In a baseball postseason that has been more or less a massacre for managers, with three of them let go at the end of their teams’ playoff runs – after regular seasons when they averaged 94 wins – it was perhaps inevitable that the entirety of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ failures against the Houston Astros in Game 2 of the World Series, a wild and many-layered affair that saw a record eight home runs, five of them coming in extra innings, would be pinned to the chest of Manager Dave Roberts.
It is the world we live in, the world Roberts chose – the world John Farrell, Dusty Baker and Joe Girardi once inhabited, as well, until the Boston Red Sox, Washington Nationals and New York Yankees decided they shouldn’t anymore.
Roberts, according to experts in the broadcast booth, the Twittersphere and the living rooms of the greater Los Angeles area, pulled his starting pitcher too soon, stayed with some relievers too long and others not long enough, and generally committed enough acts of ignorance in the Dodgers’ 7-6, 11-inning loss – which has left the World Series tied heading into Friday night’s Game 3 in Houston – to warrant his joining his recently fired brethren among the ranks of the unemployed.
But that analysis overlooks one fact: Roberts had Kenley Jansen on the mound with a one-run lead in the ninth inning. Anything that happened after that – and so many things happened, beginning with the homer Jansen surrendered to Marwin Gonzalez, that it’s almost impossible to make a full accounting of it all – was at some level out of his hands. Getting a lead to Jansen, the best closer on the planet, is Roberts’s chief goal in every postseason game. The Dodgers were 98-0 this season when leading after eight innings. At that point, the difficult part of Roberts’s night was supposed to be over.
“The bottom line is,” Roberts said, “I’ll take Kenley any day of the week with a one-run lead going into the ninth inning.”
But sometimes, maybe now more than ever, baseball happens. Sometimes the pitch that is the most unhittable in baseball, Kenley Jansen’s cut fastball, goes where it isn’t supposed to, over the heart of the plate, and is then propelled a very long way. Sometimes, even Kenley Jansen gives it up.
In any case, the repercussions of Wednesday’s events will be felt for the rest of the series – with Jansen losing a bit of his air of invincibility, and with the Astros gaining an immeasurable dose of confidence as they head to Minute Maid Park, where they are 6-0 in these playoffs. In essence, the Astros have home-field advantage in a best-of-five series; when they held the same against Farrell’s Red Sox in the Division Series, they finished them off in four.
In some ways, Wednesday night’s was the most 2017 game ever. It was full of epic bat-flips and a parade of relievers and decisions made on the basis of advanced analytics. And it had homers – lots and lots of homers. Near the end of a season in which balls left the yard at an unprecedented clip, we saw six do so Wednesday night, with some of the highest stakes possible, in a span of three innings and one trip through each team’s lineup.
It’s funny to think now, but way back when, around the top of the ninth inning, when Game 2 was still recognizable as the game we remember from our youth, and before it became the most insane, intense, home-runniest slugfest the Fall Classic had ever witnessed, Roberts and the Dodgers were on their way to the tidiest and lowest-effort of wins.
They owned two hits at that point but had a one-run lead and were three outs from Jansen away from being the first team to win a World Series game with so few hits since the 1963 Dodgers did so behind Sandy Koufax.
The route Roberts took to get to Jansen is not one with which Koufax would have been familiar. He pulled his starter, lefty Rich Hill, after just four innings and 60 pitches – largely because the Dodgers’ front office believes, backed by strong statistical evidence, that it is generally a bad idea to let a starter face an opposing lineup for a third time. That is the direction the entire game is heading, and it isn’t going back any time soon. In a sense, it was a decision made over Roberts’s head.
And then came a flurry of bullpen moves – five pitchers in a span of eight hitters at one point. Each move, taken on its own, seemed defensible in the moment, but viewed in whole, it appeared highly aggressive, and it ended with Jansen being extended to a six-out save.
“They used so many pitchers early,” Astros starter Justin Verlander noted, “(that) late in the game we were able to take advantage of that situation.”
Of course, if Roberts thought Jansen might blow the lead in the ninth – a concept that was almost unimaginable – he might have held back someone better than Josh Fields, who entered in the 10th and gave up homers to Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa, or Brandon McCarthy, who after the Dodgers rallied to tie it, gave up the game-winning two-run homer to George Springer in the 11th.
The ninth, 10th and 11th innings went by something like this: homer, pitching change, homer, homer, pitching change, homer, pitching change, homer, pitching change, homer. For better or worse, that sequence, more than the tidy game of the first eight innings, is the true representation of baseball in 2017.
If there are going to be more homers hit than ever before, it stands to reason that some of them – and, occasionally, many of them – will be hit in the ninth inning, or sometimes the 10th and 11th. Some of them will turn wins into losses, and some of those wins that turn into losses will occur in the postseason, when everyone is watching and when scrutiny of managers is highest. And some of those wins that become losses will cost managers their jobs.
But before you convince yourself Roberts blew a big one Wednesday night, and before you argue he ought to join the others on the managerial scrap heap, remember the barest, purest truth of Game 2: Kenley Jansen was on the mound in the ninth inning with a one-run lead. If managing in the postseason is a high-wire act like never before, Roberts was already safely on the other side.