Perhaps you have heard the adage that you can see something new every time you watch a baseball game. As many games as I have seen at a ball park or watched on television, I didn’t think that adage could apply any more. But Saturday night I saw something I had never seen before. I saw a runner called safe when he never touched the base.
This happened in the seventh inning of the second game of the division series between the Mets and the Dodges. The Mets were winning, 2-1, with Noah Syndergaard pitching. The Dodgers had runners at first and third.
Howie Kendrick hit a ground ball to second baseman Daniel Murphy, who made a less-than perfect throw to Ruben Tejada, the shortstop, who was at second base. Tejada caught the throw with his back to the infield and was turning to throw to first for what he hoped would be a double play.
But Utley took him out with a ferocious slide, dumping him on the ground with a broken leg. Utley was called out on the force play, got up and immediately ran to the dugout. However, Don Mattingly, the Dodgers’ manager, challenged the call at second, and his challenge was upheld.
The umpires put Utley at second, even though he had never made contact with the base with any part of his body.
“The fact he was called out means he was not required to touch second base,” said Joe Torre, the MLB executive who oversees on-field issues. “When the play is overturned he’s awarded second base. If they had tagged Utley before he went off the field he would have been out.”
The review umpires ruled that Tejada didn’t step on second, which replays confirmed. Replays also clearly showed that Utley never touched second. In baseball’s new world, that obviously doesn’t matter. In baseball’s new world, officials are quick to install new rules, which means by the time next season opens there will be a new rule covering takeout slides, just as there’s a rule outlawing collisions at home plate.
“It was one of those awkward plays,” Utley said after the Dodgers’ 5-2 victory. “Tying run at third and I’m trying to break up the double play. I didn’t intend to hurt him.”
But an ESPN report said, “Sure, the Chase Utley slide that broke Ruben Tejada’s leg was within the boundaries of what we see in baseball, but it was a malicious play that needs to be taken out of the sport.”
My view of Utley’s slide? Hard but clean. I am probably in the minority on this. In an instant reaction from my son-in-law, he called the play “totally dirty,” adding, “Ridiculous the next batter didn’t get one in the ear. If you want to play 1950s baseball, it has to go both ways.”
I grew up watching baseball in the 1950s. I would welcome a return to the way baseball was played then.
WHY THEY PLAY THE GAMES
If World Series participants were based on payrolls, the Los Angeles Dodgers would be playing the New York Yankees in two weeks.
Fortunately, even the wealthiest and highest-paying teams have to play the games, both during the season and the post-season, to reach that coveted goal.
The Dodgers, with the No. 1 payroll, are in the playoffs. The Yankees, at No. 2, were but no longer are, $219 million down the drain.
Of this year’s 10 playoff teams, four began the season among the 10 highest payers and six were in the top half of the 30 teams, but three were in the bottom 10, representing the second best showing of bottom-third teams in the four years the playoff population has totaled 10.
This year’s most successful bottom-10 teams have been the No. 21 New York Mets; No. 25 Pittsburgh Pirates, which lost to the No. 13 Chicago Cubs in the National League wild-card game, and the No. 29 Houston Astros, who knocked off the Yankees in the American League wild-card game.
Two years ago none of the bottom-10 teams advanced very far. No. 21 Cleveland lost the wild-card game to the No. 28 Tampa Bay Rays, who then lost to Boston in the division series. No. 26 Oakland and No. 27 Pittsburgh also lost in the division series, the Athletics to Detroit and the Pirates to St. Louis after scoring a wild-card victory over Cincinnati.
A year ago the bottom-10 teams lost the wild-card games, the No. 27 Pirates to San Francisco and the No. 25 Athletics to Kansas City. The winners of those games then won their way to the World Series, where the No. 7 Giants edged the No. 19 Royals, 3-2, in Game 7 behind Madison Bumgarner’s brilliant 5-inning, 2-hit relief effort.
The Giants won the World Series in 2012, too. That was the first year of the second wild card, but that year the Giants were not a wild card. They were a division champion and had the eighth highest payroll.
The Giants have shown an intriguing consistency with their payrolls. In the past four years, beginning with that season, the Giants’ have been eighth, sixth, seventh and fifth in the payroll standings. Interestingly, they won the World Series out of their lowest places in the four seasons.
Whatever the Giants are doing, they have figured out a way to be consistent and competitive. And they have won at a bargain rate compared with the Yankees,
The Yankees and the Giants have a connection that would bother George Steinbrenner if he were alive. The Giants’ general manager is Brian Sabean, who began his baseball career working for the Yankees under Steinbrenner.
As the long-time (19 years) general manager of the Giants, Sabean has worked under vastly different conditions than Brian Cashman, who has been the Yankees’ general manager for 18 years.
The Giants do not spend like the Yankees. While the Yankees’ payrolls have totaled $850 million the past four years, the Giants have paid their players $581 million. But while the Giants have made two post-season appearances and won two World Series in that period, the Yankees have made two post-season appearances and won only one division series.
PREDICTIONS ARE UNPREDICTABLE
Everybody loves predictions, that is, everybody but me. Everybody in my business loves to make predictions, that is, everybody but me. I don’t know what the obsession with predictions is all about, but I know predictions make the predictors look foolish.
Look at Sports Illustrated. That estimable publication last spring picked the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series. Memo to Sports Illustrated: The Indians will not win the World Series because to win it, you have to be in it, and the Indians won’t be in it because they aren’t in the playoffs. They aren’t in the playoffs because they finished the season with an 81-80 record.
The team Sports Illustrated said would lose to the Indians in the World Series isn’t in the playoffs either. That team would be the Washington Nationals.
To complete their futility of foolishness, SI was wrong with its predictions of all five American League playoff teams and two of five National League teams. Well, you can’t win ‘em all.
Like most prognosticators, SI simply picked the winners. PECOTA, on the other hand, takes predictions to an entirely different level. PECOTA is an acronym for a formula created by Nate Silver, who has gained notice as a political prognosticator and employee, first by The New York Times, currently by ESPN.
Now the property of Baseball-reference.com, PECOTA tells you not only where each team will finish but also what its won-lost record will be. You wouldn’t want to bet the rent on PECOTA’s predictions or projections, whatever they are.
I don’t know how PECOTA has done in the past, but I know what its projections did this year. Its worst miscalculation was the Kansas City record, projected to be the A.L. second worst 72-90 but turned out to be the A.L. best 95-67.
Poor PECOTA was at its division worst with the N. L. Central. Pittsburgh won 98, not 80; the Cubs won 97, not 82; St. Louis won 100, not 89; Milwaukee won 68, not 80, and Cincinnati won 64, not 79.
Here is how PECOTA fared with all teams. (* denotes correct projection for place in standings):
SHUNNED BY YANKEES, PITCHERS IN PLAYOFFS
In case anyone hasn’t been paying attention (that means you, Brian Cashman), four pitchers the Yankees apparently chose not to pursue in the weeks and days leading up to the July trading deadline started post-season games.
Not all of them won their games, but their teams were in the post-season and they helped them get there. The four are Cole Hamels of Texas, Johnny Cueto of Kansas City, Scott Kazmir of Houston and David Price of Toronto.
Given the state of their starting rotation, the Yankees could have used any one of those pitchers, but they were unwilling to trade any of their top three or four prospects. Actually, two of those prospects, pitcher Luis Severino and first baseman Greg Bird, played in the majors this year and while they didn’t help the Yankees to get very far, they were impressive.
Were they worth keeping instead of getting a Hamels or a Price? It makes for a great winter-time debate.
ROSE BY ANY NAME SMELLS BAD
Not long after Pete Rose finally got a meeting with the baseball commissioner on his application for reinstatement to Major League Baseball, he got company. A Japanese pitcher, Satoshi Fukuda, was suspended for betting on 10 Nippon Professional Baseball games, including games involving his own team, the Yomiuri Giants.
The Associated Press also reported that the team suspended pitcher Shoki Kasahara, who introduced Fukuda to an employee at a tax accounting firm who enticed him to bet on games.
Fukuda, 32, bet on games, the report said, in an attempt to win back more than $8,000 he lost betting on high school baseball games in August. Just as betting on major league games violates MLB’s cardinal rule, which is posted in large-print posters in all clubhouses, gambling violates the Japanese league’s charter.
Rose supporters, misguided though they may be, might argue that Fukuda’s case has no impact on Rose, but it does. It’s a glaring reminder that players have no business betting on games. The MLB rule serves as a deterrent. Allowing Rose back into MLB would undermine the deterrent. Just think. No player has been caught betting on games in the 26 years since Rose removed himself from baseball by betting on games.