Kevin Cash’s explanation for removing Blake Snell in World Series loss doesn’t add up

This wasn’t the World Series of baseball. It was the World Series of math.

Call it like it is: the Tampa Bay Rays were playing with their pencils and calculators while the Los Angeles Dodgers were stomping all over them on their way to their first World Series title since 1988.

The Dodgers knocked off the Rays, 3-1, in a decisive Game 6 on Tuesday night, but the final score does no justice to the events that took place.

This game isn’t going to be forgotten for a long, long time. And Rays’ manager Kevin Cash will need a collection of championship rings if he’s ever going to live down the decision to remove Blake Snell in the middle of a shutout in the sixth inning.

Snell was dominating. There was nothing to indicate he was tired. The former Cy Young winner had thrown only 73 pitches. He struck out nine, six of which came in the six at-bats he faced the Dodgers’ top-three hitters: Mookie Betts, Corey Seager and Justin Turner.

And yet, after Austin Barnes singled for the second hit of the night off Snell in the sixth, with Betts, Seager and Turner due up as the lineup rolled over, Cash stepped out of the dugout to the dismay of everybody watching.

Except the Dodgers.

“I was pretty happy,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters afterwards. “Because he was dominating us and we just weren’t seeing him.”

Snell screamed some obscenities when he saw Cash coming to take the ball, but Cash never allowed him a Matt Harvey moment.

Five years after Harvey told former Mets manager Terry Collins that he wasn’t coming out of Game 5 against the Royals — Harvey eventually blew it in the ninth and the Mets lost the World Series — the Rays weren’t going to give Snell a chance to talk his way into staying.

But here’s the problem: this wasn’t the ninth inning, it was the sixth, and Snell had thrown 28 fewer pitches than Harvey had thrown (101) in 2015.

Snell was as fresh as he was ever going to be. He hasn’t thrown six innings since last July, not because he isn’t capable, but because the Rays are reading the numbers. Starting pitchers are often much worse the third time through the order. The Rays way is to not chance it and play the odds.

So they brought in Nick Anderson, who allowed two runs to score, wiping out the Rays’ 1-0 lead, and that was that.

After the game, Betts was asked on the Fox broadcast what he thought of the pitching change.

“I’m not sure why (they did it),” he said. “But I’m not ask going to any questions. He was pitching a great game.”

Taking Snell out “seems like that’s all we needed,” Betts said.

What a terrible moment for the game of baseball.

It wasn’t fun for the fans, who had to see one of the game’s best pitchers exit in the middle of a masterpiece. I wasn’t fun for the players, and many of them watching at home used their Twitter accounts to express their outrage. And it can’t be good for baseball’s bottom line, and the sport is already facing a World Series that had the worst Game 1 TV ratings of any World Series game in MLB history.

Cash’s defense to remove Snell was simple: “Mookie coming around for the third time through, I value that.”

He added, “There was no set plan. As much as people think, there was no set plan.”

That’s baloney. And we all know it’s baloney because to say there’s no plan implies he wanted to see how Snell looked out there, that he was reading the game situation and there was a potential circumstance in which Snell could’ve kept pitching.

And what circumstance is that, exactly? Snell could not have done more to prove he deserved to keep pitching.

Betts, Seager and Turner are three of the best hitters in the game, and the three hottest hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup. Snell struck them out all six times.

“I think I’m going to make the adjustments I need to make as I see them a third time,” Snell told reporters afterward. “I don’t know, man. I believe in me, I believe in my stuff, I believe in what I was doing. I didn’t walk nobody, they had two hits up the middle. … For most of that game, I was dominating every outcome possible.”

Snell said he wanted the whole game. He wanted to “burn the tank and see how far I could go.”

And he earned it.

Unfortunately, baseball is no longer being played as a live sporting event. Instead, it feels like you’re watching a broadway play where the script is carefully written beforehand and the actors have no freedom to improvise.

Stick to the script.

But feel for the game is why we watch baseball. It’s all about those one-on-one battles to see who can withstand the pressure and make adjustments on the fly. And it’s enhanced to the max in October.

Tuesday, it was all erased in favor of a predetermined math problem.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2TJimb3