John Fogerty -- "Centerfield" (1985)

Put me in, Coach

I'm ready to play

Today

After suffering through the baseball-related rant in the previous 2 or 3 lines, you were no doubt hoping that I would get back on track and conclude my series of posts about my recent trip to Las Vegas, Joplin, and Cape Cod.

But I'm going to ask your indulgence while I pick at the scab of the Washington Nationals' playoff defeat at the hands of the San Francisco Giants just a little bit longer.

One of my favorite baseball stories involves Graig Nettles, a very fine third baseman who played in 2700 major-league games in the course of his 22-year career.

Nettles stealing a hit in the 1981 World Series

Nettles was manning third for the New York Yankees in the infamous 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and their hated rivals, the Boston Red Sox.  The Yanks had a one-run lead with two outs, but the Red Sox had two men on base when Hall of Fame Carl Yastrzemski stepped to the plate to face Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rich "Goose" Gossage.

Yaz popped up

Yaz swung late at one of the Goose's unhittable fastballs and lifted a popup to Nettles, who caught it to seal the victory.

After the game, a reporter asked Nettles what he thinking when Yastrzemski stepped into the box to face Gossage.

"I was thinking, 'Please don't hit it to me,'" Nettles answered -- perhaps the most honest thing a major-league baseball player has ever said.

Nettles jumps into Gossage's arms
after catching Yaz's pop-up

I think every boy who has ever played Little League baseball understands exactly how Nettles felt.  With the game on the line, you want the batter to hit the ball to anyone but you.

Fast forward to game four of the 2014 National League Division Series between the Washington Nationals and San Francisco Giants.  The score was tied and there were two men on base and only one out in the bottom of the 7th of a do-or-die game for the Nationals when manager Matt Williams walked to the mound to make a pitching change.  He decided to put the ball into the hands of rookie reliever Aaron Barrett.

Aaron Barrett

What was going through the head of Barrett at that moment?  "Put me in, Coach -- I'm ready to play"?  Or was Barrett thinking more like Graig Nettles in 1978?

Poor Aaron Barrett walked the first batter he faced to load the bases.  With a 1-1 count on the next hitter, Barrett uncorked a wild pitch, allowing the go-ahead run to score.

Then something perhaps even more telling happened.  After throwing ball three, Barrett was directed to intentionally walk the batter.  But his intentional ball sailed over the head of his catcher and went all the way to the backstop.

Fortunately, Nats catcher Wilson Ramos got the ball to Barrett in time for the pitcher to tag the Giants runner who was attempting to score.

But the damage was done.  The Nats were blanked in their final two at-bats, and the Giants escaped with their third one-run win in the 2014 NL division series.   

Barrett pitched very well for the Nationals in the 2014 regular season.  He struck out 49 batters in 40 2/3 innings, and allowed only one home run to opposing batters.  While he was a rookie, he was 26 years old -- so he had been around a little.

Coming in from the bullpen:
"Put me in, Coach"

But Barrett didn't have the best control.  He walked 20 batters during the regular season, or 4.4 every nine innings -- that's dangerously high.  And he uncorked six wild pitches during the regular season, more than any other Nationals reliever.

Sportswriters and fans are all too eager to say that a player has choked, and some were quick to accuse Barrett of gagging in this crucial situation.  

But if a pitcher can't control his pitches in regular-season games, how can you say he choked when he walks a guy and throws a wild pitch in a playoff game?  To some degree, walks and wild pitches are simply what Aaron Barrett does.  

Barrett appeared one other time in the Nats-Giants playoff series.  In game two, which lasted a record 18 innings, Barrett was called into the game in the top of the 12th.  His first three pitches were balls, and then he allowed a double.  Exit Aaron Barrett.

It is probably fairer to attach the horns of the scapegoat to the head of Nationals manager Matt Williams than to the head of Aaron Barrett.  His decision to bring a rookie reliever into the game at such a crucial moment has been second-guessed from here to the moon and back. Hindsight is always 20-20, as the saying goes, and the manager's call to Barrett in game four does appear questionable given the situation and his alternatives -- especially when you look back to Barrett's shaky performance in game two.

But managers make questionable decisions every day, and they often get away with them.  Only a few days before the Nats' loss, Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost pulled his ace starting pitcher out of a one-run playoff game with two men on base and brought in a rookie starter who had only appeared in relief one time all season.  That pitcher gave up a three-run homer.

Ned Yost calls to the bullpen

Yost was eviscerated for his choice of relievers given his other options -- the Royals have an outstanding and deep bullpen -- but his team bailed him out.  Kansas City erased a 7-3 deficit and eventually won the game in 12 innings.

If the Royals don't come back, Yost would almost certainly be looking for a new job this offseason.  But the Royals did come back, swept the Angels, and won the first two games of their playoff series on the road against the Orioles.  

Five of their six playoff wins have been nailbiters -- four were decided in extra innings, and the fifth was tied going into the ninth.  The Royals are on a roll, and they look like a pretty good bet to win the World Series despite the fact that they had only the 7th-best record in baseball and the 11th-best runs differential numbers.

It's always better to be lucky than good in the MLB playoffs.  The Royals are a very good team . . . but no team wins five playoff games in their last at-bat unless a lot of things break just right for them.

The Royals celebrate yet another playoff win

By almost any measure, the Nationals are a better team than the Royals.  But the Nats are watching football today and thinking about what might have been, while the Royals are preparing to play a game that could propel them into the World Series.  

All because a bad decision by Matt Williams bit him and his team in the ass, while an even worse decision by Ned Yost didn't.  Life ain't fair, boys and girls.

By the way, my cousin Cody Clark -- who played in the major leagues with the Astros last year after eleven years in the minors -- is the Royals' bullpen coach.  Ever wonder what a bullpen coach does?  Here's the answer:

P.S.  In the last 2 or 3 lines, I trashed Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell for jumping to conclusions about which baseball players perform well under pressure and which ones are chokers based on unreliably small samples of data.  In his column about the Royals' two playoff wins in Baltimore over last weekend, Boswell did a one-eighty.  Instead of pontificating about how the Royals must have those special character traits and other intangibles that spell postseason success, Boswell called the Royals "incredibly lucky" to have won six playoff games in a row -- five in their last at-bat.  

In the most recent of those five games, the Royals scored two runs in the ninth to break a 4-4 tie on the road.  Here's how Orioles manager Buck Showalter described the hits that produced those two runs: "A swinging bunt, a bunt, a groundball [that hugged] the right-field line, and a groundball in the hole" that barely eluded the third baseman.  (If those pitches were one mile an hour faster or slower, those ground balls would have gone a little more to the left or to the right -- that game could have come out very, very differently.)

Buck Showalter

Don't misinterpret what I am saying: the Royals are a good team, with players who don't shrink under pressure.  But I wouldn't bet on the 1927 Yankees against the Royals right now.  As another Post writer said about the team, the Royals "are riding the ultimate gambler's high, winning against the odds."  

Enjoy it while it lasts, guys.  And let's hope you don't follow in the footsteps of the 2007 Colorado Rockies, who finished the regular season by winning 11 straight games, won the wild-card tiebreaker in 13 innings (scoring three runs in the 13th to overcome an 8-6 deficit), won seven more in a row to sweep the NLDS and NLCS, and then -- after an eight-day layoff due to baseball's insane postseason schedule -- collapsed against the Red Sox in the World Series, losing four games in a row.

Here's "Centerfield," a song by former Creedence Clearwater Revival stalwart John Fogerty that I've heard way too many times during the twenty baseball seasons since he released it in 1985.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Depeche Mode -- "Policy of Truth" (1990)

You'll see your problems multiplied

If you continually decide

To faithfully pursue

The policy of truth

(We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this angry-old-man rant.)

2 or 3 lines faithfully pursues the policy of truth, unlike the many brown-eyed baseball reporters whose columns you may read in your daily newspaper, or whose commentary you may hear on your local sports-talk radio station.  (2 or 3 lines does not have brown eyes.  2 or 3 lines has green eyes -- although some people might call them hazel, and hazel eyes are sort of kind of brown.)

Let me introduce you to the very brown-eyed Washington Post baseball columnist, Tom Boswell.

Boswell is one of the best baseball writers ever when it comes to telling a story.  I still have my original copy of his story about the infamous 1978 Yankees-Red Sox playoff game -- which is not only is a masterful account of a very dramatic single game, but also a masterful account of that entire season (which featured an epic Red Sox collapse that allowed the Yankees to tie them for first place after trailing by 14 games in July).   It is perhaps the best piece of baseball writing I have ever read.

But do you remember Procrustes, the mythical Greek giant who forced his captives to lie on an iron bed and then cut off their feet if they were too long to fit the bed, or stretched them if they were too short?

Boswell is a disciple of Procrustes who sometimes tailors the facts to fit his point of view rather than vice versa.  

Procrustes

Boswell recently wrote a column that said that playoff baseball is a "different and crueler sport" than regular-season baseball, and that the Washington Nationals -- who have the best won-loss record in baseball over the past three seasons -- lost the National League Division Series in both 2012 and 2014 because they are "psychologically weak."  

This is nonsense of the first order, of course.  Baseball players who are "psychologically weak" don't make it to the major leagues in the first place -- much less achieve the best record in their league.

Boswell examines the Nats' individual performances in the 2012 and 2014 playoffs and decides which players have the psychological cojones to perform well in the postseason, and which ones are "paralyzed by playoff pressure."

Keep in mind that we're talking about a total of nine games here.  (The 2014 Nats who weren't on the team in 2012 are being judged on the basis of just four games.)

Boswell lists seven Nats who he thinks look psychologically tough enough to withstand postseason pressure based on their 2012 and 2014 NLDS performances.

One of the seven is starting pitcher Jordan Zimmerman.  Zimmerman was outstanding in his one start in the 2014 NLDS, giving up a single run in 8 2/3 innings.  

Jordan Zimmerman

But in 2012, he pooped the bed in his start, giving up five runs in only three innings.  (For those of you who are keeping score at home, that works out to a 15.00 ERA.)

If you combine Zimmerman's 2012 and 2014 stats, he had a 4.63 ERA in his two starts.  That's not terrible, but it's certainly not good.  So why in the world does Boswell say that when you look at Zimmerman's October performances, he "looks adequately suited" to the month?

It beats the hell out of me.  Maybe because his 2014 start was so good that you discount his 2012 numbers?

That can't be it.  Because another of Boswell's seven favorites is shortstop Ian Desmond did just the opposite.  

Desmond had seven hits in 19 at-bats in 2012, for a very good .368 batting average.  But he had only three hits in 18 ABs in 2014, which works out to an anemic .167 batting average.  

Ian Desmond

Combine the two postseasons and Desmond hit .270 -- pretty good, but somewhat deceptive because he had only one walk and one extra-base hit (a double).

Each of these players was good in one postseason series and awful in the other one.  What does that tell you about what you can expect from them in the next postseason?  

To quote the late, great Edwin Starr, "Absolutely nothin'!"  Both players came to the major leagues in 2009, so I'm going to give a lot more weight to their performance over the course of six long regular seasons than I'm going to give to what they did in a mere nine postseason games.

By the way, Boswell says "the jury's out" on whether Nats center fielder Denard Span has the wherewithal to succeed in the playoffs.  

Denard Span

Like Desmond, Span had a horrible 2014 NLDS, hitting only .105.  But he hit .357 in two postseason series with his former team, the Twins.  So his total playoff numbers are essentially identical to Desmond's.  

However, Desmond passes the Boswell test, while the jury is still out on Span.  Go figure.

(If Boswell worked for a Los Angeles paper, I guess he would be telling Dodger fans that Clayton Kershaw was not psychologically tough enough for the postseason because he had a 7.82 ERA in his two NLDS starts this year.  Kershaw is the best regular-season pitcher in baseball, and he can pitch for me in the playoffs any day of the week.)  

Any college kid who has taken Statistics 101 will tell you that you can't draw meaningful conclusions on the basis of such a small sample of data.

Let's say you went to a typical American neighborhood and started knocking on doors, asking everyone whether they were going to vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee.

Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Let's say you stopped after surveying 162 voters, and tallied up the results.  You find that eight more favored Tweedledum than favored Tweedledee.   

You wouldn't be sure that Tweedledum was going to win the election based on those numbers -- 85 to 77 is pretty close.  But you might be willing to make a small wager on Tweedledum based on your sample of 162 voters.

If you then surveyed four more voters, and three of them said they preferred Tweedledee, would you fly to Vegas and make a big bet on Tweedledee?

OF COURSE NOT.  (If you disagree with that answer, don't fly to Vegas -- fly to Washington, DC, and play poker with me.)  

The Giants won three of four against the Nationals in the playoffs in October.  Does that mean they were better than the Nats?  

Before you answer that question, let me point out that the Nationals won eight more games in the 2014 regular season than the Giants.  Let me also point out that the Nats and Giants met seven times in the regular season, with the Nats winning five of those seven games.

Ian Desmond and Denard Span and the rest of the Nats hitters had a very bad NLDS, hitting only .164 and scoring only nine runs in 45 innings.  The Giants weren't much better, scoring only nine runs themselves.  But they got a couple of more breaks than the Nats, and they won three out of four.

Matt Williams

Boswell mostly blames the Nats' manager, Matt Williams, for their loss.  Williams did make a couple of questionable decisions, but if the Nats had hit anywhere near as well as they did in the regular season, they would have won the series easily and no one would be criticizing the manager.  (The Kansas City Royals manager, Ned Yost, made a whopper of a mistake in the AL wild-card game, but his team rallied late and took him off the hook.)

Boswell's colleague at the Post, Barry Svrluga, is not very brown-eyed at all.  As Svrluga wrote recently,

It's a dangerous thing, trying to figure out success in baseball's playoffs, perhaps the most random postseason of all.  

If Svrluga had deleted "perhaps" from that sentence, he'd be 100% correct.

Sh*t happens, Nats fans.  Don't take the playoffs too seriously.  Wait 'til next year.

Depeche Mode's name can be literally translated as "fast fashion."  But the band named itself after a French magazine whose name is more accurately translated as Fashion News or Fashion Update.

"Policy of Truth" was released in 1990 on the group's seventh studio album, Violator.

Click here to listen to "Policy of Truth":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: