Often lost amid consternation about the post-season demise of starting pitching and the rise of the bullpen game is how difficult it is to successfully line up a slate of relievers, and have each one perform without a blip.
The perils of such a strategy struck the Houston Astros in a gutting 3-2 loss Saturday night that put Atlanta up 3-1 in the World Series, on the brink of its first championship since 1995.
Zack Greinke cleverly carved his way through four innings and turned a 2-0 lead over to the bullpen, but Brooks Raley, Phil Maton and Cristian Javier, who hadn’t allowed a run in nine innings over four previous appearances, couldn’t lock things down.
Austin Riley’s RBI single off Maton in the sixth started the rally, cashing in an Eddie Rosario double off Raley earlier in the frame, while Javier surrendered dramatic back-to-back homers by Dansby Swanson and Jorge Soler in the seventh that put Atlanta up 3-2.
The swing in the series was especially dramatic, as the Astros might have had the upper hand had they knotted the best-of-seven 2-2 thanks to a better starting pitcher set up. Charlie Morton’s season-ending fibula fracture means Atlanta was expecting to go with a bullpen game in Sunday’s Game 5 against Framber Valdez, giving the Astros a strong chance to head home to Houston with a chance to clinch.
Instead, Valdez will need to save their season Sunday and they’ll have to run the table to win a championship.
Raley and Maton were each facing Atlanta for the third time, while Javier was in his second appearance, and the more often a reliever throws in a series, the more familiarity that hitters build against the pitcher. Factor in workload and recovery, and the more innings a bullpen has to cover, the more likely it is for a blip to occur.
Atlanta, of course, has thus far avoided such a fate, even after opener Dylan Lee, who debuted in the majors Oct. 1 and was making his first big-league start in the World Series, left the bases loaded with one out.
Kyle Wright took over and minimized the damage, allowing only a Carlos Correa run-scoring groundout in that inning and a Jose Altuve solo shot in the fourth in 4.2 innings of work, and Chris Martin, Tyler Matzek, Luke Jackson and Will Smith locked it down.
The Astros had their chances to blow the game open, but they finished 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position and stranded 11 men, all before the fateful home runs by Swanson and Soler five pitches apart.
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MORE TRADE DIVIDENDS
Just as he so often was during the NLCS, Rosario was right in the middle of things for Atlanta. His left-on-left double set the stage for Riley in the sixth while in the eighth, he chased down an Altuve smash and picked it out of the air just before it hit the wall to end the inning.
“That could have changed the whole game right there. Eddie’s been unbelievable since he’s been here, doing it with the glove and the bat,” Atlanta first baseman Freddie Freeman told Sportsnet colleague Hazel Mae during a post-game interview.
Meanwhile, Soler, batting in the pitcher’s spot during the seventh inning, complemented his leadoff homer in Game 1 with his second longball of the series to deliver the winning margin.
TRUMP AND THE CHOP
Back in April, when Major League Baseball moved the all-star game from Atlanta after Georgia passed a bill that put several restrictions around the state’s voting process, former U.S. President Donald J. Trump called for a boycott of MLB.
The former president of the United States is now urging a boycott of our national pastime. pic.twitter.com/sunb82hYOf
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) April 3, 2021
Six months later, he called MLB and asked to attend Game 4, Atlanta club CEO Terry McGuirk told USA Today Sports, adding that, “We were very surprised. Of course, we said yes.”
The opportunity to grab attention at a marquee event is an obvious explanation for his sudden change of heart about the American pastime, and he sadly stayed on-brand by participating in the Tomahawk Chop, no doubt in a wink to his supporters.
Former President Trump doing the chop at the World Series pic.twitter.com/zUkj9bMjxu
— Zach Klein (@ZachKleinWSB) October 31, 2021
Since everything seems to get boiled down to binary politics in the United States right now, let’s be clear that the chop isn’t a liberals-versus-conservatives issue, but a matter of decency and respect toward an Indigenous population at bare minimum deserving of that.
The chop and accompanying chants “are racist and perpetuate racial stereotypes of Indigenous peoples,” Jennifer Adese, a Canada Research Chair and associate professor at University of Toronto, Mississauga, told Sportsnet colleague Donnovan Bennett in this highly recommended discussion of the issue.
Continuing to deny that is a deliberate burying of heads in the sand, something commissioner Rob Manfred did with his comment that in the Atlanta market, “taking into account the Native American community, (the chop) works.”
As for Manfred and MLB welcoming Trump to Truist Park mere months after being attacked by him, they’ll never miss an opportunity to build political goodwill to help maintain their prized anti-trust exemption.
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SHORT HOPS
• The Astros were lucky to avoid further damage in the sixth on Riley’s RBI single. Yordan Alvarez fielded the ball and unwisely threw home in an attempt to get Rosario, allowing Riley to advance to second and put two men in scoring position. Catcher Martin Maldonado cut the ball off near the mound, but his throw to second was a tick late. Maton bailed out Alvarez when he struck out Travis d’Arnaud after an intentional walk to Joc Pederson.
• Kyle Wright allowed five hits, one of them a groundball single up the middle to Greinke. He’s the first pitcher with a hit in the World Series since Corey Kluber singled for Cleveland in 2016. This may be the last Fall Classic in which pitchers hit as the universal DH could become part of the next collective bargaining agreement.
• At a time when velocity is king, Greinke continues to show that pitching still matters, as he averaged 90.2 m.p.h. on his fastball, topped out at 91.5 while allowing only four hits in his four innings, with three strikeouts. He also induced two double plays.
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