Author Topic: ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours  (Read 458 times)

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Offline EasyAce

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ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours
« on: October 18, 2020, 10:54:26 am »
Astrogate moratorium. Division winners only in the World Series. The magnitude of being Rays.
By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.com/2020/10/18/the-pennant-winning-rays-do-several-favours/


Your American League champion Tampa Bay Rays, with Randy Arozarena
(right front) holding his ALCS MVP award.

For those of you who still love to ponder baseball in economic terms alone, have your fun now. The third-lowest 2020 payroll in the Show just finished off the third-highest—after knocking off highest to have the opportunity. Shout it out loud. The Rays win the pennant! The Rays win the pennant!

They who have the gold don’t always rule. For that matter, neither do they who have the platinum.The Tampa Bay Rays—lucky to have a couple of steel pieces amidst a cache of aluminum, tin, and Reynolds Wrap—are one trip shy of the Promised Land as of Saturday night.

After pushing past the New York Yankees’s platinum a little over a week earlier, the Rays melted the Houston Astros’ gold into a 4-2 win in Game Seven of the American League Championship Series. Playing twelve games in thirteen days, the Rays beat both in final win-or-be-gone games. That only begins to describe their flair for the impossible.

This collection of bargains enough to make you think Woolworth’s was reincarnated as a baseball team became the first in major league history to stand on the threshold of a postseason series sweep, lose the next three straight, then win the first elimination game they’d face in the set.

They became the first to send out a starting pitcher against another starting pitcher with whom he’d collaborated previously to win a seventh World Series game. Charlie Morton got the better of Lance McCullers, Jr. with five and two-thirds innings of two-hit shutout ball on his part and just a little help from the friends he says are an honour to play and compete with.

They became the first to feature a rookie hitting a seventh bomb just in the postseason, when left fielder and series MVP Randy Arozarena sent Lance McCullers, Jr.’s 2-2 fastball over the right center field fence in the bottom of the first—after McCullers hit Manuel Margot with the first pitch of the inning.

They had Mike Zunino—a Seattle trade surrender whose steady defense got undermined by a few passed balls in Game Six but whose power is steady enough when he isn’t injured—provide the rest of their Saturday night scoring with a one-out, full-count launch into the left field seats of McCullers in the second and a one-out sacrifice fly off Jose Urquidy working relief in the sixth.

And, after manager Kevin Cash hooked Morton with a better too soon than too late attitude, the Rays’ bullpen wavered and bent only in the eighth, when Carlos Correa—who’d hit Nick Anderson for the game-winning bomb in Game Five—knocked a bases-loaded two-run single off Pete Fairbanks, who then got Alex Bregman to climax his series-long futility with a furiously swinging strikeout.

If Morton follows through on earlier hints that he might actually retire at 37, he’ll retire as a member in good standing of one elite club. Name the five pitchers who’ve had multiple scoreless starts in postseason winner-takes-it-all games. The answers: Morton plus Madison Bumgarner, Bret Saberhagen, Hall of Famer John Smoltz, and Hall of Famer-to-be Justin Verlander.

Saturday night was Morton’s fourth time out in such a game and his third as a starter. In every one of them, he never threw a pitch while his team was behind. The modest righthander who starts his delivery slow motion before his right arm becomes a whip, whom the Rays could afford because his injury history made him a bargain, really has been late-career better than advertised. If you needed a reminder, he rid himself of thirteen of his twenty batters on three pitches or less.

Arozarena also became the first rookie to hit seven homers in a single postseason. He may have been the only one who wasn’t counting. “I try not to pay attention to the statistics,’’ he said postgame, “but with the Iinternet and everyone bringing it up, you’re kind of aware of it. Honestly, I don’t pay attention to the statistics outside of me and what I can control.”

When Fairbanks shook off Yuli Gurriel’s one-out single to right to strike Josh Reddick out and get Aledmys Diaz to fly out to Margot in right, it would have touched off an all-night party in Tampa Bay if not for the coronavirus social distancing protocols. Those protocols also kept the jubilant Rays from much more than what Zunino said was confetti-tossing and Silly String shooting.

“We’ve done a great job to make it as fun as possible . . . but there’s nothing better than popping bottles and having that seep in and burn your eyes,” the catcher said post-game. That’s one reason why even the World Series winner, whomever it may prove to be, might be the first to reach the Promised Land and holler out, “Wait ’till next year,” hopeful that the pandemic recedes enough to let baseball get back to whatever normal it can achieve.

“Probably more so this year than any other year, the motivation is doing it for each other,” Morton said. “You adhere to protocols; you’re social distancing from families at home. Telling their kids they can’t hug them. This has brought out a level of humanity and empathy that you wouldn’t see in a normal season.”

It also kept baseball’s Public Enemy Number One in the wake of Astrogate from facing the slings, arrows, protest banners, and live catcalls sure to have greeted them on road trips if the pandemic hadn’t substituted cardboard cutouts for live fans.That was the biggest unexpected break the Astros—having enough with being exposed as illegal high-tech cheaters—could have received.

Fans settled for social media slappings plus masking and social distancing while greeting the Astros’ team bus live with slings, arrows, protest banners, trash cans (the mode by which they sent the illegally stolen signs to their hitters in 2017 and part of 2018) and live catcalls whenever the bus pulled into the road ballpark’s parking lot.

The Rays did the Astros and the rest of us another favour by pushing them home for the winter. Assume as you shouldn’t that the Los Angeles Dodgers send the Atlanta Braves home for the winter in Game Seven of the National League Championship Series Sunday. (The Braves aren’t going to go down without a fight, their Game Six futility to one side.) The Rays prevented a World Series dominated by too-much-is-more-than-enough talk about a grudge rematch.

There’s probably no way on earth Astrogate will be forgiven or forgotten for a long time to come. But the spectre haunting America of the Astros going back to the World Series this time around haunts no more. The last thing the Series needs when America needs the Series most is to be half dominated by Astrogate regurgitation and appetites for revenge.

Be certain the Astros will return to the Series in due course. When they do, they’re liable to be just about finished with what has to be done put Astrogate into the past at last—roster and organisation turnover. They have the makings of an impressive young bullpen and a few young positional talents ready to come into their own, too.

The Rays also did us all a bigger favour than even the foregoing. Not only will there be no losing team in the World Series, there’ll be only division winners squaring off. All that early postseason mess, all commissioner Rob Manfred’s apparent wet dreams about permanently expanded postseasons. Put it behind you for now.

Just pray that Manfred doesn’t take the wrong message from it and dance this mess around permanently. Reminder: the Rays had the American League’s best irregular season record. And real division champions—of however truncated an irregular season—will battle to get to the Promised Land. That’s the way it should always be.

The only thing left is for the Rays to come to terms with going from faceless to familiar. That could prove the simplest and most pleasant of their battles.
---------------------------
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Online DCPatriot

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Re: ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours
« Reply #1 on: October 18, 2020, 02:13:07 pm »
@EasyAce

A great read!

Have to ask you once again.  Are you actually Tom Boswell?   :beer: 
"It aint what you don't know that kills you.  It's what you know that aint so!" ...Theodore Sturgeon

"Journalism is about covering the news.  With a pillow.  Until it stops moving."    - David Burge (Iowahawk)

"It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living" F. Scott Fitzgerald

Offline EasyAce

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Re: ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours
« Reply #2 on: October 18, 2020, 04:04:08 pm »
@EasyAce

A great read!

Have to ask you once again.  Are you actually Tom Boswell?   :beer:
@DCPatriot
Have to tell you once again---I'm not even close!  :beer:


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.

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Re: ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours
« Reply #3 on: October 18, 2020, 04:34:13 pm »
I once was a mouth foaming fervent baseball fan, and more specifc one of the same with the Astros.

I have pretty much blown off this game, but did rekindle a slight passing interest as the team went pretty deep into the post season.   In retrospect, the treatment the rest of baseball has given the Astros was pretty much deserving.  I do however, want to express my disgust that some in some unnamed cities likely had just as bad transgressions, and the hypocricy of baseball fans in general thinking the transgressions were unique in Houston, is disgusting.  We fans in especially in Houston, don't deserve this treatment.  And beleive me, we get it.

Secondly, what is most disappointing in this stupid mess, is that the team had enormous talent, and really didn't need banging garbage cans to compete at the highest level.  That was especailly evident this year, as the team was missing Verlander, Cole, Osuna, Alvarez, and Bregman for a big chunk of the season.  And still made it all the way to an ALCS Game 7. 

I still contend that there is a lot of dirt on the other 29 teams that MLB will do its damnest to squelch to try to save what is left of this game.  Selig and Manfred have done a great job to destroy it.  I did without baseball for the first summer of my life since 1964.  You know what?   It wasn't as bad as I thought. 
I display the Confederate Battle Flag in honor of my great great great grandfathers who spilled blood at Wilson's Creek and Shiloh.  5 others served in the WBTS with honor too.

Offline EasyAce

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Re: ALCS Game Seven: The pennant-winning Rays do favours
« Reply #4 on: October 18, 2020, 06:59:32 pm »
I do however, want to express my disgust that some in some unnamed cities likely had just as bad transgressions, and the hypocrisy [sic] of baseball fans in general thinking the transgressions were unique in Houston, is disgusting.
@catfish1957

I wish I could improve upon how former NBC Sports writer Craig Calcaterra (he's since left NBC to strike on his own) put it last January:

[T]hat all of this hasn’t, at least as of yet, come out in uniform, 30-team reports with lockstep discipline does not make what the Astros and Red Sox have done any better. It doesn’t excuse them or make their punishment unjust. It’s simply a matter of the lowest-hanging fruit being grabbed first . . . If you break the rules you can be mad that others who broke the rules didn’t get caught too, but you still broke the damn rules. Absent some actual evidence of an improper purpose-driven singling out, such complaints are not exactly compelling. (Emphasis added.)

There was, I'll say once more, one big difference between the Astro Intelligence Agency and the Rogue Sox Video Room Reconnaissance Ring: MLB itself provided the video rooms to all teams in all ballparks from which the Rogue Sox and who knows how many others (so far, the Yankees seem verifiably most likely, and it's a fair guess that at least four or five other teams at minimum did likewise---much like Mom and Dad handing the teenagers the keys to the liquor cabinet and expecting them not to drink underage when Mom and Dad go out of town for the day or even the weekend.

The only shock there would have been if Mom and Dad were shocked, shocked! that the kids reached for a few belts.

But Mom and Dad did not provide them the altering of a center field camera off its mandatory eight-second transmission delay or the installation of a second, unlawful camera to transmit in real time to the supplementary clubhouse monitors in front of which someone deciphers enemy signs and bangs the can slowly to transmit them to the hitters. The Astro kiddies thought of either (both?) of those all by themselves. (Think about it: if the Astros had only done as the Rogue Sox and perhaps others and just run a little reconnaissance out of the MLB-provided video rooms---remember: the Rogue Sox operation depended entirely upon having men on base to receive the decoded signs to send the hitter---they'd have been cheating but it probably wouldn't have brought them half the opprobrium the Astro Intelligence Agency did.)

Here's a little whataboutism for those who insist on going that way: The Astros way of espionage put in the same off-field-based sign-stealing league as:

* The 1914 Philadelphia Athletics. (Had a telescope user atop a building across from Shibe Park's outfield stands to steal signs, turning a weather vane on the same roof one way to signal fastball, another to signal curve, etc.)

* The 1940 Detroit Tigers. (Used the newly-minted high-powered-for-its-time scope of pitcher Tommy Bridges' hunting rifle to steal signs from the seats behind the outfield in Briggs Stadium; Bridges or others using the scope would signal hitters from there.)

* The 1948 Cleveland Indians. (Used a handheld spyglass Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller acquired during World War II to steal signs from inside hand-operated scoreboards down the 1948 stretch.)

* The 1951 New York Giants. (Used the Wollensak spyglass owned by erstwhile Cub Hank Schenz---who'd used it to steal signs from inside Wrigley Field's scoreboard previously---to steal signs from the clubhouse building in back of center field in the ancient Polo Grounds and then buzz the bullpen from where a stolen sign would be sent to a hitter. Enabling that formerly stupefying comeback from thirteen games out to forcing a pennant playoff. Trivia: Giants manager Leo Durocher never once discussed the scheme in his eventual memoir, Nice Guys Finished Last---but was later revealed to have been astonished when a very few Giants, including Hall of Famers Monte Irvin and Willie Mays, told him no upon his asking who wanted to hit with the stolen signs.)

You might note that that's four pennant winners and one World Series winners. Five and two if you add the Astros to that club.

The Astros in today's higher than high tech world saw and raised those teams' off-field-based espionage. And, got caught verifiably a lot sooner than those teams did. It took years if not decades to verify once and for all about the '14 A's, the '40 Tigers, the '48 Indians, and the '51 Giants. In a couple of cases player memoirs spilled the beans, such as Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg copping to the '40 Tigers' espionage in his memoir and '48 Indians first baseman Eddie Robinson exposing their espionage in his memoir. In due course, it took Wall Street Journal writer Joshua Prager to investigate and verify what the '51 Dodgers merely suspected and ill-fated pitcher Ralph Branca heard secondhand from an ex-Giant who became teammates with him on the Tigers later in the '50s.

(Here's one for you if you didn't remember me referring to it before: The Dodgers were convinced down that '51 stretch that the Giants were up to something and that it was coming in part from that Polo Grounds building behind center field. Dodger coach Cookie Lavagetto had the bright idea of bringing a pair of binoculars to the park to see if he could catch the Giants in the act. Unfortunately for Cookie and Dem Bums, an umpire saw the binoculars and confiscated them before the game could begin. Snarked the real Thomas Boswell---@DCPatriot is being kind when he suspects me of being Boswell in disguise---"Why, it would be unfair for the victims to use binoculars to expose the telescopic cheaters!")

The part you're most right about is, of course, that the Astros were more than good enough to win without an underground intelligence agency in 2017 and a portion of 2018. (The Rogue Sox may not have taken their espionage to quite the extracurricular level of the 2017 Astros, but anyone who thinks the 2018 Red Sox weren't good enough to win as overwhelmingly as they did simply didn't see that team play.)

I'm even willing to offer the benefit of the doubt and say that they wouldn't have dared even think about re-opening the AIA or trying some newer ways to cheat high tech this year, not after the Astrogate uproar. And, that given that plus not dealing with the injured list as often as they did in the earlier phase of this irregular season, the Astros probably could have a) won the American League West this year or b) finished with at least a winning record that would have justified their postseason presence a lot higher.


"The question of who is right is a small one, indeed, beside the question of what is right."---Albert Jay Nock.

Fake news---news you don't like or don't want to hear.