Scintillating Games on Second Day of MLB Wild Card Playoff Round
October 9, 2022
Yesterday’s four wild card games produced not just one but two extremely rare developments.
- The game between the Cleveland and Tampa was scoreless entering the bottom half of the fifteenth inning, setting a record for the most innings in which a post-season game has gone without a run being scored by either team. In fact, there had never been a scoreless game that reached the 14th inning before this.
- The Seattle Mariners overcame an in-game, 7-run deficit (8-1) to beat the Toronto Blue Jays by a score of 10-9. That tied the second largest post-season come-from-behind margin previously achieved by the Boston Red Sox in 2008. One has to go all the way back to the 1929 World Series to find a game winner that overcame a larger deficit, which was by 8 runs.
Continuing day one’s and the whole 2022 regular season pattern, the four games played yesterday featured an extraordinary number of pitchers used. There were 47 in total: sixteen in the Cleveland-Tampa game, fourteen in the Seattle-Toronto game, nine used by the Padres and Mets, and eight who appeared in the Philadelphia-St. Louis game. 47 pitchers averages out to a starter and 5 relievers by each team that competed.
A new playoff format has been introduced this year, expanding the number of teams that made the cut to a dozen from ten previously and changing the wild card round from a single-elimination event for four teams to a best two-out-of-three contest involving eight teams in all. This reorganization was driven by the prospect of more money. In theory, there could have been twelve wild card games if each match-up went a full three games to be decided, but three of yesterday’s winners (the Cleveland Guardians, Seattle Mariners, and Philadelphia Phillies) had also won the first game and thus move on to the divisional playoff round without needing to play a game today.
Cleveland and Philadelphia won their games yesterday without allowing their opponents to score a single run, continuing the motif of few hits and even fewer runs that characterized regular season play and Friday’s games. In the game between the NY Mets and San Diego Padres, the teams conformed to the pattern in a tight low-scoring game through the middle of seventh inning, with the Mets then clinging to a 3-2 lead. During the reliever back end of the game, the Mets scored 4 runs in the bottom of the seventh, eventually won by 7-3 but not before the Padres loaded the bases in the top of the ninth, scored a run and forced the Mets to use an extra pitcher to secure the win. A third and deciding game between the Mets and Padres will be played today.
Mets manager Buck Showalter experienced a deja vu moment in yesterday’s game. As manager of the Yankees in 1995, he saw his team deadlocked with the Seattle Mariners in the ninth inning and chose to use one of his trained starting pitchers, Jack McDowell, to get the last two outs that inning and carry the game into extra innings. It was an unconventional but not unreasonable choice. Who knew how long the game might last? McDowell got through the 10th inning, and the Yanks scored a run in the top of the eleventh to give him a lead as he went out to pitch the bottom of the 11th. The Mariners got three straight hits, scored two runs, and won the game and the series.
Fast-forward to the 2016 divisional playoff series between the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays. The Orioles, then managed by Showalter, had the best reliever in the game, Zack Britton. This time perhaps influenced by the 1995 experience, Showalter when in a tied decisive game 5 in the late innings, used a relief pitcher, but not Britton. He wanted Britton to be available if the Orioles took a lead. Instead, the Blue Jays won the game and series, with Showalter’s best pitcher never entering the game.
Fast-forward again to last night. Showalter this time didn’t wait to use his best relief pitcher. With the Mets holding a 3-2 lead in the top of the seventh and some top players due up for the Padres, the best Mets reliever, Edwin Diaz entered the game and did his job. The Mets won and lived to play another day, but Diaz threw more pitches (28) than he customarily does, which could prove disadvantageous in today’s game. Three similar high-tension playoff game circumstances handled in three very different ways. We’ll know later today if any of those ways worked out ultimately.
Baseball’s heavier reliance on relief pitchers is defended by the proposition that batters do better against any given pitcher the more times they hit against them in the same game. While backed up with empirical evidence, back in the day, there are many examples of starting pitchers being very effective for a whole nine innings. For example, Sandy Koufax pitched a 4-hit shutout win with 10 strikeouts in game 5 of the World Series on October 11, 1965 and came back three days later in the do-or-die seventh game to pitch a 3-hit shutout and again striking out ten. But unlike today’s starters, starting pitchers back then were trained to go the nine-inning distance. A second motivation for this change in handling the pitching staff is that starters get paid more than relievers, and very good starters are a rarer commodity than pitchers that are very effective as relievers at least for a few years.
Copyright 2022, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
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