Second Guessing Scioscia – Criminal Intent

Welcome to Second Guessing Scioscia, our look back at some of the questionable decisions that Mike Scioscia made in the last week. And, boy, there are some questionable decisions to be reviewed. In the history of this column, we have never once struggled for content. However, we aren’t anti-Scioscia, but we aren’t exactly pro-Scioscia either. In particular, we believe his in-game tactics need some help and we are here to provide that help by nitpicking incessantly and grading them with our patented SciosciaFace grading system.

In this week’s edition of Second Guessing Scioscia we take a look at some very well intentioned moves from Scioscia that were criminally bad.

No rest for the weary
In Wednesday night’s game, Jered Weaver pitched 6.1 innings of shutout baseball before getting the hook and left the mound muttering expletives under his breath. This isn’t entirely unusual as Jered almost always leaves the mound muttering expletives. In the rare event that he is not muttering expletives, it is because he is shouting them.

This instance of muttering was actually kind of justified though. No pitcher likes leaving the game when they have a shutout going, but they really don’t like it when they have a shutout going and have thrown just 86 pitches. There didn’t really appear to be any legitimate reason for Scioscia to pull Jered though.

Weaver had retired six in a row before allowing an infield single to J.B. Shuck to start the seventh, which he followed up by striking out Alexei Ramirez. If Scioscia thought Jered was starting to struggle, he must’ve been seeing something we laymen weren’t.

It also wasn’t a pitch count issue. Like I said, Jered had thrown just 86 pitches. This was his third start back from the DL, so maybe they didn’t want Weaver to overexert himself, but Jered threw 97 pitches in his previous start. If putting a governor on his pitch count was the goal, it would’ve applied in his previous outing as well.

The best I can figure was that Scioscia was worried about match-ups which is weird because the next three batters due up were Carlos Sanchez, Tyler Flowers and Tyler Saladino, all of whom have an OPS hovering just about .600. OK, that’s selling it a bit short. Sanchez did double against Weaver a few innings earlier, so maybe Scioscia was scared of the light-hitting second baseman… I guess.

The fact that Weaver got sent to the showers really isn’t that big of a deal though. There is no shame in trying to avoid the times through the order penalty, even with a pitcher who is on a roll and facing bad hitters.

The real issue is that the Angels bullpen was desperately need in every bit of rest they could get. Huston Street was already unavailable after having pitched five out of the last six days. Joe Smith was being “saved” to close the game even though it would be his fourth(!) day of action in a row. Cesar Ramos basically can’t be trusted right now, same for Cam Bedrosian and Mike Morin. That basically meant Scioscia is going to have to get a lot out of Trevor Gott and Fernando Salas (and to a lesser extent Jose Alvarez) over the next few days. It is also a major reason that Scioscia had to leave Nick Tropeano out there for so long during Thursday’s game when he started getting shelled in the fifth inning.

You’d think that Sosh would think a few moves ahead here and try to get a few more outs from Weaver since he was pitching well and spare Gott some pitches. NOPE. Instead, Scioscia leaned on Gott heavily, having him make a five-out appearance. It would be just the third time Gott recorded that many outs in the last eleven days after not once pitching more than three outs in the previous two months. In fact, Gott had only thrown 26 or more pitches in a game once before in his short MLB career. He threw 26 pitches in this game.

What that means is that Scioscia would have to be careful about using Gott on Friday, a day in which Joe Smith would be unavailable due to his own overwork. This was definitely not Scioscia’s finest hour, but he at least has something of a “just trying to win this one game” excuse to hide behind. I’m not sure that it actually holds water here, but at least it is something.

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I’m not down with IBB
Intentional walks don’t get nearly enough attention for how stupid they are. Sure enough, Scioscia is second in the American League behind noted managerial dunce Lloyd McClendon in ordering intentional walks.

A perfect example of an intentional walk gone bad came in the August 16th loss to the Royals in which Scioscia’s choice to intentionally walk Mike Moustakas led directly to a Huston Street blown save. In this instance, you can see the logic behind the decision. With the tying run on second, Scioscia decided it was better to have Street put Mike Moustakas on base and go up against Drew Butera and Alex Rios for the final two outs or try and induce a GIDP from Butera. Those are certainly two terrible hitters, so I’d be eager to face them as well, but the walk of Moustakas increased Kansas City’s win expectancy by a whopping 5%.

It also put Street in a bad position where he had very little margin for error. Mind you, he started the inning off by walking Eric Hosmer on five pitches, so it wasn’t like Huston was out there throwing darts. He does have pretty notable platoon splits, as does the left-hand swinging Moustakas, so that is a factor here, but the other factor is that Moustakas getting put on base meant that the WINNING run was on-base. Predictably, Ned Yost pinch-ran for Moustakas with super speedy Jarrod Dyson, making it even easier for the Royals to score.

Sure enough, Street’s command continued to betray him and he walked Drew Butera to load the bases. Now, to a certain extent you have to trust your closer not to walk one of the worst hitters in professional baseball. That cuts both ways though. You should also be able to trust your closer to get a solid hitter like Moustakas out as well. As a result of this, the Royals saw their win expectancy jump by 20% and they now, basically for free, got to have Dyson on second base where any base hit to the outfield should score him easily to give the Angels a loss. More importantly, it put Hosmer on third base where just about any ball in play other than a pop fly would score the game-tying run.

Even Alex Rios wasn’t an inept enough hitter to screw that up. He launched a flyball to right for a nice, easy game-tying sac fly to force extra innings where the Royals would go on to win. It all could’ve been avoided too if Scioscia just had Street pitch to Moose. Even if Huston just threw four pitches not all that close to the strike zone in hopes that Moustakas might chase and get himself out, that would’ve been an improvement over the free pass. Just don’t give the opposing team a free boost to their win expectancy. Make them earn it.

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