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2020 World Series - Dodgers vs Rays

CowtownHorn

By CowtownHorn
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Congrats @Sbbruin

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I didn’t realize fucking Vin Scully or any other elderly people with pre existing conditions played for the dodgers. Jesus fucking Christ. Shut up. You look like a insecure clown. “But why don’t you t

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Sbbruin

Sbbruin 21900

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20 minutes ago, WBT said:

Dodgers in 5.  Rays don't have the bats to keep up.

Those arms though.  I think 6 or 7.  But any haters who think winning a title with an extra round of playoffs and no home field despite earning it is somehow not legitimate is disingenuous.  This may be the most difficult title anyone’s ever won, whoever takes it.

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Hank Chinaski

Hank Chinaski 6324

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29 minutes ago, WBT said:

Dodgers in 5.  Rays don't have the bats to keep up.

The Rays are sneaky-good offensively - they finished 9th in MLB in wRC+, and that was with only 23 games with Arozarena. He is hitting .382/.433/.855 in the postseason. Dropping him in the middle of that lineup makes it pretty strong. 

I'll go with LA in 7. Mookie is the piece they needed to finally get over the top. (How's that for a hot-take? Adding the 2nd-best player in MLB is helpful.)

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Sbbruin

Sbbruin 21900

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5 hours ago, Helobious said:

Rooting for the Dodgers. But this will be the first WS since 2016 I don’t truly hate at least one team involved. Rays definitely did baseball a favor by keeping the Astros out.

I rather enjoy them discussing their pending offseason moves.  We have more pressing issues to attend to.

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torre

torre 1286

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https://www.mlb.com/news/2020-world-series-rosters-breakdown

 

Above is a nice article describing how the teams were built complete with a graph.   Two best teams this year.   Excerpt:

 

Similar to the Rays, Los Angeles has made several small moves that have turned into steals, such as dealing for Enrique Hernández (a throw-in in the Dee Gordon trade with the Marlins in 2014) and Chris Taylor (from the Mariners for Zach Lee in 2016) and signing lightly regarded free agents Justin Turner ($1 million Minor League deal in 2014) and Max Muncy (released by Athletics in 2017).

Of course, Tampa Bay knows a thing or two about finding value in under-the-radar free agents. Right-hander John Curtiss and lefty Aaron Loup, both signed by Tampa Bay last February, combined for 1.3 WAR during the regular season while appearing in 41 games. Charlie Morton, pitching in the second year of his two-year, $30 million deal, is the only other free agent on Tampa Bay’s projected World Series roster. The 36-year-old right-hander was brilliant vs. Houston in the ALCS, winning Games 2 and 7 and working 10 2/3 scoreless frames between the two outings.

 

 

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shadow_operative2.0

shadow_operative2.0 16040

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Fun with #s... 

Quote

Near as I can tell, Arozarena is still eligible to win the Rookie of the Year award next year, after he's already won the ALCS MVP award. He's a fantastic reminder that there are different ways to become a legend; Mike Trout has four career total bases in the postseason, while Arozarena -- who has scored 24.6% of the Rays' run this fall -- already has nine postseason games with at least that many.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30146858/ranking-all-56-players-los-angeles-dodgers-tampa-bay-rays-fall-classic

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MC Fresh Breath

MC Fresh Breath 4074

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On 10/19/2020 at 8:29 AM, Scraps said:

Dodgers in most likely 5...possibly 6.  

Rays suck at hitting(other than John David Washington) ...the Dodgers do not.  

Good one from Jayson Stark about that:

 
Quote

 

By Jayson Stark Oct 18, 2020comment-icon.png 131 save-icon.png

Just when you thought the 2020 American League champions were about to slide off the October cliff, the Tampa Bay Rays made a statement Saturday night.

They are going to do what they do. They don’t care what anyone thinks of how they do it. And they are living proof that if you’re smarter and deeper and more innovative than everybody else, you, too, can go play in a World Series.

That’s where the Rays are headed next week after their tense, riveting and utterly fascinating 4-2 win over the Astros in Game 7 of the ALCS Saturday night. It was a game and a series just made to order for one last ALCS edition of the Wild and Weird. So here we go, one more time.

1. There has never, ever been a great team like the Rays

I wrote those words after Game 1 of this series. They’re as true as ever after Game 7.

Don’t misunderstand what those words mean. This is the team that deserves to represent the American League in the World Series. Had the best record in the league. Then went the distance twice to oust the Yankees and Astros. And had to do it while becoming the first group in history to grind through 12 postseason games in 13 days. That sounds like a great team to me.

But if you’re one of those people who just started honing in on the Rays’ unique baseball ambiance in this postseason, I’m guessing you spent most of those nights screaming stuff like: “What are they doing?” Or possibly: “What are they thinking?” Or certainly: “Who the heck are these people, anyway?”

“We’re not a team that is built with superstar after superstar,” said their managerial maestro, Kevin Cash, after this exhausting Game 7 win. “We’re a team that maximizes opportunities and tries to get matchups to help us win games. And we did that really, really well this year.”

This year? How about this month? I feel totally confident in saying this: No team has ever written a World Series script like this team. I’m pretty sure that if we muster all the resources the Wild and Weird Department can scrounge up, we can even prove that. So let’s review how the Rays did this:

THEY NEVER DID REMEMBER TO HIT: In the ALCS, the Rays got outhit by the Astros, .260-.201. That’s 59 points worth of batting average. And they won! But that was nothing new. In the ALDS, the Rays also got outhit, this time by the Yankees, .243-.202. That’s 41 points. And they won that series, too!

If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: Hmmm, that seems hard to do. Very perceptive of you. According to STATS, they’re just the third team since the invention of the Division Series to get outhit in both the LDS and the LCS — and make it to the World Series anyway. The others:

• Dusty Baker’s 2002 Giants: Outhit by 12 points in the NLDS and 10 points in the NLCS.

• Mike Hargrove’s 1997 Indians: Outhit by two points in the ALDS but then by 55 points in the ALCS.

But … these Rays outdid both those teams, getting outhit by more than 40 points in both series. And that’s just in batting average. I could have used pretty much any category on the stat sheet and gotten the same result. It takes remarkable creativity to get crushed offensively two series in a row and still wind up in the World Series. But “creative” sounds like the perfect word to describe the 2020 Rays. Don’t you think?

OTHER GREAT MOMENTS IN NOT HITTING: OK, think how challenging it is to make the World Series when you also do stuff like this:

• Hit .174 with runners in scoring position over the first three rounds of the postseason — and win all three rounds! That’s the lowest postseason RISP average by a team that played in a World Series since Sarge Mathews’ 1983 Phillies hit .137!

• Speaking of not hitting with runners in scoring position, how about this: The Rays didn’t get one run-scoring hit with a runner in scoring position after the sixth inning of ALCS Game 3! That’s 38 consecutive innings! And 19 consecutive plate appearances! Un-be-lievable.

• Oh, and their hitters also struck out 81 times in the LCS, the second-most ever (one behind the 2018 Dodgers) for a team that won a postseason series. But …

• To get there, the Rays struck out at least nine times in all seven games of this series — and no team has ever done that in a postseason series. They also struck out at least 11 times in six of the seven games. And yep, no team has ever done that, either.

• Ah, but fortunately, they did hit a bunch of home runs. They scored 71.9 percent of their runs in these first three rounds thanks to all the long balls they hit. And it’s a good thing, right? That’s by far the highest rate ever by a team that made it to the World Series. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the previous high for the greatest percentage of postseason runs via homers for a team that reached the World Series was only 58.3 percent, by Wilver Stargell’s 1971 Pirates.

MEANWHILE ON THE MOUND: The Rays applied all their creative powers on the other side of the ball, too. For instance:

• In their four wins in the ALCS, not one of their starters made it through the sixth inning. Only three teams have ever done that and won an LCS: Chris Carpenter’s 2011 Cardinals, C.J. Wilson’s 2011 Rangers and Jeremy Guthrie’s 2014 Royals.

• But let’s not think just about the wins. In these seven games, the Rays had no starting pitcher get an out beyond the sixth inning in any of them. No team had ever won an LCS in which its starters had seven outings that short. And only two teams have ever won any postseason series that way — John Lackey’s 2002 Angels and John Lackey’s 2016 Cubs, both in two very crazy World Series.

• And finally, there was the guy who saved Game 7, Pete Fairbanks. For one thing, he’s a rookie — which made him the first rookie to save Game 7 of any series, according to STATS, since David Price saved the seventh game of the 2008 ALCS, for — who else? — the Tampa Bay Rays.

• But even more impressive was this: Fairbanks was also a guy who saved zero games during the entire regular season — for a team that had 12 different pitchers save a game this season. That’s impossible enough. But then they had that guy save the game that sent them to the World Series, because of course they did.

The Rays, man. Nobody does it quite like they do it.

2. Charlie Morton: He’s now an October legend

When Dusty Baker saw Kevin Cash pop out of the dugout and head for the mound with two outs in the sixth inning Saturday, the Astros manager admitted he was not saddened by the thought that his team wouldn’t have to watch Charlie Morton do his Bob Gibson impression anymore.

“We hoped he took Morton out too soon,” Baker confessed later, “because he was carving us up pretty good.”

How’s this for a definition of carving up your team pretty good? Morton was working on a two-hit shutout. He had a 3-0 lead. He hadn’t allowed a single ball defined by Statcast as “hard hit” since the first inning. And then there was this:

Between the Astros’ third hitter of the game and their 18th hitter of the game, not one Astros hitter reached base. Not one. That streak of 14 consecutive batters retired was merely the longest by any pitcher in a Game 7 since that Madison Bumgarner guy also chewed through 14 in a row in the grand finale of the 2014 World Series/MadBumpalooza.

So in other words, Charlie Morton was dealing, because that’s what Charlie Morton does this time of year. He’s now an official October legend. And since we know now that his night and his team’s night worked out splendidly, let’s review just how much of an October legend he has become:

• He has now pitched in four winner-take-all games in the last four seasons. He has been the winning pitcher in all four of them. No other pitcher in the history of this sport has won more than two games like that.

• In a related development, Morton’s ERA in winner-take-all games is now down to 0.46 — which is what you get when you allow one earned run in 19 2/3 innings. I took a spin through Baseball-Reference to see where that ranked among all pitchers in history with 19 or more innings in win-or-else games. He’s in excellent company:

Madison Bumgarner: 0.00
Charlie Morton: 0.46
John Smoltz: 0.74
Gerrit Cole: 3.09
Bob Gibson: 3.67

• This was the second time Morton has given up no runs in a winner-take-all start. (He also spun off five shutout innings against the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS.) So he now joins this list of starting pitchers who have more than one scoreless start in winner-take-all games: MadBum, Smoltz, Bret Saberhagen and Justin Verlander. Good group!

But now I know what you’re thinking: If this dude is that special, why the heck would his manager take him out of this game, when he’d been flat dominating, with two outs in the sixth inning of the ultimate must-win game?

Why, you ask? All right, consider the possibilities. Either A) Kevin Cash just thought it would be fun to break Twitter again for the second consecutive night, or B) he had enough information that he knew, despite the outrage across the North American continent, this was actually a good idea.

“It’s no discredit to anybody (who disagreed),” Cash would say afterward. “It’s just, that’s what we do. We believe in our process, and we’re going to continue doing that.”

Look, I know — and he knows — that The Process, as practiced by the American League champions, is not the way Old Hoss Radbourn did it or the way Walter Johnson did it or even the way Randy Johnson did it. Kevin Cash was not the toast of Baseball Twitter for doing what he did Saturday — especially when it came one day after a similar move with Blake Snell in Game 6 blew up on both of them.

But ask yourself this: Would the Tampa Bay Rays even be here if they did what you, or Old Hoss Radbourn, or Baseball Twitter wanted them to do every night? Remember the part of this column where we mentioned there has never been a great team quite like this?

Kevin Cash doesn’t hate the human element. He’s just trying to get the biggest outs of his team’s whole season. I’m fairly confident he has his reasons. But now that we’ve got that out of the way …

I was curious about …

THE EARLY HOOK! So I asked my friends at STATS Perform this question: Has any other starting pitcher — who had previously won a Game 7 — gotten hooked from another Game 7 while working on a shutout?

Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. That’s a good one. The answer, of course, is: No freaking way.

The previous shortest start of that kind? It was 7 1/3 innings by Smoltz — in the fabled Jack Morris Game (i.e., Game 7 of the 1991 World Series). But it was still 0-0 — in the eighth — when Smoltz came out.

Baseball has changed a lot since then, apparently. And the best evidence is the last American League team standing, those wacky Tampa Bay Rays.

AP20292087066770-1024x683.jpg
 
(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)

3. It’s finally safe to wave adios to the Astros

I was sure they’d keep on winning until they drove America to new levels of delirium. I was sure there was some sort of impenetrable Astros karma in the works, and it could not be stopped. Not by you. Not by me. Not by the Rays. Not by an emergency restraining order.

But nope. I was wrong about that. Turned out the Astros were stoppable after all — by Charlie Morton and his pals. So as America thanks Charlie and his pals, here’s my question: What should we make of what these Astros just did?

They just finished playing in a postseason where in-game video was not a thing. Where access to video rooms and other forms of technological espionage were unavailable. Where teams were so onto the sign-decoding techniques the Astros had once employed that they’ve clearly set a postseason record for most pitchers consulting index cards in their hats.

Yet it didn’t stop the Astros from sweeping the Twins … and sending the A’s home … and mostly outplaying the Rays, down to the final out of Game 7 … and only losing after climbing all the way back out of the bottom of 0-3 Canyon.

We saw Carlos Correa hit .362 with six homers — and huge moments — in this postseason. We saw José Altuve put aside his throwing glitches and hit .375 with five homers in this postseason. We saw George Springer and Michael Brantley do exactly the sorts of things we’ve been watching them do in October for years now.

And their historic feats in this postseason — a fourth consecutive trip to the LCS, and a record for most postseason games played together by their core players (57) — are going down in the books, like them or not.

So let’s ask this again: What should we make of the Houston Astros now?

“The legacy of this group,” Dusty Baker said Saturday night, “is, these guys are ballplayers. And these guys are men. They’ve been through a whole bunch, other than on the ball field. And these guys can forget whatever problem that they’ve had and come together as a group. … And when they invite the 2017 team back and the 20-whatever team back, these guys will cherish these moments and have these moments for the rest of their lives.”

Not that the rest of America will cherish any of that, though. So as I watched their final game together Saturday night, I texted an AL executive and asked if this October provided any type of vindication for this group. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get far with that premise.

“It’s hard to get redemption,” he wrote, “for a complete lack of integrity. (But) I don’t think any rational people didn’t think they were talented.”

I feel like that summed it up eloquently. This October was a vivid reminder of the Astros’ talent — but it doesn’t excuse any of the misdeeds that earned them their rightful place as baseball’s most loathed team. Nor does it excuse their lack of acceptable contrition for what they did.

So it didn’t take long for this exec and I to agree on that, at least. But then he couldn’t help but add: “And I would happily take Springer, Bregman and Correa on my team.”

4. Dusty’s sad place in October history

This could have been one of the greatest nights in Dusty Baker’s career. Instead, it was memorable for all the wrong reasons:

His teams have now lost six consecutive winner-take-all postseason games — with four different teams (Cubs, Reds, Nationals, Astros).

If you’re thinking that has to be a record, it’s because that is in fact a record.

According to STATS, he’d been tied with A’s manager Bob Melvin at five in a row. But now Baker stands alone. Is he the most beloved manager never to win a World Series? I think he is.

5. Days of wine and Arozarenas

Finally, Randy Arozarena hit another home run Saturday. Why is this even a surprise anymore? This is where we can all join in and sing our favorite October chorus again: He’s the greatest player we ever saw — whoever he is.

Already this week, I’ve compared him to Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Ken Griffey Jr. So why stop there? Albert Pujols, come on down. Can we now safely argue that Arozarena has even blown by Pujols’ greatest postseason ever? It’s close. Take a look.

PUJOLS, 2004:  (24 for 58) .414/.493/.793/1.286 with 6 HR and 10 extra-base hits
AROZARENA, 2020: (21 for 55) .382/.433/.855/1.288 with 7 HR and 11 extra-base hits

Arozarena hit seven home runs all season. He now has hit seven in 14 games in the postseason. Only three players have ever hit more home runs in a single postseason. They’re Barry Bonds in 2002, Nelson Cruz in 2011 and Carlos Beltrán in 2004 (all with eight). They’re all pretty famous. And now Randy Arozarena gets to hang out in the same sentence as all of them.

This could not happen in most other sports, you know. In the NBA, they’re not bringing guys off the end of the bench to go outplay LeBron. But aside from the fact that Arozarena is one talented dude, there is only one explanation for how a man could arise from just about total anonymity to have an October so monstrous that we just dropped an Albert Pujols comp on you. Yes, thank heaven once again for …

Baseball!

(Photo of Mike Zunino: Ashley Landis / Associated Press)

What did you think of this st

 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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Never liked the Dodgers, but always liked that '88 squad.  Buncha scrubs up and down the lineup.  Only three guys in that whole lineup had decent careers and one of 'em was hurt the whole series except for the most epic pinch-hit HR's of all time.  But that pitching staff put on a clinic.  

Anyway, no dog in this hunt.  Sorry for you Astros fans.  Really have enjoyed watching these Stros teams the last few years.  Nothing against the Rays, I guess.  Just be nice to see the Dodgers take home hardware, they've waited a lot longer than the Rays have even been a glint in someone's eye.  

Mostly just want Hershiser to see his team get another ring.  That guy and his 'nieces' are fun to party with in Omaha if you ever get the chance.  

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Blotto

Blotto 23585

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2020 team salaries: LA - $108 million, TB - $28 million. As I have no real affinity for either team, I'll probably root for the underdog. But as much fun as it is to poke at Kershaw for shitting the playoff bed, he does seem like a good dude. Wouldnt hate seeing  him perform well and get a ring. 

That being said I took the Rays tonight at +150 in case Kershaw shits the bed per usual, and if he does, i'll grab the Dodgers in game for +ML. Small wager just to keep my interest

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