrong pitcher. That's what turned the Rays' early 1-0 lead — on Randy Arozarena's one-out-in-the-first smash into the right field seats — into the 3-1 Series-losing defeat.
If you are one of my 10 readers, you've already read it, so bear with me just in case there's an 11th reader lurking. Snell was dealing through five full. The cards began getting just a little shaky in the bottom of the sixth, and it's not as though Snell hasn't been there before.
Over his entire career, Snell has been the way, oh, just about every starting pitcher worthy of the job has been: he's easier to hit the third time around the order than he is the first. Makes no sense without the numbers? Here we go again: when Snell goes around the order the first time, the order bats .205 with a .280 on-base percentage, a .312 slugging percentage, and a .592 OPS (on base/slugging). When he faces the order the second time around, they bat .234/.316/.396/.711. When he starts the third time around, they bat .247/.329/.413/.742.
Snell opened the bottom of the sixth getting Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder A.J. Pollock to pop out to short right center field, with Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe ambling out for the catch. Then, on 1-1, Snell hung a slider in the middle for Dodger catcher Austin Barnes to line off the middle into center for a base hit. But he'd started Barnes with a fastball that was slower than his peak speed just a couple of innings earlier.
Remember: Snell finished his evening with 9 strikeouts, an awful lot of swing-and-misses, and having struck out the side in the first and the third. He also hadn't gotten past the sixth inning all year long. His third-time-around-the-order numbers, analyst Eno Sarris reminds us (just in case we'd known, but forgotten), are 23 percent worse than the league average for starting pitchers.
And looming on deck as he dealt with and lost Barnes was Mookie Betts.
The Mookie Monster. The guy everyone else is still screaming struck out twice against Snell earlier in the evening and only hit .200 against left-handers this year. This truncated, irregular-season year. (Which is why his mere 64 plate appearances against left-handers this year don't really mean all that much.) Betts is also the guy who hits .297 with an .888 OPS against left-handers lifetime. It's practically even-up in the splits with his numbers against right-handed pitchers: .302/.897.
Since the commentators during Game 6 made such a point of mentioning it, it's only right to mention it here, too: from his years with the Boston Red Sox, Betts had the most direct experience of any Dodger against Snell. Here's the part they didn't mention so far as I knew in the moment: Betts hit .304 with a .370 on-base percentage against Snell lifetime entering this postseason.
Cash wanted a right-hander to match up with the right-handed Betts, even with Betts's near-even split. He had right-hander Nick Anderson up and throwing as Snell started the sixth. He was hoping for a return engagement by the Anderson who was lights out in 19 irregular season gigs (0.55 ERA; 1.35 fielding-independent pitching rate; 0.49 walks/hits per inning pitched rate; 26 strikeouts and no walks in sixteen innings). Not to mention the Anderson who struck out six Yankees out in four and two thirds division series innings.
He got, instead, the Anderson whose American League Championship Series ERA was a ghastly 8.31 while striking nobody out, walking 3, and surrendering 7 hits; and, whose postseason total entering Tuesday night was a 6.75 ERA and a 1.88 WHIP.
Cash should have thought sooner and better of Ryan Thompson, the rookie who'd been lights out in six ALCS and World Series games with his 1.93 postseason ERA (and zero ERA in the Series) and 1.18 postseason WHIP (and 0.38 Series WHIP), and who'd worked a 1-walk, 1-strikeout, 15-pitch ninth in Game 5 two nights earlier. If not Thompson, then Diego Castillo would have been a viable option even with his 3.38 Series ERA, but Thompson really was Cash's best hand among the Rays' right-handed bulls.
Maybe you should listen, too, to Anderson himself. "Workload, 2020 season, the whole thing is just crazy, honestly," he told reporters post-Game 6. "Not having a normal routine, lifting, the season, everything — it's been crazy. I didn't feel as good as I would have liked to, but it's the big leagues; you're not going to feel good every time. I was still confident. It wasn't the situation, it wasn't being in the World Series or anything like that. Not a lot of gas."
Anderson himself admitting he wasn't feeling a hundred percent or maybe even seventy-five percent. Cash read Snell properly as Snell began tiring but he read Anderson not at all. Thompson wasn't even a Game 6 rumor, never mind a topic.
The screamers roasting Cash for hooking the hot hand didn't stop think about the hotter hand. Not in the moment, not when Betts ripped a double down the left field line, not when Anderson wild-pitched Barnes home with Series MVP Corey Seager at the plate, and not when Betts slid home ahead of a throw down from first on Seager's hopping ground out.
Please, let's not go there again about "heart" and "character" and "fortitude." Do you really want to be reminded how often men and teams stand and play proud, with all the heart, character, and fortitude you can ask for, and then some ... and still get sunk crossing the Jordan to the Promised Land?
Do you still really want to let Snell hang in there to face the Mookie Monster? The net result might tell you yes, but the deepest and most objective look says no. Cash's mistake was Anderson. Lucy, that and only that is where the manager and his front-office overseers got some splainin' to do.
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