"It looks like an infield popup in the boxscore." --Comment about a home run ball snagged by a leaping outfielder.
Besides its towering significance in the standings, still in limbo with a day left in the season, Saturday night's barn burner between the Rangers and Angels was a lesson in how unhelpful even ERA can be, particularly over short stretches like a single season.
In case you hadn't heard, Texas, poised to clinch the AL West before an adoring crowd, broke open a back-and-forth game to establish a 10-6 lead entering the ninth inning. Interim closer Shawn Tolleson, pitching for the fifth straight day, entered the final frame and proceeded to cough up consecutive home runs to Erick Aybar and Kole Calhoun before manager Jeff Bannister correctly cut his losses and handed the ball to veteran reliever Ross Ohlendorf.
After inducing Mike Trout to ground out, Ohlendorf fooled Albert Pujols, who popped up behind first. Poor communication between Mike Napoli and second baseman Rougned Odor led to a collision of gloves and two bags for a hustling Pujols who was inexplicably awarded a double.
Ohlendorf fanned Daniel Murphy, bringing the Rangers to the brink of clinching and reducing the Of Anaheims to playoff life support. He then fooled C.J. Cron into bouncing a 15-hopper to the left of second base that shortstop Elvis Andrus recognized late and failed to retrieve. The Pujols run, which should have been charged to Odor, accrued to Ohlendorf's record.
Next, following a sharp David Freese single, Ohlendorf splattered Carlos Perez's bat on a two-strike pitch. But the ball leaked into shallow center and Cron, who was aboard entirely because of luck, tallied the tying run before a slack-jawed crowd. Charge that run to Ohlendorf.
Up came Johnny Giavotella, who swung awkwardly at a slider and popped a single off the end of his bat, scoring the go-ahead run. Which the record will show was Ohlendorf's fault.
Pitching coach Mike Maddux went to the bullpen after his reliever had failed him, but let's review the record. Ohlendorf allowed one hard hit ball -- Freese's single. His fielders failed to retire Pujols and Cron, and serendipity sang paeans to Perez and Giavotella. Ohlendorf got ahead on every hitter and made the pitches he wanted. Of his 27 offerings, 21 caught the strike zone.
And yet, Ohlendorf is charged with three runs on five hits, a blown save and a loss in two-thirds of an inning. Those searching for explanations will trot out the old moralizing shibboleths: "he isn't clutch," "he isn't a big game pitcher," "he doesn't have heart," "he chokes," and "he wilts on the big stage," when in fact he faced seven batters and should have recorded six outs. The only missing element of the story is a reliever following him and allowing his baserunners to score.
This outing stands as testament to the need for fielding independent pitching statistics and for measures like Deserved Run Average that separate the results of a pitcher's work from what he can actually control. DRA and its cousins are still relatively primitive and may never achieve their goal of teasing out real pitching acumen, but that is a quest worth the effort.
As a coda to this story, the Rangers did nothing to rescue Ohlendorf in their final at bat. With two outs and Elvis Andrus on first, the runner easily swiped second to place himself in scoring position for a potential tying hit. But Andrus slid past the bag and was tagged out to end the game, and consign Ross Ohlendorf, who did everything his team could ask to salvage the victory, to goat status.
(Double coda: the "winning pitcher" was Jo-Jo Reyes, who threw one seemingly meaningless pitch to record an out in the bottom of the eighth, before Anaheim's Big Adventure began.)
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