Angels manager Joe Maddon galaxy-brained his way into a big deficit Friday night. He treated Corey Seager like peak Barry Bonds and peak Josh Hamilton to, he said, fire up his team.
Maddon ordered Seager to be walked intentionally with the bases loaded in the bottom of the fourth inning against the Rangers. That gave Texas a 4-2 lead. It scored twice more in the frame, on a sacrifice fly and a balk, to go up 6-2.
The Halos' offense and the Rangers' pitching bailed out Maddon the next half-inning. LA scored five runs in the fifth to take the lead for good in an eventual 9-6 win.
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Why did Joe Maddon make this move?
So, what, exactly, was Maddon thinking by conceding a run in a manner that has been executed just three times in 72 years? Psychology, he said.
"Just trying to stay out of a big blow, and also just to stir the group up, quite frankly," he said. "That's something you don't normally do, and I thought just by going out there and doing something like that, the team might respond, simple as that.
"Seager's that good. So I know it's early in the game but I thought it could have changed the momentum of the game."
"I thought it was the right thing to do in that moment for us," he added.
Angels center fielder Mike Trout didn't seem to think so. He looked befuddled as he watched Seager get the RBI free pass.
How did the players respond?
Interestingly, Maddon said the humans who were informed of his strategy — beginning with relief pitcher Austin Warren — "dug it."
"It was a great moment on the mound. It (was) a Hallmark kind of moment on the mound," he said.
Warren sounded less enthusiastic after the game.
"Absolutely, it surprised me, but I'm not going to tell Joe Maddon no," he said, per MLB.com. "I trust Maddon a lot and it worked out."
Maddon said that he was going with his gut and not analytics.
"Numbers are one thing; human beings are something completely different, and for me, the human element right there required what we did. That's it. It had nothing to do with math," he said.
Seager didn't have a lot to say about Maddon's madness.
"At the end of the day we lost the game, so that’s really that," he said, per the Dallas Morning News. "It would've been nice to win."
"You can look at it in hindsight and say, 'Oh, it worked,' but it didn’t work," Rangers manager Chris Woodward said, per the Morning News. "We didn't execute after that. We had a 6-2 lead. We should win that game."
Who else has done it?
Maddon, coincidentally, has now called two of the three bases-loaded IBBs issued since 1950, and both times he did it against the Rangers. On Aug. 17, 2008, while managing the Rays, he ordered Hamilton walked in the ninth inning.
Ten years before that, on May 28, 1998, then-Diamondbacks manager Buck Showalter put Bonds on in the ninth inning of a game vs. the Giants.
In those previous two instances, the team that walked the slugger was leading in the game, and both times it held on for the win. Maddon's Angels had to come back, but they managed to make it 3 for 3.
