Experience? The Royals mock your ‘experience’
Another extra-inning win has the Royals defying expectations and puts the Angels in a hole from which they may not recover.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
For all the predictive models we develop, for all the probabilities we calculate, and for all the math we invent, baseball consistently defies our expectations. Isn’t it great that baseball is the biggest troll there is?
On Friday morning, we woke up excited to see Adam Wainwright and Clayton Kershaw, two of the absolute best pitchers of this or any generation, face off and give us the modern incarnation of a Bob Gibson-Sandy Koufax pitcher's duel.
We did get a classic pitcher's duel in Southern California tonight, all right. It was just 30.3 miles to the southeast of where we expected it. While Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright combined to allow 14 runs in 11 innings, Matt Shoemaker and Yordano Ventura were otherworldly in Anaheim.
All we hear about going into every postseason is how important experience is. But here's Ventura, 23 years old, throwing 99 miles per hour, and with one out of postseason history in his background, in which he allowed a two-run homer. He goes seven innings, striking out five. He makes Albert Pujols, who has 520 career homers, has won two World Series, and has hit .330/.439/.607 in the playoffs over the course of his career look utterly silly with a couple curveballs in the fourth inning.
Shoemaker's whole career is a surprise, never mind this game. A 27-year-old rookie, Schumaker went undrafted out of the Eastern Michigan University in 2008. He has a 4.52 career minor league ERA, and a 5.38 ERA in parts of five seasons at Triole-A. In five starts for Salt Lake City this year, he allowed 18 runs in 25.2 innings. Yet, here he is a legitimate No. 2 starter, slicing through the Royals and allowing only an unearned run in six innings, while striking out six with his split-fingered fastball after sitting out 18 days with a strained oblique muscle.
If experience is supposed to mean so damn much, I don’t know how you explain that. After all, both Wainwright and Kershaw have been here before, and seeing them each lay an egg was painful. By contrast, the neophytes were unexpectedly beautiful to watch.
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Then there are the managers. Ned Yost was fired from his last job with the Brewers because he was choking away a chance at the playoffs. His moves have been constantly and correctly second-guessed this postseason, not to mention in virtually every regular-season game he's ever managed, and possibly in the freezer aisle of the grocery store. Yet, here he is aggressively going to his incredible bullpen in the eighth inning and upgrading his outfield defense by replacing right fielder Norichika Aoki with Jarrod Dyson in center (moving Lorenzo Cain to the corner), which paid off beautifully when Dyson threw out a tagging Colin Cowgill at third base. As hilarious as Yost tends to be, his product continues to outstrip his process.
Hell, extra-innings games are supposed to be something like a coin flip, but the Royals have played three straight this postseason and won them all -- a first. Thursday night, a career .236/.290/.379 hitter in Mike Moustakas, who was somehow even worse than that in 2014 and was exiled to Omaha in May, hit the game-winning home run. On Friday it was Eric Hosmer, a first baseman whose home run total dropped to just nine this year, hitting a two-run bomb to win the game. Now the 98-win Angels, who sport the best record in all baseball, are on the verge of being swept by wild-card-winning Kansas City, back in the postseason after 29 years.
What experience do those two, former first-round picks both, have except disappointing in their respective ways? (Sure, Hosmer finally took a step forward last year, but gave a good deal of that back this season). Given all the extra innings, by the time the ALDS is over they might have have crammed five days of experience into four days of play, and then they’ll be downright salty. Even then, though, experience? Expectations? Shut up. This is baseball. It is ridiculous and it is fantastic, and, like all trolls, it’s just trying to get a reaction out of us. Mission accomplished.
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