The consensus after Game 2 of the World Series: Bruce Bochy messed up the sixth inning, whether it was leaving in Jake Peavy too long or using the wrong relievers. Criticizing the manager has always been part of postseason lore, but in the age of Twitter, it's the managers who seem to receive more wrath than the players these days.
If Ralph Branca had served up Bobby Thomson's home run in 2014, everybody would have destroyed Charlie Dressen for using Branca since the Giants had already hit 10 home runs off him that season, not Branca for giving up the home run.
Some words from the interwebs ...
But even though this game had just gotten away without three of his best relievers -- Affeldt, Sergio Romo or Santiago Casilla -- throwing a pitch, Bochy's troops leaped to his defense.
"I think he had the right guys in the right spots," Affeldt said. "We just happened to leave balls in spots where they could be hit."
Now, obviously, executing pitches will always be what decides these October bullpen duels. And there's no arguing with the lack of that execution by a pen that was having a great postseason until that inning. At the point Bochy waved for Machi, that Giants' relief crew had a 1.69 postseason ERA and hadn't allowed a run since Kolten Wong's walk-off homer in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, 10 days and five games earlier.
But now, contrast the way Bochy had to slalom his way through the Royals' lineup to the way the manager on the other side of the field was able to handle his own late-inning crisis.
When Ned Yost's starter, Yordano Ventura, put two runners on in the sixth, the next move required the manager to consult no spreadsheets, peruse no lineup cards and think through zero situations that might loom over the horizon.
If I were Giants manager Bruce Bochy, I still would have lifted Peavy right then, after the first baserunner. I would have had relievers warming, including a left-hander for the hitter after Cain, Eric Hosmer. I surely would not have allowed a 2-2 game to disintegrate into a 7-2 defeat in Game 2 of the World Series, never!
Thing is, I’m not Bruce Bochy. None of us out in Second-Guessing Land is Bruce Bochy, or for that matter, Ned Yost. One thing is certain: The managers know their players better than we do. Doesn’t mean they always use sound logic. Doesn’t mean they’re all idiots, either.
Believe me, I’m not trying to serve as an apologist for Bochy, Yost, the Cardinals’ Mike Matheny and Nationals’ Matt Williams, all of whom I’ve strongly disagreed with at one point or another this postseason.
Second-guessing is part of baseball, a fun part. Second-guessing in real time is inevitable in this age of social media. And actually, this was the second time Bochy arguably stuck too long with a veteran starter this postseason — see Tim Hudson, Game 3, NLCS.
But one minute we’re talking about Bochy as a lock for the Hall of Fame, and now all of a sudden he’s a dunce? Sorry, count me out. It’s true for Bochy, it’s true for Yost, it’s true for all of ‘em: Managerial decisions only look bad when they don’t work out.
However, multiple factors were conspiring to keep Peavy in the game: He had thrown only 57 pitches, and the Royals hadn’t scored since the second. “Jake settled in,” Bochy explained after the game. “First two innings he was a little erratic, but he was right on. I mean, he really was throwing the ball well.”
Some important aspects of starting-pitcher performance aren’t intuitive. Most fans — and judging by their behavior, most managers — believe that how a starter has been pitching within an outing, and how many pitches he’s thrown, are good guides to his future performance within the same game. Research by Mitchel Lichtman, a prominent sabermetrician and coauthor of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, suggests that isn’t so. Lichtman’s work shows that how a starter has performed through his first x innings doesn’t predict how he’ll do in inning x+1: All starters suffer the same times-through-the-order effect. Nor does pitch count appear to matter. “I found around the same penalty … regardless of pitch count,” Lichtman told me via email. “In other words, if a pitcher sees a batter the third time, he probably has the same penalty whether he has thrown 75 or 85 pitches.” If managers have an ability to tell which starters are about to collapse and which will keep cruising, it’s difficult to see in the stats.
Joe Sheehan, from his newsletter (as always, worth the subscription):
For all we talk about managers having additional information, starting pitchers don't get taken out after retiring ten straight hitters. They don't get taken out after three shutout innings. They get taken out when batters start reaching base and runs start scoring. They get taken out based on game statistics, based on outcomes, based on a set of fairly rigid rules, and if that wasn't the case, we'd be talking about something else today.
Bochy let the game statistics make the decision for him and sent Peavy to the mound. Now, I could almost buy this starting the inning. Cain was due to lead off, so Peavy would pitch with the platoon advantage and regardless of the outcome, Bochy could bring in a lefty to face Eric Hosmer and, a batter later, Alex Gordon. It was after Cain singled -- on a slider -- that Bochy made his biggest mistake. He did not have Javier Lopez ready, and instead let Peavy face Eric Hosmer. As when Peavy faced Hosmer in the first, it was pretty clear the he did not trust his stuff against the lefty. Peavy threw three pitches -- fastball, cutter, slider, nothing above 89 mph -- off the plate, and eventually walked Hosmer.
Generally, starting pitchers lose a lot of their effectiveness the third time around the order. Jake Peavy, this year, was obliterated his third time around the order. Peavy's fastball was not a weapon for him last night, and his spent three innings pitching away from it. Bruce Bochy had all of that information, and nevertheless let Peavy face Eric Hosmer in a tied World Series game with the go-ahead run on first, nobody out, eight relievers available and an off-day following. That's where the game was lost. Blame Peavy for not throwing strikes, sure, but blame Bochy for asking his pitcher to do something -- throw his fastball for strikes without getting crushed -- that Peavy could not do last night.
Because of game theory, it’s almost impossible to reasonably criticize any given pitch or pitch sequence. A pitch comes with an n of 1, and stripped from context, you don’t know how many times that pitch would’ve been thrown in the same situation. Taking one pitch and only one pitch, you almost always have to conclude that, maybe it was fine. There’s no such thing as a pitch that absolutely should never be thrown, aside from the one noted at the beginning. This is frustrating, but sometimes sensibility frustrates. So the world can be.
And yet. I think this is against my better judgment, but there’s a pitch I want to criticize. It happened in Wednesday’s Game 2, and it was thrown by Hunter Strickland to Salvador Perez. I can’t declare absolutely that the pitch was a terrible idea, because of all the reasons, but this is about as close as I can get to believing that a pitch shouldn’t have been called. Perez, against Strickland, broke the game open. He did so against a pitch I think he knew damn well was coming.
If the Giants are really prepared to bring home another world title — and nobody’s arguing to the contrary — they’ll be glad Game 2 happened. It was a character-builder, knocking down their mystique a notch or two. Real champions dust themselves off and get right back up.
Even manager Bruce Bochy will come under scrutiny after the four-reliever sixth inning that turned so disastrous and temporarily derailed the career of rookie Hunter Strickland. That’s healthy as well. Bochy will be a Hall of Fame manager, don’t worry about that. But it’s time to back off just a little, and stop heralding this world title until it happens.
Sam Mellinger, Kansas City Star:
The fans here are smart. They know what this means, and they continue to chant Butler’s name after he’s pulled for Terrance Gore, the miniature pinch runner. Butler got the first big hit of this game, too, a laced single past the shortstop that answered San Francisco’s early run and tied the score at one. The players and coaches in the dugout understand what this means, too. They hear the chants. They encourage him to take a curtain call. Who cares that it’s just the sixth inning?
“Your teammates say do it, you’re going to get up there,” Butler says. “It’s an exciting time. We took the lead, we know the bullpen’s coming in and we know what type of bullpen we have.”