The game is different now
And I can't say I like it better. Okay, I can say that, but I'd be lying.
“Tony Gosselin,” Joe Buck solemnly intoned last night, early on during the Rays’ 6-4 win over the Dodgers, “Is the first World Series starter to go an inning and a third since Jake Peavy for the Giants in Game 6 of 2014.”
Okay, that’s not an exact quote, but he said something very like that. And in the end, isn’t that what really matters?
A real journalist reading this would say, “No,” so good thing there aren’t any of those around!
But Gosselin’s 4-out outing was short, like Peavy’s back during the Madison Bumgarner World Series. In Peavy’s case, it’s because he was awful; Peavy gave up 5 runs in the second inning (though admittedly, he left the bases loaded for Yusmeiro Petit, who cashed in all three runs on his way to a bad outing of his own) and Bruce Bochy, trying to avoid going to a Game 7, pulled Peavy in a vain attempt to staunch the bleeding with a tourniquet.
It turns out that the tourniquet was made of barbed wire, and the bleeding only intensified, but that’s not particularly relevant. The upshot is that this was a baseball strategy comprehensible to any generation of baseball player or coach. Jake Peavy did not have it that day. His manager removed him and hoped things would work out. Things did work out, but not until the next game. Well, okay then.
Gosselin, by contrast, was never planned to be a real starter. The Dodgers planned on him getting Not That Many Outs, and Dave Roberts managed accordingly. A lot of Dodger pitchers got some work in before an off day, with the team just bullpenning it up all game. No Dodger pitcher went more than two innings, and remember, this was Game 2 of the World Series, and they did this on purpose. They would have preferred a better outcome, but this was the exact kind of game the Dodgers wanted to play.
Back even 10 years ago, no one would have chosen to play a game like that at any point, much less in the World Series. Bullpen games could always be thrust upon a team with little notice, of course, but that situation was emphatically not this situation. This was Plan A. 7 pitchers to cover 9 innings was just how that game was going to be played no matter what.
As a rule, I don’t find pitching changes very interesting. Sure, they cut away to a half-commercial, and we are lucky enough to watch that TD Ameritrade guy talk up his company on one half of the screen while a baseball player warms up on the other side, but other than that, a pitching change is just a stretch without them playing any baseball.
More to the point, I like watching starters go as deep into games as they can. I think baseball loses something when it becomes a pure bullpen-fest. There’s something about beating a starter that’s just really satisfying, something about watching the other team set up their rotation for a series and seeing it fall apart as soon as the games start being played. A bullpen game is too optimized to be all that interesting — if the computers say this move raises your odds of a shutdown inning from 49.2% all the way to 49.8%, then that’s what you do.
Something about that is just inherently different from the thing I grew up watching. I’m used to baseball being “Our guys will try their best against their guy, and their guys will try their best against out guy.” At the highest level, it isn’t that this year. That’s not to say things can’t change quickly — last year’s World Series featured Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, all of whom are capital-S Starters and were treated like it during the Series — but the Rays and the Dodgers are supposed to be the future of baseball, then what they’re doing now is what everyone will be doing a few years down the line.
It’s time to get used to this new way of playing. Maybe you’re not me and you like it better already. Totally valid! But for those of us who don’t, well, tough luck. The future is here, and by definition, it’s going to stick around for a while.