“You got to tip your hat to Hosmer right there, it took some balls.” — Mets first baseman Lucas Duda
The baseball was in the air, whizzing toward first base, and Eric Hosmer was sprinting down the line, and Mike Jirschele had a bad feeling. “I wasn’t real happy he took off,” Jirschele says now.
It wasn’t that Jirschele, the Royals’ third base coach, thought the decision to run was reckless. Just the night before, during the eighth inning of Game 4, he stood near the third-base bag and told Hosmer that he could have gone. Hosmer was on third after reaching on an error by Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy. The Royals had already scored twice in the inning and were poised to take a 3-1 lead in the 2015 World Series. And moments earlier, a pickoff attempt had squirted away from first baseman Lucas Duda, settling into the grass a few feet into foul territory. Hosmer had thought about taking off, but then he stopped, and he wanted to know what Jirschele thought.
Advertisement
“Yeah,” Jirschele told him, “you probably could have.”
The way Jirschele saw it, Duda would have had to scramble into foul territory, pick up the ball, and then spin toward home plate. It was a difficult play for anyone, least of all a 6-foot-4, 250-pound first baseman, and the Royals had decided before the series that they would test the arm of Duda at any opportunity. That’s what the advance reports said, and that’s what Jirschele and base-running coach Rusty Kuntz had relayed to the players, and so that’s what Hosmer was thinking about the next night, as he started down the third-base line. The Royals trailed the Mets 2-1 in the ninth inning of Game 5, and he was back on third, and Salvador Perez hit a broken-bat flare to the left of third baseman David Wright.
“You just realize,” Hosmer would say, “at that point in time that you’ve got to take a chance.”
Jirschele was no stranger to World Series drama or difficult decisions. A year earlier, he held up Alex Gordon at third base with two outs in a Game 7 against the Giants. The decision, by all analysis and accounts, was sound (Gordon had already run 270 feet and was fading) but that didn’t stop the second guessing, and that didn’t stop Jirschele from wondering himself. He was a baseball lifer who had spent 36 years in the minors before joining the Royals staff in 2014, a coach who returned home to Wisconsin each winter to tend to odd jobs in a friend’s furniture store.
Now he was back at third base, and Hosmer was running down the line, and the fate of two teams hung in the New York night. Duda caught the ball at first, Jirschele peered down the line, and for a moment he was sure: It wasn’t that Hosmer’s decision was wrong; it was that he had too far to go.
“With a good throw,” Jirschele says, “he’s out by a mile.”
A World Series can swing on a thousand little moments. If it’s not the second baseman booting a ball, then it’s the pitch that changed the previous at-bat. If it’s not the double to left field in the ninth, it’s the decision minutes earlier, when the starting pitcher demands the ball.
For the Royals, one of those moments came 457 days before Game 5 of the 2015 World Series, when a Royals advance scout named Alec Zumwalt walked into a ballpark in San Francisco to watch the Giants play the Mets in early August. For Zumwalt, the assignment was regular coverage; the Royals were set to face the Giants a week later, and he needed to file his regular reports before the series. It was, however, his first chance to see the Mets, a National League team not on the schedule that year, so he started a file on the club.
Advertisement
The 2014 Mets were not a great baseball team. They finished 79-83 and missed the playoffs for an eighth straight year. Matt Harvey was injured. Jacob deGrom was a promising rookie. Noah Syndergaard was still in the minor leagues. The lineup, however, was not all that different than 2015, and Zumwalt spent the series gathering intel. That weekend, he noticed something about Duda.
(Al Bello / Getty Images)
The life of a major-league advance scout is unglamorous. The travel is grueling; the job exists in the shadows. In the era of TrackMan, Hawk-Eye and other on-field tracking systems that measure every throw and movement, the job has never felt more endangered.
Zumwalt, then 34, took up scouting after a 10-year career in the minors. His playing life had ended on the doorstep of the major leagues, and man, was it close. One spring, he was a Rule 5 pick; another year, he was one of the final cuts in Braves camp. The proximity to the show was almost cruel. Yet when Zumwalt sat down with fellow Royals scouts Mike Pazik and Mike Toomey during the 2015 postseason, his team was on the cusp of another dream.
Zumwalt pulled out his file from the previous summer. Pazik and Toomey pooled together their resources from that postseason. They discussed where they could find an edge. The consensus was simple: Wright, the Mets third baseman, was a warrior, but his body was breaking down. Duda’s arm was a potential liability at first. The Royals should challenge them both at any chance.
The Royals, of course, had built their brand on pushing the envelope. The previous October, they had stolen seven bases against Jon Lester and the A’s during an epic wild-card comeback. That fall, in Game 6 of the ALCS, Lorenzo Cain had scored from first on a single when Toronto’s Jose Bautista fired a ball from the right-field corner to second base. The bold dash helped clinch a second straight pennant. It didn’t matter if the baseball felt like something out of the 1980s, or if the percentages didn’t always make sense. This is who they were.
“We don’t play the normal style of baseball, according to some people,” Hosmer would say. “It’s just the way we do it.”
When Duda received the throw from Wright and turned toward home in the ninth inning of Game 5, the New York Mets had already made believers of a skeptical lot.
Winners of 90 games and the National League East, they had already dispatched the Dodgers in an epic NLDS, beating Zack Greinke in Game 5 in Los Angeles. They had swept through the Cubs in the NLCS, unleashing their rotation of young aces. In the middle of it all, Murphy had turned into Ruth, homering in six straight postseason games. Kevin Long, the Mets’ hitting coach, declared his residence “on another planet.”
(Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / Corbis / via Getty Images)
“I can’t even explain Murphy,” he said.
The Mets were in the World Series for the first time in 15 years. They were four wins from their first title in 29 years. Then they turned the believers back into skeptics. Closer Jeurys Familia had blown a save in Game 1, giving up a homer to Gordon; Murphy had whiffed on a grounder in Game 4 as the Mets blew a one-run lead in the eighth. The Mets were just a few plays from carrying a 3-1 lead into Game 5. Yet as it were, they were down by the same margin, the vagaries of baseball laid bare for all to see. “I just misplayed it,” Murphy would say. “It went under my glove. They made us pay.”
Advertisement
The next night, in Game 5, Harvey would take the mound, attempting to send the series back to Kansas City. The pitcher had already lived multiple lifetimes in New York. He had debuted in 2012, throwing heat and recording strikeouts and engendering hope. By the next year, he had become the Dark Knight — the All-Star starter in Queens, the owner of Harvey Day, a favorite to win the Cy Young before his elbow gave out. He spent the 2014 season rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, returned to the majors in 2015 and on Oct. 27, five days before Game 5, he had started Game 1 of the World Series at Kauffman Stadium.
Harvey allowed three earned runs in six innings — though the first had come when center fielder Yoenis Céspedes had played a long fly ball from Alcides Escobar into an inside-the-park homer. If he could match that performance, or perhaps exceed it, the Mets would have deGrom lined up to pitch Game 6 and Noah Syndergaard, their Game 3 savior, waiting to pitch in Game 7. “It can be done,” Wright said, adding: “We’re capable of it, especially with the three guys we have on the hill.”
The Royals, meanwhile, were focused on ending the series in Game 5. They had already been bruised by a World Series the year before that stretched to seven games at Kauffman Stadium. They did not wish to do it again. In the moments after Game 4, Hosmer spoke of taking advantage of every mistake and pitcher Danny Duffy said the team was in a hurry to get home and sleep. They were so close to being champions.
The next day, on the way to Citi Field before Game 5, one of the team buses was unusually full. Zumwalt found himself sitting next to Royals broadcaster Ryan Lefebvrre. As the bus veered through New York traffic on a Sunday afternoon, Lefebvre lobbed a question to Zumwalt in an attempt at small talk.
“I was sort half joking, but I said: ‘So how are our we gonna beat these guys?’ ” Lefebvre says now. “And I’ll never forget: He turned and he looked at me and said, ‘We’ll win a game in this series because Lucas Duda cannot throw to the bases.’ ”
As Game 5 began on a perfect fall night in Queens, Zumwalt weaved his way through the stadium and found his usual place in the scout seats near home plate, wedged between Pazik, Toomey and Art Stewart, the dean of the Royals’ scouting department. Stewart had attended a World Series at Wrigley Field as a young boy in the 1930s and worked as a scout for the Yankees in the 1950s. He was at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 8, 1956, when Don Larsen threw a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, so he had personal experience with sublime performances in New York. Yet as the scouts settled in and gazed upon Harvey on the mound at Citi Field, they could tell something looked different.
Harvey opened with three scoreless innings while allowing two hits. He struck out the side in the fourth and fifth and then added another strikeout, his ninth, while working around a single in the sixth. With the Mets ahead 2-0 and his fastball humming at 96 mph, he worked through clean frames in the seventh and eighth on 18 pitches. As the crowd at Citi Field chanted his name — “Harvey, Harvey!” — he coaxed a fly-out from second baseman Ben Zobrist and strutted off the field.
Advertisement
Inside the Mets dugout, manager Terry Collins had already made plans for the final three outs. Harvey’s pitch count was at 102. The heart of the Royals’ lineup awaited in the ninth. Familia was ready to enter and face Lorenzo Cain.
Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen corralled Harvey in the dugout and delivered the news. The pitcher was stunned. “No way,” Harvey said, before making a beeline for Collins. “No way,” he said again. “No way.”
What followed was an emotional conversation between pitcher and manager, the contents of which would be delivered to the Fox television audience during the bottom of the eighth. Harvey wanted the ball. Collins relented.
“He just came over and said, ‘I want this game. I want it bad. You’ve got to leave me in,’” Collins said. “I said, ‘Matt, you’ve got us exactly where we wanted to get you.’ He said, ‘I want this game in the worst way.’
“So, obviously I let my heart get in the way of my gut. I love my players. And I trust them.”
Harvey would open the ninth inning by walking Lorenzo Cain on a 3-2 breaking ball. Hosmer followed by blistering an 0-1 fastball up against the wall in left. Collins stomped his foot, looked toward the ground and emerged from the dugout, calling upon Familia, the Mets’ lead now 2-1 with nobody out and Hosmer on second. Harvey was gutted. “I poured my heart out and gave everything I had,” he said.
(Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
The next batter was Mike Moustakas, who grounded out to second and moved Hosmer to third. That brought Perez to the plate with one out and a man on third. Standing on third base, Hosmer ran the scenarios through his mind.
Moments later, Perez swung at a 96 mph fastball on his hands. The pitch broke his bat, and the ball would move Wright to his left, just in front of shortstop Wilmer Flores. In a second, Hosmer knew what he would do. The scouting report said to test Duda. He had failed to do so the previous night. There would soon be two outs, too, and Familia was on the mound, and deep down, in that part of the brain where preparation meets instinct, something just said go. “It’s just the way we play the game,” Hosmer said. “We’re aggressive.”
Advertisement
Duda pulled the throw wide, past a lunging Travis d’Arnaud. Hosmer slid headfirst across the plate for the tying run. The groans cascaded from the lower reaches of Citi Field, from the fans who watched in horror behind home plate to those in the far reaches of the outfield, who could only yell: “He’s going!”
“I didn’t make the throw,” Duda would say.
“A good throw he’s out,” Collins would say.
“Bless his heart, Duda,” Kuntz told The Kansas City Star. “He’s a good bat.”
“You put pressure on the defense, you catch them by surprise,” Jirschele says. “How many times do you see a guy take off from third when a third baseman throws it to first?”
(Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / Corbis / via Getty Images)
The game would march into the night, and the Royals would capture their second World Series title with a five-run onslaught in the top of the 12th. Christian Colon came off the bench and lined an unlikely single into left field. Murphy made another error. Cain unloaded the bases with a three-run double. Citi Field emptied as night became morning.
Back in the final moments of Game 5, Alec Zumwalt pulled out his phone and did something he rarely does. He recorded the final pitches. He captured Wade Davis striking out Wilmer Flores and thrusting his arms in the air. He watched as the dugouts emptied and the celebration began. He enjoyed the moments with his fellow scouts.
“Wasn’t that ninth inning a miracle?” Stewart would say. “That was it. That was the ballgame.”
(Top photo: Rob Tringali / MLB Photos via Getty Images)