There is a reason why you should never skip ahead to the last line of a novel. Sure, you might find out how the story concludes. But you miss out on every reason why you should care in the first place. The magic is in the journey.
The ending of Game 4 was straightforward. Rays postseason superhero Randy Arozarena dove into home and the moment his gloved hand touched the plate, the game was over. The Tampa Bay Rays won 8-7 and knotted the World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers at two games apiece. Thanks for coming folks, drive carefully!
Oh, but there was so much more than that. The journey of that play, like the journey of the game, and like the journey of this completely wacky season, was magical.
"I'm still trying to catch my breath," Tampa Bay's Kevin Kiermaier said. "Forty minutes after it's over with. It's really incredible."
Let's begin our guide through the biggest plate appearance in the life of one Brett Phillips with a factoid. The aim in this little corner of our World Series coverage is to venture deep into the weeds of each game's biggest play, or at least a play that is both impactful and suggests larger truths. In Game 3, we chose Max Muncy's two-run single, both because it was the play that had the largest statistical impact on the outcome and because it was emblematic to the way the Dodgers approach offense.
That play was the only high-leverage plate appearance of Game 3. According to the FanGraphs.com version of leverage index, with the cutoff for high leverage set at any play with an index of 1.5 or more, Game 4 had 33 such plate appearances. Thirty-three!
Indeed, the last play of the game was the highest-leverage play of Game 4. With a leverage index of 6.69, per FanGraphs, it was easily the highest-leverage play of the World Series. Before Phillips came through, the Rays' win probability stood at 17%. Given that his base hit knotted the Series, it was hands-down the biggest hit of the entire 2020 season.
So that's a pretty big set of details right there, yet even so they are woefully insufficient to capture what actually happened. There is no small grouping of words that would do the ending justice. Flowery words, we know, but did you see that game?
So a whole bunch of stuff happened and Rays manager Kevin Cash had emptied his six-man bench, save for light-hitting backup catcher Michael Perez. The Dodgers led 7-6 and owned an 83% win probability with longtime relief ace Kenley Jansen on the mound. Kiermaier had reached with a soft single and Arozarena had drawn a tough walk, with a two-strike check swing going his way and keeping the Rays' hopes alive.
Phillips had come on to run for Ji-Man Choi in the eighth, and Choi had pinch hit for Mike Brosseau in the sixth. It was that kind of game, where Cash was going to rifle the sofa cushions for every bit of spare change he could find, if it would buy a much-needed win.
In L.A., there will probably be another round of Jansen-related panic reactions and you can understand why. He was once as automatic as they come, but over the past couple of years, he has become the No. 1 reason to invest in antacids, if only because his appearances tend to come with the game on the line, and this time of the season, those games for the Dodgers tend to carry championship implications.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had alternatives. He had Joe Kelly, Jake McGee, Dylan Floro, Alex Wood, Victor Gonzalez and Dustin May, all of whom could have viably pitched the ninth or come on during it. Phillips entered the at-bat with a .201 career average and just a .175 mark against lefties. In that list of relievers, you had southpaws McGee, Wood and Gonzalez. Roberts stuck with Jansen.
"You can't beat yourself, like I said, you got to be positive," Jansen said, after it went wrong. "I didn't give up one hard hit, I mean what can I do? Can't do anything with that."
Meanwhile, Cash stuck with Phillips. Of course, Perez was his only alternative. He's also a lefty hitter and while his career average (.221) is better than Phillips' .202, the latter has about the same on-base percentage and a better slugging percentage. Perez also has a career .375 average against lefties, and while that's over just 32 at-bats, it might have played a small reason why Roberts wanted to go with Jansen vs. Phillips rather than one of his lefties against Perez.
Phillips stepped to the plate, while the Dodgers' defense was aligned into a shift in the infield, while the outfield also played him to pull. His mindset? Well, after it all played out, here is how Phillips summed it up:
"Keep dreaming big," Phillips gushed. "These opportunities are closer than you think. Keep dreaming big kids and having that unrelenting belief, it does, things like this happen. It's awesome."
The first pitch to Phillips was a cutter in off the plate. It had good, late bite and it was to Phillips' credit that he took it in a spot when his adrenaline had to be off the charts. Trumedia gave the pitch a 21.6% chance of being called a strike. Good take but not an easy one.
The second pitch was another cutter, a little more elevated and it caught the inside edge of the plate. The strike probability was 52%, and plate umpire Chris Guccione gave the nod to Jansen. Guccione's strikes-looking rating this season has been right at league average.
The third pitch was a fastball, a 94 mph sinker that caught the outer edge of the plate, a call that left Phillips shaking his head. Trumedia scored that one with a 78% strike probability, so it was another pitchers' pitch in Jansen's favor. He had Phillips set up for the game-ending punch out. With a career strikeout rate of 34.7%, Phillips is used to the feeling.
This seems like an opportune moment to pause and consider some of the most infamous fielding gaffes in World Series history, the kind of which are never forgotten. Not saying what happened next will join this list, but not saying it won't. It kind of depends on how the rest of the series plays out.
• There was poor Fred Snodgrass, whose misplay in the 1912 World Series keyed the Red Sox win over the New York Giants and when Snodgrass died 62 years later, the New York Times obituary was headlined, "Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly".
• There were two errors by the Senators' Roger Peckinpaugh that led to four Pittsburgh runs and cost Walter Johnson a victory in Game 7 in 1925.
• There was the passed ball by Mickey Owen that opened the floodgates in the Yankees' comeback win over Brooklyn in 1941, the first Dodgers loss in a string of World Series defeats to New York that led to the "wait 'til next year" mantra.
• There was Boston's Johnny Pesky, holding the ball too long and allowing the Cardinals' Enos Slaughter to score on a mad dash that proved to be the Series-winning run in 1946.
• There was Boston's Bill Buckner, who had a Mookie Wilson squibber elude him, allowing the Mets' Ray Knight to score the winning run of Game 6 in 1986, forcing a seventh game that the Red Sox lost. Sunday marks the 34th anniversary of the Buckner play.
• Finally, there was Cleveland's Tony Fernandez, who booted a grounder three batters before Miami's Edgar Renteria bounced a game-winning single up the middle off Charles Nagy to score Craig Counsell and give the Marlins their first title in 1997.
Anyway, back to Saturday. Phillips is down in the count 1-2. His average this season with two strikes was .094 in 36 plate appearances. For his career, it was .107 -- 22-for-206. Good night, and good luck.
Jansen threw Phillips another cutter. The top-line metrics in terms of velocity and spin weren't much different than the other two he'd shown Phillips, but this one just didn't bite as much. It started in the middle of the plate and broke in, but stayed out over the plate. Trumedia scored this one with a 99.1% chance of being a strike, but Phillips never let it get to that.
Phillips turned on it and looped it, an 82.8 mph drive off the bat well to the left of Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager and well to the right of shifted second baseman Enrique Hernandez. The ball landed in shallow right field, sending a stream of pellets into the air, the kind of which would not be unfamiliar to the Tropicana Field-bound Rays.
Center fielder Chris Taylor raced over to cut off the ball. He had moved over to center starting with the seventh inning, after Joc Pederson pinch hit for A.J. Pollock, delivering a big two-run hit, and remained in the game in left field. Taylor -- like Snodgrass, like Peckinpaugh, like Buckner -- simply failed to catch the ball.
It's really no more complicated than that. Taylor is an amazing defensive player. His career total for defensive runs saved is "just" plus-9, but his value with the glove is immense. How many players can plausibly start in both center field and shortstop, as Taylor had done countless times? He has committed only two regular-season errors in 862 innings as a center fielder, and none since 2018. But this time, Taylor simply failed to catch the ball.
The ball was bouncing in the predictable way balls bounce, but Taylor might have been peeking to see if he could gun down Kiermaier at the plate to preserve the win, or at least keep Arozarena from going to third. Whatever happened, he missed the ball and booted it. At that moment, Kiermaier had just rounded third base and Arozarena was well past second base, while Phillips was pulling into first base.
Taylor pounced on the muffed ball quickly and was in a throwing motion just as Arozarena was rounding third base. Kiermaier had crossed the plate to tie the score, while on-deck hitter Brandon Lowe was gesticulating wildly with a bat in his hand. Arozarena had no intention of stopping at third and the Rays' coach at that bag -- Rodney Linares -- was windmilling his send arm so feverishly he might want to have his shoulder checked out.
Taylor's throw came in to first baseman Muncy, who turned to try to cut down the runner and found an unexpected sight: Arozarena was rolling across the field between third base and home plate, his batting helmet tumbling away from him and Jansen just kind of standing there near the third-base line as if he had been contemplating trying to tackle Arozarena.
Muncy relayed the ball to catcher Will Smith. Alas, Smith was the one player on the field who didn't have the benefit of what every other baseball fan in the country had just seen, which was Arozarena sprawled out on the field. Arozarena had jumped to his feet and begun a feeble retreat toward third base, hoping he could win a run-down play.
"I was actually trying to get back to third base because I knew we had already tied the game so, if anything, I was just trying to get in a rundown," Arozarena said through an interpreter. "Then, I saw the ball get past him, so I turned around and scored."
Smith, thinking he was in the midst of a bang-bang play at the plate to prevent the winning run from scoring, attempted a sweep tag of a runner who simply was not there. He tried to catch Muncy's accurate, short toss but the ball bounced off his glove and ricocheted off Guccione's leg toward Lowe as Smith swept his empty mitt across the plate. Jansen started running toward the plate, perhaps still thinking about tackling Arozarena.
"Was trying to see what I could do, I could have run a little more and see the play," Jansen explained. "Like I said, we came up short today."
What Jansen saw was that there was nothing between Arozarena and the plate. The Rays' Mr. October had corrected course, darted for the dish, dove at it, touched it, then pounded it once for good measure as Lowe and Kiermaier raced at him with arms raised. But they weren't running at Arozarena, they were running at Phillips, who the whole time had just been running around the bases, perhaps hoping for a Little League homer.
When Arozarena scored, and the Rays' win probability jumped from 17% to 100%, Phillips flung his batting helmet through the air and took off for left field, his entire team in pursuit. In the stands, you could see black-clad Rays fans jumping and down wildly and blue-clad Dodgers fans standing still with both hands on their heads.
And this, baseball fans, is why you never skip ahead to the last line of a novel. Just ask Brandon Lowe.
"I'm about to live 15 years shorter," Lowe said. "I think that kinda sums it up. My God, I think I lost 10 years on that last play. God, that's a storybook baseball game if I've ever been a part of one. That was insane."