Recapping a day in which Yordan Alvarez stunned the Mariners and the Phillies held on in a Game 1 thriller:
Phillies 7, Braves 6
Max Fried gave up a bunch of two-out singles with runners in scoring position, and Ranger Suárez didn’t. That’s it, that’s the story. You can dig into the narratives if you’re an old-school fan and see who didn’t have the derring-do or gumption to win. You can dig into the Statcast data if you’re a new-school fan and figure out whose spin rate was up, down or sideways. Please, go for it. They’re both noise, but there’s signal buried within.
But the story is probably just that Ranger’s ground balls found infielders and Max’s ground balls found holes. That’s not to dismiss what the Phillies did — they looked like a stellar baseball team in a hostile environment — but when the Phillies’ bullpen was shaking and twitching, you don’t need a PowerPoint demonstration to understand what those late innings would have looked like if just one of Suárez’s ground balls had eyes.
If you’re looking for narratives, though, this game had them. Nick Castellanos was a $100 million grievance for Phillies fans if they didn’t make the postseason, but he was a wait-and-see player if they did. They waited, and they saw. Who knows if this will continue for the rest of the postseason, but for at least one game, he was the guy.
Even if Castellanos didn’t make a great catch, he was the guy. But he made the great catch and added some extra sauce.
Astros 8, Mariners 7
The Mariners had this game. They had Big Dumper dumpin’. They had homers and doubles a-flyin’. Even though their relief ace, Andrés Muñoz, was touched up for a two-run homer, he still left the game in winnable shape. All they needed to do was not say, “Watch this,” as they attempted to swallow a foot-long submarine sandwich whole.
Mariners manager Scott Servais deserves criticism for assuming that Robbie Ray could be Jesse Orosco, even for a second. He also deserves criticism for thinking that Yordan Alvarez gives a rip about left-handed pitchers. He does not.
But for me, a baseball hipster, the game was lost a couple pitches before.
Or, to be more fair, the game was won a couple pitches before. You’re looking at the fourth pitch in this sequence. With a 1-2 count, Paul Sewald dropped a pretty nice slider on the bottom corner of the strike zone, and Jeremy Peña hit it into center field for a single. It was good pitching, and it was good hitting. If the hitting was less than good, it would have been a Mariners win.
Alvarez was the hero, but don’t forget how he got to the plate in the first place. It takes a village.
Yankees 4, Guardians 1
Maybe it’s a problem that the Guardians can’t hit.
For example, let’s take one of the Guardians who can hit, Steven Kwan. He was on deck when the final out was made by Myles Straw, a Guardian who can’t hit that well. That’s not to say that Straw hasn’t added value to this year’s team (he has) or that Kwan would have saved the day (dunno, odds are always against it), but it’s another example of the tiny, tiny, tiny needle that the Guardians are trying to thread.
They’re trying to beat an absolute juggernaut of a franchise, and they’ll need to use every last scrap of their collective might to do it. They’ll need to pitch and pitch and pitch, and they’ll need to field like the dickens, which will justify playing some of these players like Straw.
The Guardians’ pitchers gave up crucial hits to Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Jose Trevino, though, which isn’t what pitch-first teams want to do. Oscar González flubbed a ball in the right-field corner that led to a run, even though he’s a typically reliable fielder. The first rule of a pitching-speed-and-defense team is to do all of those things better than the other team. Once that’s done, see what shakes out.
The Yankees pitched better than the Guardians, though, in large part because of Gerrit Cole, who is rather talented. They also did it because their uncertain relievers are finding their way. Also, their fielders didn’t screw up at an inopportune time, and their random bottom-of-the-order hitters delivered, where none of that was true for the Guardians.
Dodgers 5, Padres 3
Turns out the Dodgers have a lot of good players. Like, a lot of good players. This gives them an advantage over other teams. Because of the good players. The Padres also have a lot of good players, too, but … it’s different.
Brandon Drury hit a long foul ball for the Padres that looked like it was something for a brief second. Mike Clevinger was a part of the comin’-for-the-Dodgers plan that the Padres enacted in 2020. Both of them made sense at the time. Both of them make sense in 2022. They’re actively helping the Padres toward their goal of an NLCS berth, and it’s not hard to imagine how.
But the Dodgers are just the Dodgers. They have Trea Turner hitting first-inning home runs. They’ve developed and weaponized Will Smith. They’ve had Julio Urías on the team for approximately 34 seasons, and it’s like he’s now coming into his postseason own. He’s still just 26, somehow.
This is what dominance looks like in baseball. It’s a 5-3 win. It’s not 38-19, like it is in the NFL. It’s not 112-99, like it is in the NBA. It’s 5-3, in perpetuity, until morale improves. And it always makes so much sense in retrospect.
Read more from Tuesday’s games here.
(Photo: Troy Taormina / USA Today)