2015 WORLD SERIES: Game 4—Royals 5, Mets 3

Our story so far: the Mets have just won Game 3 and if they can somehow win Game 4 the Series will be tied 2-2 and then it’s a Best of Three series. The Royals are starting their Swiss Army Knife pitcher, Chris Young, and he’s been mostly used as a reliever and since the middle of July has only thrown five innings or more two times.

If the Mets can get Young out of the game early, they’ll see the Royals middle relievers—the weakest part of any pitching staff—and for five innings that plan seems to work.

Young throws four innings, leaves with the score 2-0 (he gave up a homer to Michael Conforto and Alex Rios brain-cramped to give the Mets a second run…and we’ll have lots more on that in the next section), Danny Duffy relieves Young and gives up another home run to Conforto and after five innings it’s 3-1 Mets.

And it stays that way until the 8^th inning and that’s the best part of this story, but first…

The Mental Grind of Baseball

In the bottom of the third inning, with one out and Wilmer Flores on third base, Alex Rios catches a fly ball for the second out, thinks it’s the third out, doesn’t throw the ball in and Flores tags and scores.

As former Royals second baseman and former Royals TV announcer and, as of yesterday, former Jackson County county executive, Frank White once said during a broadcast: in a Big League ballpark there are a lot of opportunities to find out how many outs there are.

Meaning: C’mon, dude, there are scoreboards everywhere.

The ever-informative Jason Kendall once told me about playing in a Turn Back the Clock game which also meant it was a Turn Off the Scoreboard Game and Jason said all the players were confused and kept asking each other what inning they were in and how many outs there were and what the count was because they were all accustomed to relying on the scoreboard.

And Now the Extremely Rare Digression within A Digression

So I just asked Google when the Major Leagues started using scoreboards and in 1888 someone in Boston installed some lights that indicated balls and strikes and in 1908 someone invented an electronic scoreboard that would indicate balls, strikes and outs, which the team owners didn’t like because they thought it would hurt sales of paper scorecards.

Y’know…

The team owners have a long and rich history of being on the wrong side of issues, mostly because they’re a bunch of short-sighted greedy assholes and as a group they also opposed putting games on radio, putting games on TV, installing lights and selling team apparel.

As either the owner or GM (and right now I can’t remember which) of the New York Yankees once asked; why would I want every kid in New York walking around wearing a Yankees cap?

BECAUSE THOSE KIDS ARE GOING TO PAY YOU FOR THEM, YOU MORON.

Anyway…

In 1912 the Reds installed the first scoreboard; it was 15 feet high and 54 feet long and a major innovation that kept fans informed and made the games more interesting and pretty soon every team had one.

But before 1912 fans and ballplayers were required to pay attention, something we pretty much suck at doing unless you’re talking about our cellphones because we could be at our mom’s funeral and still want to check for text messages. (Face it, she’s dead and no longer gives a crap, so while you’re at it go ahead and check the scores in the playoff games, but try not to let out a whoop when you’re team wins.)

And Now Back to Losing Track of the Number of Outs

Shouldn’t happen, but it does and if you ask ballplayers about it—and I have—they’ll talk about the Mental Grind of Baseball.

On each and every pitch a player on defense needs to know the score, the number of outs, the count (when the hitter’s ahead in the count he’s more likely to pull the ball, when the hitter’s behind he’s more likely to go the other way) if at all possible, the pitch being thrown, the speed of all the runners involved (it changes what you might do with the ball) and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember right now.

Oh, wait, here’s one:

Is the grass wet because if the ball bounces you’ll be throwing a wet baseball, if you catch it in the air you’ll throw a dry one and that changes what you might do with the ball and, if I counted the Royals number of pitches right (always a good question) in Game 4 Alex Rios needed to do that 130 times.

As ballplayers will tell you, do it 129 times and the one time you don’t do it the Gods of Baseball (and they’re real, unlike some other Gods we worship) will make sure you pay for taking a pitch off.

Which is not an excuse.

Paying attention is a big part of the job and when I first started covering the Royals I was keeping track of mental mistakes, like not knowing the number of outs and you can tell an outfielder’s lost track of the outs when he catches the third out of an inning, but still comes up ready to throw the ball back to the infield.

I asked a Royals coach if that should count as a mental mistake because since it was the third out nobody advanced or scored and he said Hell, yeah, there’s no excuse for standing on a Big League field and not knowing the number of outs.

Point of interest:

The analytics crowd hated what I was doing, but at the end of the year—by keeping track of mental mistakes—a Royals coach told me I had identified the two players they thought had problems with ADHD and the aforementioned Frank White couldn’t believe I was developing valuable information like that and then just giving it away on the internet.

Live and don’t learn because I’m still doing it.

The Eighth Inning

Mets pitcher Tyler Clippard replaces Addison Reed and Tyler can’t find the strike zone consistently, which doesn’t stop Alcides Escobar from swinging anyway and grounding out, but then Ben Zobrist walks and Lorenzo Cain walks and that brings Eric Hosmer to the plate.

The Mets once again bring in relief pitcher Jeurys Familia.

In 2015 Jeurys had a great regular season (1.85 ERA, 43 saves) but is having the kind of World Series that will put a player in therapy. (Just looked it up and Jeurys had a 1.80 ERA in the Series, but still managed to be in the wrong place at the right time on more than one occasion and guess who was on the mound when Eric Hosmer ran the 90-yard dash in Game 5.)

But we’ll deal with that later and right now it’s two on, Hosmer at the plate.

If you’ve been following along you know the Royals want to pressure the Mets defense with ground balls because they believe the Mets have loaded up on Good Bat/Bad Glove players.

By 2015 (and beyond) pretty much everyone in baseball is obsessed with offense and has somehow forgotten keeping a run off the board is just as valuable as putting a run on the board, mostly because the Analytics Community can’t figure out how to accurately measure defense (and the numbers they have now suck) so they ignore defense and pretend it doesn’t matter…

Right up until a Bad Glove second baseman misses a groundball.

A couple things about that error: give credit to Eric Hosmer for running hard because that’s what put pressure on Daniel Murphy and made him rush the play and try to scoop the ball on the run.

A CBS story speculated that maybe Murphy rushed the play in an effort to turn a double play which doesn’t seem likely because the ball was hit too slowly for that and you can hear someone yelling: “One! One! One!”—maybe the pitcher, maybe the first baseman—letting Murphy know his only play was at first base.

Odd moment I missed at the time:

After making a horrendous error that changed the game, Daniel Murphy decided his lips were dry and took out some Chap Stick-type product and gave his lips a swipe and if I’d made that error—and I would have, because I also suck at catching baseballs—I’m not sure I’d be aware I had lips.

I’d be too busy thinking of the hole I wanted to dig and climb into.

Also…

Give credit to Zobrist for running hard and scoring and after that Mike Moustakas singles and Salvador Perez singles and it’s 5-3 which means the Royals can bring in Wade Davis for a six-out save and just in case you forgot—and I did—the Mets got a rally going in the ninth inning, but the game ended on some horseshit base running by Yoenis Cespedes:

So the Mets who finished fourth in the National League in homers and hit two of them in Game 4, scuffle on defense and on the base paths and get beat by a team that finished second-to-last in homers in the American League.

I have heard it argued that players need to focus on doing Big Things like hitting homers and striking out batters and don’t sweat the Small Stuff, which ignores the fact that in baseball there is no Small Stuff.

All that “Small Stuff” like defense and base running matters and if you don’t take care of it, eventually it will take care of you.

Next Up:

Game 5 and the moment when everything the Royals believe in and have been criticized for doing, wins them a World Series.