On the day that Garrett Crochet signed his extension this spring, Dan Secatore described a baseball season like this:
Every baseball season begins as a locked box of possibilities — an infinite number of ways
to tell an infinite number of stories, any of which could end up being the story of the baseball season. But only one of those possible stories sneaks out of the box. We watch baseball to find out which story that is, whether it’s the one with the happy ending or the sad, the one that drives us crazy or the one that makes us sing.
Well, leave it to the baseball gods to cook this one up!
We’ve landed on a win-or-go-home, do-or-die night at Yankees Stadium with a pitching matchup of … [checks notes] … Connelly Early vs. Cam Schlittler. The number of things that had to happen for us to arrive at this juncture is nothing short of astounding. Both of these guys started the season in Double A, with Schlitter pitching for the Somerset Patriots until June, and Early for the Portland Sea Dogs until July.
Those two teams actually ran into each twice over the first half of the season, but Early and Schlittler never lined up to meet in the same game. Instead, it got saved for tonight when two titans of the sport, with payrolls totaling over a half a billion dollars, clash for a Game 3 that might as well be a Game 7. It’s one of those things that’s so beautifully baseball you can’t help but be both amazed and dumbfoundingly horrified all at the same time. Nobody outside of prospect hounds knew who these guys were four months ago, and now, one of them is about to become a postseason legend.
Early’s journey is even more dizzying when you consider that he’s never pitched on the road in a real major league stadium. He has just four big league starts, and the two on the road were in the minor league park the A’s are using in Sacramento, and the spring training facility the Rays had to used this year thanks to Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida last October. Now, he goes straight into the cauldron of Yankee Stadium with an entire season on the line. This will be baptism by fire.
It once again underscores how, more so than any other sport, nobody has any idea how these MLB playoff games are going to play out. The baseball gods laugh and mock anybody who tries to make plans. But hey, let’s try to set the table for tonight anyway.
Below is a check in on the Sox pitching staff (all the arms on the Wild Card roster) as well as some quick notes on their availability.
Without a doubt, the biggest thing that jumps out is how much that Whitlock outing from Game 2 hurts. Not only did he crack and give up the winning run last night, but Cora had to stretch him so much in an attempt to bridge the entire bullpen from Bello to Chapman that is almost certainly destroys his ability to be part of a bridge to Chapman tonight.
Whitlock came just nine pitches short of throwing twice as many bullets as Brayan Bello, so oddly, Bello might actually be more likely to appear in Game 3 than him. This changes the entire equation for the Sox, who on paper going into the series just needed to get through seven innings with a lead twice, hand the ball to Whitlock in the eighth and Chapman in the ninth, and then move on to the LDS.
But as usual, the baseball gods don’t care about, and absolutely and will not follow a script. Instead, they’ve opted for a menu item that includes Alex Cora and the Sox possibly needing to do something that worked for them in Game 1: just keep lefties in the game all night and try to gain the platoon advance over as much of the Yankee lineup as possible. I mean, you probably get Slaten in at some point and maybe a righty to try to get Judge at the end of an inning, but you could also just let Connelly Early keep throwing to how ever many lefties it takes to get to the final lefty in Chapman.
If that happens, you could get Connelly Early, Payton Tolle, and Kyle Harrison all in this game. An entire season coming down to three guys who are all 24 or younger. And you know what’s even crazier about that and our locked box of possibilities going into the season? Everybody thought this year was going to be about three young guys for the Sox. It was all about waiting until they had 21-year-old Roman Anthony, 22-year-old Marcelo Mayer and 23-year-old Kristian Campbell all in there at the same time. Now, none of them are a part of this series and we could end up with three young arms deciding the whole thing instead. (I will forever love and hate this sport with a burning passion!)
But this is the magic that happens in baseball when you stack games together with no off-days in a postseason series. It gets weird fast. Despite the best-of-three Wild Card round being shorter than its best of five and best of seven siblings in the LDS and LCS, it’s the only series that can start (and in this case also finish) with three consecutive games without a breather, and the more you upend the rosters in high stakes baseball, the wackier it gets.
We could be in for an all timer tonight folks. Amid the chaos of October, legends are born.
