ALCS Game 4: Sox, Diaz Blow It

Thoughts and notes on the Red Sox blowing their second game of this series, starring Laz Diaz, the Red Sox hitting with RISP, Alex Cora, and many others!

sigh

I’d forgotten what this feels like. It’s sickening. The Red Sox, with some help from home plate umpire Laz Diaz, handed the Astros a game they desperately needed and had little business winning, losing 9-2 to tie the best-of-seven ALCS at two games apiece.

We’ll get into all of it in a second but I should say this is Sox Outsider, my Red Sox newsletter. I’m Matt Kory, and I’ve written at The Athletic and a bunch of other places. If you’re new to SO, welcome! Please subscribe! It’s free and fun (though maybe less so today) and hopefully worth your valuable time. Thanks.

It’s late and I’m tired and extremely pissed off, so apologies for the lack of poop jokes.

Red Sox RISP

The Red Sox went 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position. It’s tough to win games against a great offense like Houston’s with a stat like that and, well, yeah. After answering Alex Bregman’s solo homer in the first inning to put Houston up 1-0 with a two run shot by Xander Bogaerts, the Sox bats went quiet. They had…

• Two runners on in the first after Xander’s homer

• Two runners on in the second

• A runner in the third

• A runner at third with one out in the fourth

• A runner at second with one out in the fifth

• A lead-off walk in the sixth

• A two-out walk in the eighth

None of those runners scored.

After starting the remains of Zack Greinke and following him up with the extremely mediocre Brooks Raley, the Astros went to their big bullpen guns, such as they are, for the final seven innings. The Sox had many, many chances to expand their 2-1 lead and failed to do so. Any whining about the eventual result of this game (warning: whining incoming) has to be done with full knowledge that the Red Sox had numerous shots to break the game open and missed them all.

Boston Bullpen

Other than the homer by Bregman, Nick Pivetta was extremely effective, if not actually great. He was consistently behind hitters, but was able to make pitches to get out of jams. His command seemed to get better in the fourth and fifth innings and his pitch count was only at 65. He could’ve gone longer than the five innings he threw, but with the bullpen rested and a one run lead on the books, I thought it was the right call to avoid exposing him to the top of the Astros lineup for the third time and put in Josh Taylor.

The problem last night was that both Boston’s best pitchers and hitters had their shots and failed. For the pitchers, it was Garrett Whitlock, whose first pitch in his second inning of work to Jose Altuve ended up over the wall for a game-tying homer. Altuve regularly ambushes first pitches and Whitlock started him with a sinker up and that was that. It’s easy to Monday morning QB pitch calling, and Altuve had looked terrible all game long, so maybe trying to sneak one by him and get ahead (which is more or less what Whitlock said he was trying to do post-game) wasn’t such a terrible idea. But it didn’t work, and the Astros tied it.

The ninth was started by Nate Eovaldi who was pitching on his throw day. I liked the aggressive usage of a good pitcher and I think it was the right call by Cora. It just didn’t work. Carlos Correa greeted Eovaldi with a double barely over the glove of Hunter Renfroe in right. Eovaldi recovered to strike out the next to guys and get a 2-2 count on Jason Castro. Then he threw this pitch.

Evan Marinofsky @EvanMarinofsky

If this is called a strike, the inning is over and the game stays tied. But Laz Diaz called it a ball.

It was called a ball.

It

was

Mike Petriello @mike_petriello

@mattymatty2000 was it a strike yeah probably, was it totally insane that it was a ball? i'm not sure.

not a ball.

Two pitches later Castro lined a single into right field which scored what became the winning run. We’ll get to what happened after that in a few paragraphs but first let’s discuss the call.

Laz Diaz

Diaz missed the call. We can argue about the effect of that call on the game, but this one is extremely simple: it was a strike and he called it a ball. That’s it. Was it close? Yes. Was it a strike? Also yes.

Of course the Red Sox are responsible for everything that happened after that. Of course they did terribly in all aspects following that missed call and that all had huge impact on the outcome of the game as well. And credit to the Astros for taking advantage of the situation.

All of that is true, but so is the fact that it was a pretty shameful missed call that had a massive impact on the game and the series. If Diaz gets that call right, the Astros don’t score seven runs because the inning is over and the Red Sox are coming to bat in the bottom of the ninth in a 2-2 game. That’s what should have happened. But it didn’t happen.

You could maybe make the argument that the pitch shouldn’t have been a strike because Diaz wasn’t calling pitches there. This is the ‘the umpire sets his own strike zone’ argument, which I hate, but let’s go with it for a moment. Except no because Diaz was all over the place, all night, to both sides.

Jeff Passan @JeffPassan

Home-plate umpire Laz Diaz has missed 21 ball-strike calls tonight, according to @ESPNStatsInfo. That is the most of any umpire this postseason. The green dot in the upper RH corner is the Eovaldi curveball that would've ended top of the ninth with the score 2-2. It is now 9-2.

And in case you think this kind of performance from a home plate umpire is acceptable, it is not.

The above is from umpscorecards.com. Those first two numbers really do tell a story, don’t they?

So the Red Sox didn’t hit, and their best pitchers didn’t pitch well, and the umpire sucked, and then their manager said, “Hold my beer.”

Alex Cora

After the Diaz missed call and the Castro single and a full count walk to Jose Altuve, Cora rightly took Eovaldi out. The game was pretty close to lost at that point and the bullpen was rested and Eovaldi was going to need to start another game, probably Game Six in Houston, so there really wasn’t any need to run him into the dirt. The problem was what Cora did after he took Eovaldi out.

He put in Martin Perez.

Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

No, I’m really not kidding.

REALLY! I swear! I’m not kidding.

The next Astro hitter was Michael Brantley who is left-handed, so he brought Perez in to go left-on-left. The problem in that calculation is that Perez is bad. That fact was made clear on his first pitch, as Brantley cleared the bases with a double, prompting me, a family man, to swear on Twitter. I blame Alex Cora.

To be clear, the Red Sox chances of winning at that point were pretty small. They had three outs to go against Houston’s best pitcher and they had to score a run, something they hadn’t done since the first inning. But, counter-argument, it was only one run, so they did have a chance. Putting Perez in there torpedoed that chance. It put the chance in the microwave, set it on high and then left the room. It took a magnifying glass to the sidewalk and held it over the chance until the chance caught on fire.

Cora does some unconventional things and often they work and we kinda laugh awkwardly and quickly forget about them, but this was, I thought, quite bad.

Now, I should say, in Cora’s defense, Perez had success against lefties this season, holding them to a .669 OPS. Also, Perez had come into Game One and immediately got a double play ball to get out of a jam. So perhaps those two items persuaded our gentle manager. Me, I keep coming back to the truism that Martin Perez is not a good pitcher and should not be in any important game unless the Red Sox are leading by 10 or losing by 10. If the two teams scores are not 10 runs apart, no Perez.

Where the Red Sox are right now

The series is now tied, 2-2. The Red Sox have blown the Astros to smithereens twice, blown two close games twice, and blown home field advantage, as well. Today suddenly becomes pretty close to a must-win, as you really don’t want to go back to Houston down three games to two.

I have to say, I watched some of the post-game press conferences and was pleasantly surprised at the Red Sox attitude about this loss. They obviously cared, but they were ready to put it behind them and optimistic about the rest of the series. That was good to hear because it sure wasn’t how I was feeling in that moment. Not sure it’s how I’m feeling now either, but then who cares how I’m feeling.

Chris Sale gets the ball this afternoon. I’ll have more after the game. Thanks, everybody, for reading, subscribing, and sharing Sox Outsider. I really do appreciate it.