Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES — As the first game of the Dodgers/Giants series ended with Will Smith being pulled off of first base by a poor throw from Trea Turner, it got us to thinking: is a bullpen game compatible with a National League style of managing?
Roberts low on late-inning options
Obviously, having your starting catcher playing first base for the first time in his career is less than ideal, but by that point in the game, manager Dave Roberts didn’t have many options available to him. He could have moved Justin Turner over to first and put Smith in at the more familiar third base, but I’m not sure that would have affected the outcome much. Still, the moves that Roberts had left at that point of the game were very limited. Because, almost by design, if you try to do “bullpenning” in the National League, something will end up sucking before the end of the game, and the manager just has to pick his poison.
No DH = Hard Managerial Choices
Let me explain. With a designated hitter, you can make as many pitching changes as you want without any impact on your batting order. Not so in the National League. So if you go with a bullpen game, you know that your pitcher’s spot is probably going to come up at least three or four times during the course of the game. That means your going to either let your pitchers bat in the early innings (probably the best option) or burn through a ton of bench players constantly pinch hitting for the pitchers spot. You can paper over some of this with double switches, but sooner or later your going to end up with the situation that Dave Roberts found himself in once he lifted Albert Pujols in favor of pinch runner Walker Buehler in the tenth.
Think about it. Roberts had already burned through McKinstry, McKinney, and Pollock pinch-hitting earlier in the game. He’d lost Max Muncy to a double switch earlier in the game. So when Doc inserted Austin Barnes into the game, his hands were pretty much tied at that point. Barnes could play a little infield, too, but none of the options were very good.
It all comes down to pitchers’ AB’s
This is going to be true with every National League bullpen game until the DH is added. The manager simply doesn’t have enough warm bodies on the bench to cover all the pitcher’s AB’s without damaging his team in some way. However, you sliced it, Roberts was in a tough spot in that game. On the other hand, if you can get one or two AB’s out of your starter (or even three), what a difference that makes at the end of the game. Suddenly, your bench is full of options and your not stuck with so many unattractive choices when you send your team out in the field late in a ballgame.
So when Will Smith made that stretch to catch the high throw from Turner, there’s a big part of me that thinks if Pujols or Muncy or even McKinney were still in the game, there might have been a different outcome. And that is the bitterest pill of all.
