Drunk on Baseball, Day 2

So … that was a pretty wild day, eh? Pal Joe Sheehan gets it right — neither one of us like expanded playoffs one bit because of how it devalues the regular season. But then you get a ridiculous, incredible, joyful baseball day like Saturday and you can’t help but think: Wow, that’s pretty good.

Anyway, some late-night random thoughts:

Cleveland 1, Tampa Bay 0 (15 innings)

I don’t know if this was a fantastic game or a terrible game or something that defies description — I have heard all those opinions and more — but one thing you can say for certain is that none of us have ever seen anything quite like it before.

For almost five hours, under the heat of playoff baseball, we watched two teams fail to score a single run. They failed to score a single run off FIFTEEN different pitchers. Until the last batter, Cleveland hit .090 and struck out 20 times. Tampa Bay hit a stouter .122 and struck out only 19 times.

Put it this way: Before Saturday’s game, only three players in postseason history — Harrison Bader, Reggie Sanders and an old Yankees pitcher named George Pipgras — had ever struck out five times in a postseason game. I was there for Reggie’s five-K game; it was as if he was in a fog.

In this single game, TWO players struck out five times, Tampa Bay’s Jose Siri and Cleveland’s Andrés Giménez. And the only surprising part was that it wasn’t more.

It is true that these are probably the two worst offensive teams in the playoffs. Cleveland somehow finished sixth in runs scored despite hitting only 127 homers. And Tampa Bay’s offense was brutal, 11th in runs, 12th in OPS, 13th in total bases in the American League.

Still, they are major league teams with some good hitters, and yet they stood no chance at all against whatever pitcher happened to be out there. I do think it is a reflection of today’s game; pitchers are simply too good. They throw too hard, their secondary stuff explodes and dances, they have superhuman control — most of them can hit the thermal exhaust port every time.

It’s almost comical. It goes without saying that the two starters — Tyler Glasnow and Triston McKenzie — have great stuff and great command.

But then, look at the relievers:

Tampa Bay’s Pete Fairbanks: 100-mph fastball, put-away slider.

Tampa Bay’s Jason Adam: 95-mph fastball, slider that the league is hitting .096 against.

Cleveland’s James Karinchak: 95-mph fastball with obscene break, huge curveball.

Cleveland’s Trevor Stephan: 97-mph fastball with split-finger pitch that the league swung and missed at 32% of the time.

Tampa Bay’s Garrett Cleavinger: 96-mph fastball plus unhittable slider plus he’s left-handed.

Cleveland’s Emmanuel Clase: 100-mph cutter and slider that should be illegal.

Tampa Bay’s Brooks Raley: Actually throws in the low 90s (whoa!) but makes up for it with a sick slider and changeup that nobody can hit.

And so on.

It’s an endless parade of blinding pitcher power. Now, yes, it is true that this Cleveland-Tampa Bay game is unusual. Sometimes hitters have their way — take, for example, the free-for-all in Toronto on Saturday — and that’s because hitters are absurdly skilled, too.

But it’s not a fluke that this year batters hit .243 and had a .312 on-base percentage and both of those are the lowest in the game since the late 1960s and early 1970s. You have to go back five years just to find the last time that batters across baseball had more hits than strikeouts.

In these playoffs so far, there have been 112 hits and 155 strikeouts.

In any case, this one went all the way to the bottom of the 15th, where Corey Kluber made a mistake and Cleveland rookie Óscar González did not miss and now the Guardians will be playing the Yankees in what I think is a super-interesting matchup. On paper and in bank statements, it looks like a mismatch, a Yankees romp, and it very well might turn out that way. But I wouldn’t overlook this Cleveland team.

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Joe

Seattle 10, Toronto 9

I don’t even know what to say — when Seattle reliever Paul Sewald went walkabout in the fifth inning and gave up four runs to make it 8-1 Toronto, I gave up on this game. Why wouldn’t I? The Blue Jays had a 99% win expectancy at that point.

And then these magical Mariners got three consecutive hits off starter Kevin Gausman to load the bases with nobody out. Gausman promptly struck out Mitch Haniger and got Adam Frazier to fly out. That brought up switch-hitter Carlos Santana.

And Blue Jays manager John Schneider, the one who did not play in “Dukes of Hazzard,” went to the mound, pulled Gausman, and brought in lefty Tim Mayza. It didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense when he did it, since Gausman clearly was not gassed and Santana has, throughout his career, been a better hitter against lefties. This year, he hit just .178 and slugged .366 against righties — he hit almost 90 points better and had 150 more OPS points against lefties.

But, he was 0-for-3 against Mayza, so maybe that’s what Schneider saw. I don’t know.

“Timmy Mayza is a tough guy to get underneath and hit the ball out of the ballpark,” Schneider explained. The numbers don’t necessarily show that, though; Mayza gave up seven homers in 48 innings this year, which isn’t tragic but isn’t word-class either.

But, OK, in came Tim Mayza — “You trust your entire roster,” Schneider said — and he promptly threw a wild pitch, which scored one run, then he threw a 91.2-mph sinker that didn’t sink enough, and Santana turned on it and poked it over the fence. That made it 8-5.

The Blue Jays made it 9-5 in the seventh inning with a nice little rally … and then the magical Mariners came back again. Eugenio Suarez doubled. Cal Raleigh added to his Seattle legend by singling him in. Mitch Haniger singled.

And the Blue Jays went to their break-glass-in-emergency closer, Jordan Romano, a 6-foot-5, 210 pound Canadian force who throws in the upper-90s along with a swing-and-miss slider … pretty much like every other reliever these days. Romano gave up a little single to Adam Frazier, who specializes at hitting little singles, but then whiffed Santana and Dylan Moore and seemed about ready to put the game away.

Only then, J.P. Crawford came up, and on the first pitch he lofted a short TCBT fly ball … with TCBT standing for the announcer call “That Could Be Trouble.”

A few things happened at roughly the same time, none of them good for the Blue Jays. Toronto centerfielder George Springer, who has taken a “Rockford Files” beating in this series, got a late jump on it. So that wasn’t good. At the same time, Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette was after the ball like a dog chasing a frisbee and it’s pretty clear that everything else in the entire world disappeared for him. That wasn’t good, either.

What you had, in the end, was that Springer was the only one with a real shot at catching the ball — but he had the presence to look up and see Bichette flying in and he veered slightly off-course, in a doomed attempt to avoid the collision. Bichette saw nothing but ball, and he dove fearlessly for it, but was not even able to get a glove on it. The two crashed, both players sprawled on the ground, Springer was already hurt, so this only made things worse, the ball bounced away, three runs scored and the game was tied.

I’m going to guess that in Seattle baseball lore, this play now ranks second behind only Edgar Martinez’s double in 1995. And I’m going to guess that in Toronto sports suffering, this play now ranks second behind only the Maple Leafs’ blowing a three-goal lead in Game 7 against Boston back in 2013.

The rest was probably inevitable. In the ninth inning, the unsinkable Cal Raleigh doubled and came around to score when Adam Frazier turned on a first-pitch slider against Adam Cimber and drove in the game-winning run.

This was one of those rare sports series where I really was rooting equally hard for both teams. I mean, how can you not love this Mariners story? But at the same time, I truly adore the Blue Jays and their fans and Toronto in general. I felt equal parts joy for Seattle and pain for Toronto. What else can you say? It was some kind of game.

As Springer and Bichette collided, the Blue Jays’ hopes went down with them. (Mark Blinch/Getty Images)

Philadelphia 2, St. Louis 0

Well, in the end, my concern that the Cardinals were being too sentimental by giving major roles to departing legends Albert Pujols and Yadi Molina proved to be misplaced. On Sunday, Pujols got two hits, including in what looks to be his final big-league at-bat. He got to walk off the field to the St. Louis cheers he has earned throughout his life.

And, Molina did some hero stuff himself. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with the Phillies down 2-0 and a runner on first, he cracked a base-hit to send the winning run to the plate. He too was pulled for a pinch-runner and walked into his final baseball sunset surrounded by the love of St. Louis.

No, in the end, the phone call was coming from inside the house.

In the end, the two MVP candidates in the league, Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, were at the heart of the Cardinals’ sorrow. Arenado at least got one hit and did hit a ball that, off the bat, looked like it was gone (it died on the warning track). But he also failed to make a key defensive play. And Goldschmidt, meanwhile, seemed utterly lost. He went 0-for-7 with four strikeouts and his at-bat in the eighth, with runners on first and second and just one out, was a flat-out disaster, as he struck out on a pitch that was never in the zone.

Baseball is certainly not the only sport where superstars can get inside their own heads, but because the game is so hard and the odds are always against hitters, just a slight drop in a hitter’s confidence can lead to shocking outcomes. Goldy is one of the best hitters in all of baseball and I think he’s on his way to the Hall of Fame. But at some point pretty early in this series, I think the Phillies were happy to see him come up.

As for Philadelphia … with Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, they’re dangerous — especially if Bryce Harper can find his home run swing like he did on Saturday.

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New York Mets 7, San Diego 3

The Mets are a much better team than the Padres, I think. I know San Diego has all that star power (though much of it is missing without Fernando Tatis Jr.) but that Mets lineup is much deeper, Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer should be the scariest pitching duo in the playoffs, and Edwin Diaz is a comic book hero.

But, alas, they’re the Mets, so nothing comes easy — Scherzer was a broken version of himself in the Game 1 loss, deGrom just looked off in Game 2 (even if he did touch 102 with his fastball), and even though the Mets beat up on the Padres bullpen on Saturday and scored seven runs, the Padres STILL sent the tying run to the plate in the ninth, sparking heart palpitations throughout Queens.

I have absolutely no idea what to expect tonight in the only Game 3 of the wild-card round. Could the Mets breeze to an 11-1 victory? Absolutely. Could they fall behind 6-0 in the first inning? Absolutely. Could they lose on some egregious call because the power went out in the replay booth? You bet. They are the Mets, now and forever.

By the way, I like Jeff McNeil’s bat. I like how it has no knob on the handle. He’s not the ONLY player in baseball to use a bat with no knob, but he’s one of the few, and anyway it looks cooler when McNeil’s hitting because of the way he chokes way up on it. My wife Margo was watching the game and said, “Why is he allowed to use a longer bat than anyone else.” He actually doesn’t — his bat is 34 inches long, which is typical for MLB players and well within the rules.*

*You can actually use a bat up to 42 inches long, though nobody has ever come close to using one that long. Pete Rose actually did use a 36-inch bat. Tony Gwynn, meanwhile, used one that was only about 32 inches long.