What a Manager Does When the Game Is Already Gone

In the 7th inning yesterday, Terry Francona and the Reds found themselves staring down the barrel. Runners on second and third, one out, and the heart of the Mariners’ order stepping into the box.

Francona made his move, going to the bullpen for lefty Caleb Ferguson to match up against Dominic Canzone who is also a lefty. But before Ferguson could even throw a warm-up pitch to the batter, Francona stepped in once more by putting Canzone on intentionally loading the bases to bring up Cal Raleigh, the 2025 MVP candidate.

Francona was operating in a absolute disaster zone a near-zero margin scenario. According to Baseball Savant, the Mariners held a staggering 96% win probability in that exact moment.

Walking a batter to get to Cal Raleigh looks like a really strange decision from the outside looking in. The problem is that the Red’s essentially have one final shot “to keep the game in tact”. Holding the Mariners to 3 runs facing their best arms out of the bullpen isn’t an ideal situation.

Even before issuing the free pass to Canzone, the Reds were backed into a corner. They needed two clean outs without surrendering a single run just to keep their microscopic win probability where it is. A base hit scores two, but the real threat was the much smaller like a sacrifice fly, a soft grounder any of which plates a run.

To fans watching, walking Canzone to face Raleigh felt like madness. Francona didn't pretend it was easy either. "It's not a comfortable situation either way," Francona admitted after the game. "Saying that, I do that every time. We have to try to keep them from scoring more." But three-run leads late in a game are a fortress big-league managers don't deal in hope, because mistakes today compound tomorrow.

In fact, the hill is steep way before the 7th inning. According to Baseball Savant, when a team falls behind by just three runs as early as the 4th inning, their win probability drops below 10%. By the 7th most paths to victory are already closed.

That is precisely why sitting on your hands isn’t an option. Even with a 10% shot, simply letting the inning play out and marching passively toward an almost inevitable loss is bad management. Pushing your chips to the center to preserve any sliver of hope is a move that deserves credit, not second-guessing.

Facing Canzone with runners on second and third meant pulling the infield in to cut off the run at the plate drastically increasing the odds of a routine grounder squeaking through for a base hit. By intentionally walking Canzone to load the bases, Francona sacrificed a base runner to gain crucial real estate, allowing his infield to drop back to double-play depth.

Realistically, Francona wasn’t managing to play ideal baseball. He knew that if Canzone drops a single into the outfield and pushes the deficit to five, those final six offensive outs really don’t matter. The game becomes an exercise in playing out the string.

Unfortunately for the Reds, the gamble didn’t pay off. As Francona bluntly put it after the game: “The worst possible outcome happened.”

When the final box score hits the paper, casual observers will point to Cal Raleigh stepping to the plate with the bases loaded and call it a managerial blunder. In baseball, result-oriented bias is a hard habit to break, if a radical move fails, the manager gets roasted; if it works, he’s a genius. But judging Terry Francona by the outcome misses the entire point of high-leverage decision-making. Francona didn’t walk Canzone because he was blind to Raleigh’s bat. He walked him because he understood the grim reality of the scoreboard: in a game where his team was already at a 4% win probability, sticking to the standard playbook was surrender.

Francona gave his squad the only thing they had left a fighting chance. Francona didn’t lose this game in the 7th with an intentional walk, he fought to keep it alive when the room was already out of oxygen. You can criticize the result all day, but when the season is on the line, that relentless pursuit of leverage is precisely the process you want steering the ship.