2019 Tampa Bay Rays vs. 1948 Cleveland Indians
Preview
Here’s our last 2019 team, the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays have been a consistently good team for over a decade now, and the first and latest excellent teams in their history – 2008 and 2019 – are both represented here. The 2008 team already pulled off a major upset, beating the 1984 Tigers earlier in the tournament; can the 2019 club do the same against the AL 7th seed 1948 Cleveland Indians?
The Rays were a team built on pitching, and are one of only five teams on the bracket who got more WAR from their pitchers than their hitters. The Rays have always been a pitching-based club, to be sure, but in 2019 they had ace Charlie Morton in top form: a 3.05 ERA (2.81 FIP) and 1.08 WHIP while striking out over 11 batters per nine and – in a year that shattered home run records across the league – allowing an MLB lowest 0.7 HR per nine. Behind Morton were Blake Snell, 2018’s Cy Young winner, who despite a far higher ERA than his award winning campaign was still effective, if unlucky: a 3.32 FIP was well below his 4.29 ERA while he actually struck out batters at an astounding 12.4 per nine rate (had Snell played a full season at that level, it would have been the ninth highest in history). Snell was unlucky, and also missed time due to elbow surgery in the offseason, but he was still a hell of a pitcher. After Snell were Yonny Chirinos, who was solid with a 3.85 ERA (4.44 FIP); and a collection of other starters who were cycled in and out in the absence of Tyler Glasnow (who had a fantastic season start before an injury that kept him from starting duties for the rest of the year).
On the offensive side, the Rays didn’t feature any big names but they did get some big production. The biggest bat in the lineup belonged to DH Austin Meadows, who the Rays had stolen from Pittsburgh in exchange for Chris Archer. Meadows looks like a star in the making, hitting .291/.364/.558 with 33 homers and a 142 wRC+ at age 24. Wily Adames provided exceptional defense at short, with additional production from Brandon Lowe, Tommy Pham, and 1B Ji-Man Choi (who I first encountered as a prospect while playing OOTP a few years back – he developed into a great hitter, though that was before PED revelations). So the Rays aren’t a team to slouch on.
But then, neither are the 1948 Cleveland Indians, the last Cleveland club to win a World Series. The Indians are one of the deadliest offensive clubs in the bracket, with 42 WAR from their hitters alone, and another 13.7 from their pitchers. The anchor of the lineup was SS Lou Boudreau, who also managed the club. Boudreau was 30 in 1948, and hit .355/.453/.534 with 18 HR and 34 doubles to win the 1948 AL MVP. Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, was in his first full season at age 24, hitting .301/.384/.390 with an excellent wOBA (weighted on-base average – the value of different types of getting on base) of .402. Joe Gordon hit 32 homers from second base, while 3B Ken Keltner had 31. This was a dangerous ballclub at the plate.
On the mound, over the full season, they weren’t quite as deep. But the top of the Indians’ rotation was as good as anyone’s: Bob Lemon had a Cy Yound caliber season (though there was no Cy Young in 1948); he placed 5th in MVP voting with a 2.82 ERA (3.54 FIP) and a league leading 1.22 WHIP, while throwing 10 complete game shutouts to lead the majors. Fireballer Bob Feller was just coming off back to back great seasons; ’48 wasn’t as kind, but he still won 19 with a 3.56 ERA (3.68 FIP) and 5.3 K/9, near the top of the AL. Gene Bearden’s 2.43 ERA was deceptive (a miniscule .242 BABIP helped him – his FIP was closer to 4) and the same was largely true of Sam Zoldak. But on July 9, the Indians debuted a rookie unlike any other, whose promise was a memory but who still gave the Indians an instant edge: 41 year old Satchel Paige, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game, whose true ability will never be measured with MLB stats because of baseball’s color barrier. Paige, even at 41, was a sensation in Cleveland, pitching in 21 games, 7 of them as a starter. Of those seven, he pitched three complete games, two of which were shutouts. His 2.78 FIP was by far the team’s lowest, despite the presence of a couple of other Hall of Famers in their prime in the rotation. At 41. He would go on, by the way, to pitch intermittently in the bigs until 1965, when he threw three innings for the Kansas City Athletics at age 58. Naturally, he didn’t allow a run.
The Series
This was a clean sweep with the Indians heading to Round 2, but there were some interesting points in there.
Game 1 saw Bob Lemon go six while walking four, striking out four, and giving up four hits (all singles). Nothing like consistency. It was hardly dominant, but it was good enough, as the Indians had scored two runs behind him on an RBI triple from SS Lou Boudreau in the first and an RBI single by RF Allie Clark in the third, which scored Boudreau. So when Lemon exited, his team held a 2-0 advantage. But the first man out of the pen, Steve Gromek, allowed singles to four of the first five batters he faced in the seventh, tying the game at two. Gromek got out of that inning and then actually struck out the side in the 8th, though, to keep the Indians in it. And sure enough, in the bottom of the inning, Allie Clark singled with one out, and went to second on an error by 3B Yandy Diaz, where he was taken out for a pinch runner, Wally Judnich. C Jim Hegan doubled, scoring Judnich, and Doby singled; when the LF overthrew the ball trying to get Judnich, Hegan scored and Doby went to second. He scored in the next AB, when LF Dale Mitchell singled. The Rays went quietly in the ninth, and the Indians wrapped up Game 1 – a little more dramatically than the score might indicate.
Game 2’s score, however, did suggest drama – and drama there was. Cleveland jumped on starter Ryan Yarbrough for two over the first two innings (a Lou Boudreau RBI single in the first and homer by LF Eddie Robinson in the second), but for the second straight game the Indians simply clung to a 2-0 lead most of the way. In the seventh they added two more, when Allie Clark, Robinson, and Jim Hegan singled, doubled, and tripled (respectively), making the game 4-0 in the later innings. But Tampa Bay found life in the eighth, after Yarbrough walked and Tommy Pham singled. Austin Meadows hit a two run triple to make it 4-2 heading into the ninth. With two outs in the top of the ninth, the Rays again got going, loading the bases for Tommy Pham; the LF singled, but Eric Sogard held at third. Austin Meadows was exactly who the Rays wanted at the plate, and he did drive the ball deep to right on an 0-2 pitch from Bob Feller, but not deep enough: Bob Kennedy, who had come in as a defensive replacement for Allie Clark, settled under the ball near the warning track and put the game away.
Game 3 saw the immortal (and I almost mean that literally) Satchel Paige take the mound for the Indians against Yonny Chirinos. Paige didn’t exactly cruise, but he got through the first three innings unscathed. The Indians, meanwhile, had built up a two run lead, with Joe Gordon driving in Boudreau on a single in the first, and 3B Ken Keltner doing the same with Dale Mitchell on base in the third. But the fourth inning reshaped the game: the Indians broke loose in the top with four hits, the biggest being a bases loaded triple by Lou Boudreau and a follow-up two inning homer by Keltner. Those five runs put the Indians up 7-0 midway through the 4th. The Rays got a bit back on a collection of hits that added up to two runs, but it wasn’t enough as Cleveland kept pounding Tampa pitching. Chirinos had given up those first seven, but the Indians would add six more: two in the sixth and eighth, and one in the seventh and ninth. Joe Gordon was responsible for three of them with a pair of homers. Tampa Bay added two in the 8th on a Travis d’Arnaud homer, but the train had long left the station by that point. The Cleveland Indians swept the Rays away, and will now move on to face the 1982 California Angels in round 2.
Link to series page:
https://topteamstournament.wordpress...eland-indians/