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Washington’s ace was a late scratch on Sunday, but he hasn’t ruled out a return for Game 7. The question now is whether his crew can push the Astros to that point.
For the first 14 games of the Nationals’ postseason move, Davey Martinez managed to avoid the soft part of his pitching personnel by utilizing his frontline starting pitchers as frequently as possible, even out of the bullpen. In those 14 games, pitchers other than the team’s top four starters and two top relievers threw simply 19 innings. They allowed 13 extends, which didn’t argue in favour of further work.
On Sunday, though, Martinez ran into a roadblock that he couldn’t manage around: planned starter Max Scherzer’s severe neck spasms. Scherzer, who’d been suffering less severe symptoms since Friday, got treatment at the park on back-to-back days but woke up worse on Sunday. “I had to only basically fall out of bunked and picking myself up with my left arm, ” said Scherzer, who added that it was “literally impossible to do anything with” his right arm and that he was unable to dress without his wife’s assistance. Scherzer has suffered neck spasms before–in August 2017, he was drew from one start, scratched from a subsequent one, and be forwarded to the IL–but never like this. Scherzer is famous for always wanting to pitch, so no one doubted GM Mike Rizzo when he described the ace’s symptoms as “ungodly pain.”
With Scherzer down to one running arm–unfortunately for the Nationals, the left one–Martinez had to hand the ball to Joe Ross, who was added to the World Series roster after failing to make the cut for the wild-card game, the NLDS, and the NLCS. Entering Sunday, Ross’s two scoreless innings in Game 3 represented his only in-game work since September 29. On the bright side, Ross was on a roll before the postseason started: After joining the rotation for good on August 2, he recorded a 2.75 ERA in eight starts down the extend. But a look at a larger sample discloses how huge the drop-off is from a health Scherzer to Ross: Of the 313 pitchers with at least 150 innings pitched from 2017 -1 9, Scherzer’s park-adjusted ERA graded eighth-best, and best among starters; the oft-injured Ross’s ranked 38th-worst.
It’s extremely rare for a team to use 5 different starters in a World Series. The last team to do it was the 1980 Phillies: Bob Walk, Steve Carlton, Dick Ruthven, Larry Christenson, Marty Bystrom.
— Tyler Kepner (@ TylerKepner) October 27, 2019
Considering those stats and the circumstances on Sunday–the surprise of being pressed into service with only a day’s notice that he might be needed, any hangover influence from his two-inning outing on Friday, and the all-time-great Astros lineup he was facing–Ross wasn’t awful. But he would have had to be almost flawless for his team to have had a chance against Astros ace Gerrit Cole, and despite several “Let’s go, Joe” chants from a supportive gang, Ross was far from that. He let four extends over five innings, but the first two were enough to seal a weekend sweep. The Astros went on to take Game 5 by a score of 7-1, sending the series back to Houston with the Astros one win away from a championship.
During the regular season, Ross’s weakness was the walking, and in Game 5 he allowed one to the first hitter he faced, George Springer. Two ground balls got him out of that inning–the first hitless first inning for both sides in the series–but another grounder get him in difficulty in the second, when he got a glove on a Yuli Gurriel comebacker but couldn’t field it cleanly. The next batter was Yordan Alvarez, who’d deserved a start in left field after being benched in plays 3 and 4 amid a postseason power outage. The time off may have helped.
“From the Astros’ perspective, he picked a awful occasion for his first slump, ” I wrote last week, “but one well-timed hit in the coming week could still salvage his postseason.” On Sunday, he got it. Just after radio broadcasting flashed a graphic about his 21 -game, 71 -at-bat homerless streak, Alvarez hoisted a low-and-away sinker into the left-field stands for what would prove to be a game-winning two-run homer. He subsequently singled twice prior to being hoisted for a pinch smuggler, and now that he seems to be back, Houston will be that much tougher to beat. Carlos Correa threw video games away with another two-run homer off Ross in the fourth, and the Astros added three more extends off a well-rested Daniel Hudson in the eighth and ninth, courtesy of a Gurriel single and a two-run was shot dead by Springer.
Cole, in what could be his last start or even outing for the Astros, was–you guessed it–great again, ricochetting back from his streak-snapping defeat in Game 1. Because we’ve apparently time-traveled back to the heyday of the starting pitcher, A.J. Hinch let him hit in the top of the seventh with two outs and a runner on first, and he stayed in to allow a solo kill to Juan Soto in the bottom half of the inning, finishing the frame at 110 tars. Soto’s homer was one of only three reaches surrendered by the righty, who trodden two and strike out nine. After Cole escaped a first-and-third jam with no outs in the second largest by striking out Ryan Zimmerman and getting Victor Robles to ground into a double play-act, he stopped the Nationals off the footings through the sixth, save for a fourth-inning walk to Anthony Rendon. The Nats mustered three hard-hit projectiles with expected batting averages over. 500 in the third and fourth, but the Astros had fielders in front of them, as they so often do.
Cole induced simply 13 swinging ten-strikes, and only four on his fastball, which he had trouble commanding. After striking out at least 10 batters for the 11 th consecutive start in ALDS Game 5, he’s made three straight starts without a double-digit strikeout tally for the first time all time. Cole finished Sunday’s start simply short of 250 innings on the season, so perhaps he’s feeling some fatigue. During this relative strikeout dry sorcery, though, he’s lasted seven innings in each outing and allowed a total of six drains, which is in accordance with a 2.57 ERA. Some slump.
The revelation that Scherzer’s status for Game 5 was in doubt over the weekend casting Martinez’s apparent lack of aggressiveness–both in failing to pinch make for Anibal Sanchez in Game 3 and in using Fernando Rodney rather than Sean Doolittle or Hudson in Game 4–in a slightly softer light. Martinez knew he might need extra innings from his pen on Sunday if Scherzer couldn’t travel, which he acknowledged played a role in his decisions on Saturday and may have been in the back of his mind on Friday. Martinez may have stayed with Ross a little long on Sunday, too, letting him reached in the third largest and remaining in until he was facing the top of the Astros’ order for the third time in the fifth, but he couldn’t count on more than four innings at most from pitchers he trusted, even if he’d use Sanchez for an inning in relief.
Ultimately, Martinez wasn’t the Nationals’ problem this weekend. Neither was the umpiring, although Lance Barksdale’s floating zone on Sunday didn’t help; Ross appeared to throw an 0-2 strike to Correa in the fourth, but a projectile bellow extended the at-bat that ended in a dinger.
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Yan Gomes: “If any questions are about the adjudicator, I’m not going to talk about it. But I’ll retain saying, the facts of the case that you’re requesting about him, you’re answering your own questions.”
— Jesse Dougherty (@ dougherty_jesse) October 28, 2019
Even if Martinez had drawn every lever at the optimal period, Scherzer’s neck had loosened up, and more sees had gone their course, the Nats likely would have lost all three plays at Nationals Park barring a better concert at the plate. During the regular season, crews that scored one extend went 33 -4 15, a . 074 winning percentage. Counting the playoffs, teams that scored one running against the Astros have gone 1-31, an. 031 winning percentage.( The Twins beat Justin Verlander 1-0 on April 29.) The Nationals scored one extended a piece in all three games, and they never held a lead on the homestand, a bummer for the devotees who’d never seen a World Series in D.C. and had few opportunities to cheer. There’s only so much better a director can do when his offense presents him almost nothing to work with. Prior to this series, the 2019 Nats had never scored fewer than four drains over any three-game span. But then they hadn’t played the Astros, either. This weekend, Washington’s buzz recognized stopped spinning.
The Astros moved 3-for-17 with smugglers in scoring statu in games 1 and 2, but their at-bats delivered at opportune periods in D.C. Whatever unclutch contagion they’d contracted in those first two races extended to the Nationals, who started a blended 1-for-19 with runners in scoring point in plays 3 and 4. Before Game 5, a reporter questioned Rendon if there was a way to get those hittings. Rendon made the question the response it deserved, joking, “So we have these at-bats, and usually you try to square it up, and there’s a baseball, and then you made the outfield grass and usually they’re hits.”
Welcome to hard-hitting analysis with Anthony Rendon. pic.twitter.com/ 6ClkIawH9i
— Cut4 (@ Cut4) October 27, 2019
It clanged simple enough, but the Nats took another oh-fer with athletes in scoring point on Sunday, although the bigger problem was that their hitters had just been two chances to change that. Home teams are now a combined 4-for-38 with runners in scoring stance in this series. Not coincidentally, the dwelling squad has yet to win.
As Baseball-Reference reported, this is only the third World Series in which the road squad won plays 1-5. That streak has never continued through a sixth game, and if it doesn’t this time, the series will end on Tuesday. The odds are ever in the Astros’ favor; FanGraphs and FiveThirtyEight give Houston an 80 to 85 percentage chance to take the name. The good news for the Nats is that they have Stephen Strasburg going against Verlander in Game 6; with an off period on Monday, they should be able to get through that play utilizing simply Strasburg, Doolittle, Hudson, and perhaps Patrick Corbin. If they live Game 6, all eyes will return to Scherzer, who had a cortisone shot on Sunday that doctors told him would take at least 48 hours to kick in. If Scherzer can get out of bed, get dressed, and move his arm on Wednesday, he’d get the Game 7 nod against Jose Urquidy; if not, Sanchez would start instead. As they face elimination for the third time this October, the Nats would be fortunate to make it that far.
Read more: theringer.com
