THE MORNING HORSEHIDE HERALD

THE ROTATION DESK: ALL WEEK THE WIRE SAID RASMUSSEN — THE RAYS SAY MARTINEZ, SIX-AND-THIRTY YEARS OLD AND AN ALL-STAR AT LAST, WHOSE CLUB HAS WON FOUR-AND-TWENTY OF HIS THREE-AND-THIRTY STARTS, AND THE ACE SLIDES TO SATURDAY WITH HIS OWN BLESSING

The wire spent the idle days reckoning Drew Rasmussen likely for the opener, and this paper printed the reckoning with the hedge it deserved. The Rays, it turns out, were reading a different page of the ledger. On Thursday afternoon the club announced that Nick Martinez — 36 years old, a big-leaguer since 2014, and an All-Star for the first time in his life this season — will take the ball in tonight's first game at American Family Field, opposite Jacob Misiorowski and the best pitching line in baseball.³

The case for the veteran is written in the club's own results. Tampa Bay has won 24 of the 33 games Martinez has started this year, October included; the man himself went 15-6 with a 3.10 earned-run average across 180 regular-season innings, and in two postseason starts — both on the road, against the Yankees and against Cleveland — he has allowed three runs on seven hits and three walks in nine innings.¹³ The road, indeed, is where he has been best all year: a 2.38 figure in 16 starts away from the dome against 3.90 beneath it, and his first start in Tampa Bay colors came at this very park in March, when he held Milwaukee to two runs over six innings in a 3-2 victory — the club's only win of that opening set. He joins Scott Kazmir of 2008 and Tyler Glasnow of 2020 as the only men ever to start a World's Series opener for the franchise, and at 36 years and 79 days he will be the oldest pitcher to make his Series debut by starting a first game since Boston's Tim Wakefield and St. Louis' Woody Williams did it opposite each other in 2004.³ The manager, Kevin Cash, compressed the whole argument into five words: "When Nick pitches, we win."³

The mechanics behind the surprise are pure Tampa Bay bookkeeping. Rasmussen slides to Saturday's second game on five days' rest — the allotment he has had for 23 of his 30 regular-season starts and all three of his October outings — and Freddy Peralta, most valuable man of the American round, is held for Monday's third game under the Tropicana roof, where his figure since the August deadline is 1.45 across seven starts. The alignment leaves both Peralta and Griffin Jax available from the bullpen in the first two games besides.³ The ace himself endorsed the demotion that is not one: "That puts my mind at ease, for sure... We're confident he's going to get us off in the right direction." And the man with the ball tonight made no speeches about it: "It fell on me, and my job is just to rack up as many outs as we can and keep us in this ballgame." Of the batting order he must keep in it against: "They fight for every pitch. It's going to be an absolute dogfight."³

THE ELEVENTH-HOUR DESK: A ROSTER DUE AT TEN O'CLOCK THIS MORNING AND A SHOULDER FOUR MONTHS SILENT — WOODRUFF'S CASE STANDS AT 'LITERALLY A 50-50 TOSSUP,' AND THE RULE-BOOK, NOT THE RADAR GUN, MAY CAST THE DECIDING VOTE

The last name on Milwaukee's roster will be settled at ten o'clock this morning, Milwaukee time, and as of Thursday evening nobody in the organization would call it. "It's literally a 50-50 tossup right now," said one person in the know — and the person in the know included neither Brandon Woodruff nor the president of baseball operations, Matt Arnold, who met the pitcher face to face Thursday afternoon with the question still open between them.⁴

The story this paper has followed all week now reaches its verdict. Woodruff, 33, the longest-tenured Brewer, was to have spent this month recovering from an August shoulder surgery; an August scan showed improvement nobody expected, the operation was cancelled, and a five-week throwing program carried him to Tuesday's simulated game — 23 pitches at 90 to 92 miles the hour against the heart of his own order. The complication is not the arm but the statute. An injured man may ordinarily be replaced on a Series roster, but Milwaukee's best understanding is that the league would likely deny a substitution for Woodruff as a preexisting injury — which means a wrong guess could leave the club a man short for the length of the Series. The arithmetic of the choice is equally plain: the Brewers carried 13 pitchers through the first two rounds and used 11 of them, so Woodruff's place would come at the cost of Chad Patrick or Kyle Harrison.⁴

What the clubhouse thinks is not in doubt. "The velocity was there," said William Contreras, who caught the simulated game from the batter's box. "As a player, everybody wants 'Big Woo' on the team." The ledger explains the sentiment: 55 wins against 30 defeats and a 3.10 earned-run average over 790 1/3 innings these past nine seasons — the best figure in franchise history for any man with 500 innings logged — and no small share of the organization's whole revival. The pitcher, for his part, declines to lobby: "I care about one thing, and that's winning. I know it's not an easy decision."⁴ By the time tonight's first pitch is thrown, it will have been made.

THE ARBITERS' DESK: TWO MEN WILL SEE THEIR FIRST WORLD'S SERIES FROM INSIDE IT — MORALES TAKES THE PLATE TONIGHT, LENTZ AT SIX-AND-THIRTY IS THE YOUNGEST SERIES UMPIRE IN FOUR YEARS, AND THE SEASON'S CHALLENGE LEDGER FOLLOWS EVERY MAN ONTO THE FIELD

The men who will call it have names now. The league has handed the Series to a crew of seven under the chief James Hoye: Dan Bellino, Vic Carapazza, Tripp Gibson, Nic Lentz, Gabe Morales and Jim Wolf complete the roll, with Morales behind the plate for tonight's opener and Wolf taking it Saturday. It is the third World's Series for Hoye and for Wolf, the second for Bellino, Carapazza and Gibson, and the first for Lentz and Morales — and Lentz, 36, becomes the youngest man to work a Series since Pat Hoberg in 2022.⁵

Yesterday's number set out how sparingly the two clubs spend their challenges on the mechanical arbiter; today the paper can report on the men they would be challenging. By the season's public ledger, Lentz was overturned on just 48.3 percent of the challenges brought against him, the ninth-best mark among the 76 umpires challenged a hundred times or more; Gibson, Morales, Carapazza and Hoye all stood inside the top thirty, Wolf sat 39th, and Bellino, at 59.9 percent, ranked 65th. In the division round, Gibson, Hoye, Lentz and Morales were perfect — the machine sided with each of them on every challenge brought.⁵ The crew carries some history in its luggage besides: Gibson held the plate for the fourth game of the 2022 Series, the second no-hitter the event has ever seen. Alfonso Márquez and D.J. Reyburn will sit the replay bureau in New York.⁵ The automated arbiter, as this paper noted yesterday, waits only on a tap of the helmet; tonight it learns whether anyone in a World's Series dares summon it.

THE PROVENANCE DESK: TWO UNWANTED SALARIES, A HOSPITAL BED AND A SOUTHWEST FLIGHT OUT OF LAS VEGAS — THE 2018 SWAP NOBODY WATCHED SENT DÍAZ ONE WAY AND BAUERS THE OTHER, AND EIGHT YEARS LATER IT FURNISHED BOTH SIDES OF THE WORLD'S SERIES

This paper set out on Tuesday how thick the Series runs with reunions — each pennant round's most valuable man facing the club that first dressed him. The ledger, it develops, has a favorite of its own. On December 13, 2018, the Rays, Cleveland and the Mariners completed a three-cornered transaction built entirely around money nobody wished to keep paying: Cleveland owed Edwin Encarnación $24 million for 2019, Seattle owed Carlos Santana $35 million over two years, and the veterans were swapped to ease both books, with cash and a draft pick greasing the corners. The deal was finalized as the executives' Southwest flight left Las Vegas — while Seattle's baseball president, Jerry Dipoto, conducted his end from a hospital bed with blood clots in his lungs.⁶

The footnote to the financing was the baseball. Tampa Bay, playing facilitator, sent its prized 23-year-old Jake Bauers to Cleveland and took back a 27-year-old Cleveland spare part named Yandy Díaz — a hulking figure whose exit velocities said slugger and whose ground balls said otherwise — along with the reliever Cole Sulser. Eight years on, the accounting reads as follows: Díaz refused every suggestion that he remake his swing, let the Rays' patience do its work, won the American League batting title at .330 in 2023, has hit 121 home runs in Tampa Bay colors, and this month dismantled the very club that let him go — 9 hits in 27 trips with two home runs in the pennant round. Bauers wandered from Cleveland to Seattle to the Bronx, batting .218 along the first leg, rebuilt his approach from the studs, and produced the season of his life in Milwaukee: 26 home runs, an .874 on-base-plus-slugging, and the most-valuable laurels of the National round. Even Sulser, the makeweight, has circled home — he sits in Tampa Bay's Series bullpen today.⁶

So tonight the two unpolished youngsters of a money trade stand in opposite dugouts with the championship of the world between them, and the Rays' baseball president, Erik Neander, surveys the whole handiwork with proper humility: "We don't know what we're doing," he joked. Díaz keeps the better epitaph: "I'm just happy for the both of us, and how it's worked out in our careers."⁶

THE HERALD LOWERS ITS COLORS: TODD BENZINGER, WHO GATHERED THE LAST OUT OF THE 1990 WORLD'S SERIES INTO HIS GLOVE, DIES AT THREE-AND-SIXTY ON THE EVE OF ANOTHER

On the eve of one World's Series, the game lost a man bound forever to the ending of another. Todd Benzinger, first baseman of the 1990 Cincinnati champions, died Wednesday at the age of 63; the Reds announced the passing Thursday. It was Benzinger who squeezed the final out of that October's astonishment — the sweep of the mighty Oakland club — and the image of him recording it has opened Cincinnati's book of happy memories ever since.⁷

His was a journeyman's career of nine seasons, begun with Boston in 1987 and carried through Cincinnati, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco before it closed in 1995, and it was the years after that measured the man: he managed the Class-A club at Dayton, gave his time to the Reds' caravans, fantasy camps and legends' programs without stint, and coached the young ballplayers of New Richmond, Ohio, where he had gone to high school. "Todd will forever be remembered by Reds fans for catching the final out of the 1990 World Series," said Rick Walls of the Reds Hall of Fame, "but those of us who had the privilege of knowing him will remember so much more."⁷

The Herald lowers its colors. A man may be handed one immortal moment and squander the rest; Benzinger caught his, put it quietly in his pocket, and spent 36 years giving the game back to the city that cheered it. No scorecard keeps a better line than that.