No Crying Over Split Milk

The Royals take one in New York...

So last night the Royals beat the Yankees 4-2 and if they hadn’t walked 73% of a football team in Game 1 the Royals would have beaten the Yankees twice and been 2-0, but as you may have already heard, you shouldn’t cry over spilt milk which is mostly said by irritating people who are talking about other people’s dairy product mishaps.

Easy to be philosophical when it’s not your milk.  

The good news is the Royals are now playing Best of Three and two of the games are in Kauffman Stadium, a ballpark that favors the Royals style of play. So no more cheap home runs to right field and I looked it up and Gleyber Torres’ Game 1 homer traveled 339 feet which might not have reached the Kauffman Stadium warning track.

And now some stuff about last night’s game.

Ted Williams and The First Rule of Hitting

Ted Williams, who was a pretty decent hitter and wrote a book about it, said the first thing a hitter had to do was get a good pitch to hit because the best hitter in the world couldn’t hit a bad ball good.

(Those red and orange balls are the ones Ted wanted to hit and, no surprise, they’re in the middle of the strike zone.)

We think and talk a lot about a hitter’s swing, but spend less time thinking about what hitters choose to swing at and right now – in a very small sample size – you can see Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr. (who are both scuffling) swing at some bad pitches.

Although to be fair (don’t get used to it) in Game 1 Bobby hit two balls with exit velocities of 100 and 108.4 MPH and exit velocity is a good number to pay attention to because hitting a ball hard is all a hitter can do and hit enough balls hard and you’re going to be OK…eventually.

A bad number to pay attention to is Win Probability unless you’re a Gambler’s Anonymous candidate because the only reason they put those percentages up is so you can make bets during ballgames and another shitty number are those catch-probability percentages because I guarantee you they can’t include all the factors that matter like wind or sun or how hungover your right fielder is during a day game after a night off.

Which reminds me I once had one of my outfielders look up into the sun for a fly ball and then projectile vomit because he’d been drinking all night and only stopped at 7AM and when I asked what the fuck he was thinking and told him how irresponsible that was because we had a 10 AM start, he said:

“Why do you think I stopped drinking at 7?”

Anyway…

If my notes are right – and I’m pretty sure they are – Aaron Judge has the highest percentage of postseason strikeouts of anyone who has 200 postseason plate appearances and last night Bobby was swinging at pitches he couldn’t hit if his bat was a foot longer and he had Inspector Gadget’s arms and you know they didn’t swing like this during the regular season because Judge hit .322 and Bobby hit .332.

So what’s different now?

I’m not there to ask and they might not want to talk about if I was and they’d probably say something like, “Who let this clown in here?” but the obvious factor that springs to mind is pressure.

Guys want to perform well in these Under-The-Bright-Lights situations and smart pitchers can take advantage of that and you see it all the time with a runner in scoring position because hitters really really want that RBI and might be willing to chase a bad pitch to get it.

So throw a slider in the dirt and see if an overanxious hitter will chase it.

Look at Bobby’s five plate appearances from last night and he’s swinging at borderline strikes and pitches entirely out of the strike zone and in his third at-bat, when he finally got a fastball in the middle of the zone, fouled it off.

Aaron Judge did the same thing – chased bad pitches and fouled off or missed good ones – and the two are related because to swing at bad pitches you have to alter your swing and then your mechanics break down and are out of whack when you finally get a good pitch to hit and it doesn’t take much to miss the middle of a baseball.

In Bobby’s seventh inning at-bat with a runner on third base he saw six pitches and none of them were even near the strike zone, but he still took a hack at three of them and struck out and if the Yankees are smart they’re going to keep trying to get Bobby to chase, so in Game 3 pay attention to his pitch selection.

Timeout for Some Hitting Wisdom

I once watched Russ Morman (and if he’s reading this and he probably is, “Hi, Russ!”) bat fourth in a game and in the first inning the 3-hole hitter saw a first-pitch curve, swung, fouled it off, then got a fastball, fouled it off and went on to strikeout.

They tried to pitch Russ the same way and he also saw a first-pitch curve, but took it for a strike, then got his fastball and banged it off the left field wall for a double.

After the game I asked Russ if the difference in the two at-bats was taking the curve for a strike instead of swinging at the curve for a strike and he said yes and added that pitchers are trying to get you to chase up, down, in, out, fast, slow, curved and straight and if you swing at all those pitches and locations your timing and swing will be dicked up when you finally get a good pitch to hit.

(Although Russ is classier than me — who isn’t? — and probably didn’t use the term “dicked up.”)

Second Piece of Hitting Wisdom:

I was looking at Jason Kendall’s 2,000^th hit bat and said 2,000 hits was awesome for a catcher – he’s fourth all time and definitely ought to be in the Hall of Fame, but he scared and pissed off too many of the reporters who would have to vote for him – and Jason said about 1,800 of those 2,000 hits were:

“Right down the middle.”

And then added:

“That other shit is hard to hit.”

Which is interesting because as a catcher Jason was trying to get hitters to overthink and chase pitches, but as a hitter he said screw all that and just waited for a pitcher to make a mistake in the middle of the plate. And Jason didn’t care if the mistake was off-speed or a fastball because he’d pull the off-speed stuff and hit the fastball to the opposite field, but hitting mistakes in the middle of the plate over and over kept his swing mechanics consistent.

Good hitters are not only consistent in how they swing the bat, they’re also consistent in what they choose to swing at.

Cole Ragans’ Long Wait

Yesterday I wrote about how a long inning on offense can have a negative effect on a team’s pitcher who is sitting in the dugout getting cold and in the top of the fourth inning the Royals scored four runs, sent seven hitters to the plate and the Yankees also made a pitching change, so Cole Ragans had a long wait and when he came out to pitch the bottom of the fourth he scuffled.

Ragans walked the leadoff hitter, got a force out – and somewhere in there Salvador Perez called time and while walking to the mound, turned and looked at the Royals dugout while doing a spinning motion with his finger, meaning: “Get somebody going”—and the next two batters lined out, which is never a good sign, but it was still a “shutdown inning” (putting up a zero after your team scores) and if you’re a Royals fan your team got shot at and missed.

There are key moments in a ballgame and the bottom of the fourth was one of them.

George Brett, Still A Good Base Runner

George and Leslie Brett were at the game and they kept showing them on TV and it’s pretty clear George still cares and gets excited about baseball and if you’ve never hung out with pro athletes, they’re the most competitive people in the world and care way more than the rest of us, which is part of what makes them good, because if I’d been cut from my high school basketball team I would have figured basketball wasn’t for me and maybe I should take up ballroom dancing, but Michael Jordan got pissed and went home and practiced.

Anyway…

In the fourth inning Salvador Perez homered and Yuli Gurriel singled, moved to second on a wild pitch, Tommy Pham singled, Gurriel scored, Pham stole second, Garret Hampson singled, Pham scored and during a replay George could be seen yelling at Hampson to go to second base.

Now here’s the deal on that:

When an outfielder makes a throw to home plate, an infielder is supposed to at least act like he might cut the ball off which should freeze the trail runner (in this case, Hampson) but Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo launched his throw too high to be cutoff and when a trail runner sees that high throw (and George saw it from wherever he was sitting) that trail runner can take an extra 90 feet.

The high throw let Hampson move into second base which was a Big Deal because he then scored on Maikel Garcia’s single.

Why Insurance Runs Are Such A Big Deal

Hampson taking an extra 90 feet and then scoring a “tack-on run” (runs scored after you already have a lead) made the score 4-1 which was a Really Big Deal because after Jazz Chisholm hit a home run in the ninth inning the score was 4-2 and Hampson’s “tack-on run” then became an “insurance run.”

And having a two-run lead instead of a one-run lead meant Royals closer Lucas Erceg could be aggressive because the next batter could hit the ball to Queens (assuming that’s the right general direction) and the Royals would still have a one-run lead.

So even after Yankees first baseman Jon Berti singled and the tying run was at the plate, Erceg could ignore Berti and not worry about a stolen base (Berti stole 41 of them in 2022) and focus on Gleyber Torres which he did and got the final out.  

Now it’s back to Kansas City and if you’ve never been to a playoff game before, try to get a ticket because it’s totally different than regular season baseball and it gets so loud you’d think were standing next to a jet revving its engine.

The K will be jumpin’ and I mean that literally, you can feel the ballpark shaking.

Nice to have playoff baseball back, isn’t it?