In Baseball, You Don't Know Nothin'

It's all so improbable that you almost have to laugh if you cared enough.

People don't care nearly as much about baseball as before, and a glance at the sport indicates why. It's all done with algorithms now, and adjustments which make a mockery of the way players are supposed to be distributed on a baseball field.

Players walk around with scouting reports inside their caps to remind them of where they're supposed to be standing. No more do coaches and managers take out a towel and wave it at them to move to the left, right, farther or closer. Usually, three infielders are perched on one side of the diamond or another, a blasphemy of how they should normally be standing.

If you like numbers and statistics and odds and tendencies, this might have an attraction. But it ruins the romance of the sport. It does serve a purpose, though: Batting averages are lower than they've been in quite some time. Not only do hitters fail more often, they fail more easily. They try just as hard and sometimes hit the ball just as well, but not only are they still out, it looks like it was planned that way all along. Defenders often do not have to move. The ball looks magnetic.

The pitchers are far more skillful. They throw harder than ever. They change speeds smoothly and usually without detection. The hitters are incredibly challenged. They strike out far more often.

It gets boring, quite honestly, and as an old guy who was raised near a major league ballpark and occasionally got to see these incredible players, you tend to lose appreciation--and interest. It takes a guy like me, who played catcher, still the hub of the game, to keep watching games in which the home team isn't involved because it's the World Series--which is, you know, the World Series.

The Series is fading in significance not quite an anachronism but falling in importance from what it used to be, like battleships and toaster ovens. If you appreciate it foremost, you have to be a certain age.

Even then, the Series is now an accumulation of four series of games, which when you finally get to it after the preliminary series, there's an exhaustion that tends to set in. You want the thing to be over sooner, not later, like other romances that fade. It used to be that the World Series put just enough tension into the season; now, there's too much.

So when a game takes place that defies all that has gone before it, that despite the plans and algorithms of the opponents ends up quite unlike anything you've ever seen before, you have to stop and marvel. Such a game, such an ending within a game, happened Saturday night. 

The Tampa Bay Rays, a team few have heard of, beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team nearly everyone has heard of, in a way that most everybody is still trying to figure out but in a way that shows that the game is still marvelous and that, as the late, great Yogi Berra pointed out: In baseball, you don't know nothin'.

The final drama had a deserving buildup. The Dodgers took early leads but the Rays wouldn't let them get away. It was 2-0, then 2-1, then 3-1, then 3-2, then 4-2. Then Brandon Lowe, normally a superb hitter but stuck on trying to pull the ball, which is what the Dodgers have so pleasantly allowed him to do so he can be retired and not bother them, has learned that to help his team, he has to adjust and hit the ball to the opposite field, which is left. He has hit three home runs in this Series, and all have been to the left of center field. He hit another one last night, a three-run blast, which put Tampa Bay in front 5-4 in the sixth.

But the Dodgers came back and immediately regained a 6-5 lead on Joc Peterson's two-run single in the seventh. That lasted exactly one-half inning, when Kevin Kiermaier, who can look just awful missing the ball, homered too and tied it up.

But Dodger shortstop Corey Seager, who has been destroying Ray pitching, hitting rockets even when making out, hit a flare to left to drive in yet another lead run in the eighth. That may have been caused by an error that won't show up in the books, something connoisseurs of the game notice. Tampa Bay shortstop Willy Adames kept faking toward the Dodgers' Chris Taylor, who was on second base that inning, trying to keep him from gaining too much of a lead and perhaps making him hold up at third base upon a single. 

But he kept trying to do it with two outs, which is more or less a fool's errand because a runner on second will be leaving with the crack of the bat, gain four or five steps head start, and probably score from second on a single regardless of how it's hit. In staying too close to the bag, Adames potentially missed making a remarkable play on Seager's Texas Leaguer. The ball fell, and Taylor scored anyhow. 

Such a subtle mistake, and potentially such a big price. If Tampa Bay were to lose, they would be down 3-1 in a best-of-seven Series, with the Dodgers' ace Clayton Kershaw, who has been pitching great this post-season, ready to retake the mound tomorrow and close things out.

It got to the bottom of the ninth with LA in front, 7-6. Right-hander Kenley Jansen came in for the Dodgers to mop up, he with the cutter that saws off bats and leaves hitters grasping. A cutter is a nasty, wicked pitch, thrown at fastball speed and, thrown by a right-handed pitcher, moving into the inside edge of the plate for a left-handed hitter, away from a right-handed hitter. Batters often hit the ball, but because the cutter moves at the last possible split-second, the batter's estimate of hitting the ball on the sweet part of the bat, the one designed to propel it far, is distorted and the ball goes a much shorter distance instead. It's a recipe for easy outs, which is why Jansen has lasted as long as he has: He has one of the most efficient cutters in the sport, and doesn't have to work nearly has hard as other pitchers do to gain the same results. It's how Mariano Rivera lasted so long with the New York Yankees, and entered the Hall of Fame unanimously.

But even then things don't always work out. Jansen struck out the first Rays hitter. Kiermaier came up and completely shattered his bat, exactly what Jansen would have wanted, but the ball got to short center field and managed to clear a diving Dodger second baseman Kiki Hernandez, who had a chance because he was, indeed, backed up into short right field by algorithms, by two inches. Kiermaier was on with a single.

Still no big deal. The Dodgers still led by a run, there was already one out, and a double play would settle matters. Jansen got a second out when Joey Wendle, hitting the ball much harder this time, nonetheless found left fielder Peterson's glove after he had been made to run backwards a few steps. One out to go.

Coming up now was Randy Azozarena, with the improbable name--how many guys named Randy do you know who can't speak English?--and the improbable post-season, in which he has been tearing up pitching staffs by hitting nine home runs in 18 games and batting north of .350. It was enough by now that the Dodgers gathered at a team meeting on the mound, with the pitching coach huddling to go over, once again, how they would be pitching to him. That's respect.

They nearly got what they wanted. The count reached 1 and 2: Down to the last strike. But Azozarena kept fouling off Jansen's pitches, which is usually a hitter's warning: I may have you timed. The Dodgers have already paid for that, which is why Jansen eventually walked him. The tying run got pushed to second. A hit would score him.

But the next hitter was a fellow named Brett Phillips, a hanger-on. Playing for two teams this year, he has hit less than .200 with each. He has been put in the game because, with adjustments, he's pretty much all Manager Kevin Cash has left. Not only that, but Phillips hadn't faced live pitching in 17 games. It looked like a mismatch. But.

The count reached 1 and 2 again; one strike still to go. Jansen was giving Phillips nothing good to hit. The strikes were called, and on borderline pitches that were masterfully thrown. The end drew near.

The next cutter didn't do as much as Jansen wanted. It stayed out over the plate two or three inches farther. That's the difference between hitting the ball very weakly and making sufficient contact. Phillips swung and the ball fell beyond Hernandez's now much more futile reach into center field. It wasn't much of a hit, reminiscent of Luis Gonzalez's flare that won the 2001 World Series for Arizona off Rivera. But said Mercutio as he lay dying: 'Tis enough. 'Twill serve.

The game would be tied for sure. Kiermaier would score easily. And then it happened: Three well-trained, veteran Dodger players, on a team which to that point had made several terrific fielding plays, would be asked to make easy plays you can bet they knew how to do since they were nine years old, in some sandlot little league. But they didn't make them.

Chris Taylor came up to field Phillips' hit in center field. The ball didn't do anything like spin strangely; sometimes it does, but this time wasn't it. But he took his eye off the ball.

Why did he do that? Because Randy Azozorena is fast. Taylor was thinking, in probability, faster than he should have been thinking but that's what the other team's speed does, that Azozarena would be trying to get to third base, and that he would have to return the ball quickly to prevent that or even try to throw him out. But that made little sense. It was only a single to center. Azozarena would still be 90 feet away, and the game would still be tied.

That's what speed does if you aren't careful; it makes you play faster inside your head and you think you have to do something a little faster than you would normally do. That's how mistakes are made. Taylor failed to field the ball immediately.

In fact, the ball rolled away from him a good ten feet. Azozarena saw that and kicked his considerable speed into another gear. He was thinking that maybe he could score from first on the play.

So did third base coach Rodney Linares, who is there to decide whether to hold up runners who might easily be thrown out at the plate and give them a chance to score if someone else should reach base. But there was never a doubt; this was the moment. You do it by feel, Linares later said, which is how some decisions are made in sports: Carpe diem.

So he waved Azozarena home and home he flew. Except for one thing: He got so excited that he lost himself in that very crucial moment. He fell halfway there. He would be a dead duck. It was a terrible mistake.

You would think. But two more Dodger mistakes were left.

Taylor, now knowing his team was in trouble, fired the ball home. Maybe he saw Azozarena lighting out for the plate. In any event, the ball came in to the right of the plate. But teams have contingencies for wayward outfield throws; there is the cutoff man.

On a hit to the right of second base, the cutoff man is the first baseman. That's basic baseball. Everybody knows that. And first baseman Max Muncy was where he was supposed to be, about 60 feet from the plate.

He's done this plenty of times before: to catch the throw and, in one move, spin and throw it with some speed to the catcher, who would make the play. And Muncy did so, but his throw, too, came in on the right side of the plate as catcher Will Smith saw it. 

Muncy has made that play before, dozens and dozens of times in pre-game infield and in games themselves. The speed of the relay is also a consideration: once intercepted, you must make up the time. He did, but it was inaccurate. At this moment in this game, that mattered a lot.

Smith, reaching for the ball, would have to make a tough play, as he saw it: catch and spin with the ball to make the tag on a sliding Azozarena, in one move. But he's made that play before, too.

Muncy's throw needed to be on the other side of the plate. If it had been there, if Smith could have been facing in another direction, he would have known that Azozarena had fallen--in which case the play would be easy, the inning would end, and we would all go to the tenth inning and maybe beyond.

But Smith tried the catch-and-tag move that he thought was necessary. And he took his eye off the ball, which had not been thrown in a good spot. He failed to secure it. The ball spun away.

Azozarena, caught in No Man's Land, ready to get into a pickle which, in the big leagues, is nearly always futile, got up and had accepted his fate. Then he saw the ball hit the umpire and dart toward the backstop. He slid in head first and pounded his hands in joy on the plate. Game over: Rays win, 8-7.

It was crazy. But can we expect anything else in this year of utter craziness?

One of the most important Major League games of anybody's life was decided because three well-trained, experienced, professional fielders couldn't make simple plays. Maybe none of this will matter: Kershaw is pitching light's-out right now and maybe he will calm things down, put the Dodgers back in front, and Walker Buehler, probably the game's best starter, will put the Rays away in Game Six.

Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it. In baseball, you don't know nothin'. Thanks for reading.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark