Something You've Never Seen Before

What makes baseball such a great game? Why does it get inside so many of us in ways that nothing else really can? There are a million answers to the question — I’ve tried to come up with a few hundred myself in my baseball books — but if you had to pick one answer, one line, you could do worse than this simple cliché:

There’s always the chance you will see something you’ve never seen before.

I know, I know, that’s true for other sports, and it’s true for movies, and it’s true for art, and it’s true for music, and it’s true for literature and everything else — It would not be a vibrant life if you ever started to believe that you’ve seen and heard and felt all that there is. But, I’d argue, it’s particularly true for baseball because of the way the sport is shaped.

Two baseball games were played on Monday night. In the first, the Seattle Mariners romped over Toronto 10-3 to take a 2-0 lead in the American League Championship Series, and while the result was thrilling in its own way — this is DEFINITELY the closest the Mariners have ever been to the World Series — the game itself was utterly familiar. The Mariners bashed three home runs and got six scoreless innings from the bullpen. The Blue Jays’ offense, for the second straight night, couldn’t get out of its own way. It was the sort of game where, if it had happened in July, it would have been forgotten minutes after it was played.

“Who won?” someone would have asked you the next morning.

“The Mariners!” you would have said if you were a Seattle fan.

“Not the Blue Jays,” you would have said if you were a Toronto fan.

And you would have gone about your day.

This, honestly, is how most of baseball is — 2,430 regular-season games every year, 24,300 games every decade, more than 200,000 Major League games since the dawn of time. Some games are unforgettable. Some games are humdrum.* The vast majority of games live in that middle space. It’s 100 floors of fright. They’re not all going to be winners.

When the Dodgers-Brewers game started — Game 1 of the NLCS — there was no telling what kind of game it would be. The Brewers didn’t even announce their starting pitcher until a short while before first pitch. The matchup ended up being two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell vs. a relief pitcher named Aaron Ashby. The only two things I know about Aaron Ashby are that (1) He grew up in Kansas City and (2) His uncle is former All-Star pitcher Andy Ashby. That’s not a lot to go on. I assume the Dodgers did a bit more research.

Or maybe they didn’t — Ashby rolled through a scoreless first inning, finishing it off with a strikeout of Freddie Freeman. And with that, he was done for the day. The Brewers would try to match Snell’s particular brilliance with a bevy of relief pitchers and a whole lot of scrap. The Brewers call themselves “Average Joes.” I try not to be offended.

I mention Blake Snell’s “particular brilliance” … he’s simply the greatest strikeout pitcher in the history of baseball. That’s not hyperbole. He strikes out 11.2 batters per nine innings, and that’s the highest K rate for any pitcher with 1,000 big-league innings. He also ranks seventh on the all-time unhittable list, with just decimal points between him and some legends:

Fewest hits per nine innings:

Here’s the conundrum: How do you beat one of the most unhittable pitchers in the game’s history and the greatest strikeout pitcher? There are two strategies:

Play A. You hope he’s wild. Snell can be very wild. He walked 99 batters in 180 innings when he won the 2023 Cy Young. That’s so many walks. He’s tightened up his control somewhat over the last couple of injury-plagued years, but it can still leave him.

Plan B: You keep the game close and hope to work him enough to get him out of the game early. Snell famously has only one complete game in his career, and that was the no-hitter he threw last year. This year, he had not gone more than seven innings, and he averaged fewer than six. That Dodgers bullpen is, as they say, “gettable.”

Unfortunately for the Brewers, there was no hope against Snell on Monday. We often call Tarik Skubal the best pitcher in baseball, and I believe he is that, and then there’s Paul Skenes, who has his own case, and then there’s Garrett Crochet, and Chris Sanchez, and others.

But really, when Blake Snell is right, he’s the best of them all. Those five words, “when Blake Snell is right,” are fraught with ambiguity because he’s so often hurt, so often wild, so often not quite right. But just as the raspberry is the best fruit if you happen to catch it during the 48 seconds when it is ripe, Blake Snell is an untouchable force when the stars align. And the stars were aligned on Monday. He pitched eight full innings. He gave up one hit and promptly eliminated that runner on a pickoff. He struck out 10. He didn’t walk anybody. He faced the minimum. Heck, he only got to a three-ball count six times — and he struck out four of them, three looking. The Brewers didn’t have a prayer.

So the Brewers were reduced to Plan B — keep the game close and hope to get a shot at the Dodgers’ flammable bullpen. But that plan seemed to die in the fourth inning. The Brewers had Quinn Priester on the mound, and it is astonishing that CBS has not had a television show built around an action named Quinn Priester.

“Who are you?” the bad guy would say in a disgusted voice.

“Oh, I guess I didn’t introduce myself,” our hero would say. “I’m Quinn Preister.”

“Oh, so you’re Quinn Priester! Yes, yes, I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Funny,” Quinn Priester would respond. “I didn’t want to meet you.”

Anyway, Priester walked Teoscar Hernández. Will Smith singled up the middle. Tommy Edman singled to load the bases. And then, well, here we are, about 2,500 games are played every year when you include the playoffs. There have been almost six million outs recorded in baseball history.

But still, because this game can be a miracle, you will sometimes see something you’ve never seen before.

Max Muncy drove the ball 400 feet to center field. The ball was carrying, carrying, it had a chance to be a home run, it seemed sure to be a run-scoring double, it was definitely deep enough to advance the runners. Milwaukee centerfielder Sal Frelick, who won a Gold Glove last year but as a right fielder — raced back to the wall. He leaped. The ball hit the base of his glove … and popped out. Frelick bounced off the wall, and when his cleats hit the warning track, the ball was waiting for him, dangling in mid-air like a spider spinning its web. He snagged it out of the air.

On television, it looked like he had caught the ball. That’s how it looked to the players on the bases — Hernández raced back to tag up from third.

But he had not caught the ball. It had ticked off the outfield wall before it came back down to him. That meant the ball was live. That meant that there was still a force play at every base. Frelick knew it. He came up throwing, made a perfect throw to the cutoff man Joey Ortiz, who fired the ball home.

“It’s in and out of his glove, but he caught it,” the excellent Brian Anderson shouted from he booth. “And now, chaos on the bases. Might have a play at the plate. The throw … not in time! … No! He’s out! HE’S OUT!”

Hernández was indeed out — a forceout at the plate. The home plate umpire John Libka deserves all sorts of credit because he immediately made the call.

Then Brewers catcher William Contreras jogged over to third base to step on the bag … because Will Smith, who was also convinced that Frelick had caught the ball, had returned to second.

Score it 8-6-2-2u — the craziest, wildest, most wonderful double play I’ve ever seen.

It took me five whole minutes to explain to Margo what had happened, and that was a very fun five minutes.

Baseball! This is the magic. We’ve all seen countless fly balls hit with a runner on third base. But we never saw that before.*

And that crazy play did help keep the Brewers close — they trailed just 2-0 going into the ninth inning. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Snell because he had thrown 102 pitches. It seemed like a bananas decision to me to expose his bullpen like that, but Roberts is pretty famous for pulling starters doing historic things, and, anyway, he has developed a crazy amount of faith in the closing ability of Rōki Sasaski, who has been a closer for approximately 23 minutes now. You get it — Sasaki’s stuff is otherworldly — but he did have control issues before he got hurt, and sure enough this time around he walked Isaac Collins*, gave up a ground rule double to Jake Bauers, allowed a long sac fly to Jackson Chourio, and then walked Christian Yelich.

That forced Roberts to bring in Blake Treinen, who has been a one-man Dodgers wrecking crew, not a great thing to be since he’s on the Dodgers. Treinen promptly allowed Yelich to steal second, putting the winning run in scoring position. He walked Contreras to load the bases. And that brought up Brice Turang.

If the Brewers are the average Joes, then Turang is the averagest Joe. He looks like the sort of neighbor who would borrow your lawnmower, but would bring it back tuned up and filled with gas. Nobody’s heard of him, but he had a 6-win bWAR season, he won a Gold Glove last year, he can steal a base, and hit with a little power, and he will often find a way to beat you. He was not the guy the Roberts wanted to have up there with Blake Treinen on the mound.

But this was the bed he made, and the truth is that sometimes in baseball you can make all the wrong moves and still win. Turang inconceivably struck out on a pitch about a foot over his head, and the Dodgers ended up winning 2-1. It was an anticlimactic finish to an unforgettable game, but that’s baseball, too.