On October 27th, 2020 the Tampa Bay Rays faced off against the Los Angelas Dodgers in Game 6 of the World Series. The Tampa Bay Rays were down in the series three games to two. They sent out their former Cy Young pitcher to the mound, Blake Snell, to force a Game 7. Blake Snell brought his A-Game on Tuesday night, dealing nine strikeouts and only giving up two hits. Blake Snell was actually the first pitcher in World Series history to record nine strikeouts with zero walks in less than six innings. Blake Snell was absolutely on fire and had the Rays leading Game 6 with a one run lead. However, Kevin Cash, the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays decided to pull Snell after giving up his second hit in the 5th inning.
Kevin Cash decided to pull Blake Snell who had thrown only 73 pitches at that moment in the game, not because of the pitch count but because analytics has shown based off Snells past performances that he struggles when he faces batters for the third time around. Instead of going with your gut and making your decision based off what the eyes tell you, Kevin Cash trusted numbers instead of his ace who was having an all-time performance in the most critical game of this Tampa Bay Rays season.
Baseball leads all other sports in sports analytics. The Oakland A’s showed how effective a team can be by using analytics and statistics to find players who are cheap, because of the Oakland A’s small payroll. The Oakland A’s couldn’t afford any top free agents. Short-story-short the Oakland A’s were able to use analytics to discover talent from the data. Baseball is a very stat driven sport where a players greatness is based off a batting average, number of home-runs, on-base percentage (OPS), and for a pitcher earned-run average (ERA). There are many more stats that matter to baseball but that is for a whole other story.
I want to know what people think about whether you should trust analytics all the time in sports and never make a call from a the feel of the game, and if that’s so, what is the point of a manager if they make their decisions based on analytics.
Source: https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/10/30/kevin-cash-blake-snell-world-series-game-6
https://calgarysun.com/sports/baseball/mlb/analytics-cost-cash-rays-shot-at-pulling-out-world-series-upset