Installment 13: The best team in baseball history had the largest blown lead in baseball history.
Part 1.
The 2000 Mariners lost the American League Championship Series in the bullpen. Seattle relievers blew leads in the seventh inning of one loss and the eighth inning of another. Their opponents’ bullpen, meanwhile, was excellent:
Yankees’ ALCS bullpen ERA: 2.91
Mariners’ ALCS bullpen ERA: 8.55
So that winter the Mariners signed the Yankees’ best set-up man, Jeff Nelson. Seattle’s bullpen now promised to be a strength in 2001. The three relievers who had allowed the lowest batting averages in the AL the previous season—Nelson, Arthur Rhodes and Kazuhiro Sazaki—were now all Mariners. “With the addition of Jeff, in my estimation, we have the most dominant bullpen in the American League,” the Seattle GM Pat Gillick said, and he was right.
Seattle had the league’s best bullpen ERA in 2001. From the seventh inning on that year, they outscored their opponents by 115 runs. And overall they won 116 games, tying the 1906 Cubs for the most regular-season wins ever1.
They would have won 117 if they hadn’t blown a 14-2 lead in the final three innings on August 5, matching two bad early-20th-century teams for the largest blown lead in MLB history.
Cleveland’s win expectancy in the game actually hit zero as early as the top of the third inning, when the lead was still only eight runs. Zero, in this case, is an inexact representation of a tiny, but still real, chance of a comeback. By my rough math, though, the chances of Cleveland winning the game dropped to as low as 1 in 2,650—0.03 percent—when there were two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning. That’s without factoring in that their opponent was those 116-win Mariners.
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The way it happened is pretty straightforward: 16 of the next 21 Cleveland batters reached base. They went:
—single, walk, walk, single, fly out /
Home run, HBP, home run, groundout, single, single, double, strikeout /
Single, fly out, strikeout, double, walk, single, single, triple—
For what we’re talking about, it was pretty tame.
A pitcher tries to do three things: Throw strikes (avoid walks), miss bats (get strikeouts), and miss barrels (avoid hits). The Mariners relievers, from the moment they began entering the game until the score was 14-14, did the first two pretty well. They threw 64 pitches, 41 of them were strikes, and eight of them were swinging strikes:
Mid-Meltdown Relievers: 64 percent strikes, 12.5 percent swinging strikes
2001 AL League Average: 63 percent strikes, 9 percent swinging strikes.
I can’t say they avoided all hard contact—there were two homers in the eighth, obviously hit hard—but the rest of the batted balls were a scraggly bunch:
The first hit was a blooper off the end of the bat, just barely too shallow for the left-fielder to dive for it;
the second hit was a swinging bunt to the third baseman;
the third hit was a soft liner past the shortstop, this close to an out:
the fourth hit was a pop flare down the line, this close to a foul:
the fifth hit was a groundball squared solidly up the middle;
the sixth hit was solidly off the wall in left field;
the seventh hit was lined into left field, on a pitch out of the strike zone;
the eighth hit was a grounder slapped the other way, between the third baseman and shortstop;
the ninth hit was grounded down the line past the first baseman; I’d guess it was struck 92.7 mph.
There were also two huge moments in the ninth inning that went Cleveland’s way:
1. With Cleveland down by five leading off the bottom of the ninth, catcher Ed Taubensee singled. The next batter flied out to right field. For some reason, Taubensee let himself get doubled off first base:
But he was called safe. There was no replay review in 2001 so Taubensee just got away with it, and after the next hitter struck out the inning and the game were still stubbornly alive.
2. Later in the ninth, with Cleveland still down by three but the bases loaded, Omar Vizquel had a 2-2 count. Kazuhiro Sasaki threw a fastball down the middle and Vizquel—having chased two low splitters and presumably expecting a third—froze. This is the final frame before the ball hits the catcher’s mitt:
It’s a strike by probably six inches in any direction. But it was called a ball, and the game continued.
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Vizquel would go on to ground a ball down the line past Ed Sprague, the first baseman. The ball then got past the right-fielder Charles Gipson, who struggled to play the carom in a crowded corner, allowing Kenny Lofton to score from first and tie the game. Both defenders might have playing too far off the line, given the situation.
Ed Sprague was not the 116-win Mariners’ regular first baseman. That was John Olerud, who won Gold Gloves in 2000 and 2002. Sprague was not a first baseman, not good at defense in general, and about 100 innings from the end of his career. Charles Gipson was not the 116-win Mariners’ regular right fielder. That was Ichiro Suzuki, who would won the Gold Glove in 2001. Gipson and Sprague were only in the game because, in the blowout, both teams had taken a bunch of their regulars out early.
Most of the lead wasn’t blown by the high-leverage relievers Nelson, Rhodes and Sasaki. It was mostly blown by a tiring starter, a long reliever, and a lower-leverage lefty. For most of the collapse, the good relievers were just a distant threat.
By the time any of Nelson, Rhodes and Sasaki started to appear on the mound, there were already two outs in the ninth and the tying run was already in the hole.
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“I think this could be the turning point of the season,” said Jolbert Cabrera, who had the winning hit (while breaking his bat) for Cleveland in the 11th inning. Nah, it wasn’t. Cleveland had a .559 winning percentage entering the game; they had a .558 winning percentage in the rest of the season that followed the game. Seattle played at a 114-win pace the rest of the way. When they met Cleveland in the Division series, they won the series in five games. The 12-run lead the Mariners blew wasn’t a turning point, it was just a blip, caused by some bad luck, some bad calls, some marginally worse-than-expected performances, some mistakes made by bottom-of-the-roster players, and a strong opponent. It was extraordinary, it was “stranger than fiction” in the words of Jon Miller, but it was also just a fluke.
So if you want a takeaway from this account, it’s this:
In small-enough samples, the best team in history can be, literally, the worst team in history.
Part 2.
And that might have been my only takeaway from this game, if not for something Jeff Nelson said many years later. This was when Nelson was a part-time broadcaster for the Yankees’ television network. One August day, the subject of the 2001 Yankees came up. Nelson said:
