As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?
My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.
I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Evan Carter and the entire Diamondbacks roster have been great too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Carlos Correa is important because he’s a great player, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. I’ve already covered the losing managers of the Wild Card round, as well as Brandon Hyde’s efforts. Today, it’s Rocco Baldelli’s turn.
Rocco Baldelli, Minnesota Twins
Batting: A-
The Twins have a fairly set lineup, which meant that Baldelli’s main lever was when to switch Alex Kirilloff out for Donovan Solano. To be honest, that lever was a pretty simple one to understand: the first time a lefty pitcher came up, Baldelli made the switch. Kirilloff is enough worse against lefties, and not better enough against righties, that I think this is essentially automatic. I’m less enamored with using Kyle Farmer to hit for Edouard Julien in the first game of the Wild Card, but Farmer was coming in for defense anyway, so it’s a small-potatoes decision.
When the Jays swapped out José Berríos for Yusei Kikuchi in the second game of their series, Baldelli even went one further and replaced Matt Wallner with Willi Castro. I would normally object to this, but with the bases loaded and no one out, I like the decision to prioritize contact. Wallner was awesome this year, much better than Castro, but he struck out 31.5% of the time. With a lead and a runner on third, prioritizing a run even at the expense of overall production makes sense.
Since the Astros don’t carry lefty relievers, Baldelli had fewer decisions to make in the next series. He used Castro as a makeshift lefty off the bench to replace Michael A. Taylor in the first game, then started all of his righties and switch hitters against lefty Framber Valdez, only to empty out the bench with swaps as soon as Valdez left the game. Both of these felt automatic to me, but there’s still value in making the easy decisions correctly.
The decision tree lost even more branches when Kirilloff left Game 3 due to injury. Solano replaced him for the rest of the series, but the injury led to an interesting wild card: Byron Buxton replaced Kirilloff on the roster. He hadn’t played in months, but he was facing live pitching, and it’s not like the Twins had other impactful options, so why not give him a try?
In the deciding game, Baldelli lost patience with Wallner, who had been playing poorly in the playoffs (41% strikeout rate). I’m not in love with that decision, particularly against José Urquidy, hardly a bat-missing wizard. Urquidy has strong reverse platoon splits in his career, but given that Baldelli replaced him with Castro and Castro batted left-handed, I’m not quite sure I understand. The Twins’ lack of roster flexibility hurt them somewhat here, as Castro is the only realistic platoon partner for Wallner. This is a spot where I’ll give the team the benefit of the doubt; I don’t see why this move made sense on its face but it’s close enough, and the situation was weird enough, that it was hardly a big error, if it even was an error.
With no Kirilloff, the only viable pinch-hitters were Wallner and Buxton. Baldelli gave Buxton the one pinch-hitting spot that made sense – Taylor in the nine hole – and then used Wallner as a defensive replacement. Given that Wallner hit for a ton of power this year, while Buxton slugged 70 points lower, didn’t have the platoon advantage, and was coming off of a serious injury, I would have gone with Wallner. But again, I want to defer to the team here where I’m not sure I know all the facts – they seemed to specifically avoid using Wallner in this game, and maybe there’s a reason why. This is the only decision I didn’t quite understand, but credit to Baldelli for being internally consistent with his choices.
Pitching: B+
The Twins came into the playoffs with two ace-level arms, three solid third options, and a bullpen that was gaining steam as the year wore on. That creates tension between riding your horses and obliterating the opposition with bullpen firepower, and that situation came up right away: Pablo López went five strong innings in Game 1 of the Wild Card, but ran into trouble with two outs in the sixth. A run-scoring single cut Minnesota’s lead to 3-1 and put two runners on base. I think this was a good spot to go to the bullpen; López had thrown 93 pitches and was almost certainly not coming out for the next inning to face the top of the Toronto lineup, regardless of what happened here. Louie Varland came in and finished the inning.
From there, Baldelli cruised – he went with lefty Caleb Thielbar against a three-batter pocket that included Daulton Varsho (pinch-hit for) and Brandon Belt, then dominant righties the rest of the way. The same script held in the next game; Sonny Gray shoved for five innings, then it was time for the bullpen. Varland was worse on his second straight day of use, which meant Thielbar had to face the slightly weaker lefty pocket of Kevin Kiermaier, Matt Chapman, and Varsho. I thought it was a good use of Thielbar – he’s a high-leverage arm, it was a high-leverage spot, and using him made the Jays pinch-hit for Kiermaier with a comparatively weak bat (Santiago Espinal) who then had to remain in the game and take another at-bat against a righty reliever. The rest of the series was academic.
Against the Astros, the sledding got considerably tougher, and I think the Twins made an error right away. Bailey Ober was clearly a short-haul option against Houston; he left after three innings and three earned runs. This wasn’t one of those start-the-fourth-and-get-in-trouble situations, either; he departed after the third, with Kenta Maeda coming in to replace him. If that was going to be the case, and given the shape of rest days and with López going in Game 2, I would’ve brought in a big relief arm to face the top of the Astros lineup in the third before going to Maeda in the fourth.
Ober simply isn’t a better option to face those guys a second time through than, say, Griffin Jax, who didn’t pitch in this game. When you have a wide variety of good relievers, I can’t imagine letting either of Ober or Maeda face the top four Houston hitters twice. The logical plan when you’re already piggybacking is to use Ober through the lineup once, send in a bridge reliever, then try to get through the next 12-15 batters using Maeda. That didn’t happen, and the best Astros did what they do best, which is make games uncompetitive.
The main question after this was how much the team should expose Thielbar, their only lefty, to the Yordan Alvarez/Kyle Tucker duo. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this excellent article by Cameron Grove, now a Guardians R&D member but more famously the creator of PitchingBot (shout out to the person on Twitter who alerted me to it). The takeaway is pretty easy: when hitters get to face the same relievers multiple times in a series, they get better results. It’s not an overwhelming penalty, and it’s normally easy to mitigate simply by shuffling around who faces who, but with only one lefty, the Twins couldn’t just throw Thielbar in there every time with no consequences.
The first time he came in made perfect sense: down one run, bottom seven, with one out and those two lefties due up. Thielbar came in, and Alvarez cracked another homer. Yeah, whoops, baseball is tough sometimes. Those are the sorts of spots where you use your best arm, future consequences be damned. Not every good decision works out.
With López back on the mound, things were a lot easier in the next game. He got the entire lineup three times through, Brock Stewart came in for the top of the order and to surrender the obligatory Alvarez homer, and then Jhoan Duran closed things out for a comfortable 6-2 victory. There was never a point where it made much sense to pull López; he was cruising the whole time, and quickly had a five-run lead.
Gray didn’t achieve the same success in Game 3, but he made things equally easy on Baldelli. He gave up four runs in the top of the first, and the next time there were two runners on base was the top of the fifth. That started a chain of relievers, but the Twins weren’t scoring, so Baldelli wisely left some gas in the tank by bringing in Maeda for some bulk innings. Maeda gave up one run across two innings, and with the score 6-1, Baldelli doubled down by sending Ober out to absorb more innings. It turned into absorbing punishment when Alvarez and José Abreu homered, but the game was already over at that point. There was only one more pitching change, and only due to sheer exhaustion: Jax recorded the last two outs after Ober had allowed four of the last five baserunners to reach.
That set up a do-or-die Game 4, with Joe Ryan on the mound and López waiting to pitch a potential Game 5. Baldelli had done a good job setting up the bullpen the previous day, and he had all hands on deck. That meant a more faithful application of the plan I talked about in Game 2; Ryan wasn’t ever going to see the lineup a second time through. He departed in favor of Stewart after two innings, which set Thielbar up to face the dynamic lefty duo for only the second time in the series. He battled them to a standstill – Alvarez singled and Tucker struck out – but Abreu popped another homer to make it 3-1 Houston.
That didn’t change Baldelli’s plans. It couldn’t – the only way forward was to win this game, which meant using your best arms regardless of the score. Those relievers performed admirably; Chris Paddack, Jax, and Duran combined for 6.1 scoreless down the stretch. They held the mighty Houston offense to three runs in a bullpen game. It just wasn’t enough. The Twins only managed two runs. Three Houston relievers combined to strike out eight of the 11 batters they faced, and that was that.
The bad outcome shouldn’t distract from the good process that Baldelli employed. He consistently set his guys up for success, with the only lapse being the tandem-start Game 2. But he fixed that the next time he had a fresh bullpen with a day off due up, and he understood both when to manage to the score and when to use every possible option with no regard for the next day. You can’t win them all, but I was really impressed by his ability to manage the tension between good starters and a good bullpen without losing balance to either side. If it weren’t for that one decision, I’d give him an A.
