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LOS ANGELES – Dave Roberts knocked out the Dodgers' chances of winning the World Series by managing his pitching staff as a fan who won a contest. He ran his relays, trying to find the worst for the worst time, and succeeded in a way that he could not have even imagined. He lost Game 4, and probably the series, and has all the way crushed the best moment of Rich Hill's career as a burning cigarette butt. Roberts's meticulousness inspires respect.
Or maybe, just maybe, we do not know everything. Could this be possible? Perhaps the quickest and easiest synthesis, the one that proves most satisfying for the inner demons, is not always the one that resists the facts. There are things going on outside the TV screen, real human things that might not provide the same bilious catharsis, but probably deserve to be mentioned anyway.
During two very different matches, the Dodger Stadium was the scene of heroes who managed hits, great games and unforgettable moments in any club. Here is how it all happened.
Inspired by their ace, the Red Sox racked up nine points against the Dodgers scorer to take a 3-1 lead and return from the longest loss in World Series history.
From the Wild Cards round to the World Series, we'll be covering the 2018 playoffs.
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Hill had succumbed in six innings of the 9-6 defeat of the fourth game. He had thrown a lot of throws (91), but not an intolerable amount. None of the dreaded Boston hitters had reached second base. He did all those endearing things of Rich Hill: swear, sweat, talk to each other, tie those parachute balls on the board with a powdery softness, swaying after every shot with that strange and flamboyant leg that always gives the impression that He tries to remember every step back in his hand. The Dodgers led 4-0, the joint was in free fall and it looked so promising that this World Series, once the only province of the best baseball team, would be tied at two games each before Sunday.
But Hill began the seventh while walking with Xander Bogaerts and, within an ecosystem that advocated that launchers be merely functional conduits for a relief squadron, it was not surprising to see that the lukewarm Alexander Alexander's left thrower in the Dodgers market immediately leads to heat. Hill is 38 and the Dodgers tend to treat him as someone who burns spontaneously if he is faced with the prospect of playing the same hitters three times during a game. Removing it from the game before trouble occurs seems almost reflexive.
But Hill has had the toughest course of Boston three times, and he behaved in such a way that he should have been celebrated and honored by a team whose talent was flush with beaks and claws. after a match 3 of 18 struck Eduardo Nunez for the third time, that was enough. Roberts went to the mound and did that little thing he did when he was happy with the guy he was removing, and he took the ball. Hill headed for a farewell acclaim, which he subtly and perhaps reluctantly recognized as worthy of the mark, and all this looks quaint now.
Historians will note its strange similarity to the World Series 2 match against the Astros last year, when Hill was eliminated after four innings, a race and three hits. The Astros were delighted with this private development, as were the Red Sox on Saturday night. "We were excited in the office, for sure", reliever of the Red Sox Joe Kelly said. "Rich Hill was absolutely on fire."
With Hill gone, the Red Sox scored nine points in the last three rounds to take a 3-1 lead. The conga failure line began when Alexander beat the only batter that he faced on four shots. She continued when Ryan Madson gave Mitch Moreland a three-run homer. Since then, the match has seemed like an endless sarcasm. everything Roberts cares about.
But after the match, when he was given the polite chance but probably pointless to explain himself, Roberts said he and Hill had had a conversation in the bottom of the sixth part, which started by asking his starter for 38 years how he felt and Hill responded. with a less than emphatic answer.
"Keep an eye on me," Hill said at the moment, and then confirmed. "I'm going to give everything I've got, but let's go from one hitter to the other, just keep an eye on me."
This led everyone in the room to listen to Roberts stop for a second and maybe examine their souls. The easy story – Roberts, incompetent and maybe even traitor – was not going to last. And in the calm of penance, Roberts was asked if it was rare for Hill to make such a potentially awful warning.
"I have never heard it," says Roberts. "You talk about a World Series match in which there is no margin.There is a lot of emotion, intensity, effort, concentration – He did everything to put us in a position to win a baseball game. "
1:56
Mark Teixeira and David Ross give their opinion on what went wrong for Ryan Madson and Kenley Jansen.
These facts do not absolve Roberts. Reasonable people might badume that "keep an eye on me" with four points in advance in Saturday night's conditions should be interpreted as "let me at least give up a point before you take the ball." Managers talk about getting 27 outs, and it was pretty obvious that Hill was the best choice to have at least two or three. And there is every reason to believe that Madson, who allowed seven legacy runners to score in four games, was not the man to be entrusted with the legacy of the fourth game of Rich Hill.
But it turns out that a baseball game does not look like a TV show. Instead of smiling anchors throwing red meat at your lowest instinct, a baseball game is an unpredictable enterprise played by sentient beings whose genius, art, and fallibility all have backgrounds that further darken the game. gray than black and white.
This does not mean that Roberts' decisions did not prove to be bad, or that they did not – which ultimately cost the Dodgers their last chance to return to this World Series. That's not to say that Rich Hill did not deserve to tie a few extra outs to his name before leaving in the night. It simply means that we do not know everything and that we will never know it, so all the rest, as Roberts himself might say, is simply the opinion of a man.
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