Inside Baseball: Dodgers took advantage as Rays cashed out on common sense

We didn't get a Game 7 between the Rays and the Dodgers and we really could have used it after all the madness this season has wrought. For that, we have the push-button managing of Tampa Bay's Kevin Cash to thank.

Of course, this being 2020, there's a decent chance there would be no baseball Wednesday night anyway after Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner was suddenly yanked from Game 6 after a second positive Covid-19 test.

Following the Dodgers' 3-1 win that wrapped up their first title in 32 years, Turner defied a sentence to an isolation room and reappeared on the diamond at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, to join his team for pictures. First, he wore a mask and then he got rid of it. MLB bubble, be damned. A good old-fashioned superspreader potential after weeks of no positives.

That's bad judgment outside the game and MLB will surely have something to say about it in the days ahead. Inside the lines, I wish we were talking about Buffalo Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Roberts getting the Dodgers over the top after their bitter losses in the Fall Classic in 2017 and 2018. But Roberts wasn't the story in this one after the unfathomable Captain Hook routine Cash pulled on former Cy Young winner Blake Snell. Cash simply followed the organizational blueprint of not letting his starter pitch a third time through the batting order.

It was a classic case of playing the game on spreadsheets and not with people. You do that, you deserve to lose. And the Rays did.

The problem here was Snell was working a two-hit shutout with nine strikeouts when he was yanked with two out in the sixth and a man on first. The top of the order was coming up – and Mookie Betts, Corey Seager and Turner were 0 for 6 with six strikeouts in the game to that point.

Cash took Snell out. Fudge was the pitcher's reaction captured by Fox. Or something like that.

Betts promptly doubled and eventually slid home with the go-ahead run off reliever Nick Anderson, who was touched for runs in seven consecutive games this postseason. Betts' solo homer in the eighth gave the Dodgers their insurance run. Nice trade by the Red Sox, potentially ushering in the Curse of the Mookie.

"Just felt like at that point Blake had given everything we could ask out of him. Tough decision, gut-wrenching decision," Cash said. "Nick Anderson has been arguably the best reliever in baseball the last two years. Wanted him to get through the inning. Totally understand the question, the criticism that's going to come with it but confident we had two really good options to choose from.

"Looking back on it, you really wish Nick would have been able to get through it or we would have been able to get through it but I'm OK with the decision. I think that's what makes us special is we value each other, we rely on information and knowing how talented the Dodgers' lineup is, to avoid any pitcher from seeing them three times through makes a lot of sense."

In the year of the pandemic when the Covid outbreaks among the Marlins and Cardinals nearly shut the whole thing down in August – before the Blue Jays ever got to throw a pitch in Buffalo – we're not going to spend the winter pondering the drama of the Dodgers' first title since the heroics of Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser. 

We're just going to talk about Cash. A lot of AL Manager of the Year voters who marked off their ballot for him wish they had a do-over.

Never make a move the other team is happy about. That's what he did.

Betts and Cody Bellinger were both chuckling when Alex Rodriguez asked about the move after the game on Fox.

Said Betts: "I think at that point, I was like, 'I've got a chance.' ... I wasn't asking any questions though. I was just like, 'Hey, your manager said you gotta go.' " 

This was Pete Carroll not handing off to Marshawn Lynch. Times 10. Grady Little leaving Pedro Martinez on the mound and Buck Showalter not bringing Zach Britton in were rendered minor-league stuff compared to this.

Kevin Cash, 2020. We'll forever remember what that refers to. Social media immediately exploded.

Tweeted Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard: "So who gets to pull the manager?"

From Hall of Famer Chipper Jones: "Dude has a 9k-2 hit shutout, with 75 pitches (it was actually 73)??? And u yank him?? Fire me...I’m riding my horse!"

From ARod on Twitter: "The Rays front office and computers may end up being the MVP for the Dodgers. Computers running the game. Not humans. Binders lead to blinders. Manager with blinders on, you miss what's actually happening in real time."

On MLB Network, analyst and longtime MLB infielder Harold Reynolds went off.

"They gave them a gift tonight. They did," Reynolds said of the Rays. "I know they're going by the numbers and script and all that. I hope this wakes everybody up. It wakes up every front office in baseball that when you have competition, why do we play sports? You want moments like Blake Snell was in. I want to see what I can do. Man against man, let's go. Let's do it.

"You've got to watch the doggone game. We don't see this in any other sport. Tom Brady is lighting people up, do you take him out? LeBron (James) is hitting threes, don't shoot any more? Come on, this is ridiculous. We're getting to a point where I understand everybody has all the metric numbers we'll hear about ... Nobody was touching him. You can't do it. I'm not blaming this just on Kevin Cash. This is an organizational decision."

Lots of people in baseball feel the Rays are pretty self-important at times. After all, former manager Joe Maddon was the one who turned the defensive shift and the opener into mainstream moves, and both are long-term detriments to the game. But too many teams don't let their managers manage anymore. Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo frustrated his own pitchers several times this summer in Buffalo with his decisions. And there's no way a baseball lifer like Montoyo was making them. They were dictated from above.

It's not a good thing that the two biggest talking points from the postseason were the Yankees' idiotic use of rookie Deivi Garcia as an opener in Game 2 of the division series against the Rays and the Cash implosion that was the climactic moment of the World Series. The sport is suffocating itself night after night. It was sad to see it on the biggest stage.

A few words on Roberts

The Dodgers' skipper played 276 games with the Bisons from 1998-2001 and racked up 97 stolen bases, still a modern-era franchise record. He's in the Top 10 on the franchise list for hits (305), runs (194) and triples (17). He was always a cerebral player and was a key cog on playoff teams in 2000 and 2001. When he was called up to Cleveland from the 91-win Herd of 2001 on the final week of the season, it was a death knell to their playoff hopes the next week.

He went on to record the biggest stolen base in baseball history three years later in Boston during Game 4 of the iconic 2004 ALCS and was inducted into the Buffalo Hall in 2013.

“The first thing I recall about Buffalo is that I realized that I was getting pretty close to the big leagues,” Roberts told me prior to his induction. "And I had heard Buffalo was ‘the big leagues of the minors.’ I learned a lot with my time in Buffalo. I was around a lot of great people, people in the organization with the Bisons. I really learned to become a complete baseball player in Buffalo and it really prepared me for the major leagues."

Roberts joins Toronto's Cito Gaston (1992-93) as the only Black managers to win the series and he's also the first of Asian descent; he was born in Japan to an American father and Japanese mother.

Loved how Roberts went with Julio Urias out of the bullpen to end both the NLCS and World Series. That was having a feel for the game, exactly what Cash didn't show.

Around the horn

• Tampa Bay's Randy Arozarena tied the MLB record with three postseason series with three-plus home runs, and he did it in the first three postseason series appearances of his career. He had three in the ALDS, four in the ALCS and three in the World Series.

He's tied with Yankees legend Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Astros sluggers Carlos Beltran and Jose Altuve, all of whom needed many more postseason appearances to accomplish the feat.

Arozarena, who had just eight regular-season home runs in his career, became the 45th player to hit 10 in the postseason. The previous record holder for fewest regular season homers paired with 10 in the postseason was Mets/Phillies center field Lenny Dykstta – who had 71.

• What now, world? We had no sports from mid-March until July 23. And Wednesday marked the first day in more than three months with nothing going on. With no idea when the NBA and NHL get started again, it's going to be all football all the time going forward among major sports, with some college football and college basketball thrown in.

• Baseball long ago played optimist and issued 2021 schedules that open April 1, and most teams issued spring training schedules for games that start in February. Nobody knows if we're actually going to play those games or how many fans, if any, will be able to attend. While on a Sabres road trip, I went to a Dodgers spring training game in Glendale, Ariz., on March 1 with more than 11,000 fans in the house. It feels like it was five years ago.

• This World Series obviously was played at a neutral site in Arlington so it makes seven consecutive years when the home team did not win the clincher. The last team to win the title in front of its home fans was the 2013 Red Sox against the Cardinals.