Soto Magic

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Gentlemen, start your bullpens.

But never forget, even the best bullpens fail with overwork and facing the greatest hitters night after night.

Superstar Juan Soto showed that Saturday night when he blasted a two-out, three-run 10th-inning home run to centerfield, a ball that kept carrying and carrying – and it carried the Yankees all the way to their 41st World Series appearance and first since 2009.

The blast lifted the Yankees to a 5-2 victory over the Guardians at Progressive Field, winning the ALCS in five games.

The Yankees will play either the crosstown Mets or the across the country Dodgers in the World Series; by winning Saturday night, it means ace Gerrit Cole will be available to start Game 1 of the World Series for the Yankees.

The Dodgers will go with a bullpen game Sunday in Game 6 of the NLCS. It is the third time this postseason that the Dodgers do not have a real starting pitcher on the mound to start the game.

What a shame the game has become.

Bullpenning has been the overriding theme of this postseason, too much bullpenning, not enough starting pitching. The Guardians were supposed to have the greatest bullpen of them all with closer Emmanuel Clase, Hunter Gaddis and Cade Smith anchoring that pen.

But the Bronx Bombers crushed six home runs in the five-game series against that vaunted bullpen. And that was the difference in the ALCS.

Maybe all these analytical geniuses running teams will begin to think twice about bullpenning. All those relievers sure didn’t help the Guardians. Cleveland has not won a World Series since 1948.

Those in charge of the game wanted this, they want to turn the game into turnstile baseball with one reliever after another coming out of the bullpen, and now they got it. And it ain’t working.

Now they are going to have to live with it.

Some of these playoff games make little baseball sense. Baseball is a game that when it is at its best when it is starting pitcher-based but it is now a mishmash of relievers, who throw hard but have little idea where the ball is going.

Soto knew where this ball was going, Gaddis’ four-seam 95 mph fastball at the top of the zone went 402 feet, and it was rocketing along at 109.7 miles per hour. Soto will be a free agent after the World Series and his price continues to climb just like that home run – and Scott Boras is sitting on baseball’s biggest gold mine.

The Yankees won Game 4 thanks in large part to a three-run home run by Giancarlo Stanton, who also hit a two-run home run Saturday night to tie the game at 2-2 in the sixth. That three-run home run Friday came off reliever Cade Smith as the Yankees went on to an 8-6 victory at Progressive Field.

That blast put the Yankees ahead, 6-2 in the sixth.

What’s most amazing is that Jazz Chisholm Jr. had just sacrificed the runners ahead – Juan Soto to third and Aaron Judge to second – giving the Guardians an avenue of escape.

Stephen Vogt, the Cleveland manager who is obsessed with bringing in as many relievers as humanly possible, could have walked Stanton but had the overused Smith pitch to the Yankee slugger. Smith got ahead 1-2 and then put a fastball on a tee for Stanton where he could extend his arms and crush the baseball.

On Saturday night, Vogt had another opportunity to walk Stanton, but didn’t and elected to pitch to him with two outs in the sixth and Stanton delivered against Tanner Bibee.

None of it made sense.

Nerd percentages have fully replaced baseball strategy and experience.

Back when I was a kid there was a frightening movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It came out in 1956, but it was a staple in the early ‘60s on WOR TV’s Million Dollar Movie, which basically was our Netflix. That was it. But the theme, taken from Gone with the Wind was dramatic.

Life is imitating art, I’m just not sure what planet these new Nerd baseball executives have come from, but they are everywhere.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers a doctor discovers that the people in his beloved small California town are being replaced by emotionless imposters, an alien species grown from plant-like pods.

That was some scary stuff for a kid to see in his little town of Kenilworth, N.J., especially the scene near the end of the movie with the truck filled with pods making its way on the highway.

Who was next? No one was safe.

That is essentially what is happening to Major League Baseball. People with high baseball IQs and experience have been replaced in every organization by pods of analytics, completely changing the game.

They have destroyed starting pitching, the Complete Game is history, and postseason outings rarely go five innings. They destroyed batting average. They destroyed hitting for contact. They destroyed the instinctive ballplayer, now it is look at a card and position yourself accordingly or else. They don’t make baseball decisions. The Guardians made a critical error Saturday night, allowing Soto to come to the plate.

Life is imitating art, I’m just not sure what planet these new Nerd baseball executives have come from, but they are everywhere.

On Friday night Vogt automatically went to his closer in the ninth, the same closer, Emmanuel Clase, who was beaten the night before by the Yankees power hitters with Aaron Judge and Stanton homering off Clase.

Because of the Yankees own bullpen problems, Vogt and the Guardians escaped with a 7-5 win on Thursday night – but not on Friday night or Saturday night. Now the Guardians have all winter to think about rebuilding their bullpen.

Captain Hook Vogt went with Clase in Game 4 and Clase was the loser as his ERA jumped to 10.29. Clase was the eighth pitcher of that night for the Guardians. The night before Vogt also ran through eight pitchers, even though starter Mathew Boyd rolled through the first five innings, allowing only one run, he was taken out.

It was time to go bullpenning.

What’s funny about all this is that the Nerds in charge will not let starters see anyone in the opposing lineup the third time or even earlier sometimes, but they do think it is A-OK for relievers to come in game after game after game in a series. And, of course, relievers don’t usually have the repertoire of starters, so they are dealing with usually just two pitches, maybe one.

But none of that counts in the hypocritical MLB world.

To their credit, both Jeff Francoeur and Ron Darling on TBS have been questioning that wisdom throughout the ALCS of too much bullpenning. Good for them.

The limiting of starters’ effectiveness and innings all started a while back at the same time. Innings were limited in the minors for starters. They didn’t learn how to get out of jams or go deep into a game. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; in other words, the Nerds created the problem and now they say they can fix it with more cowbell … and more relievers.

But what do I know?

Let’s check in with some people who have been around baseball their entire lives, and what do they make of all this current invasion of the body snatchers taking place throughout baseball.

“It’s like a Bizarro World,’’ one longtime top talent evaluator told BallNine on Saturday. “At a certain point, you are not only doing in the near-term damage, but you are also doing long-term damage to these guys to their careers. You overuse them.

“When Detroit swept out Houston,’’ he added, “everybody was so excited, ‘Oh my gosh they might make a run,’ I said, ‘You can’t go deep into the playoffs and all the way into the end, doing what A.J. Hinch was doing. Now Vogt is doing it, Dave Roberts is doing it, I was so happy that the Mets started David Peterson Friday night in their win over the Dodgers, that was a good move.’’

Hinch called all that reliever action “Chaos.’’

Chaos it is.

Having four real starters is gold this time of year.

The Mets got themselves behind the eight ball when they started Kodai Senga in Game 1 of the NLCS, losing 9-0 to the Dodgers. Senga only threw 5.1 MLB innings this year because of injury.

“How do you start Senga in a playoff game, I just don’t get it,’’ the evaluator, a former pitcher, said. “It’s very frustrating, I’m not a mathematical genius, but I know if I have four starters who go six or seven innings, then the other nine relievers don’t have to pitch as many innings, and they are going to be stronger and probably more effective.

“You don’t have to be a genius to go seven times four is 28 of the 36 innings (over four games)’’ he said.

As for Friday night’s game between the Yankees and Guardians he said this about about Smith’s fastball on the three-run home run on a 1-2 pitch to Stanton.

“Cade Smith is bleeping exhausted because he had to be a two-inning leverage reliever every game because you take your starters out so early,’’ the evaluator said.

“There were so many different places Smith could have gone with Stanton. To throw him another fastball out over the plate was crazy. You got to go in at some point. Those guys (Stanton and Judge) are 6-foot-6, 6-foot-7, they have long arms. They cannot cover 96-in, they just can’t do it, unless they leak and cheat (start the swing early) and as soon as you see them leak and cheat, they are extremely vulnerable to breaking balls. We watch them swing and miss at balls low and away all the time.’’

And on top of all that, first base was over.

“I don’t get it,’’ the evaluator said.

And on Saturday night a spent Gaddis was the victim of Soto’s dramatic Yankee Moment home run.

A former pitching coach noted of the fateful Friday night home run pitch: “Why not show him a breaking ball down, then go back up, it allows for a mistake. Analytics don’t get that.’’

A former top advance scout also added, “On 0-2, 1-2, I always wanted to change eye level, by pushing hitters off the plate. Oh well.’’

Oh well, indeed.

That is just not the Nerd way.

Go with your “A’’ swing as a hitter. Go with your “A’’ pitch as a reliever, even if it is right down Broadway and you are pitching game after game, giving the hitter more information each and every at-bat on your approach and style.

“It’s still all about location, location, location, down and in or up and away,’’ the scout said.

But these comments are from people who watch the game in front of them, not the computer analysis that is developed many hours before the game. Bruce Bochy did a masterful job reading on-field situations last year and it carried the Rangers to their first World Series title.

As for the Mets-Dodgers, and Game 6 Sunday night in L.A. one evaluator said, “I think if the Mets win Game 6, they win Game 7, the Mets seem to be a team that loves having their backs against the bleeping wall.’’

Better than watching the ball sail over the wall as the Guardians did on Saturday night when Juan Soto sent the Yankees to the World Series with some Soto Magic.