World Series Game Four turning points: Dodgers bullpen woes

The World Series managers’ use of their starters and bullpens in Game 4 provide plenty of opportunity for second-guessing

Pitching – or lack thereof – was the whole story in Game 4 of the World Series Saturday night. By scoring nine times with Dodger relievers on the mound, Boston batters delighted second guessers everywhere who wonder about a manager’s use of his staff.

In his team’s 9-6 victory, Red Sox manager Alex Cora also maneuvered himself into and out of the second-guessers line of fire several times.

Cora and Dodger manager Dave Roberts jointly employed nine relievers, all but two of whom allowed at least one run to score. Both managers also raised eyebrows with their willingness – or reticence – to lift their starting pitchers.

Despite what managers, stat geeks and TV announcers will sometimes assert, pitcher use decisions are rarely formulaic …at least they don’t work out that way. That’s because most pitchers’ performance levels vary from game-to-game. The image is often presented of bullpens as infallible bastions of 100-mph throwing missile launchers rendering batters helpless. But that image fails to consider that pitchers are human.

The same is particularly true of starters. Although the general line of logic is that starters begin to lose it the third time through  the order and are virtually worthless by 100 pitches, that is not always the case. And even if it is, they may still be better than the guy chosen to replace them. Judgment is required. And with judgment comes debate.

The repeated need for both Roberts and Cora to  address this conundrum – when is the right time to  remove pitcher – enlivened Saturday’s game.

Here’s a review of their decisions, why they were made and how they worked out.

Entering the sixth, Rodriguez had allowed just two singles, walked just one, and was pitching a shutout. So, however, was his mound opponent, making every nuance of performance critical. Rodriguez hit the first batter, David Freese, struck out Max Muncy, but gave up a double to Justin Turner that left runners at second and third with one out.

At that point, Cora’s options involved relieving Rodriguez with right-hander Joe Kelly and hoping he could retire Manny Machado, presumably then walking left-hander Cody Bellinger and gambling that Kelly could retire Yasiel Puig to end the inning.

Puig’s season numbers, however, suggest that he is a far better hitter against right-handers than left-handers, so Cora opted to stay with Rodriguez, walk Machado and hope to get a double play ball out of Bellinger. The strategy nearly worked; Bellinger bounced sharply to Steve Pearce at first, who threw home for an out. But Christian Vazquez’s return throw to first hit the speedy Bellinger and caromed into right field, allowing Turner to score.

With Puig coming up, Cora might still have lifted Rodriguez for Kelly or Matt Barnes, who was also getting ready. But conscious of Puig’s dramatic reverse splits, he gambled on Rodriguez, who grooved a fastball that Puig sent on a three-run ride.

A few minutes later, Roberts faced his own decision point on Hill. The left-hander had been brilliant through six innings, giving up no runs and just one hit while walking two and hitting a batter. No Red Sox runner had reached second base against him. In the seventh, however, Hill made the mistake of walking the leadoff hitter, Xander Bogaerts. That, coupled with his pitch count – which was nearing 90 – sent off alarms in the Dodger pen.

One of the common managerial rules is that if you’d be satisfied with five or six decent innings and get six solid ones, lock in your gains by going to the pen post-haste. That’s what Roberts did. In the time it took Hill to fan Eduardo Nunez for the inning’s first out, left-hander Scott Alexander warmed up to face left-handed hitting Brock Holt.

Roberts went to the mound, congratulated Hill on a job well done, and motioned for Alexander, who promptly walked Holt on four pitches. Roberts pulled him for Ryan Madsen, who one out later kept his perfect Series record alive of having allowed every inherited runner to score. He threw a three-run homer to pinch hitter Mitch Moreland.

Hill left having thrown 91 pitches. He showed no signs of deteriorating, having retired five of the last six hitters. Beyond that, there was no need to rest him for a future assignment since he is not expected to pitch again in the Series.  That means Roberts’ decision to pull him bears every resemblance to fixing something that wasn’t broken.

Worse, it set off a chain reaction committing Roberts inexorably to a bullpen strategy that in short order would prove fatal.

Roberts started the eighth inning by turning the game over to his closer, Kenley Jansen. There were underpinnings of sense to this: the Dodgers trailed 2-1 in the Series, so they absolutely had to have this game, and Jansen entered protecting a 4-3 lead. Beyond that, he faced the two-three-four hitters in the Boston order, making the eighth a superb time for Roberts to counter Boston’s best with his best.

Nor did Roberts’ decision violate the almost universally violated dictum against removing a pitcher who’s going well. Jansen replaced Ryan Madson, who had allowed Moreland’s three-run pinch hit home run. So the question wasn’t whether Roberts needed a new pitcher to start the eighth, but who it should be.

And that was one more argument for Jansen. In truth, Roberts had nobody he could trust as completely in a delicate situation. His normal setup guy, Pedro Baez, had also pitched two innings Friday night.  Dylan Floro and Alex Wood were both available, but neither was as reliable as Jansen.

But there were also arguments against Jansen. He had worked two full innings Friday, and during the entire regular season he had never worked more than one inning on consecutive nights.  Would he be up to his usual standard of performance? Jansen answered the question almost immediately, throwing a cutter over the inside part of the plate that Steve Pearce slammed into the first row of the bleachers in left-center to tie the game.

Having lost the lead with Jansen, Roberts pulled his closer to start the ninth and turned to Floro. Pulling a closer in a non-save situation is something managers routinely do during the regular season, but not necessarily in the World Series. Roberts was probably bowing to the reality that if he used Jansen a second inning for a second straight game, he would be unable to bring him back Sunday night, possibly in an elimination situation.

But trusting the game to Floro enhanced the prospect of just that elimination scenario occurring. Sure enough, Floro loaded the bases with two out, then gave way to Wood, who surrendered hits to Benintendi, Pearce and Bogaerts, producing five runs.

Wood’s use late in the inning raises another question: Why, after Holt doubled, didn’t Roberts bring the left-hander in to face the left-handed hitting Rafael Devers?  Instead he stayed with Floro, who gave up the hit that sent home the go-ahead run. The answer appears to be that Roberts had been caught flat-footed; he didn’t get Wood up in time to be ready to come in at that moment. There are few state secrets in baseball, and the advantage of using a left-hander against a left-handed hitter in a key late-inning situation certainly isn’t one of those few.

It is also an entirely fair question whether, had Roberts stayed with Hill longer in the seventh, he might have been able to bypass Madson altogether, retain a margin that could have allowed the Dodgers to navigate the eighth without Jansen, and save their closer for an actual closing situation in the ninth.

In retrospect, and as satisfied as the Dodgers might have been with Hill’s work to that point, his removal early in the seventh looks very much like the initiation of a chain reaction bullpen disaster for a team ill-positioned to afford such.