The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  We’d love to take credit for this signing, too: We’ve been complaining to Chris Long about Chavez for months, and Chris has been talking to the Padres, his former employers. But the Padres’ assistant general manager, Josh Stein, bursts that bubble, telling me that the team pursued Chavez because of a recommendation from a former big leaguer, the late Tony Phillips (who played eight games for Pittsburg at age fifty-six), and a childhood connection between Matt Kavanaugh and Padres area scout Sam Ray. “Sam went and watched him for a couple games, saw raw power in BP, saw him get pitched around a lot in games, spent some time with Matt and thought he merited a shot,” Stein says. “We discussed it internally and felt like we could find enough PA’s in the Cal League to give it a real shot for the rest of this year and then we’ll see where it takes us.”

  I’m content with where it’s already taken Chavez: away from San Rafael. (I’m also happy to hear that being pitched around was a point in Chavez’s favor, since Kavanaugh tried to pressure Yoshi into pitching to him by telling him the intentional walks we were issuing would hurt him.) Chavez finished with a 216 wRC+, which means he created 116 percent more runs than a league-average player would have in the same number of plate appearances. To put that into perspective: Barry Bonds’s wRC+ was 220 from 2000 to 2004, when he hit 258 homers, drew 306 intentional walks, and won four MVP awards (plus one runner-up finish). The self-confidence (or self-delusion) of professional athletes is a powerful force: To the last plate appearance, and the last long home run, our pitchers were confident that they could get Chavez out the next time, despite our instructions to pitch around him or put him on. But against the Stompers, specifically, he was far better than Bonds in his best season, doing more damage against us than he did against Pittsburg and Vallejo combined.

  Factoring in playing time, Chavez’s offense was about 2.5 times more valuable than anyone else in our league, even though he missed the last 15 percent of the schedule. Yet the Barry Bonds of the Pacific Association was considered a borderline candidate for high-A, which is three levels below the big leagues. Baseball is hard.

  We’re not the Stompers of old, but neither are they the peak Pacifics. We’ve lost roughly a third of our roster, and the Pacifics have lost their two best players. I’d like to make this matchup sound like an epic, last-gasp showdown between two teetering giants, Superman and Doomsday punching each other to pieces. But it’s less glamorous than that. We’re more like watches that haven’t been wound—still ticking, but too slowly. It’s the last evening in August, and unless this game goes to extras, neither team will live to see September. Saaaands of time.

  * * *

  Before the season started, when Sam and I still dreamed big, we wondered whether we could win games by telling our hitters not to swing once they were ahead in the count by two balls, on the theory that Pacific Association pitchers wouldn’t be able to throw strikes often enough not to walk them. Even in the majors, pitchers’ control is less pinpoint than you think. Since 2009, on 3-0 counts with opposing pitchers at the plate, major league pitchers have thrown the ball in the strike zone only 68.0 percent of the time (520 times out of 765). Think about that: These were situations in which there was no chance that the batter would swing, even on a lollipop directly down the middle, and yet pitchers threw the ball in the zone barely more than two-thirds of the time. Granted, that’s a skewed sample, because control artists aren’t likely to fall behind a pitcher 3-0 in the first place. But it’s backed up by COMMANDf/x data that shows that MLB fastballs miss their targets by roughly eleven inches, on average, only half a foot less than the width of the plate.

  We abandoned the idea of the “stop swinging” strategy when we got data from Sportvision that showed that low–minor league pitchers aren’t that much worse than big leaguers at throwing strikes when they have to—and also when we thought about how much our hitters would hate us if we told them always to take on 2-0 and 3-1. But the Stompers still have the league’s lowest swing rate (41.1 percent, with the three other teams clustered between 47.2 and 48.4), and that could come in handy tonight, since Celson Polanco tends to nibble against lefties and almost always throws his breaking balls outside the strike zone.

  On his first four pitches, Polanco misses his spots by feet, not inches. Yuki, who has the league’s lowest swing rate, doesn’t offer at any of them, and forty seconds into the game the Stompers have a runner on first. After two more balls to start Kandel’s at-bat, Ricky Gingras, the Pacifics’ catcher, calls time and goes out to talk to Polanco, who looks frustrated and fusses with the resin bag. In the first-base coach’s box, Tommy Lyons thinks, “Wow, we have it. They’re giving it to us.” Maybe Polanco will never throw a strike. Just more balls and more walks, loading the bases and forcing in runs, until Kavanaugh has no choice but to take him out. But whatever Gingras says seems to settle Polanco down, and he throws two called strikes to Kandel, who then pops out.

  The outfield flags are hanging limp. There’s no wind, which is almost unheard of during night games in San Rafael, where our camera in center often blows over. It will stay upright tonight. Baps, the third batter, swings his new pink bat (which he calls “the Pink Panther”) and wallops the first pitch to left-center, but Zack Pace, as always, gets a good jump and tracks it down, having covered a wide swath of the outfield without looking as if the outcome was ever in doubt. Baps tells us later that he thought he’d hit a homer, but the ball isn’t carrying. Polanco gets Chad Bunting to ground out, and now it’s Santos’s turn. Polanco threw eleven fastballs in twelve pitches in the first, because he was never ahead in the count, but Santos, who knows he has Sean and Dylan behind him, doesn’t keep any of his arsenal in reserve. He starts Pace with a changeup, then switches to the sinker, then fires two fastballs at 90. Pace grounds out, and Andrew Parker—who’s using hand signals instead of his fingers, which Santos can’t see—calls for a first-pitch curveball and a second-pitch slider to Danny Gonzalez, who lines a shot that Santos spears as he falls off the mound to the first-base side. Maikel Jova swings at a high fastball, another 90, and pops the Pacifics out of the inning.

  Both sides go quietly in the second, but in the third inning the Stompers apply pressure. Leading off, Matt Rubino drills a line drive to deep right-center. Pace’s pistoning feet kick up dust on Albert Park’s outfield diamond, making it look as if he’s being strafed by a pursuing fighter. But he’s timed his sprint perfectly, and he snags this one, too. Polanco loses the zone again with Eddie Mora-Loera up, falling behind 3-0 and walking him on a way-wide 3-1 pitch. Then he throws away a pickoff attempt, allowing Eddie to advance to second. Yuki pushes a bunt past Polanco to make it first and third with one out, then steals second without a throw on the first pitch to Kandel. Keith reaches out and slices the second pitch to shallow right, where Jova makes a shoestring catch. It’s not a surefire sac fly, but it’s deep enough to try, so Eddie tags and breaks for the plate. He stops on the way home, as if surprised that Jova has unleashed an Ichiro, but the throw from the normally strong-armed right fielder is actually weak, wayward, and cut off by first baseman Jake Taylor. Now Eddie seems surprised that Jova hasn’t unleashed an Ichiro, but Taylor is running right at him and throwing to Chase, so Eddie takes off for the plate again. Tucker at third throws the ball home, and Gingras goes ten feet up the line to catch it and apply the tag to Eddie, who tries in vain to scurry around him. In fifteen seconds, the Stompers have gone from a rally with an expected payoff of roughly 1.3 runs to an inning-ending double play. And they owe it to what Baseball Twitter would call a TOOTBLAN, “Thrown Out on the Bases Like a Nincompoop.”

  In the bottom of the third, Santos is fully armed and operational. Johnny Bekakis K’s on three pitches, taking a called strike on a slider and then waving weakly at a curve and another slider in the dirt. David Kiriakos singles, Pace strikes out—a rare occurrence—on a fastball up, and Gonzalez goes down swinging on another nasty slider down and away. Santos, who threw a curve at 68 and a fastball at 90, slaps his chest on his
way off the mound, with five strikeouts through three innings.

  In the fourth, he walks Jova, which is even harder to do than striking out Pace: The San Rafael right fielder entered the game with only 13 walks in 354 plate appearances, the league’s second-lowest rate. The second pitch to Jake Taylor, a fastball in the dirt, gets by Andrew Parker and goes to the backstop, and now Santos is in trouble, down 2-0 to the Pacifics’ best hitter with no outs and a runner in scoring position. The next pitch is almost the worst-case scenario: It’s a hanging slider, waist-high for the 6-foot-5 first baseman, and Taylor puts his whole behemoth body into the swing. The slider doesn’t do anything except sit on a tee at 76, but there’s a corollary to the principle that pitchers can’t always throw strikes: Hitters can’t always hit hanging sliders, and Taylor swings through this one. The next pitch is lower and slower, coming in at 70 mph and corkscrewing inside, and Taylor whiffs again. After that, there’s a fastball up and away at 88, and Taylor is called out on a check-swing by home-plate umpire Dean Poteet, the only ump who earns regular compliments from Pacific Association players. It’s Santos’s sixth consecutive out via the strikeout, only the second time a Pacific Association pitcher has done that in the same game this season. (Beatty did it in June.)

  But then Jeremy Williams singles to left, and Mark Hurley makes a mental mistake, throwing to third even though Jova is already there. Williams takes second on the throw as Yuki, the master of fundamentals, stands in front of the base and lifts up his arms in exasperation. The next batter, Chase Tucker, reaches out for a 2-2 slider away and pulls it softly through the same hole, the weakest possible single. Jova scores, and this time Hurley holds the ball, triple-pumping as if he’s afraid to throw to the wrong base again and decides that the safest course is not throwing it anywhere. Williams scores standing up, and Tucker advances to second the same way Williams did, as the ball eventually comes in to Eddie at third base.

  Two runs have scored on a walk, two Hurley mental mistakes, and a lousy excuse for a single, and even that small lead, which wouldn’t have made me nervous in June, now seems almost insurmountable. The Stompers haven’t had a come-from-behind victory since August 7, and that was a 1-0 deficit after the top of the first, which they erased in the bottom half. The last time they won a game they were trailing at the end of an inning was July 30, which was before eight of our current twenty-two players joined the team. To make matters worse, it’s a weekday. Over the past two seasons, Pacific Association teams have slugged 43 points higher on Saturday and Sunday than they have from Monday through Friday. We think we know why. Weekday games start later, which makes them colder, darker, and more hostile to hitters—hardly the ideal conditions for the comeback we now need.

  With one out in the top of the fifth, Rubino lines a solid single to center, and with Mora-Loera up Polanco loses the plate again, walking him on four pitches, the last of which almost goes over the head of his catcher. “He can’t throw strikes to short guys,” I say to Sam, and sure enough, Polanco walks Yuki, who now has two more walks than strikeouts on the season. That loads the bases for Keith Kandel; he just needs to hit a fly ball somewhere to score a run. Instead, he strikes out half-swinging at a fastball over the plate, and I’m angry about the batting order all over again. Baps strikes out, too—but not before an 0-1 fastball inside crosses up Gingras and glances off his glove to the backstop, allowing Rubino to come in from third. We’re back within one.

  The reduced deficit lasts seven minutes. Santos gets two easy flies for outs in the fifth, but then walks Danny Gonzalez, another aggressive hitter who usually has to hit his way on. Walking a nonwalker comes back to bite him again. Santos gets Jova to swing through a slider low and away, and Parker wants another slider in the same place. But Santos misses inside, and Jova, who rarely misses bad breaking balls, drives a double to left. Gonzalez scores, and we’re down two again, this time with three fewer outs remaining.

  As Chad Bunting leads off the next inning for the Stompers, Sean Conroy gets up in the pen; Santos’s season is over. Sean hasn’t pitched since his audition for the A’s, so if needed he’s fully prepared for another fireman appearance like his late-July triumphs over San Rafael. Bunting sees ten pitches, fouling off seven, before striking out. Moch walks, another free pass for a short guy, and takes a big lead off first. For most of the season, stolen bases were a weapon for the Stompers, who entered this game with by far the league’s best stolen-base success rate and stolen-base run total.

  Much of that success, though, had come from Hibbert and Feh: Moch has attempted only three steals all season. Nonetheless, he takes off on 1-2. In this league, Gingras is an average-throwing catcher, with a 2.05 pop time and a 35 percent caught-stealing rate (average is 32). Moch picks a changeup, but it’s high and out over the plate, giving Gingras an easy release. Moch slides in too late, a precious runner erased. The next pitch hits Hurley high on the back, which would’ve advanced Moch anyway, assuming Polanco had thrown the same pitch.

  “I don’t think Hurley’s going to be stealing here,” Tim says on the radio broadcast. “Parker can definitely run into one.” But Hurley does take off, on the very first pitch, and he’s thrown out, too. We’re down two runs, and we’ve run into three outs on the bases. This isn’t like us. “I didn’t like that he stole while I was hitting,” Parker says after the game. “Just in case I hit one, ’cause that would be a tied ball game. I understand them moving shit, but…”

  “Desperate,” Sam says.

  “Yeah,” Parker replies. “Like almost a panic. Like, we’re not doing shit, but … blink and a blast away from a tie ball game.”

  I assume this is a counterproductive Yoshi attempt to manufacture runs; weeks earlier, he’d told me that he wanted someone who could steal the bases if we needed to scratch out runs in the title game. According to Tommy Lyons, though, the steal sign wasn’t on. Moch and Hurley acted on their own.

  Sean, who lied and circled two sevens on his pregame happiness survey because it worked so well on Pride Night, comes into the game and sets down the Pacifics in the sixth, aided by Moch, who ranges far up the middle to snare a Williams bouncer, spin, and fire to Baps, who scoops it. Eddie (short guy!) walks again in the top of the seventh, but that’s all the Stompers muster. Sean works around a Gonzalez walk to post another zero in the bottom half. Just before Jova makes the final out of the inning, the Pacifics’ PA man announces that the concession stands will be selling beer beyond the seventh inning. “We have not yet had last call,” he says. I hope that also applies to our offense.

  Polanco’s at 109 pitches (and on his fourth trip through the lineup) as the eighth inning begins, and if Sam and I were in the Pacifics’ dugout, we’d be screaming for a reliever. Patrick Conroy, a lefty, is up in the Pacifics’ pen for the fourth time, and closer Guadalupe Barrera is stretching. Soon, another lefty, Chris Lovejoy, joins them. But Polanco is still going strong. Keith leads off with a strikeout, and Williams makes a running catch on a Baps fly to left that almost falls in. We’re down to four outs.

  After going down 1-2, Bunting—possibly reaping the benefits of making Polanco work extra hard in his previous at-bat—gets hit in the rib area, a painful place where Jon Rand once told me he likes to throw at hitters because “no one works out lats in baseball.” That brings up Moch, the lefty, and Kavanaugh heads to the mound for what seems like a certain call to the pen for one of the two lefty relievers he has waiting. Polanco has thrown 120 pitches, and Moch has been a much better hitter against right-handers (138 wRC+ vs. righties, 93 wRC+ vs. lefties). He’s also a short guy, Polanco’s apparent kryptonite. But Kavanaugh opts to stay with Polanco, who receives a round of motivational butt slaps as his teammates leave the mound. The first pitch is low and in for ball one. Pitch two is low and even farther in. Pitch three is high and away, and pitch four is low. Moch drops his bat and trots to first, and Polanco turns to our center-field camera and drops a beautifully framed F-bomb.

  Now Kavanaugh comes and gets Polanco, and
brings in the lefty Lovejoy to face the right-handed Hurley. Hurley has a 153 wRC + vs. lefties, and a 112 wRC+ vs. righties; Lovejoy has allowed a .222 wOBA to lefties and a .303 wOBA to righties. This might be the worst managerial move ever made.

  “What the hell is he doing?” I ask Sam.

  “Shut up shut up shut up,” Sam answers.

  Since Sam isn’t feeling social and I don’t want to be in the dugout if this doesn’t work out, I decide that I’d like a change of scenery (for nonsuperstitious reasons, I swear). With no other games going on, we have a second camera set up in the stands directly behind home plate, where our entire scouting staff is assembled to see the last act of the summer. When I join them, they give me anxious smiles and speak in hushed tones, as if they’re afraid any additional stress might make me snap.

  Hurley takes a called strike, then gets an 82 mph fastball that floats over the middle. He swings and grounds the ball into left field, the twin of Tucker’s run-scoring single in the fourth. Bunting scores. Moch almost gets back-picked at second by the throw in from Williams but dives back to the bag safely.

  Next up is Andrew Parker, who kills left-handed pitching. Actually, “kills” is an understatement. Here are Parker’s 2014–15 platoon splits: