There is a moment, in every series a manager has ever managed, when the lineup card stops being a list of names and starts being a question. Sometimes the question is gentle — should we sit the catcher today, give him a rest, get the backup his at-bats. Sometimes the question is harder. Sometimes the question is: what we have been doing is not working, and what should we do instead?
Doug Triblehorn answered that question Monday morning in something close to the loudest way a manager can answer it. He took out four starters from Sunday's lineup. He moved his three-hole hitter to leadoff. He moved his leadoff hitter to the three-hole. He moved his shortstop from the two-hole to the six-hole. He gave Kody Clemens his first start of the season. He gave Colton Cowser his first start of the series. He sat Brett Baty (0-for-9), Byron Buxton (1-for-10), Gleyber Torres, and Yainer Diaz. He played Mark Vientos at third, Adley Rutschman behind the plate, Cowser in right.
Four-of-nine spots changed. Three more got shuffled. The Komodo lineup that took the field for Game 4 against Zach Wheeler was, in the most literal sense, a different team than the one that had been losing this series for three days.
In the bottom of the second inning, Mark Vientos — playing third base in place of the rookie who had gone 0-for-9 in three games — hit Zach Wheeler's fourth pitch of the at-bat over the wall in left-center. A solo home run. One to nothing, Dragons. The first hit of any kind that the new lineup card produced was a home run from a player whose name had not appeared in the previous three lineups.
In the top of the fourth, Juan Soto answered with a solo shot of his own off Andrew Abbott — Abbott, who at that point had thrown almost nothing but strikes and gotten almost everyone out. Soto turned on an 0-1 fastball that caught the inner third and pulled it into the second deck in right field. Tied one to one.
In the bottom of the sixth, with one out and Elly De La Cruz on second after a walk and a wild pitch, Riley Greene — the one bat from the original Bobcats-series lineup who had hung onto his spot through everything, despite an 0-for-9 series of his own — hit a Wheeler curveball into right field for the kind of single that does not get talked about in highlight packages. It scored De La Cruz. It made it two to one. It turned out to be the game.
Abbott went five and one-third. Adrian Morejon went two innings of zero. Sean Newcombe finished the last five outs, picked up the save. The Bobcats managed four hits all night and gave Wheeler — who pitched a quality start and deserved better — his first loss in a long, long time.
The lineup card did not win the game. Abbott and Morejon and Newcombe won the game. But the lineup card got the runs, and you cannot beat Zach Wheeler in a two-to-one game without runs. The benched players did not make it onto the field until late, mostly as defensive replacements and pinch-runs. The four new starters between them produced three of the four Komodo hits, drew three walks, scored both runs, and drove in both runs. That is what is called, in the language of a manager who has had to make this kind of call before, productive at-bats.
The series is tied. The Bobcats and the Dragons play one more, on Tuesday at Komodo Park. Houser for the Dragons. Eovaldi for the Bobcats. Winner takes the set. Whatever happens, the Komodo Dragons just survived a game in a series they had no business surviving, with a lineup half of which did not exist twenty-four hours earlier. Sometimes the manager makes the call. Sometimes the call answers.
What did the call look like, before the answer arrived? It looked like a manager standing at a whiteboard at 9:47 a.m. on Monday morning, in the small office that the home manager keeps off the back hallway of the Komodo Park clubhouse, with the assistant general manager and the bench coach and the hitting coach standing around him, working through the names. Vientos for Baty, that was easy — Baty had been 0-for-9 with five strikeouts, and Vientos had been on the bench all series with no at-bats of consequence, and the only reason Vientos had not started yet was that Triblehorn had wanted to give the rookie a chance to settle in. The rookie had not settled in. Vientos went up on the card. That was the first move.
Cowser for Buxton was the second. Buxton had gone 1-for-10 with six strikeouts and the one hit had been an infield single against a sweeper in the dirt that he had topped to third. He was not seeing the ball. He had been complaining of mild back tightness for three days, which Triblehorn took as both legitimate and convenient — a manager can sit a struggling outfielder when there is a back to sit him for, and the back, in this case, was real enough to be sat. Cowser had been hitting line drives off the pitching machine at full velocity for four straight days. Cowser had not played in any of the three games. Cowser went up on the card. Second move.
Rutschman for Diaz was the third. Diaz had caught three games in a row, which is the catcher's load that no manager wants to push past — especially when the catcher in question has caught Rasmussen and Joe Ryan and Abbott in three consecutive games and has now seen something like four hundred pitches across nine days. Rutschman was, by every measure available to the analytics department, the better game-caller in the Komodo system. He was the more patient hitter. He was the better blocker. He had been catching bullpens for the entire first half of the season as the backup. He had not started a game since the third week of May. Rutschman went up on the card. Third move.
Clemens for Torres was the fourth. This was the harder call. Torres was not having a particularly bad series — he was 1-for-9 with a Game 2 home run and the kind of plate discipline that Triblehorn liked to see at the top of the order — but Torres was also slumping at second base, with three errors in the previous ten games and a routine ground ball booted in the third inning of Game 2 that should have ended an inning. Clemens had been with the major-league club for six weeks. He had not started a game. He had played second base, third base, and right field in the minors. The scouting reports said his glove was steady. Clemens went up on the card. Fourth move.
Four moves. Four-ninths of a lineup card. The manager looked at the whiteboard, looked at the four new names, looked at the three positions where he had moved his existing starters into different slots, and asked the room whether anyone disagreed. No one disagreed. The hitting coach said, "We need contact and we need bottom-of-the-order baserunners." The bench coach said, "We need the order to turn over against Wheeler." The assistant general manager said, "We need to score two runs." The manager nodded. The card was the card.
The card paid off in the second inning, with Vientos's home run, in the way that cards sometimes pay off — immediately, dramatically, with the kind of swing that confirms every decision in the room. Vientos saw an 0-0 fastball at ninety-five miles per hour from Wheeler, took it for a called strike. He saw a 0-1 curveball that hung at the bottom of the zone, took it for a ball. He saw a 1-1 sinker that ran in on his hands, fouled it off into the third-base dugout. He saw a 1-2 changeup at the bottom of the zone, away — the put-away pitch — and he laid off it for a ball. He saw a 2-2 fastball at the top of the zone, on the inner third, the kind of fastball that Wheeler had been getting away with all season, and he did not let it get away. Exit velocity 104 miles per hour. Distance 412 feet. The ball landed in the third row of the left-center bleachers and the Komodo crowd, which had been polite-but-quiet through the first inning and a half of a scoreless ballgame, rose in the kind of way that crowds rise when their team's lineup card has just announced itself.
Soto's home run in the fourth was a quieter event, in the way that opposing-team home runs are always quieter events. He turned on Abbott's 0-1 fastball, caught it on the sweet spot, sent it into the second deck in right field on the kind of trajectory that does not require comment. The Bobcats' first baseman shrugged. The Dragons' shortstop watched the ball clear the fence with the bored, professional patience of a player who has watched many home runs clear many fences. Tied at one. The game returned to its scoreless logic — for two more innings, anyway, until Greene's single in the sixth produced the run that decided the matter.
Greene's at-bat in the sixth deserves its own paragraph, because the at-bat in the sixth was a kind of distillation of what Triblehorn had been hoping for when he kept Greene in the lineup despite the 0-for-9. De La Cruz had walked to lead off the inning — a four-pitch walk, on a four-pitch sequence in which Wheeler missed inside, missed outside, missed inside again, and missed outside again. Wheeler does not miss four pitches in a row very often. The walk was an aberration. The wild pitch that moved De La Cruz to second was a second aberration — a curveball that Wheeler tried to bury at the bottom of the strike zone and instead skidded under the catcher's mitt. By the time Greene came to the plate, the Dragons had a runner on second with no one out and the kind of opportunity that good lineups cash and bad lineups waste.
The Dragons, for three games, had been a bad lineup. The Dragons, on Monday night, with the new card, were a different lineup. Greene worked a five-pitch at-bat — ball, called strike, swinging strike on a low slider, ball, and then the sixty-five-mile-an-hour curveball that he served into right field for the single. The runner from second scored standing up. Two to one. The crowd, which had been holding the kind of breath that crowds hold when their team has the lead-in-the-game runner on second with one out, exhaled in the way that crowds exhale when the runner scores.
That was the game. Morejon worked the seventh and eighth — six up, six down, two strikeouts, four ground balls — and Newcombe finished the ninth and the front half of the eighth, the last five outs, with the kind of clinical efficiency that lefties bring to late-inning work against a lineup loaded with right-handed bats. The Bobcats put together a single base-runner in the top of the eighth — Abrams on a one-out walk against Newcombe — but Newcombe got Soto on a strikeout looking and Tucker on a roller back to the mound, and the inning was over. The ninth: Olson groundout, Machado strikeout, Bellinger groundout. Three outs in eleven pitches. The Komodo crowd erupted. The series, which had been two-to-one Bobcats forty-five minutes earlier, was now two-to-two with one game to play.
What happened, in that 9:47 a.m. meeting in the manager's office, was the kind of thing that does not happen often enough in baseball. Most managers, when their team is losing a series, look at the lineup card and the four-of-nine that has produced two hits in three games and they tell themselves that the regression is coming, that the bats will wake up, that the players who have produced for them all season will produce again tomorrow. That is the conventional thinking, and the conventional thinking is, most of the time, correct. The Bobcats' bats woke up in Game 3 because they were going to wake up at some point and they happened to wake up against Joe Ryan. The Dragons' bats might have woken up in Game 4 against Wheeler without any changes at all. The conventional thinking would have produced, on a different night, the same result.
Triblehorn did not go with conventional thinking. He did something harder, which is to say he made the kind of move that, if it does not work, produces fourteen days of second-guessing from the beat writers and a long, awkward postseason press conference. Sitting Baty, the rookie, is one thing — the rookie has options, the rookie has not earned untouchable status. Sitting Buxton is another thing — Buxton is a veteran with a no-trade clause and the kind of presence in the clubhouse that does not respond well to being told to take a seat. Sitting Diaz is a third thing — Diaz had caught the previous three games and was, by his own admission in the postgame, "ready to catch every game in this series." Sitting Torres is a fourth thing. Four veterans sat. Four backups inserted. The room, at 9:47 a.m., was tense.
By 10:15 a.m., the room had been broken up and the lineup card had been posted on the clubhouse wall. By 10:30 a.m., the four sat players had come to the manager's office, one at a time, to ask what was going on. Triblehorn explained. He explained four times. He said the same thing each time: You're not out of the lineup. You're out of this lineup, for this game, because I think the matchup against Wheeler is better with the other guys today. Tomorrow you might be back in. Tonight you're not. Three of the four veterans nodded. Buxton, the fourth, asked a question. Triblehorn answered the question. Buxton nodded. The conversation ended.
What had the players who were benched produced, before they were benched? Buxton: 1-for-10, six strikeouts, no walks. Baty: 0-for-9, five strikeouts, no walks. Torres: 1-for-9, one home run, four strikeouts. Diaz: 1-for-8, two strikeouts, one walk. Collectively, four-for-thirty-six, with one extra-base hit, seventeen strikeouts, and one walk. That is a slash line of .111 / .135 / .194, which is the slash line of a player who is not going to play in the big leagues for very much longer. Two of them — Buxton, Torres — are veterans with proven track records that will get them through this kind of stretch without much fuss. Two of them — Baty, Diaz — are young players who, given a few more games like the first three, would be looking at being on the bench through July. Triblehorn made the decision now rather than waiting. The card paid off now rather than waiting.
It is worth noting, as Stark always notes about lineup changes that work, that there is a particular kind of survivorship bias at play here. We are writing about the lineup change because it worked. We are not writing about the lineup change because it produced two runs, neither of which came from the player whose decision was the loudest (Buxton's bench), and one of which came from a player who had not been moved at all (Greene, who stayed in the five-hole). If Vientos had gone 0-for-3, if Greene had grounded into a double play in the sixth, if the Bobcats had scored two more runs in the late innings and won the game 4-1, we would be writing about the manager's hubris and the lineup card's failure and the cost of departing from the regular order. The lineup change worked because the bottom of it produced runs and the top of it did not give up runs. The lineup change worked because Vientos saw a fastball he could turn on and Greene saw a curveball he could poke into right field and the rest of it filled in around those two moments. The lineup change worked because, at 9:47 a.m., Doug Triblehorn looked at four names and made a decision and the decision was right.
The series is tied at two. The Bobcats and Dragons will play one more, Tuesday evening at Komodo Park. Nathan Eovaldi for the Bobcats — the veteran right-hander with the cutter and the splitter, the four-pitch mix, the strike-thrower's strike-thrower. Adrian Houser for the Dragons — the soft-contact specialist, the right-hander who induces ground balls and lives at the bottom of the zone. Winner takes the series. Loser goes home with three losses across five games against the team that has been the best team in baseball all season.
What lineup will Triblehorn run out for Game 5? The question is, in fairness, not the question it would have been at this time yesterday. Yesterday, the lineup was the regular lineup and the question was whether the regular lineup would produce. Tonight, the regular lineup is not the regular lineup. The lineup that produced two runs in Game 4 is, by any reasonable accounting of recent performance, the lineup that has the better chance of producing two more runs in Game 5. Vientos with the home run goes back up. Cowser with the double goes back up. Rutschman with the walk and the single goes back up. Clemens with the walk goes back up. The four-of-nine that the manager changed in Game 4 will, in all likelihood, be the four-of-nine that he keeps in Game 5.
Unless he doesn't. Unless he decides that the Game 5 matchup against Eovaldi calls for a different alignment. Unless he looks at Eovaldi's splitter-heavy approach and decides that the lineup needs to be loaded with left-handed bats, which would mean putting Buxton back in, possibly Baty, possibly Torres. Unless he looks at the way Houser pitches and decides that Houser needs a defensive catcher rather than an offensive one, which would mean Diaz back behind the plate. Unless. Unless. Unless. The lineup card on Tuesday morning will be a different lineup card than the one on Monday morning. That much is certain. What names go on it, and in what order, remains, on Monday night, the kind of unanswered question that is going to keep the bench coach and the hitting coach and the assistant general manager up past midnight.
The Komodo clubhouse, after Game 4, was loud — the kind of loud that home clubhouses get when a team has won a game it badly needed to win, with a lineup it had not seen before, in front of a home crowd that had not, by any measure, expected to be in this position. Vientos was at the center of it. Greene was at the center of it. Cowser, the rookie, was being congratulated by everyone in the room. Rutschman, the catcher whose first start in five weeks had produced a walk and a single and four innings of clean game-calling, was getting beers handed to him. Clemens, the second baseman whose first start of the season had produced an 0-for-2 with a walk and two clean defensive plays, was smiling the smile of a player who has, finally, gotten the chance.
And Triblehorn, who had made the call that the room was now celebrating, was sitting in the corner of the clubhouse with the lineup card from the game in front of him and a Sharpie in his hand, making notes. Tuesday is Tuesday. Tuesday is Game 5. Tuesday is Eovaldi and Houser and the kind of single-elimination atmosphere that the Komodo Park crowd will produce in a way that only Game 5 crowds can produce. The Komodo manager has six hours, from the end of Game 4 to the team meeting tomorrow at noon, to figure out what the next lineup card will say. The current lineup card, which is the one in front of him on the table, has Vientos at seven, Cowser leading off, Rutschman at nine, Clemens at two. Triblehorn looks at it. He underlines the four names. He writes a question mark next to each one.
Then he puts the cap back on the Sharpie and folds the card into his pocket and walks out of the clubhouse to face the press. Tuesday is Tuesday. Monday was Monday. The manager made the call. The call answered. The series is tied. The bus, by the time the press conference ends, will not be pulling out anywhere — both teams remain at Komodo Park, both teams have one more day of baseball to play, both teams have one more lineup card to assemble, both teams have one more chance to win the series. Tuesday will decide it. Tuesday is twenty hours away. The series is tied at two.