Mariners, Guardians deliver a day of historic comebacks, scoreless innings: Stark’s Weird and Wild on MLB playoffs
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Have you heard the October tale about the team that made a seven-run deficit disappear? What about the story of an unreal game in Cleveland in which nearly five hours went by without anybody scoring a run?
Maybe you were lucky enough to see those games. But maybe you were busy running errands, hitting golf balls or doing whatever it is that normal people do on Saturdays in October. Well, either way, I’ve got you covered.
That’s because I was busy watching 11 hours and 36 consecutive minutes of postseason baseball games — so you didn’t have to. It was quite a day, and quite a night for that matter. So why don’t we rev up the engines of the October Weird and Wild machine, and tell you all about Day Two of the 2022 Wild Card Series.
1. Down a touchdown, forgot to bring Geno Smith
“If we can win this game,” J.P. Crawford was saying Saturday night, “we can win any game.”
Yeah, I know that’s the kind of stuff that baseball players say this time of year. But can we all agree that for once, this was one baseball player who had a point?
After all, Crawford and the Seattle Mariners had just performed an official October baseball miracle. Down seven runs in the sixth inning — on the road. Looking at a win probability of 0.9 percent. Facing the ugly historical precedent that should have told them no team had ever won a postseason game under quite those circumstances. And yet …
Somehow or other, the Mariners won this baseball game, in a dome in Canada, 2,600 miles from home. Somehow or other, the Rogers Centre scoreboard read Mariners 10, Blue Jays 9. Somehow or other, Crawford was thinking that if this had just happened, who knows what else might happen.
So what did just happen? The Weird and Wild column lives for games like this. So sit back, shake your head and ponder the impossibility of it all.
The biggest comeback ever? All right. Settle down out there. This was not the biggest comeback in any postseason game. Let’s not forget Mule Haas’ 1929 Philadelphia A’s, who beat the Cubs in Game 4 of the World Series after trailing by eight runs in the seventh. Oh, the Mariners did tie Dustin Pedroia’s 2008 Red Sox for second-biggest comeback. But take a deep breath. This is about to get better.
The biggest road comeback? Yep. The Mariners do own that one now. The old record for largest postseason road comeback was six runs. It was shared by the 1996 Yankees (in the Jim Leyritz Game in Atlanta, World Series Game 4) and the 2012 Cardinals (in what is remembered in Washington, regrettably, as the Drew Storen Game, NLDS Game 5). Those are two really famous games, but now this game is No. 1.
The biggest comeback in a series clincher? Yes, that record now also belongs to the Mariners. Before they came along, those 2012 Cardinals held that record, too, with their six-run comeback in D.C. And they’d wrestled that honor away from Brad Ausmus’ 2005 Astros, who charged back from five down in their 18-inning marathon NLDS clincher against the Braves. It’s amazing how much we talk about both of those games every October. And now these Mariners will be part of that conversation — for like the next six centuries.
Now let’s do the math! We worked with our friends from STATS Perform to break down the mathematics of this comeback. And we promise you won’t need to go get an emergency Masters at M.I.T. to understand what that math is telling us. Basically, you’d have a better chance of rolling out of bed and shooting a 61 at the Masters than the Mariners had of making an 8-1 lead disappear. Check this out …
The postseason math: According to STATS, 242 teams have now trailed a postseason game by seven runs or more in the sixth inning or later. Their record in those games was an attractive mark of 3-239. That’s a winning percentage of .012. That’s better than your odds of winning the Mega Millions — but not by much!
The Mariners math: Our friends from STATS also burrowed back into Mariners history for us. And here’s what they found:
• The Mariners’ regular-season record when trailing by seven or more in the sixth or later in the last 10 seasons? It’s a picturesque 1-138! That’s a winning percentage only Daniel Craig could relate to, by which we mean .007!
• So how about the Mariners’ all-time record when trailing by seven or more in the sixth or later? That’s even worse, believe it or not. According to STATS, it’s a mind-blowing 2-693, which computes to a spiffy little winning percentage of .003!
• The Mariners haven’t come back from seven-plus down that late to win any game in the regular season in more than six years (and 900 games), since June 2, 2016, when they pulled a 16-13 shocker on the Padres after falling behind 12-2. And you know, I bet those Mariners also said afterward: “If we can win this game, we can win any game.” But if they said that, boy, were they wrong. Since then, the Mariners have lost 88 regular-season games in a row when they fell behind by seven or more in the sixth or later.
• And regardless of what unfolds, it’s hard just to win a game in which you give up nine runs. The Mariners’ record the last three years when they’ve done that in a road game? How about 0-24. But they won this game, which mattered more than any of those other games. So let’s look at this another way — in other words …
The Blue Jays math: Now let’s remember there were two teams playing in this game. And you’ll no doubt be stunned to learn it was as mathematically challenging for the Blue Jays to lose a game like this as it was for the Mariners to win a game like this.
• STATS chewed on Blue Jays history for us, too. What would you guess their regular-season record is over the last 10 seasons in games they’ve led by seven or more runs in the sixth inning or later? How about 149-1! That’s a .993 winning percentage. And the only loss was a nearly identical game to this one, against the Rays, on July 28, 2019. (Up 8-1 in the sixth … lost 10-9).
• The Blue Jays’ all-time record in the regular season when they hold leads this large this late? STATS reports it’s a ridiculous 643-7. That’s a .989 winning percentage.
• And when the Blue Jays score nine runs in any game, guess what? That tends to work out better than this game worked out. They went 18-0 in those games during this season. And they’d won their last 54 games in a row when they scored at least nine times. But …
They didn’t win this game, did they? They held a seven-run lead, 10 outs away from tying up this series, and then a baseball miracle happened. So face it. No matter how talented, plucky and resilient these Mariners are, there’s no logical, mathematical explanation for what happened at Rogers Centre on Saturday. There’s only this:
Baseball! In October!
2. I’ll take two dozen doughnuts — plus 5! — to go
This is what it looked like.
000 000 000 000 000
000 000 000 000 00
It could have been your neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts. Instead, that’s what the scoreboard read Saturday afternoon in Cleveland as Oscar Gonzalez headed for home plate, moments from the at-bat that would change his life.
Hmmm. We’ll have a couple dozen glazed, please — and a walk-off October homer to go?
What we witnessed Saturday at Progressive Field – Guardians 1, Rays 0, in 15 zero-filled innings, capped by Oscar Gonzalez’s unforgettable walk-off – was a postseason game I can guarantee people will be referencing for a century. There has never been an October classic quite like it.
So why was that, you ask? This is why the postseason Weird and Wild column was invented, we reply. So let’s tell you all about it.
OSCAR GONZALEZ WALK-OFF HOMER IN THE 15th! #POSTSEASON pic.twitter.com/bVpy55LKXz
— MLB (@MLB) October 8, 2022
0-0 IN THE 15TH! This was the 1,709th baseball game in postseason history. You know what the first 1,708 had in common, right? None of them made it to 0-0 in the 15th inning, because of course they didn’t.
Before this game rewrote October history, only one scoreless playoff game had ever even made it beyond 12 innings. That was Game 1 of the 2020 Reds-Braves Wild Card Series, which was eventually won — after a leisurely four hours, 39 minutes — on a Freddie Freeman walk-off single.
So this game wiped that one out of the record book. But hang on. We can do better than that, because this Guardians-Rays game was also a …
1-0 ELIMINATION GAME! OK, anybody out there want to guess how many other teams have been eliminated from the postseason on a 1-0 loss in extra innings? I know you do, because it’s a short list — and it includes the 1-0 extra-inning classic in October history.
Yes, that would be The Jack Morris Game, all right — Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. And even if this was a long ways from that, just mentioning that game for any reason can get those goosebumps bumping.
Did you know that other than the Morris Game (which went 10 innings) and this game, the only other extra-inning 1-0 postseason elimination game also involved Cleveland: Game 6 of the 1997 ALCS — which turned out Cleveland 1, Orioles 0, in 11 grueling innings.
And that, friends, is the whole list. Just those three games. And one of them happened Saturday, in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
The funny thing is, though, we’ve ripped through all of that, and we haven’t even gotten to …
A GUY HIT A SERIES-ENDING WALK-OFF IN THE 15th! Speaking of fun lists, they don’t get much more entertaining than this one. We now present the group Oscar Gonzalez joined Saturday — the five other players in history to hit an extra-inning walk-off postseason homer that sent one team home for the winter:
Edwin Encarnación (Blue Jays) — 2016 AL Wild Card Game, off Baltimore’s Ubaldo Jiménez, in the 11th.
Chris Burke (Astros) — 2005 NLDS, off Atlanta’s Joey Devine, in the 18th. (Roger Clemens pitched in relief that day.)
David Ortiz (Red Sox) — 2004 ALDS, off the Angels’ Jarrod Washburn, in the 10th.
Aaron “Bleeping” Boone (Yankees) — 2003 ALCS, off Boston’s Tim Wakefield, in the 11th.
Todd Pratt (Mets) — 1999 NLDS, off Arizona’s Matt Mantei, in the 10th.
And that’s a wrap. For the record, Burke and Gonzalez are the only rookies to join this club. And only Burke worked his magic in a later inning than Gonzalez.
(Hey, just for the fun of it, here’s a quick rundown of everyone who ever did what those guys did in the ninth inning, because why not: Bill Mazeroski, Chris Chambliss, Joe Carter, Magglio Ordonez, Travis Ishikawa, Jose Altuve and Chris Taylor. The Walk-off Dream Crushers Club. Tremendous.)
MORE GREAT MOMENTS IN 0-0 OCTOBER LORE! So now let’s take elimination games off this table, because when any postseason game is still locked at 0-0 in the late innings, it’s something to remember.
So Oscar Gonzalez became just the third player in history to crank a long ball that ended any scoreless postseason game with one wave of the bat. I doubt you’ll recall the others, but somebody should:
Jeff Kent (Astros) — Smoked a three-run walk-off, off the Cardinals’ Jason Isringhausen in NLCS Game 4, 2004, in one of the best postseason games most of America never saw, because America was way too busy being obsessed with watching the Yankees and Red Sox that week.
Tommy Henrich (Yankees) — Ended a Game 1 World Series thriller in 1949 with a walk-off homer off the Dodgers’ Don Newcombe, in another one of many games with the Yankees that broke Brooklyn’s heart.
THIS WASN’T JUST A 1-0 POSTSEASON ALL-TIMER! I always hate to veer off the October highway in these columns. But what happened Saturday in Cleveland would have been a Weird and Wild special if it had gone down on a Tuesday in June, let alone a Saturday in October. So here come a few more from our 0-0/1-0 files:
Last 15th-inning walk-off trot in Cleveland to end a 0-0 game — The only other walk-off homer by a Cleveland player to bust up a 0-0 game that went as long as this one? It was launched by the great Earl Averill, off the Athletics’ George Turbeville, nearly 90 years ago, on Aug. 24, 1935. The Earl also spun his walk-off sorcery in the 15th.
Last walk-off in Cleveland in any inning, in a 0-0 game — That blast was hit almost 20 years ago: a Casey Blake walk-off against the A’s on May 28, 2004.
Last time any game was still 0-0 after 14 innings in Cleveland — It happened 80 years ago (on Aug. 11, 1942), and … it ended in a 0-0 tie, because it was Game 2 of a doubleheader and they’d forgotten to install light bulbs (h/t Jon Weisman). That was over 12,000 games ago!
Last time any game made it to the 15th scoreless in the regular season — We haven’t even seen a game like this during the regular season in over a decade. The last time any game was 0-0 in the 15th or later? July 17, 2011: Red Sox 1, Rays 0, in 16 innings (h/t Andrew Simon). That was over 25,000 games ago!
Last time any team threw 247 pitches and won a 1-0 walk-off — I picked that number, obviously, because the Guardians had to spin off 247 pitches in this game. And that’s a lot of pitches. In fact, according to Baseball Reference, there has been only one regular-season game in the entire pitch-count era (1988-2022) in which any team won a 1-0 game that way. On May 17, 1991, the Phillies threw 260 spectacular pitches in outlasting the Cubs, 1-0, in 16 delightful innings at the Vet. (Yeah, I was there, all right.) A Dickie Thon walk-off single finally ended that one — and not a moment too soon!
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL — Because there are a few other things we think you need to know. Such as …
1. The totals for this game are absurd: 15 innings, 104 hitters stomping to the plate to face 16 different pitchers, who threw 432 pitches, which produced just 11 hits but 62 swings-and-misses, not to mention 39 strikeouts, eight walks, two hit batters, no hits with runners in scoring position all day and nine fly balls caught by Guardians center fielder Myles Straw, who at one point in the fifth inning had recorded every Cleveland putout in the whole game that wasn’t a strikeout!
2. Corey Kluber, the former Clevelander himself, allowed that fateful walk-off homer to Gonzalez. And how Weird and Wild was that? Well, Gonzalez had never hit a walk-off home run. And Kluber had never allowed one — possibly because he hadn’t pitched in relief in any game in nine years.
3. The Guardians wound up winning two games in this series, which was helpful, but wasn’t even the Weird or Wild part. The Weird and Wild part was that they scored all their runs in those two wins (all three of them) by doing that thing they did less than almost any team in baseball this year — hitting baseballs that left the park.
• Naturally, there wasn’t a single stretch all season in which they won back-to-back games like that.
• And naturally, they hit just two walk-off home runs all year — but hit them in the most Guardian-esque way ever: They smoked none from Opening Day until June 29 … then thumped walk-offs on back-to-back days … then hit no more in July, August or September.
But then up stepped Oscar Gonzalez and hit one on an indelible October afternoon. And while he might not have realized at the time, that one will be traveling forever.
3. Buenas noches to Albert and Yadi
I was sure the baseball gods had an October fairy tale planned for Albert Pujols and his longtime Cardinals amigo, Yadier Molina. Their season in St. Louis seemed way too enchanted to end the way it ended — with the Cardinals getting swept by a Phillies team that hadn’t won a road series, against a team with a winning record, since June.
But this weekend, the Cardinals ran out of fairy tales. And that means it’s time to say adios to Pujols and Molina — until we meet them again on a podium in Cooperstown in five years.
ALBERT! His career didn’t end with a win, but it did end with a 99.2 mph lightning bolt down the third-base line, for his 97th career postseason hit and one more October multi-hit game. It also ended with this lovefest.
2-for-4 in an elimination game. Year 22. #AlbertPujols, everyone. #Postseason pic.twitter.com/MglYVtabLp
— MLB (@MLB) October 9, 2022
This was Pujols’ 29th postseason multi-hit game. The only hitters in the live-ball era with more are the three you’d probably expect: Derek Jeter (58), Bernie Williams (36) and Manny Ramirez (31).
And it was a multi-hit game at age 42. So Albert went 2-for-4 in the final postseason game of his life. He was 42 years, 265 days old at the time. And only one player has ever had a multi-hit postseason game at an older age than that — the one, the only Julio Franco, who had five of them, according to the great Sarah Langs of MLB.com, with the last one coming six weeks after he’d turned 45.
Albert and the Bambino. OK, one more thing: Did you know that only two players in history can say they hit 700 career homers and hit three home runs in a postseason game? One was Albert. The other was Babe Ruth. Pretty awesome.
YADI! We were one day away from what would have been the 16th pairing of Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright in a postseason game. That game will never happen now. But Yadi and Wainwright will still exit with a unique claim to fame I’ve heard nobody talk about.
You see, it isn’t only that they just set a record that will never be broken, with 328 games together as the Cardinals’ starting pitcher and catcher. It’s that …
Before they even paired up for any of those games, Wainwright threw the pitch that won a World Series (in 2006) and it was caught by Yadi. But it wasn’t until the following year that they began their historic streak. So cool.
Did you know that Yadi showed up in 2,224 regular-season box scores over 19 seasons — and in all that time in shin guards, he played only one of those games when his team was mathematically eliminated from any chance to play in the postseason? True! And that one game was 14 years ago. Wow.
Finally, just five players in history finished their careers with more postseason hits than Pujols. And one of them was … yep … Molina, with 102 of them. That 102nd hit was a single in the ninth inning Saturday, in his final at-bat, with his team one strike away from elimination. Now that’s the way to put one last sweet swing on a baseball.
What a career for a St. Louis legend.
Well done, Yadi pic.twitter.com/i9njW4V6Cm
— ESPN (@espn) October 9, 2022
4. Party of six
Wait! Don’t leave us and start watching football yet. We’re not quite done here. You need to hear all about our other favorite highlights from Saturday.
AND THE TEOSCAR GOES TO … So maybe the day didn’t end well for Blue Jays masher Teoscar Hernández. But hey, it started great, anyway.
In his first two trips to the plate Saturday, he swatted home runs off the reigning AL Cy Young winner, Robbie Ray. So I found myself thinking: I wonder how many hitters have ever done that in a postseason game? And fortunately, the gang at STATS forgot to hide when I asked them that question. So here’s their sensational list of the other four men who have had a two-homer postseason game off the previous season’s Cy Young:
David Ortiz
David Price
Game 2, 2013 ALDS
Pablo Sandoval
Justin Verlander
Game 1, 2012 WS
Carlos Delgado
Chris Carpenter
Game 2, 2006 NLCS
Ken Griffey Jr.
David Cone
Game 1, 1995 ALDS
(Source: STATS Perform)
go-deeper
GO DEEPER
Blue Jays suffer stunning Game 2 collapse, ending another season in disappointment
THE JAKE SHOW – So whaddaya know. It took 214 trips to the mound (209 regular season, five in the postseason). But Jacob deGrom finally got to make (and win) a postseason start at Citi Field. ‘Bout time, right?
And along the way, deGrom racked up four strikeouts on pitches measured at 100 mph or swifter. And in the history of postseason baseball during the pitch-tracking era (2008-22), only one previous starting pitcher had ever registered more than one triple-digit strikeout in a postseason game. That was his former teammate, Noah Syndergaard, with two, in Game 2 of the 2015 NLDS (h/t Sarah Langs).
DeGrom also averaged 99.4 mph on the 51 fastballs he fired in this start. According to our friends from Codify Baseball, no other starting pitcher in the pitch-tracking era had ever averaged 99 mph or faster in a postseason game featuring at least 50 fastballs. Because that’s not humanly possible … for anybody else.
THE METS DODGE THIS CENTURY CLUB — But now here’s one more reason it was a good thing that deGrom and the Mets won this game, because if they hadn’t …
They would have become only the second National League team in the division-play era to join a club that no team wants to join. That would be a club for teams that won 100 games in the regular season and made the playoffs — but then won zero postseason games that year.
Want to guess the only NL team to ever do that? I can help with that. It was Dave Cash’s 1976 Phillies, who won 101 games and broke a quarter-century postseason drought … but then got swept by the Reds in the best-of-five NLCS. Oops!
There are also three AL teams that have done this: 2019 Twins (swept by the Yankees) … 1980 Yankees (swept by the Royals) … and 1971 A’s (swept by the Orioles).
PHUN IN PHILLY – But on the brighter side of Phillies sweeps, they just swept a postseason series — for just the second time in the history of their franchise! The Phillies’ only other sweep before this two-gamer in St. Louis was … the last series they won before this one: the 2010 NLDS against Cincinnati, which featured Roy Halladay’s unforgettable no-hitter.
And also … this was just the second time the Phillies have won any postseason series against a team that won at least six more regular-season games than they did. The other? Oh, only their first World Series title in franchise history, when the 91-win 1980 Phillies beat Willie Wilson’s 97-win Royals in six.
CRUISING DOWN I-84 — I don’t know how to explain baseball. I really don’t. Padres center fielder Trent Grisham hit .184 this season. And now he has hit postseason home runs, on back-to-back nights, against Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom. C’mon, really?
I also don’t know why I looked into this, but I did. So here goes. In the annals of baseball history, no player had ever finished a season with 500-plus plate appearances with a batting average that low and then hit any postseason home runs — let alone two of them, off the nastiest aces in Queens.
The previous record-holder for lowest average (500 PA or more) by a guy who hit a playoff homer: Our friend, Carlos Pena, who batted .196 for the 2010 Rays but still went deep against the Rangers in the ALDS. Sounds like a record he’d be grateful to have unbroken.
PAGING BILL MAZEROSKI — Finally, what was that final score in Toronto again? Oh, that’s right: Mariners 10, Blue Jays 9. And why do I ask questions like that when I obviously know the answer? Because I wanted to drop in a note about the other 10-9 games in postseason history. Let’s just say they don’t merely disappear into the October score bin.
The Bill Mazeroski Game was Game 7 of the 1960 World Series: Pirates 10, Yankees 9, courtesy of the epic Maz walk-off.
The David Freese Game was Game 6 of the 2011 World Series: Cardinals 10, Rangers 9, courtesy of the game of Freese’s life.
The Cards Shock Clayton Kershaw Game was Game 1 of the 2014 NLDS: Cardinals 10, Dodgers 9, courtesy of Matt Carpenter’s stunning home run off the Dodgers’ ace.
The Kenny Rogers Game was Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS : Braves 10, Mets 9, courtesy of Rogers walking in the run that ended the Mets’ season.
The Yankees Torture Cleveland Game was Game 2 of the 2020 ALDS: Yankees 10, Cleveland 9, courtesy of the Yankees spitting on a 4-0 Cleveland lead in the first inning and then doing what they always seem to do to Cleveland in October.
There now. Wasn’t that a blast from the past? You’re welcome!
Jayson Stark is the 2019 winner of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award for which he was honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jayson has covered baseball for more than 30 years. He spent 17 of those years at ESPN and ESPN.com, and, since 2018, has chronicled baseball at The Athletic and MLB Network. He is the author of three books on baseball, has won an Emmy for his work on "Baseball Tonight," has been inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame and is a two-time winner of the Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year award. In 2017, Topps issued an actual Jayson Stark baseball card. Follow Jayson on Twitter @jaysonst
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