NEW YORK — Let’s just get this out of the way up top: Jazz Chisholm Jr. should have been called out at second base.
The replay review of his seventh-inning stolen base showed that his foot had not yet touched the bag when Royals second baseman Michael Massey applied the tag. Chisholm then scored the go-ahead run on Alex Verdugo’s single to left field, and the Yankees won a somewhat sloppy, back-and-forth Game 1 of the American League Division Series, 6-5, on Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.
“They just said there was nothing clear and convincing to overturn it,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said Sunday morning, after he asked MLB why the call on the field was not reversed. “If he had been called out, that call would have stood too.”
Perhaps that explanation is reasonable; perhaps the middle of a baseball game isn’t the time for the league’s replay officials to be doing a Zapruder-like examination to determine whether a glove lace grazes a limb before that limb grazes a base. I’ve made that same argument plenty of times in the past when close calls are upheld. Baseball’s challenge rule is set up like the U.S. judicial system: The umpire is judged by a jury of their peers in the replay room, and as long as there is a Henry Fonda among them who is not certain — beyond a reasonable doubt — that the umpire was wrong, the call is supposed to stand. But the fact is, any reasonable person who watched the footage of the play would think the tag was applied before Chisholm’s foot made contact with the bag:
The Royals (and Royals fans) have a right to be upset. Anthony Volpe struck out swinging at the same pitch on which Chisholm stole second. Instead of a strikeout-caught stealing double play, the Yankees had a runner on second base with one out in a tie game. We don’t know how things might’ve played out if the call had gone Kansas City’s way, but if it had and if the Royals had gone on to win, this series might’ve looked completely different entering Monday night’s Game 2.
That said, the fact that the play at second was close at all is a testament to Royals right-hander Michael Lorenzen, who is one of the better pitchers in baseball at holding runners on and preventing steals. Chisholm, meanwhile, was one of five players in the majors to steal at least 40 bases this season. Volpe’s six-pitch at-bat, in the seventh inning of a tie game, provided the ideal setting for this cat-and-mouse game to unfold.
Stealing a base is all about being on time. You run too early and the pitcher picks you off; you run too late and the catcher throws you out. Consider the six-pitch sequence as baseball’s version of the “Not My Tempo” scene in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, where Lorenzen is Terence Fletcher, the abusive jazz instructor played by J.K. Simmons, and Chisholm is Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), his drumming student. (To be clear, unlike Fletcher, Lorenzen seems like a nice guy and not a sadist.) Lorenzen is doing everything he can to mess up Chisholm’s timing, while Chisholm is trying to keep pace with Lorenzen’s ever-changing tempo.
On the first pitch, Chisholm is dragging; Lorenzen delivers to the plate before Chisholm can take his full lead. Volpe takes the pitch for a ball.
Chisholm’s second lead is all about watching Lorenzen. He has no intention of running on that pitch, but he wants to get a feel for how the pitcher might alter his tempo on the second pitch. You can see Chisholm is fiddling with his sliding mitt, but his eyes are glued to Lorenzen. That pitch also misses. Ball two.
Next comes the first disengagement. Lorenzen comes set with 10 seconds remaining on the pitch clock and then he waits. He turns his head 90 degrees, his vision going from home plate toward third base, and then back again. He nods his chin forward, feigning a look over his front shoulder at Chisholm, who doesn’t flinch. Lorenzen bobs his head again, this time more subtly, and then in one motion hops off the rubber, spins, and throws to first baseman Yuli Gurriel. Chisholm drop-steps with his left leg and scurries back to the base. The pickoff attempt is low, and Chisholm gets in easily, and as soon as Gurriel tosses the ball back to Lorenzen, Chisholm skips off the base again, glances around at the fielders, and returns to the bag.
While Chisholm is surveying his surroundings, Lorenzen catches the ball, quickly re-engages with the rubber, brings his hands together with nine seconds left on the clock, and pauses for a beat in the set position before rocking forward with his slidestep motion and whipping a 95-mph sinker to the lower part of the zone. It all happens so fast that Chisholm doesn’t have time to get his primary lead. Dragging! All he can do is improvise into his secondary lead so he can get to second base in the event that Volpe puts it in play. He doesn’t swing. Strike one.
At this moment, Chisholm thinks he’s seen the two extremes of Lorenzen’s looks: the long hold, with head gestures to distract him — think Fletcher clapping his hands and shouting at Andrew — and then the quick pause-and-go with more than a half-dozen seconds left on the clock. He’s timed up both; it’s time to test it out.
Chisholm vows not to drag again. He takes his lead immediately, and by the time Lorenzen’s hands are together at the belt, Chisholm is about a half-step from the edge of the cutout, his hands resting on his bent knees. Six seconds to pitch. At five seconds, Lorenzen hinges back slightly, and Chisholm transfers his weight off his left leg onto his right one so he can spring into a sprint to second. He takes a few hard steps and halts. Volpe spits on a sweeper down and away. Ball three.
Chisholm’s got the tempo down, but he needs to make sure Lorenzen isn’t going to switch it up again. Besides, in a 3-1 count, Volpe has a strike to play with; he’s in a position to take a healthy hack if he gets a pitch he likes, but big cuts can also lead to big whiffs. If the pitch isn’t to Volpe’s liking, he can take it for the second strike. If it’s not in the zone, he walks and Chisholm advances to second anyway. It simply isn’t worth it to risk getting thrown out or, worse, getting picked off before Volpe even gets a chance to see the 3-1 offering. So Chisholm takes his lead and waits, watches Lorenzen pitch at five seconds, and makes no attempt to run. Good choice. The pitch is a hard sinker on the black outside that Volpe takes for strike two.
It would’ve been a great pitch for catcher Salvador Perez to receive and unleash a quick and accurate shot to second. At 34, Perez is no longer one of the top throwing catchers in the league. All those innings wear down the knees, leg muscles and ligaments, so it takes him more time to get up from his squat than it did in his younger days; his arm also isn’t as strong as it once was. Even so, he is still slightly above average at preventing stolen bases because he has one of the quickest exchanges in baseball. And for as fast as Chisholm is (83rd-percentile sprint speed) and for as well as he runs the bases (his 6.2 BsR was eighth best in the majors), stealing a base becomes much more difficult when a pitcher with a quick delivery throws a fastball to a catcher with a quick exchange. Chisholm would’ve been cooked, in other words.
Now, it’s time to fly. Full count, nobody out. Chisholm expects Lorenzen might throw a breaking ball in the dirt to try and get Volpe to chase. A great pitch to run on. He just has to make sure Lorenzen goes home and doesn’t try to pick him off.
Lorenzen comes set early; again, Chisholm is in his full lead right away, hands on knees. With 12 seconds left on the clock, Lorenzen holds the set position, just as he did after the second pitch, when he used his first disengagement and threw over. He looks down at his glove, centered at his belly button, picks his head up and swivels it toward the plate, and looks over his front shoulder at Chisholm. Four seconds come off the clock. He flicks his head up and down, as if he’s the cool kid saying sup to his buddy across the cafeteria. He does it again, but smaller and quieter. Chisholm twitches slightly toward his back leg. Lorenzen sees this and bobs his head a third time with five seconds left; this one is bigger than the first, more snap than flick, prompting Chisholm to fully transfer his weight to his left leg just as Lorenzen slidesteps and delivers the pitch.
Lorenzen spins an 82-mph sweeper in the dirt. Volpe chases it and whiffs. Perez backhands it off a short hop, replaces his right foot with his left as he turns, springs from his crouch, and throws high. Chisholm is not quite halfway to second when Perez releases. Massey leaps and catches the throw. Seeing this, Chisholm begins his popup slide, but he’s too early. Rushing, not dragging.
Because he’s early, he pops up before getting to the base. Massey slaps down a beautiful tag as he falls to the ground. Umpire Lance Barrett signals safe. The Royals challenge the call, and you know what happens next.
“I thought he was out. Umpire called him safe. I just thought if it’s close, they’re probably not gonna overturn it,” Lorenzen said after the game. “Right when it wasn’t super, incredibly obvious, I was like, ‘There’s no way. They’re not gonna overturn it in this situation.’”
He added: “He didn’t get a great jump. I thought we did a good job. Sweeper down and away. Bounce. Salvy did a good job of being able to pick that and make a good throw. He just got in there, right? I guess. I don’t know if he did, but…” He let the ellipses say the rest.
It’s hard to fault Barrett for the call. In real time, he can’t zoom in and pause the play to see the tiny space between Chisholm’s foot and the corner of the bag.
I asked Lorenzen if he knew Chisholm would run on that 3-2 pitch, and if that’s why he held set for so long — the same way he did earlier in the at-bat when he threw over. He didn’t know for sure, he said, but “I take pride in changing my timing, especially if I know you’re a runner. Every pitch I threw that at-bat was a slidestep. I thought I executed some good pitches doing that in that situation, changing my looks and changing my times.”
Chisholm, for his part, said he was safe. During the replay, he and Massey talked about the play. “He was like, ‘I think I put down a good tag,’” Chisholm recalled in his postgame media scrum. “I said, ‘You did put down a good tag, but that doesn’t mean I’m out.’”
I walked with Chisholm on his way out of the clubhouse. I wanted to ask him about his baserunning strategy. Chisholm told me he didn’t think Lorenzen was going to throw over on that sixth pitch, but he conceded that it wasn’t his best jump. He also credited Lorenzen for making things so close.
“He had a 1.2 with a slidestep,” said Chisholm, referring to the time it takes Lorenzen to deliver to the plate. “Yeah, he held it for a minute, but I was really trusting AV. He was either gonna throw a ball in the dirt, or he was gonna throw a ball for AV to make contact with, and I’m gonna get to third base.”
Yes, Chisholm got a bad jump, and based on the replay footage, he probably wasn’t safe, but he still made the smart decision to run there. In a tight game, it was worth the risk. As he said, if Volpe had hit a single, Chisholm would’ve gone to third with nobody out. If Volpe had put the ball in the gap, Chisholm would’ve scored easily.
The cat-and-mouse game is likely to continue if Chisholm reaches base in Game 2. Cole Ragans, a lefty, is even better than Lorenzen at preventing stolen bases. According to Baseball Savant, Ragans ranks eighth in Advances Prevented vs. Avg., a stat that measures how much better or worse than average a pitcher is at keeping baserunners from advancing (via steals or balks) in basestealing situations at first base. Notably, this metric does not account for any outs that baserunners make during these stealing situations; the few players who dare to run against Ragans are safe more often than not. (His -3 Outs vs. Avg. is tied for the worst mark among all qualified pitchers.) This isn’t all that uncommon among pitchers who are good at preventing steals, which makes intuitive sense: Because these pitchers are so difficult to steal against, the baserunners who do attempt to advance tend to be some of the game’s top basestealers. That, of course, brings us back to Chisholm, a great basestealer who is smart and aggressive about picking his spots to run.
It took one of the best pitchers at controlling the running game, one of the best catchers at exchanging the ball from his glove to his throwing hand, and one of the most efficient snags and tags possible on such a play to make things close on Saturday. Everything went in Kansas City’s favor. Well, everything except the call. The two teams will be ready to do it all again Monday night in Game 2. We’ll see if the results will be any different.
