Hottie McShotty wrote:I agree with Wutang-OG. This was clearly an analytics based decision. So you're telling me Scneider based his decision on a gut feeling after his SP was having a dominant performance bringing in an average lefty to face Santana? lol.
It's very easy to explain from the standpoint of a human manager. It is
absolutely impossible to explain from the perspective of analytics.
Human manager - you are up seven, and your starter has gotten into trouble. But you're still up seven, and you're managing with the series-decider in mind as much as you are this game. You have to strike a balance between winning this game, and also ensuring that you have as much of the back-end of your 'pen available for the decider as possible, and you had to use a couple of those in Game 1 and thus really want to avoid using them again.
But your starter put three guys on, and you're worried he's going to get a bit melty-downy and you're going to be remembered as Toronto's Grady Little. And Tim Mayza is warm. As a result, you rationalize. Mayza struggles against righties, sure. But he does get grounders (when he isn't giving up XBHs to righties), and again: you're up seven. Unless he gives up a home run, the downside risk isn't
that bad, and even if he does...you're up three, right? A bit too close for comfort, but you'll probably still close it out. It's not that you even like the Mayza matchup, it's just that you feel that you need to do
something in that spot, and Mayza is the something available for you to do that doesn't crimp your plans for Game 3.
Some algorithm - the algorithm is broken in ways that would be blatantly obvious to anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of baseball, and yet people with decades in the game continue to blindly trust it as the final arbiter of in-game decisions. Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line, while the decisions are being left to an AI of the quality of the
Microsoft chatbot that got turned into a Nazi in less than a day. It demands LHP v RHB matchups all day, and we obey, for it is ours not to reason why. This all makes perfect sense and is definitely what is happening here.
I know which of those two versions of events makes more sense to me. There's a reason my biggest complaint about managers is that they often feel like they need to do much more managing than is beneficial. Schneider decided to put on his Managing hat, and it was the wrong call.