MLB Postseason: High and low moments from the NL Wild Card telecast

Ron Darling has a generally solid night in his analysis of the first MLB Postseason game of 2019, NL Wild Card match between the Brewers and Nationals.

As a color analyst for the New York Mets, Ron Darling is one of the game’s most insightful – as well as entertaining – voices. During Tuesday night’s NL Wild Card game, the first MLB Postseason game of 2019, between the Washington Nationals and Milwaukee Brewers, WTBS gave Darling a chance to demonstrate that insightfulness.

He generally succeeded, sometimes to the point of rendering his boothmate, Jeff Francoeur, extraneous.

While Francoeur contributed only occasional value to the telecast of the Nationals’ 4-3 comeback win, Darling was generally, if not always, sharp. He showed his form as early as the third inning, noting that Milwaukee starter Brandon Woodruff was playing ‘country hardball’ with the Nats. “There’s no setting up hitters, there’s no upsetting timing,” Darling correctly observed.

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Indeed to that point, Woodruff had retired six of the first seven batters he faced on 27 pitches, only two of those at-bats necessitating more than four pitches.

As if to support Darling’s observation, the TBS graphics department was ready with a note to the effect that 23 of Woodruff’s first 27 pitches had been heaters. That’s country hardball.

But country hardball carries with it risks, and they can fly a long way. So it was that on Woodruff’s 32nd pitch – yet another heater – Trea Turner homered to put Washington on the board.

In the fourth inning of the NL Wild Card game, Darling pointed out something about Nationals starter Max Scherzer that a pitcher’s eye is especially trained to notice. “I’m not seeing the sharp bite on the slider,” he remarked. To that point, Scherzer had thrown his slider nine times, five for balls.

It was, however, not a perfect night for Darling. In the seventh inning, as Nationals catcher Kurt Suzuki was in the process of being retired by Drew Pomeranz, Darling landed on plate umpire Mike Everitt for presumably unintentional bias. “You’d have to say the Brewers have gotten the benefit of a lot of calls more than the Nats,” he contended. The immediate cause of Darling’s angst appeared to be a borderline knuckle-curve that Everitt called a strike…as Pitchtrax eventually showed it to be. Four pitches later Suzuki grounded out.

Darling’s indictment of Everitt was technically true, but not materially so. The plate umpire actually had a very good night, missing only seven calls according to Pitchtrax. It’s true that five of those seven missed calls did benefit the Brewers, but none of the five shifted the likely outcome of an at bat to any great degree.

In fact, Everitt’s “worst” call of the night hurt the Brewers. It was a low two-strike curveball from Stephen Strasburg on which Everitt rang up Brewers pitcher Drew Pomeranz. Given the likelihood of Pomeranz actually hitting Strasburg, that error probably didn’t affect the MLB Postseason outcome too much, either.

Francoeur, and later Darling, both wisely zeroed in on the perceived Brewer game plan to pitch Washington batters above the belt. “The Brewers are trying to get the Nats out up in the zone,” Francoeur observed in the sixth. When Victor Robles whiffed on a high Josh Hader heater for the first out in the fateful eighth, Darling piled on. “If there’s one theme for the Nats, it’s their inability to lay off the high pitch,” Darling said.

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Darling may have soon wished for a re-do on that lamentation. Within moments, Michael A. Taylor and Anthony Rendon had both laid off high Hader pitches, one for a hit batsman, one for a walk, loading the bases for Juan Soto. When Hader threw Soto a 1-1 letter-high four-seamer, he belted it into right field for the game-deciding base hit.

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