The Arizona Diamondbacks‘ white-knuckled loss to the Texas Rangers in Game 1 of the World Series probably rang of the grimly familiar for longtime fans of the Snakes. That’s because the D-backs surrendered a game-tying home run in the ninth inning.
This is just the franchise’s second trip to the World Series, but already they’ve made history of an unfortunate kind:
Two of those three game-turning blasts came during the 2001 World Series, when 22-year-old workhorse relief ace Byung-Hyun Kim allowed a pair of game-tying home runs in the Bronx. The first came in Game 4 and led to the Yankees‘ tying the series at 2-2. Staked to a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the ninth, Kim permitted a single to Paul O’Neill bookended by outs. With two away, that brought Tino Martinez to the plate. He did this to the first pitch he saw from Kim:
Kim also pitched the 10th inning and surrendered Derek Jeter’s walk-off home run in a game that began on Oct. 31 but ended after midnight local time and thus became the first time a Major League Baseball game was played in November. Thus, Jeter’s occasional nom de baseball of “Mr. November” came to be.
Then came Game 5 the next night. Kim had thrown 62 pitches the night before – a titan’s burden for a high-leverage reliever – and adding regular season and postseason together he was at 108 innings for the year as, again, a 22-year-old. That was also unexplored territory for Kim, who had peaked at 70 2/3 innings the year before. Still and yet, Arizona manager Bob Brenly tabbed him to protect a 2-0 lead in the ninth. Kim permitted a lead-off double to Jorge Posada but then retired Shane Spencer and Chuck Knoblauch to put the Snakes one out away from a 3-2 lead in the series. Then, however, came the 1-0 pitch to Scott Brosius:
The Yankees would eventually win it in the 12th and go back to Arizona one away from their fourth straight World Series title.
That prelude brings us to Game 1 of the current Fall Classic and the aforementioned third time the D-backs have allowed a game-tying homer in the bottom of the ninth of a World Series game. This time, it was closer and deadline addition Paul Sewald, who allowed the clutch blast – or anti-clutch blast from the Arizona perspective – to Texas’ Corey Seager:
Seager ambushed that first-pitch high fastball from Sewald, sent it 418 feet into the right-field seats, and turned a 5-3 lead into a 5-5 tie. The Rangers, of course, would win in the 11th on a walk-off homer by Adolis García.
As for Sewald, he complicated his straits by issuing a five-pitch walk to the not-especially-patient Leody Taveras. He rebounded to strike out Marcus Semien, but even so Seager is not the sort of hitter you want to face as the tying run. It turned out to be a case of Sewald’s occasional homer issues in platoon-disadvantaged situations running into one of the best lefty power hitters in the game. This season, 26 of Seager’s 33 regular-season home runs came off right-handers like Sewald. For his career, Seager has slugged .476 with 53 home runs against lefties – strong numbers. Against the opposite side, however, has a career SLG of .529 with 117 home runs.
In light of those trends, did Arizona manager Torey Lovullo consider pitching around or even intentionally walking Seager and thus putting the tying run on base? He was asked that after Game 1. He said:
“In the fantasy land, knowing the outcome and you’re trying to prevent a two-run home run to stay in the game, yeah, you feel like, you put him on and you’ve got first and second with some very capable hitters behind him, which you’ve got to be careful of.
“I think, if I’m sitting there as a Monday morning quarterback, I’m thinking about it now. But I was thinking with a very clear head, make pitches, bring our closer into the game and we’ll get a couple of outs here and march off the field. That was my mindset.”
Lovullo is right that the Texas lineup is an uncommonly deep one with no real soft underbelly. If first base had been open, then maybe he indeed does call for Seager to be ducked, but that wasn’t the reality facing Lovullo and the D-backs. As things turned out, a great hitter made a great hit.
Inevitably, Lovullo was also asked about those franchise memories of Kim more than two decades ago, made fresh by Seager’s homer. He gave the only fitting response:
“Nothing there for me. I don’t think any of these players were old enough to possibly remember what was going on at that time. I know we have some really big baseball fans; they probably remember. But I don’t think anybody is connecting those dots.”
The uniform is all the 2001 and 2023 squads have in common beyond the now-shared history of squandered ninth-inning leads in World Series games. Any symmetry is coincidence. Had Lovullo cared to, he might also have noted a more important reality from 2001 – that the D-backs went on to win that World Series.
