Rob:
No, it didn’t. But, good lord, compared to some of the moves Bob Brenly made tonight, his decision to stick with Kim looks like pure genius.
If the Diamondbacks lose the Series—and that suddenly looks quite likely—Kim is going to be the goat, much like Mark Wohlers got the blame for the Series-tying homer he gave up to Jim Leyritz in 1996. But Kim didn’t lose Game 4. Bob Brenly did, and it isn’t even close.
Tony Womack led off the game with a single, and Brenly immediately consulted his Jim Leyland playbook, calling on Craig Counsell to put down a sacrifice in front of the 3-4-5 hitters. Well, Gonzalez got hit by a pitch, and Durazo walked, but El Duque struck out Matt Williams and got out of the inning.
In the third, Womack led off with a walk, and Counsell bunted him over again. Gonzalez walked, but the next two batters made outs.
In the fifth, Womack led off with a double, and again Counsell sacrificed him, this time to third base, with one out. Gonzalez hit a medium-depth fly ball, the home plate umpire called Womack out on a bang-bang play at the plate, and the Yankees escaped another jam.
Three times the Diamondbacks got their leadoff hitter on base. Three times Bob Brenly willingly gave up an out to move Womack up a base. In those three innings, the Diamondbacks got a double, a single, three walks, and a hit-by-pitch. Hernandez retired only five batters on his own—in other words, in those three innings, six of the 11 Diamondbacks who actually tried to reach base were successful. But three Diamondbacks didn’t try to reach base, and because of that the team didn’t score a single run.
The decision to lay the bunt down each time is even more perplexing, because if Brenly wanted Womack to move up a base so badly, why not let him steal? The stolen base is an overrated weapon, in general, because most players get caught too often to make the gamble worth it. Womack is one of the few players in baseball to whom that doesn’t apply.
Womack stole 28 bases in 35 attempts this year, an 80 percent success rate. Now, 80 percent is a very good success rate—but it was the worst of Womack’s career. He has swiped 267 bases in his career and been caught just 46 times. That’s an 85.3 percent success rate—the highest of any player in major-league history. Yet instead of taking a small chance that Womack might make an out on the basepaths, Brenly decided to have Counsell make a guaranteed out at the plate. Not once, not twice, but three times.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Because of that, the D-Backs let Hernandez, who hadn’t made a quality start in six weeks, who threw just 52 of 98 pitches for strikes, who allowed two of the first three hitters to reach base against him four times in seven innings, walk away from the game locked in a 1-1 duel.
The Diamondbacks got to the World Series despite, not because of, Brenly’s machinations. He almost scuttled their chances of getting past the Cardinals in the Division Series with that botched squeeze in Game 5, before Womack saved his bacon with a bloop single to win the series.
But this isn’t the Division Series. This is the World Series, where no mistake goes unpunished. And these aren’t the Cardinals. The Diamondbacks had a chance to take advantage of the pitching mismatch, score some quick runs off of El Duque, and go up three games to one. Instead Brenly was content to play small ball. The Yankees continued to play large ball—all four of their runs scored on big flies—and now they’re the ones living large.
