Agreed, and it was only the tying run, no the go-ahead. Let that drop with 2 on, 1 out and you risk things getting more out of control. I think Ethier did the right thing and I’m surprised how many people are saying he should have let it drop.
ESPN says that making the catch increased the Mets’ odds of winning by 7%. If he lets it drop then the count is 0-2.
I had an appointment and missed innings 3-7 of the game. When I got back and got the quick recap, I thought the same thing, until I understood that it was only the 4th inning at the time. Remember, at that point in the game, DeGrom was looking pretty shaky; I’m sure the Dodgers figured that they’d be able to score at least one more run.
If there’s any blame to be laid, it’s on Justin Turner for forgetting he’s supposed to cover 3rd base, or possibly on Greinke for throwing the ball anywhere remotely close to the strike zone to Murphy in the 6th, but not on Ethier for making an out.
If Ethier lets that ball drop and the next pitch results in a 2 run double, I sincerely doubt the narrative is “he did the right thing.” Not like nobody ever got a hit in a 0-2 count.
It’s nearly always preferable for the team on the field to get the out.
Murphy’s steal of third was the type of aggressive, heads-up baseball that’s good for the game. It was poor positioning of the Dodgers (no one was moving to cover third; the only guy on the left side of the bag was actually walking toward second, head down, not paying attention to Murphy), but the big issue was that no one thought to call time so they could adjust.
Murphy’s a good player but he’s not exactly a superstar. He had a hell of a playoff series but that rarely results in big bucks come contract time. I don’t understand why the New York Mets couldn’t afford him if they wanted him.
“Too expensive” meaning just a bad deal, money better spent elsewhere, etc. Like, at 3/$28, great, welcome back. At 4/$42, eh, put it into extending Harvey.
Or maybe not, depends what their in-house options are for filling his spot, which I haven’t looked at too closely.
Is that true? Haven’t followed free-agent signings that closely lately (because Astros fan) but have been preparing to lose Rasmus to free agency because someone will probably be dumb enough to pay him for his six games of Barry Bonds plus in the postseason rather than his 140 games of slightly above average in the regular season.
I think it is safe to say that Andrew Friedman made the Dodgers a different team, but certainly not a better one and I hope his job security (and that of our GM) is in as much jeopardy as Mattingly’s.
His roster moves proved mostly horrific. Trading away Dee Gordon and signing Matt Latos are just two examples. This was a guy supposedly revered for his ability to put together a bullpen. How did that work out? Reports a few months ago suggested that he was pretty much managing the Dodgers by proxy and telling Mattingly precisely what to do each day. So we got tons of platooning and creative lineups - and no consistency whatsoever.
I’m so tired of these number crunchers thinking that they have figured out a winning baseball formula, without ever taking into account the other factors involved. Although I’m not a Mattingly fan, and think it is abhorrent that a Yankee manages the Dodgers, I have to admit that his hands were pretty tied by these front office shenanigans. Time to get rid of all of them, and take McGuire with them.
Or they faced a pitcher throwing 100 and one with an unhittable splitter. That might have contributed to their “mental” difficulties.
The math favors dropping it, but it is not like Ethier had time to calculate probabilities. An outfielder is trained to catch balls, so that is what he is going to do.
The mets other options are pretty good, so it is unclear where Murphy would fit going forward. Flores can shift over to 2nd and Dilson Herrera is on the cusp of the majors. They could keep Murphy as an utility guy, but in that case someone who could play short like Zobrist makes more sense.
So what is this winning formula that you speak?
Well, you would have to ask Andrew Friedman about that. Reports are that he was sending Mattingly stacks of stats throughout the season and micromanaging lineups and hitting matchups. Mattingly reportedly couldn’t make heads or tails of the data, so Friedman resorted to calling him every day and telling him who to play where.
Personally, I think there is a lot to be said about at least striving for some consistency. Stats are fine but they don’t paint the entire picture, at least not nearly to the extent that these guys rely on them to make their decisions. What I saw was a team that never knew who would be in the starting lineup or where they would be in the batting order. A team that kept Peterson in the leadoff spot over Jimmy Rollins for a good two months even though Joc at that point couldn’t hit water by falling out of a boat.
Eh, I could rant for hours. Bottom line is - I hate the moneyball mentality and think that Friedman and the new GM made us worse as a result. I’ll take Ned Colletti any day over the stupid trades I saw this year.
I don’t know. Greinke was pitching pretty well and I don’t know how scared the Dodgers should have been of D’Arnaud, especially since he would have been behind 0-2 after the foul.
On the other hand, I feel pretty sure – and I don’t think this is just hindsight – that the Mets would take the D’Arnaud sac fly to get Murphy in 10 times out of 10 in that situation. They were struggling to scratch out runs against Greinke.
Fun fact: for the payroll of the just-eliminated Dodgers, you could have bought instead any two of the teams still playing.
For those who, like me, are just casual followers of the game, this is a nice chart summarizing the postseason as it stands right now.
I have to say I have far more respect for the way baseball handles the postseason as opposed to my beloved hockey. The NHL is so money-grubbing that they basically have the attitude, WTF, almost everybody gets into the playoffs, and we milk it for all it’s worth! Basically 16 teams get in out of the 30, and they all participate in best-of-7 quarterfinals just to get to the 8 teams that MLB starts off with right off the bat, so to speak, after the one-game wildcard elimination. I love hockey but the ridiculous everybody-but-the-lowest-14 making the playoffs is silly.
Have the Jays celebrations been out of line?
When they clinched a playoff, and when they won the ALDS were both occasions for huge self-congratulatory parties by the team itself. Is this SOP in 2015?
Historically, the great teams realized that advancing at each step was only one more step towards the Pennant and the World Series and they stayed focussed and didn’t allow themselves to prematurely celebrate.
Even if were 0-2, a long fly ball or grounder to the right side would have had the same effect. So you don’t gain much by dropping it.
(Win probability is just bullshit, starting with the name – it’s not a probability.)
I also disapprove of joy.
Every team except KC in the playoffs has not been there in a very long time; a few celebrations along the way aren’t going to kill anyone. (The Astros celebrated like crazy after winning the one-game playoff, and probably would have if they’d won the DS as well.)
The conventional wisdom is that you celebrate hard every time because that might be your last chance that season.
It might not be probability in the pure sense of mathematically determining the chance of a given outcome given a fixed and knowable set of inputs. For example, it’s not probability in the same sense as calculating that there is a 1 in 6 chance of getting matching numbers when you roll a pair of dice.
But probability is still a perfectly cromulent word for it, given that it calculates the chance of a win based on an analysis of previous outcomes. The larger the dataset (and it’s pretty fucking huge in baseball), the greater the chance that past experience can be a guide for future outcomes in similar situations.
That doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be right, but that also doesn’t mean that it’s bullshit. If the weather guy predicts a 70 percent chance of rain, and it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t mean he was wrong to make the prediction, precisely because his prediction is, in considerable measure, based on historical patterns under similar conditions.
As for the issue of the Jays’ celebrations, i don’t even know how that’s a question. Who gives a flying fuck about their celebrations? I’d also be willing to bet that the “great teams” of yesteryear probably also had some humdinger parties when they advanced; the only difference was they didn’t have cellphones and Twitter and Vine accounts to post their videos.
They did win the division title, right?
The only “Moneyball” mentality is “What wins?” If micromanaging from the GM’s office doesn’t help you win (and frankly, how could it?) that’s stupid. If Friedman and his manager don’t communicate or understand each other, that’s stupid. If your players don’t know what the hell their roles are, that’s stupid. There’s no “moneyball/old school” dichotomy here. This stuff is basic management skill.
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Historically, the great teams realized that advancing at each step was only one more step towards the Pennant and the World Series and they stayed focussed and didn’t allow themselves to prematurely celebrate.
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Well,
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What Elvisl1ves said. You’re going to feel stupid not tasting a little champagne because you assumed you’d get another chance.
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What you are saying is false, anyway. If you don’t believe me, go back 30, 35, 40 years and watch a team win a division or a pennant. The Blue Jays won their first division title 30 years ago; they went nuts. Those guys are all 55-70 years old now but they sure whooped it up when they earned the right to go the playoff series before the World Series. Go on, look up these moments on Youtube.
Here’s a video:
In this video of the 1987 World Series, Game 4, Tom Lawless belts a 3-run shot off Frank Viola in the fourth inning. At about 1:00 of the clip, you see Lawless’s reaction; he walks slowly down the first base line, knowing the ball’s out, and flips his bat when the crowd goes berserk. Remember, this is the fourth inning of a game that isn’t even an elimination game. If it was okay for Tom Lawless to do this back in the day, why’s it wrong now?
Look up any clip of a team clinching a pre-World Series thing. Ever. They celebrate, big time.
- Context matters. When the Blue Jays won the division title in 1993 the celebration was relatively calm. It was the fourth title in five years, they were defending World Series champs, and they kind of expected to win. It wasn’t really much of a pennant race.
The Jays this year are a franchise that hadn’t won anything since Jose Bautista was in seventh grade. They have a lot of players who’ve never seen the postseason, some of whom have been with the team a long time and watched as the city and indeed a whole country sort of grunted in frustration at year after year of 83-79 and 75-87. They were 50-51 at one point this year and were two bad weeks from the year being another dreary writeoff in an endless parade of dreary writeoffs in a beautiful city ESPN barely knows exist, and the players know they’re ignored, and they want to be winners but year after year it’s one disappointment after another. Some of these guys are running out of time; Bautista is 34, which is way old for a ballplayer. If he’s going to win it has to be soon or he has to leave a city he reportedly adores. And then… suddenly all hell breaks loose and they go 43-18 and they win a division, and they’re many people’s favourites to go all the way, holy shit, the city is going crazy and the stadium is packed with shrieking fans and it’s heaven. And then they lose two at home and it looks like they’ve blown the ALDS and all they did in August and September was kind of wasted, and then they come back, and then The Seventh Inning. The emotions of elation and victory are so tangible you can feel it pushing on you as you walk down the street in Toronto.
Among a million other things, this is why baseball is the best game ever invented; it brings your emotions up and down over the course of years and distills them into moments. The seventh inning was so emotionally charged not just because of the events in it but because of the context and story of Toronto baseball - hell, Toronto SPORTS - over the course of 22 years led to those moments. As one writer, whose name I shamefully forget, wrote about it, “They say baseball is boring. Of course it’s boring. Until it isn’t. That’s why it’s so great.”
And why should the players not get wrapped up in that? Jose Bautista shouldn’t flip his bat? Screw that. Why play the game at all, then?