Tag Archives: Los Angeles Dodgers

Christmas shopping spree

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A week ago I wrote the following:

“The MLB Winter Meetings have begun in San Diego and plenty of people are speculating about what big free agent news will be announced over the next few days (likely very little, based on recent years)”.

You could say I was a long way off the mark with that comment, although maybe I can latch onto the final caveat to save a bit of face.

Over the past two off-seasons there has been considerable discontent among players as to how the free agent market has failed to develop in the way they expected. Both times the fall-out descended into an argument with teams on one side and players and agents on the other. It takes two sides to make a deal. Whether it was the players being greedy or the teams being cheap depended on which side of the fence you were shouting from.

The first month and a half of the 2019/20 off-season can’t help but make you lean towards the players and agents on this one.

Take Mike Moustakas as a prime example. He had to accept one year deals in each of the previous two off-seasons due to finding no multi-contact offers to his liking. This time around he’s signed a four-year contract with the Cincinnati Reds. Whilst we do have to take the qualifying offer, and resulting loss of a draft pick, into account, that doesn’t go far enough as an explanation as to why he suddenly is now worthy of a multi-year commitment. The difference this time is in a greater number of teams looking to add a quality infielder.

It comes back to a topic I discussed just over a month ago, that of the essential element of competition that drives a free agent market. The impasse in the past two off-seasons has come from teams not upping their offers because they knew that they didn’t have to as part of winning the bidding, whilst players and agents were waiting for better offers that they thought should come, but never did.

This year, things have changed.

The Philadelphia Phillies were one of the few teams to make a big push a year ago, not least in the Bryce Harper contract, and the end result was making it eight consecutive seasons without a play-off appearance. The Phillies were never going to stand still after that disappointment and they’ve acted by bringing in Joe Girardi as manager to replace Gabe Kapler and then signing Zack Wheeler to a five-year, $118m contract and Didi Gregorius to a one-year, $14m contract.

Their NL East rivals, the Washington Nationals, were not going to take their foot off the gas after winning the World Series either. Having lost Harper last year, and rightly expecting to lose Anthony Rendon this year, there was no way they were going to let Stephen Strasburg be tempted by another team’s offer. That was why they blew everyone else out of the water with their seven-year, $245m contract offer that Strasburg accepted on Monday. It’s a huge commitment in a pitcher who has had injury problems in the past and, by all accounts, was not looking to leave Washington anyway, but the Nationals were not prepared to take any chances. They could afford to offer that contract, so they did.

This immediately ignited the market for Gerrit Cole. Strasburg’s deal took the other outstanding starter off the board and also helped to set the parameters for the contract Cole clearly was going to command.

A year ago, everyone was waiting for the New York Yankees to jump in and ramp up the bidding stakes for Manny Machado and Bryce Harper. There was no waiting around this year. The Yankees’ record of making the World Series at least once in every decade from the 1920s on came to an end in their ALCS defeat to the Houston Astros. With no Bronx Fall Classics in the 2010s, and a team with a great offence and bullpen but questionable starting pitching, there was no way that the Yankees would allow Cole to go anywhere else. No messing about: they put the largest ever contract for a pitcher on the table, nine-years, $324m, to make sure he became a Yankee.

And that then put the LA Angels on the clock. It was already a source of embarrassment for owner Arte Moreno that his team had squandered the first eight full seasons of Mike Trout, genuinely in the running to be considered the greatest player of all-time by the end of his career, by turning it into just one Division Series defeat. Having given Trout the most lucrative contract ever (12 years, $426.5M) to stay with the team for years to come prior to the 2019 season, there was no way that the Angels could get through this off-season without signing a big-ticket free agent.

With Strasburg and Cole off the market, the Angels immediately offered Anthony Rendon a seven-year, $245m contract. Just as the Nationals couldn’t let Strasburg leave and the Yankees couldn’t let Cole sign elsewhere, the Angels were prepared to offer whatever it took to make sure they didn’t miss out on Rendon.

This is what happens when teams with big pockets are motivated to out-spend each other to win now. Whatever Rob Manfred may try to claim, that has not been the context in which the free agent market has played out over the past two off-seasons.

It’s made for an exciting Winter Meetings and sets up the rest of the off-season perfectly.

Dodgers won one, A’s won one, Series 1-1

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I’m not a big fan of two-game series, as the Oakland A’s just had with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s not the lack of a winner, more that the series is over almost as soon as it begun. The difference between three games and two isn’t much, but it does make a difference.

Having lost Game One, with Sean Manaea struggling in what we have to hope was just a one-off bad night, you’ve got to be happy with a 1-1 series split, especially when Clayton Kershaw is posing a formidable obstacle to getting a win in Game Two.

With both games being 3.05 am BST starts, I had to settle for watching select innings on-demand and the MLB.com Game Recaps. That limited the amount of watching Dodger blue all over the Coliseum, although you can always count on the A’s fans that attend to shout down the opposing fans however many of them there may be.

Fiers on fier fire

The highlight of the short series had to be Mike Fiers’ A’s debut in Game Two.

There were several Dodger hitters less than impressed with home plate umpire Mike Muchlinski’s strike zone, none more so than Justin Turner when he was called out on strikes to end the top of the fourth. He had a point with the punch-out pitch, but the TV K-Zone showed the one before that he had shown his displeasure with caught the outside corner and, as Glen Kuiper pointed out on commentary, if Turner didn’t expect to be rung-up on anything close with the next pitch then he was the only person in the stadium to be surprised.

I didn’t realise Mike Fiers’ last start against the Dodgers was his 2015 no-hitter for the Houston Astros. It was a nice omen and you couldn’t be anything but encouraged with the way he went about his work. Much as it was a poor pitch to cough up Yasmani Grandal’s home run, that it came to lead off the fifth inning and was their first hit of the game showed how well he had stiffed the Dodgers up to that point.

Grandal also had the decency to give back to the A’s by dropping Manny Machado’s throw home to allow Marcus Semien to score the game-winning run in the eighth inning.

Getting runners home

It was also good to see the bottom third of the order, Stephen Piscotty and Ramon Laureano batting 7th and 8th respectively, knocking in runs in the fourth inning.

Fun as it is to watch Khris Davis thwacking yet another home run in Game One, we all know that the A’s have room for improvement when it comes to getting runners home when they’re not dispatching the ball into the seats.

Series sheet

As noted in my Tigers series update, I fill out my own series sheets to keep on top of what the A’s are doing. Here’s the Dodgers sheet. You’ll notice that I only note down the A’s side of things, other than showing the opposition’s starting pitcher.  It isn’t intended as a full record of the games, just my way of keeping track of how Bob Melvin is changing the batting line-up and using his bench and relievers.

I suspect most of it is obvious enough. Right-handers are written in blue, lefties in red, switch-hitters (Jed Lowrie) in green, with the numbers next to the hitters being hits and at-bats.

The one unique aspect to it is my RAGABU ‘system’ that I use to rate relievers. Pronounced raggaboo, it stands for Relief Appearance: Good, Average, Bad, Ugly and was my idea to have a shorthand note for relief outings (for starting pitchers I note their Game Score in brackets).

It’s purely intended as a bit of fun and a system in a loose sense of the word, in that there’s a basic structure behind the different ratings but I’ll subjectively push the rating up or down for a pitcher if I feel like it (for example, rating an appearance as Good rather than Average if they’ve been struggling a bit lately and it’s a positive return to form).

Up next: LA Angels

Where the series sheets come in really useful for me is in a three-game series such as our next one against the LA Angels.

Game Three on Sunday is a 21:07 BST start, but the first two games are at 3.07 am and 2.07 am for us in the UK, so I probably won’t catch all of them even with them being Friday and Saturday night (or Saturday and Sunday morning, if you prefer).

You get a decent oversight from reading game reports and watching highlights, yet it’s not the same as watching the games in full and I often feel a bit lacking when a Game Three day-game comes along and I haven’t watch the other games before it. Keeping my series sheets bridges that gap as it makes me look at the details a bit more than I would just scanning a box score.

Hopefully when I’m looking at it before Sunday’s Game Three there will be another win or two on the board in this surprisingly exciting A’s season.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Boos, Cheers and Chocolate Bars

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The first full week of the MLB season is now in the books and it’s starting to feel like we’re getting into the swing of it.

Every team has at least one win, albeit still only one win for the Tampa Bay Rays heading into Sunday’s games, whilst every team has at least one loss, albeit still only one loss in the case of the Boston Red Sox (linked to the Rays’ situation) and the New York Mets.

Among the expected favourites, the LA Dodgers have had the slowest start in losing six of their first eight games, with the Cleveland Indians going 3-5 through their first eight games.

But it is still only eight games.

We have to wait for what seems like an eternity for the baseball season to start again and that means it’s difficult to avoid the temptation to draw conclusions from what we’ve seen. Whether good or bad, it’s going to take a couple of months to really get a feel on how teams and players are shaping up this season.

Boos Turn To Cheers

That’s being rational about it, though. It’s easy for fans to lose perspective in the early days of the season, forgetting that a 162 game regular season brings with it plenty of ups and downs.

Giancarlo Stanton got his first taste of the difference between playing in Miami and playing in New York when he was booed in the Bronx on Tuesday for striking out five times. He gave the perfect response the following day by hitting a home run.

Similarly new Phillies manager Gabe Kapler had a rough first few days on the job with his unconventional bullpen management coming under all sorts of scrutiny. Some fans booed him at their Citizens Bank Park home opener on Thursday, partly in jest (I think), but wins like the one they had on Saturday (20-1 over Miami) will soon change that.

The simple rule is that some fan bases are quicker to boo than others and the best way to respond is to give them something to cheer about.

#BonusBreakfastBaseball

In last week’s column I referenced the 17-inning slog between the Cubs and Marlins and that the push for extra inning rules in the Majors may gain momentum over the next ten years.

What I neglected to mention is that for us across the pond there is a perk attached to these long games, especially those on the west coast.

It was about six o’clock on Tuesday morning when I looked at the scores and saw that the game at Chase Field between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks was still in progress. Two hours later and it was still going on. The game lasted 15 innings and took a total of 5 hours 46 minutes to complete, finally being won by Arizona at around 8.25 BST.

That was good fun for neutrals, great fun for D-Backs and quite significantly less fun for Dodgers fans, particularly any that had started watching from first pitch (2.40 am here) and lived through a second Kenley Jansen blow-up early this season.  Again, ‘it’s early’ …

Facebook Freebie that may feel like a blackout

As for watching baseball, a new venture for MLB began on Wednesday when Facebook provided an exclusive broadcast of the day-game between the Phillies and Mets.

Games have been shown live on various platforms before, yet the difference in this case is the worldwide online exclusive part. MLB.TV simply directed you on to the Facebook page where you had to log in to see the game.

It should be said that the Facebook deal isn’t putting anything behind another paywall and MLB will focus on the fact that it makes another weekly MLB live game free to watch.  The issue of course is that you have to sign up to Facebook to watch it and whilst for many people that will be a non-issue, it was coincidental that the Phillies-Mets game was going on precisely when Facebook announced that the number of people affected by the Cambridge Analytica saga totalled a staggering 83 million.

In the UK, we’ve been used to enjoying MLB.TV since its inception without having to worry about any local blackouts that affect subscribers in North America. The Facebook deal is only for one game per week, so it’s not a significant number of games affected over the season, but it is going to be one day-game per week, which has an increased impact on us due to those being the most convenient games to watch live in the British evening.

MLB.TV subscribers are left in the situation of either having to sign up to Facebook – which for many reasons increasing numbers want to avoid – to watch games that they considered they had paid for or miss out. Again, it’s only one game per week, but the concern would be that it sets a precedent that will gradually see more deals being signed that reduce the live action available on MLB.TV.

Twitter are also streaming one game per week live for free again this year; however these are only available in North America so not something we can use to help promote the game in this country.

The Chocolate bars are on Charlie

It’s been a good week for Charlie Blackmon. He signed a new six-year contract with the Colorado Rockies that guarantees him at least $108m.

It’s an interesting deal as it has to be seen in the context of this past off-season’s Free Agent market, with Blackmon’s original contract set to expire at the end of this season. He has decided to work out the best deal he could get with the Rockies rather than test the market and you have to say that seems a wise decision.

Blackmon has been a relatively late bloomer. Whilst his performances over the past few seasons have been excellent, he turns 32 years old in July and so, based on what we’ve just seen, you could imagine teams being wary about offering a contract for more than three years to him, even though his performances would suggest he deserved a bigger investment.

The Rockies don’t have a great track record when it comes to making big signings, from last year’s Ian Desmond deal (that doesn’t make any more sense one year) to the infamous Mike Hampton disaster of December 2000.

In the case of Blackmon, they have been prepared to push the boat out to tempt him away from free agency due to their close knowledge of the player. Come back in six years’ time to see whether it proved to be a wise decision or not.

The Sunday Smasher

The selection here should probably be Shohei Ohtani’s second MLB start on the mound, given how well his debut went and his headline-grabbing, home run hitting we’ve seen this week.

However, I picked his start last week and, as with that one, he’s going to be facing my Oakland A’s so I’ll leave that one alone in the hope that his performance is less eye-catching today.

Instead, I’m going to pick the Marlins-Phillies game that begins at 18.35 BST and is available to watch or listen to via MLB.TV. They may not be teams that neutrals would immediately pick, but I like to make sure I catch a bit of every team early in the season and the reason to choose this one is that it will be Jake Arrieta’s debut for the Phillies.

It looks a very favourable match-up for Arrieta – other than the fear for Phillies fans that they used up all their hits and runs yesterday – and he could do something special.

World Series tied at 2-2 after Dodgers 5-run ninth inning

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The Houston Astros’ path to their first World Series title appeared to be set out following their 5-3 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game Three on Friday night.

The win gave them a 2-1 series lead and made it seven wins out of seven at home in this year’s post-season. With two more victories needed to claim the title, and two more games coming up at Minute Maid Park, the script was written for a Sunday night celebration in Houston.

The Dodgers’ five-run outburst in the top of the ninth inning of Game Four on Saturday night ripped that script up, spoiling the Astros’ plans but adding an intriguing plot twist for the rest of us to enjoy.  A 1-1 level game heading into the final regulation inning turned into a 6-1 Dodger lead that the Astros could only reduce by one run (on Alex Bregman’s homer).

This World Series is officially in a state of Desmond (2-2).

Penalties 1

MLB acted quickly by issuing the Astros’ Yuli Gurriel with a 5-game suspension after his offensive behaviour during Game Three. The length of the suspension appears appropriate, the question is whether rolling it over to the start of the 2018 regular season was correct.

On balance, I think the right decision has been made.

The gesture was offensive towards Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish, but it wasn’t something that affected a play or the player during the game. Consequently, there wasn’t a clear need from a fairness standpoint to issue a penalty that affected the rest of the series (i.e. it wasn’t a transgression that cost the Dodgers and therefore fairly needed to be balanced out staight away).

The justified high-profile scrutiny and criticism, and proportionate punishment being issued in terms of length of suspension, also means that I don’t think it would be fair to say Gurriel was allowed to ‘get away with it’ by playing the rest of the World Series.

Penalties 2

The Astros’ closer Ken Giles and fellow reliever Joe Musgrove were the fall-guys in Game Four. Combined with watching the previously unbreakable Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen being jumped on in Game Two, it’s made me think of relief pitchers – especially in the high stakes of the play-offs – as being a lot like penalty-takers in football.

The expectation is that a good penalty-taker should score and they can do so even if they don’t strike the ball cleanly or it doesn’t go quite where they were placing it. You get no extra points for style; so long as it goes in you’ve done your job under pressure.

It’s the same with a top relief pitcher. They earn that rank and role by coming out on top time and again, so they are used to handling the pressure and you expect them to do it pretty much every time. They too can succeed even if they miss their spot. If the hitter swings and misses, or makes weak contact and makes an out, all’s well that ends well.

However, as with a penalty shoot-out, one team has to lose and that means someone has to come out on the wrong end of it. Regardless of how good the relief pitcher is and how well they cope with the pressure, the person they are facing in the batter’s box is an elite ballplayer (just getting to the Majors proves that) and are just as desperate to succeed.

As has been written many times before, if it could happen to the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera in 2001, it could happen to anyone. That’s no great immediate solace to the relief pitcher as they trudge off the field, but something for the rest of us to remember as we watch the drama unfold.

The Astros and Dodgers are two excellent teams with some outstanding players. One of them has to lose. The rest of us can just sit back, enjoy the contest and hope it goes the full seven games.

Kershaw wins Battle of the K’s in Game One

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Game One of the 2017 World Series turned into a Battle of the K’s, won by Clayton Kershaw, as the LA Dodgers earned a 3-1 victory.

Kershaw racked up 11K’s in seven innings against a Houston Astros team that led the Majors by hitting for power whilst rarely striking out. His opposing starting pitcher, Dallas Keuchel, pitched well but gave up two home runs that proved to be the difference.

They always say that you need to get to the best pitchers early and the only way Chris Taylor could have got to Keuchel earlier would have been by doing a hatchet job on him during his warm-up. One pitch, one home run made for the perfect start for LA.

The Astros’ lead-off hitter George Springer has made a specialty of homering his team into an early lead. His 0-4 performance, a 4 strike-out Golden Sombrero, summed up the difference between the two teams on the night.

Kershaw was masterful aside from a pitch to Alex Bregman in the fourth inning that the Astros’ third baseman hit into the seats to level the score at 1-1. It barely knocked Kershaw out of his stride though and Justin Turner’s 2-run home run in the sixth inning gave the Dodgers a lead that Kershaw, Brandon Morrow and Kenley Jansen were not going to give up.

The Astros will not be disheartened and, in theory, should have an advantage on the mound for Game Two as Justin Verlander attempts to continue his great post-season. Rich Hill will start for the Dodgers and he has the capacity to confuse even the best batters with his curveball, yet he hasn’t pitched as deeply into a game of late as he would like.

In recent times that hasn’t mattered much in the play-offs as managers have been quick to turn games over to their bullpen. The conventional role played by the two starting pitchers in Game One, alongside the unseasonably hot temperature and short game time (2hrs 30), was one of the things that made it unusual for recent play-off contests.

Unusual, but very entertaining. This Astros-Dodgers match-up has the potential to be a classic and Game One started things off perfectly. Let’s see what Game Two brings in the early hours of Thursday morning.

One win away from the World Series for Yankees and Dodgers

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This year’s MLB post-season has once again brought the term ‘bullpenning’ into frequent use as teams get what they can from their starting pitcher before turning the game over to the relievers.

However, the next two play-off games will have a clear focus on two starting pitchers.

Thursday night’s game is Game Five of the NLCS from Wrigley Field. The Chicago Cubs took Game Four on Wednesday to avoid a 4-0 series sweep, but they’re still in trouble against the Los Angeles Dodgers and all the more so because tonight they face Clayton Kershaw.

Among some outstanding hurlers, Clayton Kershaw’s record over the past five or six seasons has earned him the right to be called the best starting pitcher of his generation. The play-offs haven’t been quite so kind to him so far, yet talk of ‘struggles’ is overblown.

Whatever the past, tonight is a perfect opportunity for him to put together a signature Kershaw start and to help the Dodgers book a place in the World Series for the first time since 1988.

On Friday night Justin Verlander will be taking to the mound at Minute Maid Park as he tries to prevent the New York Yankees from joining the Dodgers in the Fall Classic.

The Houston Astros left their home a few days ago with a 2-0 series lead and full of optimism; however the home-team-wins pattern continued in a raucous Yankee Stadium where the Bronx Bombers have reeled off three victories.

This scenario is precisely why it seemed so strange that the Astros didn’t augment their starting pitcher corps prior to the non-waiver trade deadline. That has to be caveated by not knowing fully how high the asking price was for them from various teams, yet given their great regular season and strong farm system of young talent it was hard to imagine a team in a better position to add one more arm to give them a great shot at their first ever World Series title.

They finally managed to get Verlander minutes before the waiver deadline at the end of August and they couldn’t have wished for anything better from their new addition since he has arrived.

Now they need him to give them one more vintage Verlander start, ideally of six innings or more given that the Astros’ bullpen hasn’t been quite as impregnable as others, to keep the series alive.

Verlander putting up zeroes has become more important due to the white-hot Houston bats mysteriously turning snow-white cold during the ALCS. Although Masahiro Tanaka had to pitch out of some jams in Game Five, he was still able to put together seven strong innings against what had hitherto been a formidable line-up.

The added bonus for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, and added jeopardy for the Astros, was his ability to send Tommy Kahnle out for two innings to complete the game. With Thursday as an off-day, that leaves him with a full arsenal of lethal bullpen weapons to throw at the Astros when Game Six comes around on Friday. Luis Severino was yanked from his Game Two start early due to a potential injury – something the pitcher felt was unnecessary – so there’s an element of doubt there for the Astros to latch on to.

However, if he gets through even four innings then Houston could have a problem.

Predictions are always a coin-toss at this stage, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a baseball-free weekend with both the Dodgers and Yankees earning the all-important fourth win at their next – and in New York’s case first - attempt.

When blocking the plate blocks common sense

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The Sunday night game is Game Two of the NLCS between the Chicago Cubs and LA Dodgers.

Compared with the Yankees-Astros series, this NLCS is not so easy to follow for British fans as only one game from the series is currently scheduled to start before midnight UK time and that’s the potential Game Six on Saturday 21st. It would start at 9pm BST as the opener before Game Seven of the ALCS; however if the Yankees-Astros series is over by that point then the Cubs-Dodgers game would get moved to the prime-time slot and back into ‘early hours’ territory for us.

The Cubs will be looking to even up the series on Sunday after taking a 5-2 loss in the series opener. Jon Lester and Rich Hill are the scheduled starting pitchers, landing another jab in the ribs to me and fellow A’s fans who seem to be staring at ex-Oakland players in every game this October.

Blocking the plate

The big talking point from Game One came in the seventh inning when the Dodgers’ Charlie (‘not Corey Seager’) Culberson was initially called out at home plate before the replay crew called him safe on review, judging that Cubs catcher Wilson Contreras blocked the plate illegally.

As soon as the play was challenged, commentator Ron Darling (one of the best around based on his SNY Mets work) was fearing that “the silliest of rules” was about to ruin an excellent fielding play. He called it right when reviewing the footage that Contreras clearly put his leg across to block Culberson’s path to the plate before he received the ball, but in doing so wasted little time in putting across the players’ view that the rule is wrong.

When the rule on what a catcher can do in that situation was changed in 2014, it immediately gained the informal name of the ‘Buster Posey rule’ given that it was the injury suffered by the Giants’ star in 2011 that many feel was the catalyst to it.  Joe Maddon’s opinion that had it been a third-string Atlanta Braves catcher nothing would have happened unfortunately is probably true, but fairly or not rule changes often only come about when a high-profile incident occurs.

Whether you like the rule or not is a personal choice. I never understood why it was acceptable for a base-runner to be able to smash into the catcher to try to dislodge the ball, so I’m fine with the rule as it is now, although I’d be inclined to defer to the wishes of the players when it comes to making a rule changed based on player safety, given that it’s their bodies that are on the line, and it’s not only the ex-players that don’t like the rule.

However, what can’t be debated is that the rule is clear and what Contreras did contravened it.

You see it a lot in football where former-players on TV criticise off-side decisions or ‘hard-but-fair’ tackles and then brush away the laws of the game as a mere technicality getting in the way of their opinion.  The job of the officials is to call the game based on the rules as they are, not based on what some people think they should be.

The replay review unquestionably led to the right call being made and the commentators generally struck a fair line in acknowledging this point whilst expressing their disagreement with the rule that the umpires have to uphold.

However, the exception came when Cubs manager Joe Maddon came onto the field and started screaming at the on-field umpires.

“Joe Maddon, rightly so, is out of his mind but by the letter of the rule book you’ve got to give him a lane, he didn’t”.

In one sense I understood that, as Maddon clearly was not alone in thinking the rule is stupid and that it had therefore cost his team. Yet to say he was “rightly” out of his mind is a bit of a stretch.

Maddon’s response to his antics after the game was to say: “I have to stick up for my boys … I’ve got to stick up for everybody that plays this game. I thought it was inappropriate”.

The run made the score 5-2 to the Dodgers in the seventh inning, so the Cubs were still in the game with a couple of innings still to be played. Where is the sense in getting yourself chucked out of the game at that point to scream in the face of the on-field umpires who hadn’t made the call and who would have been right even if they had?

Maddon was entitled to rant all he liked about it in the press conference after the game; that’s fine if that’s how he feels. But at that moment his job was to keep his composure and help mastermind a way to lead his team out of the hole, not to “stick up for everybody that plays this game” in some ridiculous display of honour.

It was then no surprise that Contreras’s response after the game was to double-down on his manager’s own self-righteousness:

“I think that was the wrong call,” Contreras said. “I will not change anything. If I have to do that again, I will do it again. They have to change everything. Not me”.

Well, Wilson, if you want to cost your team again then that’s up to you. It wasn’t the wrong call, however much you may disagree with the rule. If the series is on the line in Game Seven, presumably Maddon will be more than happy for his catcher to do the same thing. They can walk off the field defeated but with heads held high that they ‘played the game the right way’.

What a load of nonsense. It’s no different to someone deciding that the ball hadn’t gone over the fence, but it should be called a home run anyway (in fact, the Yankees’ Todd Frazier cheekily tried that one on in yesterday’s Game Two of the ALCS when the ball got lodged in the fence before the umpires called him out of the dugout and back to second base – nice try though, Todd).

Like it or not the players and managers know the rule and so long as it is in place they have to play with it in mind. The aim is to win a World Series, not to win a battle against the rule-makers.

MLB 2017 Final Day: Everyone gets to play in October

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It’s always a shame when we get to the final day of the MLB regular season and there is nothing significant still to play for.

Looking through the standings, the only potential thing to ‘win’ would be the first draft pick in next year’s amateur draft, which goes to the team with the worst win-loss record.

The San Francisco Giants (63-98) are one loss ‘better off’ than the Detroit Tigers (64-97) in the race to the bottom. If the Giants foolishly go and win today against the San Diego Padres and the Tigers lose then they’ll be matched on 64-98.

Normally with tie-breaker situations you look at the results of the games the two teams played against each other, but I’m not sure quite how that works here.

The Tigers won their inter-league series 2-1, which should mean they finish higher, although in the circumstances they might feel that the victory should result in them finishing last so they get the number one pick. Such is the weirdness that creating an incentive to finish last leads to.

Anyway, despite the Tigers’ protestations, I suspect that the Giants do have the worst record sewn-up already on that tie-breaker (I was going to look it up, but thought better of it), so we are where we are and can enjoy the final day as simply a day of baseball with not much riding on it.

Division winners

Looking at the almost-final standings, you can’t escape the conclusion that the teams most people thought would win the six divisions heading into the year have done so.

Neither the LA Dodgers and Washington Nationals had a strong challenger on paper and so it proved, whilst the Chicago Cubs also came through with a handy gap in the end despite the NL Central being harder work for them than we might have thought.

The Cleveland Indians blitzed the AL Central, in no small part thanks to their incredible 22-game winning streak, Boston kept the New York Yankees at bay in the East and the Houston Astros took all the fun out of the AL West (for the other four teams at least) by going 38-16 across April and May and never looking back. An 11-17 August counted for little, particularly when they responded with a 20-8 September.

Wild Cards

The above is partly the whole point of having the Wild Card round. We had predictable division winners this year because they were all blatantly going to be really good teams and were only going to be beaten if they had a disaster or two to give someone else a chance.

That’s not a bad thing in my book. Whilst surprises are always fun, ultimately you should want there to be impressive teams that rack up wins in the regular season and make their eventual clashes in the post-season all the more enthralling.

The Wild Card, especially the second Wild Card, adds something else to the play-off pot.

It creates the potential for other strong teams to get in, such as the Yankees this time around. Despite the negatives you can throw at the Wild Card play-in game from a fairness point of view, the AL East was a great example of one of the main positives.

There is a huge potential difference between winning the division and going straight through to the best-of-five Division Series, compared with flipping a coin in the lose-and-you’re-out Wild Card game. Potential is the key word there, as if you manage to win the Wild Card game your odds of winning it all aren’t all that much lower than the other Division Series competitors. However, the risk of your play-offs only lasting one game means that the division is always worth fighting for now, which wasn’t the case when there was only one Wild Card per league.

NL W(ild Card)

The second Wild Card means that if there are three strong teams in one division in a given year, they could all have a chance of making it to the post-season.

That’s happened this year in the NL West. The Colorado Rockies were a somewhat surprising third-placed finisher last year behind the Dodgers and Giants, yet their 75-87 record to get there – after losing 96 and 94 games in the previous two seasons – gave reason to be cautious about being too optimistic for their hopes in 2017.

In fact, it proved to be indicative of the potential that was there at Coors Field and they’ve fully earned their first play-off appearance since 2009.

The Rockies’ progress in 2017 is nothing compared to that of the team that will be hosting them for the NL Wild Card on Wednesday. 2016 was a disaster for the Arizona Diamondbacks after they made big moves in the off-season – spending $206m on Zack Greinke and a king’s ransom in a trade for Shelby Miller – only to lose 93 games. Various people lost their jobs as a result, but there was still some talent at the club and the potential for a quick return to respectability.

They far exceeded that and enter the final day of the regular season with the joint-sixth highest win total across the Majors with 92. No one can say the D-Backs haven’t earned their play-off appearance.

Twins and the AL Wild Card game

As for the Minnesota Twins, well, some people aren’t being quite so generous in their praise of the second AL Wild Card winners.

They’ve earned their spot because they’ve got the fifth-best record in the American League and five teams qualify for the play-offs from each league. However, they enter the final day with a win-loss record of 84-77.

In football people often say the league table doesn’t lie at the end of a season; in other words, where you end up is generally a good reflection on how good your team was.

MLB takes that further by playing a 162-game regular season. Randomness can still come into, but by and large that’s more than enough time for the cream to rise to the top, the chaff to be separated from the wheat, and the middling middlers to settle in the middle.

It is fair to say that Minnesota are more middly than creamy.

That doesn’t matter in the least for the Minnesota Twins, who can smile away any jibes by knowing there are 20 other teams that would love to be in their position. They’ve made it to the play-offs a year after losing 103 games. They’ve won 25 more games than they did last year and can make it 26 if they win on Sunday. That’s a real achievement for Paul Molitor and his team.

And as for the AL Wild Card game

The problem some have with the Wild Card game in a situation like this is that a team that has earned a significantly better record over 162 games than their opponent can be knocked out by losing one game.

There’s no escaping that this isn’t completely fair, but there’s one important thing to note about it this year.

The New York Yankees have won more World Series than any other team and broken more hearts than anyone else along the way too. The ‘Evil Empire’ moniker isn’t being thrown around quite so much now as it had been the previous 10-15 years, but there’s a reason why it became a thing in the first place. Yankees fans, like fans of any all-conquering team, understand that people love to hate them.

So if it does happen and the Twins do dump the Yankees out on Tuesday night – and it certainly could – then whilst the strict analysts may bemoan it, the rest of us can have a good chuckle about it.

#ThumbsUp

MLB Sleepyhead Summary: Nationals clinch the NL East

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On Sunday, the Washington Nationals became the first team to win their division in 2017.

The Nationals completed a 3-1 series win over the Philadelphia to bring their NL East magic number down to 1 and then had to wait for the conclusion of the ongoing game between second-placed Miami and Atlanta.

The Marlins scored three runs across the eighth and ninth innings to lead, only for Atlanta to draw level 8-8 with three runs in the bottom of the ninth.

The Braves then walked-off in the eleventh to ensure Washington couldn’t be caught and could start their celebrations.

It’s the fourth time in six years that the Nats have won the NL East, but they’ll be hoping this time they can turn that into more than just a brief play-off run, as they’ve been dumped out in the Division Series stage the previous three times.

Dodgers’ dip becomes a downward spiral

For weeks it looked as though the Los Angeles Dodgers would be the first team to clinch their division, but the once seemingly-unstoppable team are now making very hard work of getting over the NL West line. They were just swept in a four-game series by the Colorado Rockies to make it ten losses in a row and 15 losses from their last 16 games.

The Dodgers still have the best record in the Majors at 92-51 and a nine-game lead in the division, which shows how incredibly well they had been playing prior to the last two weeks.

It really is curious how a talent-laden team like this can suddenly go into such a tailspin. Still, when the Dodgers were threatening a historic win total it was noted that for many ultimately their play-off results would determine whether the season was a total success or not. They’ll come out of this bad spell soon enough, complete the formality of booking their play-off place, and if they go on to win the World Series at the end of it these regular season losses will seem a distant memory.

Elsewhere in the National League

The Arizona Diamondbacks had their winning run ended at 13 on Friday as they lost two of three against the San Diego Padres. The D-Backs still have a five-game lead over Colorado for the first NL Wild Card, despite the Rockies’ broom-wielding ways against the Dodgers, and the two teams will face each other at Chase Field for four-games starting on Monday night.

On Friday I pretty much had the Chicago Cubs pencilled-in as the NL Central champs, but then they were swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in a three-game series at Wrigley and the St Louis Cardinals also won three games against Pittsburgh to make it close once again. The Cubs have a two-game lead over their two rivals, whilst the Brewers and Cardinals are three behind the Rockies for the second Wild Card.

Milwaukee now host three games against Pittsburgh but will have to play out the season without starting pitcher Jimmy Nelson who unfortunately injured his shoulder in a freak accident when diving back into first base. St Louis host the Cincinnati Reds for a three-game set, whilst the Cubs host the New York Mets.

Cleveland – 18 and counting

In the American League, the Cleveland Indians are going to lose again one day but they’re determined to put it off for as long as possible.

They swept a three-game series over the Baltimore Orioles to increase their winning run to 18 games, three behind the all-time MLB record of 21 held by the 1935 Chicago Cubs.

The American League record is 20 and set by the Oakland A’s in 2002, as featured in the film adaptation of Moneyball, and the A’s decided to honour that streak by sweeping a four-game series over the Houston Astros this past weekend.

That was good news for Cleveland too. The Astros had won seven straight heading into their series, but the A’s sweep plus the Indians’ continued run means they have edged ahead for the best record in the American League, 87-56 to 86-57.

Others chasing play-off spots

The gap at the top of the AL East remains at 3.5 in Boston’s favour over the New York Yankees after both teams won their respective series 2-1 (Red Sox over the Rays, Yankees over the Rangers). The Yankees now have a 3.5 game lead over Minnesota for the first AL Wild Card after the Twins split a four-game series with the Kansas City Royals.

The Mariners lost the finale of their three-game series against the Los Angeles Angels, but took the first two to gain a little ground in the Wild Card race and they now have the cavalry coming in the form of Felix Hernandez (Thursday) and James Paxton (Friday) returning from the Disabled List. Seattle are three games behind the Twins for the second Wild Card, as are the Orioles. The Mariners now head into Texas for a crucial four-game series against the Rangers.

The Angels are the closest competitors to the Twins, trailing by one game, and have a home series against the Astros up next, with Kansas City and Texas 2.5 back.

The Rays are now at the back of the pack trailing by 3.5 games and will play their home three-game series against the New York Yankees at the Mets’ Citi Field due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma.

MLB Sleepyhead Summary: Twins = Wins

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The MLB Sleepyhead Summary is a new regular column that helps British baseball fans keep up to speed with MLB despite the time difference!

The Minnesota Twins started last season by losing their first nine games.

An 0-9 start isn’t much fun for anyone, but when you have the word ‘wins’ in your nickname, you’re going to hear about it even more than most.

They briefly responded to the jeers by reeling off four consecutive wins, but that’s where the comeback ended. 2016 was a miserable year for Minnesota as the team ended up with a 59-103 record, the worst in all of MLB.

Unsurprisingly, expectations were not exactly high for the Twins to mount a play-off challenge in 2017, yet they continue to confound the naysayers as we head into the last two weeks of August.

The Twins have won 11 of their last 13 games, including a sweep over the Arizona Diamondbacks this past weekend (Sunday’s win driven by a nine-run first inning), to draw themselves level with the LA Angels for the second Wild Card spot. Baseball Prospectus currently gives them a 33.4% chance of making it to the post-season, which would be a fantastic story if they can pull it off.

Minnesota have a chance to earn some wins this week at the expense of the AL’s worst team. They have a five-game series away to the Chicago White Sox, beginning with a double-header on Monday, and if they can build on their 7-4 season record so far this season against the Sox they could start to win over even more of the non-believers.

More AL Wild Card shuffling

The Angels beat Wild Card rivals the Baltimore Orioles 2-1 in this weekend’s series, with the Orioles’ sole win being powered by the outstanding individual player performance of the weekend. Manny Machado launched three home-runs, the final one being the small matter of a walk-off grand slam, in a thrilling 9-7 victory.

The Angels move on to a four-game series against rivals the Texas Rangers, whilst the Orioles look to gain back some ground in a home series against the Oakland A’s.

Elsewhere in the AL, the Boston Red Sox – fresh off a series victory against the New York Yankees – have a potential play-off preview four-game series against the Cleveland Indians, whilst those Yankees have a three-game set against Detroit.

Seattle and Kansas City will both look to gain ground in the AL Wild Card race by picking up some wins against National League opposition. The Mariners continue their road trip with a visit to Atlanta, whilst the Royals are hosting the Rockies for three games starting on Tuesday.

NL Central race may also become part of the NL Wild Card race

In the National League, the Pittsburgh Pirates have the tough task of facing the LA Dodgers four times across Monday to Thursday. The Buccos are now six games back in the NL Central having recovered from a six-game losing streak to win the final two games of their series against the St Louis Cardinals. They need to keep on picking up some wins and that’s not something any team has found easy against the Dodgers this season.

The Cubs and Reds split a four-game series last week and meet up again, this time in Cincinnati, for another three games from Tuesday to Thursday. Meanwhile the Cardinals are hosting the Padres for three games at Busch Stadium and the Milwaukee Brewers are in San Francisco taking on the Giants.

The Brew Crew won two of three at Coors Field against the Colorado Rockies this past weekend and, coupled with the Twins’ sweep of the D-Backs, the play-off picture in the National League is potentially changing. Whereas even just a week ago it looked like the NL Central teams were battling for one play-off spot, Arizona now only has a 2.5 game gap over Milwaukee for the second Wild Card, with the Rockies one game further ahead.

This means that although the Cubs earned back a small gap at the top of the NL Central thanks to their weekend sweep of the Toronto Blue Jays, the Brewers, Cardinals and possibly even the Pirates might have a second chance at making the post-season aside from clawing back the gap at the top of their own division.