Dusty Must Go
October 10, 2017
If the Washington
Nationals ever hope to win a World Series title, they must part ways with Dusty
Baker. He simply doesn’t understand, nor has he shown the capability of
learning that the post-season is a different game than the regular season.
Without that realization, it is incredibly difficult to win even if you have
the best team.
During the regular season,
it’s not a big deal to lose a game. Most teams that make the playoffs lose at
least 60. However, in a short series like the Division Series, one can only
afford to lose two games. Beyond that your season is over. In the regular
season, it’s likely a team will use at least 45 different players, sometimes as
many as 60, during the course of a playoff run. In the post-season, there are
only 25 guys on the roster and for the most part the winning team will use only
15-17 of them. There’s not a lot of trying to get guys at bats or trying to
keep pitchers fresh as there is during the regular season. Every decision has
to be made with the idea that this moment is the most important moment of the
game and our chances of progressing depend on taking advantage of this moment.
There is no planning for next week or even tomorrow. It is now or never.
And the problem is that
Baker isn’t some new manager with post-season jitters making these mistakes.
He’s been making
bad decisions in critical situations for playoff teams now for twenty-four
years.
So when Dusty Baker came
to get Max Scherzer after 98 pitches and a 1-run lead
in the 7th inning of game 3 with a man on second base, there was a
clear choice to make. The series was tied in
So what did Baker do? He
brought in arguably the Nationals’ 4th best lefty reliever, Sammy
Solis. In the regular season that might have been an acceptable choice. After
all, he was going to be facing two lefties, Kyle Schwarber
and then Jason Heyward and would probably need another lefty eventually as the
line-up turned over. And Solis had a pretty good track record of getting
hitters out. But this was the playoffs where flaws tend to get magnified. So
Solis’ wild tendencies came back to haunt him. He was all over the strikezone and finally grooved a pitch that pinch hitter
Albert Almora smoked into the outfield for a
game-tying single.
What were
Baker’s other options? Well, GM Mike Rizzo spent a good deal of the summer
trying to fix the back end of the bullpen and through trades brought three
pitchers with closing experience to the Nats:
righties Brandon Kintzler and Ryan Madson and lefty Sean Doolittle. After their acquisition,
they basically pitched the 7th through the 9th inning of
every close game in which the Nats held the lead.
This was the 7th inning. Any one of those guys would have been
acceptable. If you were afraid of Schwarber match-up,
then he could have gone with Doolittle for a couple of batters and let the
righties close it out. Doolittle could pitch the 7th and maybe part
of the 8th. If you liked the Schwarber vs righty match-up better, either Kintzler
or Madson should have been the choice. It was for
situations like these that they had been acquired and had excelled. But Dusty
elected to go with his 4th best choice. Or was he the 5th
best choice because he had lefty Oliver Perez in the bullpen as well and he had
been the match-up lefty all season for late-inning situations like this. Or was
he the 6th best choice with Matt Albers, a lefty groundball machine
with a 1.68 ERA over the season, also in the pen. Solis’ ERA was 5.88. Lefty
Matt Grace was also available, an even greater groundball machine with an ERA
of 4.32. If one uses fielding independent pitching statistics, Solis was the
Nationals’ 14th best pitcher this season. Even if you argue that
Solis had been very effective over the last month of the season, you’re still
putting your team’s chances in the hands of a pitcher who has less than 90
career innings in the majors, over three other choices that have been in
exactly these types of situations before. Yet this was the guy Dusty Baker went
to with the season on the line when he had only eight more outs to go.
It makes his decision to
pitch to Anthony Rizzo in the bottom of the eighth irrelevant. That was simply
the decision that sealed the Nationals’ fate. Rizzo had been the only Cubs
hitter who had been hitting at least .300 for the series. The next best mark
was Kris Bryant’s .273. The hitter following Rizzo, Wilson Contreras, was
hitting .143 and the guy behind him, Almora, had only
1 hit in his entire playoff career (ironically it had been the hit that tied
the game off Solis) and behind him was Jason Heyward who was hitting .167. But
instead of pitching around Rizzo or even intentionally walking the Cubs’
hottest hitter, Baker decided to pitch to him. He made them pay with a bloop single that scored the go-ahead run.
In the regular season,
these are not bad decisions because there are so many games to play. In the
post-season, they are critically terrible decisions that will very likely end
the Nationals’ season. They should also end Dusty Baker’s stay as the Nationals
manager. It remains to be seen if the GM and ownership who hired both Baker and
Matt Williams before him can see clearly enough to grasp this.
If not, the Nationals not
only will not win a championship in the foreseeable future, but they will lose
the most talented player the franchise has had since Walter Johnson, because
Bryce Harper isn’t going to stick around with an organization that can’t
recognize their biggest obstacle. For the Nats to win
a championship, Dusty Baker must go.
Postscript 10/13/2017: More
questionable Dusty decisions that cost the Nats: In
the deciding Game 5, starting Gio Gonzalez, who has a
well-chronicled history of post-season meltdowns and has never recorded more
than 15 outs in any of his six playoff starts, over Tanner Roark, whose
post-season ERA is half a run lower than Gonzalez. And if he wasn’t going to
start Roark, he could at least have used him out of the pen. He spent much of
2015 there and was fully rested, unlike Scherzer who
was going on 2 days rest. He didn’t do either. Also, walking Jason Heyward (.167
in the playoffs with a .500 OPS, .259 with a .715 OPS during the regular season)
with 2 outs in the 5th inning makes no sense. Yes, bad luck and bad
umpiring played a role, as did sloppy play (which, by the way, doesn’t happen
much with well-coached teams) but Baker’s decision-making only added more
weight to an already burdensome task. It’s time for new management.