Peavy walks into trouble by issuing free pass to Hosmer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jake Peavy was finally ready to conquer some of the strangest of playoff demons. In seven career postseason starts, the 2007 NL Cy Young Award winner had never gotten through six innings. Not with the Padres in 2005 or 2006, not with the Red Sox in 2013, and not with the Giants in either of his starts this year.
This time was going to be different. Peavy had thrown only 57 pitches through five innings. He was feeling good, having settled into a groove after allowing single runs in each of the first two innings. It was a tie game, and Peavy was ready to bulldog his way through it.
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Lorenzo Cain flopped a single into short center field.
“There’s nothing you can do about the hit,” Peavy said. “I wouldn’t go back and put the ball in any other spot. You intend to throw it there, sometimes the ball falls in. He hits the ball right off the end of his bat, or breaks his bat, and the ball falls in.”
Eric Hosmer was the next batter, and that was when Peavy had regrets.
“(On the) 0-0 (pitch), I just missed by an inch or two, and fall behind 1-0,” Peavy said. “One-oh got away, from the start. Two-oh, I tried to throw a little sinker, take away a little bit of his aggressiveness. It looked like he was almost taking from jump street there, but at the end of the day, you can’t assume a four-hole hitter, their hottest hitter, is taking 2-0.”
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That is a fair lack of assumption. In the ALCS, Hosmer swung at a 1-0 pitch when Zach Britton had thrown 13 of his previous 15 pitches for balls. He could easily have been swinging at 2-0, and Peavy couldn’t give him a cookie.
“I knew I had to make some pitches at 3-0, because I didn’t want to walk him, but you can’t give in,” Peavy said. “Can’t have a ball on the white (the fat part of the plate) in a 2-2 game. I made two really good pitches to get back in the at-bat, and then he didn’t chase the curveball. I could’ve made a little bit better pitch with the curveball. Then Boch came and got me, tried to get Billy to hit a ground ball maybe.”
Bruce Bochy’s call to the bullpen for Jean Machi did not work out, as instead of a double play grounder, Billy Butler, who earlier had driven in a run with a single off Peavy, repeated that feat to put Kansas City ahead. Hosmer came in to score on Salvador Perez’s double off Hunter Strickland, and that closed the book on an ugly line for Peavy: five innings, four runs on six hits, with two walks and one strikeout.
Peavy fell to 1-4 in his playoff career, with a 7.05 ERA. A start that was on track fell apart for him with a bloop and a couple of pitches that just missed the zone. It can happen that fast in the playoffs, and now the World Series is tied at a game apiece after the Royals’ 7-2 win.
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