Rare are the nights when the top and bottom play, according to WPA, tell the story of a game so well. This contest was taut throughout, but neither team could make the big play and turn the game definitively in their favor, and so, as the only clock that applies to baseball (the number of outs before the trailing team is denied further chances) ticked down, the worm turned twice in quick succession.
Top Play (WPA): Clayton Richard was only asked to face one batter Monday night. With the Cubs already trailing 3-2, the Cardinals were threatening in the top of the ninth. A strong throw from Willson Contreras erased the damage of a walk issued to Matt Carpenter by an erratic Justin Grimm, but Grimm stuck his head right back into the lion’s mouth by walking Aledmys Diaz. Luckily for the Cubs, that walk served mostly to expose the folly of an earlier Mike Matheny decision. Matheny had used a double-switch earlier in the game, to take the aging Matt Holliday out of the game for defensive reasons. However, that left Matt Adams to bat in the third spot in the lineup in the ninth, and Joe Maddon forced Matheny’s hand by bringing in Richard to face Adams.
Matheny did the smart thing this time, taking down Adams and replacing him with right-handed batter Jedd Gyorko. Gyorko did what opposing batters have spent most of the season doing against Richard: damage. He drove the ball to the base of the wall in left-center field, and with two outs, Diaz was off from first at the crack of the bat.
It should have been a fairly easy insurance run, but that’s not how Monday night’s game worked. Nothing came easily. Kris Bryant cleanly picked the ball up with his bare hand, and hit cutoff man Addison Russell with a strong and accurate throw. Russell’s throw to the plate was a little less strong and a little less accurate—his arm is probably his weakest attribute, though it’s no noodle—but Contreras picked it beautifully, just toward the first base side of home plate, and then slapped a spinning, lunging tag on Diaz, whose attempt to sneak by him and tag the back of home plate with his hand failed. It was a stirring moment, a reminder of the Cubs’ stunning team defensive talent, and it seemed like a fitting plot point in a game that was fast becoming a contrast between the Cubs’ youthful exuberance and the Cardinals’ more limited, veteran style of play.
That isn’t the top play of the game for the Cubs, according to WPA. If we had moment-to-moment WPA and could see what the Cardinals’ odds of winning were when the ball arced past Bryant and toward the ivy, it might be, but it isn’t. Instead, the top play of the game for the Cubs came two batters later, when Albert Almora, Jr. laced a 1-1 pitch over the head of Kolten Wong in center field, and raced into second base with a one-out double (+0.167 WPA). Wong is a converted second baseman, and will have to learn that playing shallow in center field is a false flag borne only by the uninformed outfielders of yore. He hasn’t learned that yet, and the Cubs profited on Monday night. The tying run was in scoring position, and the fans, young and old, were thoroughly exuberant.
Bottom Play (WPA): It didn’t take long, though, for the baseball gods to remind all parties involved that a little bit of veteran discretion can get the better of valorous youngsters. Trevor Rosenthal hit Chris Coghlan, putting the winning run on first base, but a ball in the dirt to Ben Zobrist turned from potential disaster to a lucky break for him. Yadier Molina only partially blocked the ball, which skittered into the dirt beneath him. Almora, still feeling a bit juiced about his line-drive double, saw an opportunity and dashed to third. Molina sprang up, though, fluidly snatching the ball as he did, and fired a strike to third base. It was close, perhaps, but Almora was clearly out, and Coghlan was unable to advance to second, cursed by his own good judgment of Molina’s block (-0.232 WPA).
Ben Zobrist lashed a single to right field that advanced Coghlan to third, and certainly would have scored Almora, or even Coghlan (had he reached scoring position as the trailing runner). Then again, the ball bounced through the hole on the right side of the infield partially because the Cardinals had to hold Coghlan on first, and for that matter, we have no way of knowing what pitch Rosenthal might have made to Zobrist had he not been given such a reprieve. We do know for certain that Jason Heyward, with runners on the corners, got a chance to make the unfortunate Almora dash moot, but was unable to do so. As Heyward’s lazy fly fell into Matt Carpenter’s glove, the decibel level inside Wrigley Field plunged from feverish to Nyquil-dosed. Both teams played very well, well enough to win. The Cubs just ran out of time to be the one team that did win.
Key Moment: Seung Hwan Oh has been a revelation for the Cardinals this season. The Korean right-hander has whiffed over 35 percent of opposing batters, and walked fewer than six percent. He’s extraordinarily hard to hit. The Cubs, however, have hit him hard. Five of his nine runs allowed this season came in his four previous appearances against Chicago. Anthony Rizzo led off the bottom of the eighth by singling into center field against Oh, bringing Contreras to the plate as the go-ahead run.
For a rookie playing his second career game, Contreras put up a valiant fight. He fouled off three of the first four pitches of the plate appearance, then took two bad ones to fill the count. After almost every pitch, he walked out of the batter’s box, removed his batting helmet with one hand, looked around, breathed a bit, and stepped back in. The odd routine betrayed both his nerves and his ability to quiet them, simultaneously labeling him a rookie and exuding a veteran’s talent for lowering the heart rate and remaining under control. It was a great at-bat, really, full of pitches pretty well executed by Oh that Contreras nonetheless either laid off or fouled away, hard.
On the seventh pitch, though, Contreras was caught in between protecting the plate and not wanting to chase a pitcher’s pitch. He reached out and tapped the ball toward second baseman Matt Carpenter. A combination of the ball’s slow progress on its way to Carpenter and Contreras’s unusual athleticism made for a close play at first, but the Cardinals still managed to turn a double play, and Oh then fanned Javier Baez to escape the inning. It’s a no-fault calamity for Contreras, a good process yielding a poor result, largely because of the quality of his opponent. The Cardinals won this game, more than the Cubs lost it, and that plate appearance supports that contention.
Trend to Watch: Addison Russell had a rough night at the plate, going 0-for-4 with a pair of strikeouts. One of those whiffs was actually his best plate appearance of the night, a ninth-inning punchout against Trevor Rosenthal that featured some hard foul balls to the screen and a deep count. In the other three trips to the dish, Russell looked pretty lost when facing lefty Jaime Garcia. In fact, Russell now has 196 career plate appearances against southpaws, and he’s looked bad just about all the time against them, with an OPS under .530 and 58 strikeouts. He draws walks against lefties, but hardly ever makes good contact against them, and often gets fooled by good changeups. For a right-handed batter, this kind of suffering against lefties (Russell is a career .268/.332/.417 batter against righties, and given his defensive value, he’d be a superstar if he could merely match those figures against lefties) is strange and inexplicable. In fact, given the still-small sample, I’m inclined to believe that Russell will simply figure it all out soon and start raking against lefties. It’s certainly much too soon to say that he has a true reverse platoon skill, but it bears watching, if only because being this bad against lefties will seriously limit Russell’s value—if it continues.
What’s Next: Jason Hammel squares off with a somewhat revived (though it’s too early to say rejuvenated) Adam Wainwright in Game Two of the set, another 7:05 start. You can find the game on ABC 7 in Chicago and the surrounding area, and on MLB Network if you’re a member of the Cubs diaspora.
Lead photo courtesy David Banks—USA Today Sports
Solid recap.
I’m a bit wary of my homerism giving Almora too much benefit of the doubt, but didn’t the ump knock the ball down a little bit after the partial Molina block?