PHOENIX – It is not necessarily Torey Lovullo’s fault. The Arizona Diamondbacks manager is trying to navigate a best-of-seven playoff series that requires four starting pitchers when he only has three.

Yet one of the ugliest games in World Series history will go down on his record, even if the symptom was an industrywide dearth of starting pitching and the disease was Tuesday night’s 11-7 shellacking by Texas, a conquest that put the Rangers on the cusp of their first World Series title in franchise history.

The big finish can come Wednesday in Game 5 at Chase Field, a fitting spot to crown a Rangers team that seized a stunning 10-0 Game 3 lead and moved to 10-0 on the road in this postseason. The Diamondbacks will have their best pitcher, Zac Gallen, lined up to save their season, opposed by steady postseason hand Nathan Eovaldi.

What the Diamondbacks had to offer Tuesday was an ugly display of modern baseball when the eyes of the nation are focused on the game’s shiniest jewel event.

“We’ve had guys that have been throwing the ball extremely well, picking up the baseball on defense,” says Lovullo after the loss, an indirect reference to a Christian Walker error that led to five unearned runs. “It all came unraveled on us there in a matter of two innings.

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“And it’s 10 runs.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred knows it too well: A 10-0 game after two innings on Halloween night is no way to retain eyeballs in the ever-diminishing attention economy. And the only sight of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift on this night came from two Valley residents dressed up as the Chiefs tight end and pop megastar.

You might say Arizona’s Game 4 roadmap was a charade, too.

For the second time in as many Game 4s, Arizona opted for a “bullpen game.” The D-backs survived the first one, deploying eight pitchers to eke out a crucial 6-5 win in the NLCS. Yet that victory had as much to do with the Phillies’ own eight-man relay and mismanagement thereof, along with a Craig Kimbrel late-inning pratfall that gave the game away.

Come Game 4 of the World Series, perhaps Lovullo felt confident they could do it again. Lefty Joe Mantiply was to run the leadoff leg again, and before the game, Lovullo eagerly anticipated what was to come.

“Of course, I’d love to have four starters,” he says. “It would make my life so much easier. It’s going to be a chess game. I love that game.”

Well, consider Corey Seager the Garry Kasparov of World Series play.

When he destroyed a Kyle Nelson pitch for a two-run homer and 3-0 lead in the top of the second, Arizona was backed into a corner. When Marcus Semien clubbed a three-run homer an inning later, it was 10-0 and Texas became the first team in World Series history to post consecutive five-run innings.

And a bagful of Almond Joys probably sounded more appealing to most viewers Americans than watching the final six innings of this game.  

Arizona’s early playoff success camouflaged this scenario. The D-backs swept the Brewers in two games in the wild card series and trucked the Dodgers in three in the NLDS. And it’s not like the World Series bullpen game was anything new.

The Braves won a World Series title in 2021 despite a pair of “Johnny Wholestaff” games, winning one and losing another. But their pitching plan was torched in Game 1, when Charlie Morton suffered a broken foot. It was a marvel to survive that and take home the trophy.

The Phillies (Noah Syndergaard), Rays (Ryan Yarbrough) and Dodgers (Julio Urías) have employed at least partially intended bullpen games in the past four World Series. But this was full-fledged bullpenning, with Mantiply only expected to face six batters, taking him through Rangers lefty slugger Nathaniel Lowe in the second inning.

And then it imploded.

Kyle Nelson had retired Seager in a big spot in Game 1, a groundout with the winning run on in the 10th inning. The lefty had recorded seven outs in the Series and given up no runs.

But the bullpen game bugaboo is asking your fourth through 10th-best pitchers, give or take, on the staff to keep repeating success, the odds increasingly stacked against you. On this night, Nelson threw a center-cut slider. Seager demolished it for his third home run in this World Series, most ever by a shortstop.

It was 3-0 by the second inning, but blink and it was 10-0 an inning later after Semien’s three-run homer off the fourth Arizona pitcher, Luis Frías.

Four pitchers to record the first nine outs. Is this the best the game could offer?

“It wasn’t your traditional World Series game with a lot of World Series moments,” says Lovullo, although the Rangers might beg to differ. “But at the end of the day we’re just trying to win a baseball game and find the best way to do so.

“But the game is a little different than it was in 1975, right, when I was watching the Big Red Machine against the Boston Red Sox. That was a totally different feel. This game has changed a little bit, and we just did all we could to win a baseball game today.”

Funny that Lovullo would mention the ’75 Series; Game 7 would produce the second-highest viewership in World Series history, 51.6 million viewers. Sure, a half-century of cultural and competitive change makes ratings comparisons like apples and avocados, but Lovullo’s point remains: Aesthetic pleasure can be elusive these days.

And it’s almost cruel what happened next.

Ryne Nelson, one of the last pitchers on the roster, came into a 10-0 game in the fourth and just kept pitching, quieting the Rangers, posting zeros, and most important, keeping the D-backs’ top relievers holstered so they’ll be fresh for the must-win Game 5 on Wednesday.

Nelson made 27 starts for Arizona this season, but inconsistency earned him an August demotion to Class AAA for four starts. He came back with an improved slider, but little runway remained to earn Lovullo’s trust for a postseason start.

Nelson’s Game 4 line – 5 ⅓ innings, three hits, one run, six strikeouts – tempts the second-guesser to suggest the D-backs simply could have started Nelson. He knows it’s more complicated than that.

“It is (frustrating) but at the same time, it’s no frustration toward anybody but myself,” says Nelson, 25. “I can’t expect them to put me in the game like that when I haven’t had the results to earn it. I know what I can do and I haven’t shown it to earn that trust.

“Had I earned that, maybe the game looked different.”

That fourth starter has been a sinkhole for Arizona. Seems like eons ago, but Madison Bumgarner was in this rotation, at least until posting a 10.26 ERA and getting released in April; the D-backs took off just a few weeks later.

Veteran Kyle Davies? He was so bad the D-backs released him, after 18 starts produced a 7.00 ERA, just a week before the playoffs.

See the pattern? This isn’t necessarily a Diamondbacks problem but an industry problem, what with every team short a starter or three, with horses so in demand that Max Scherzer, 39, and Justin Verlander, 40, can command $43.3 million a year because there aren’t enough younger arms to carry the load.

And so that No. 4 hole was lurking, likely keeping D-backs brass up at night, while their players kept kicking that can down the road with a pair of sweeps.

In World Series Game 3, the bill came due. And the tossing and turning evolved into a nightmare.

DETROIT − Danny DeKeyser sat down for a plate of tacos at a nearby restaurant, after he was done walking me through a dazzling $1.2 million waterfront home in St. Clair Shores that’s listed for sale by his realty company.

It was a Tuesday, after all. Beautiful, bright and warm with the sun streaming in through the garage-door windows at Zef’s Dockside Bar and Kitchen. It’s a casual eatery on the water along Jefferson Avenue that has lived many lives. It used to be Captain Jack’s Lakefront Bar and Grill, which used to be Rojo Mexican Bistro, which used to be Andiamo Lakefront Bistro.

DeKeyser used to be a defenseman for the Detroit Red Wings, an elite skater defined by his great decisions and rare mistakes in 547 games over a 10-year career. Before that, he was an unlikely success story as an undrafted player out of Western Michigan. Before that, he was the local kid from Macomb climbing the junior ranks after he graduated from Warren De La Salle.

Now he’s turning himself into something new again at 33 years old, a year after injuries put him on the brink of retirement following a brief tryout with the Toronto Marlies, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ AHL affiliate. He called to talk it over with his wife, Melissa, who was back home in Grosse Pointe Shores with their three young daughters. It was his decision, she told him.

“Basically just kind of talked to her and I guess that was maybe the other side of it, too,” he said. “She was at home, I missed the kids a little bit, wasn’t playing and stuff like that. I was in the minors. Nobody wants to be in the minors.”

On the four-hour drive home from Toronto, DeKeyser had plenty of time to think about a future he always knew he would have to face.

“I guess it’s just one of the things you really never prepare for as a hockey player,” he said. “You hear a lot about it.”

Veterans told him about “life on the other side,” an uncertain place where DeKeyser hadn’t been since Mick and Linda DeKeyser signed up their 3-year-old for hockey 29 years ago.

“You just gotta go through it and it kind of sucks,” he said. “But you know, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and just try to find a new path forward.”

The path might have been new to DeKeyser but the journey wasn’t. When he went undrafted out of WMU, he made his way onto an NHL roster, turned himself into the Wings’ best defenseman and earned a six-year, $30 million contract in 2016.

DeKeyser majored in communications and took public-relations classes that help him communicate, present and market himself. He left college early to sign with the Wings, but completed his university studies degree online and graduated in 2019.

But he always had an innate interest in real estate. Just like more than 200 million realty junkies do every month, DeKeyser found himself thumbing through the Zillow app and keeping tabs on the market.

“It was always just kind of interesting to me,” he said, “and I always wanted to find a way to just kind of get involved. But at that time when I was playing, really didn’t have the time for it.”

From our high-top table at Zef’s, DeKeyser could see the Shore Club high-rise where he and Melissa lived before they moved to Birmingham for a couple years. DeKeyser grew up an East Sider boating on Lake St. Clair and knew he always wanted to return, so the couple bought a home in Grosse Pointe Shores in 2016.

DeKeyser knew the area well, had an interest in real estate and finally had the time, so he took a 40-hour class for his license and passed the three-hour test on his first try in June.

Then he had to find a job. That’s when he received an invaluable tip, thanks to not forsaking his hockey life entirely. He still runs youth camps and has stayed connected with the Wings’ alumni network, sometimes taking part in promotional appearances. During an event in July at the Detroit Zoo, he spoke with Andy Dirks, the former Tigers outfielder who has his own realty company.

“He said the biggest thing from going from an athlete to a real-estate agent is making sure people know that you’re serious about what you’re doing,” DeKeyser said. “You know, because there’s a lot of people that’ll be like, ‘You know, well, he’s a hockey player or baseball player. How serious is he really at what he does?’”

It’s also about making sure there’s a team behind the agent. Yes, a team — but also the right team. That’s what led DeKeyser to Saros Real Estate Services in Grosse Pointe after interviews at other local agencies. He liked the training that is provided, and especially liked the meetings at the office twice a week and the interactions they foster. After decades of constantly going to the rink — sometimes twice a day — keeping a schedule and having a place to go was appealing.

DeKeyser started in August and has since sold two houses and helped a client purchase a home.

“So just three total sales in the last couple of months, which is nothing crazy,” he said. “But for a lot of agents, just kind of starting up is the hardest part the first year, year and a half, where you’re kind of trying to build a client base. You know, just building a brand.”

So far, it hasn’t been a huge advantage to be a former Wings player. One of DeKeyser’s clients had no idea, which didn’t bother him in the slightest. He’s also OK if they’re big fans.

“I’ll answer any hockey questions, too,” he said, “but my main focus is going to be to buy or sell their house.”

There aren’t many parallels between hockey and real estate, but DeKeyser already has found one that resonates with him as he begins his new career.

“It’s competitive in that there’s a lot of real estate agents out there, just like there’s a lot of hockey players,” he said. “And to try to be the best, you’ve got to compete and learn the ways to pick up deals and learn the best ways to close deals.”

You can reach DeKeyser at danny.dekeyser@sarosres.com, on Instagram at dekeyserhockey and you can check out his hockey camps at DeKeyserHockey.com.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him @cmonarrez.

There will probably be complaints coming out of Michigan this week thanks to the College Football Playoff selection committee, which ranked the Wolverines No. 3 despite being the most dominant team in the sport on a week-in, week-out basis this season. 

They should probably thank the committee for considering them at all. 

If Tuesday’s rankings tell us anything, it’s that the Michigan sign-stealing scandal — for better or worse — isn’t going to be part of the CFP committee’s calculus.

“Our job as we look at it is to rank the teams to follow our protocols,” NC State athletics director Boo Corrigan, who chairs the committee, said on ESPN. “And as we went through, that really wasn’t part of any of the discussions that occurred in our time together. It’s an NCAA issue, it’s not a CFP issue.”

Fair enough. The CFP’s job is to determine the four best teams in the country, not litigate every detail that has emerged regarding what suspended Michigan staffer Connor Stalions was doing when he apparently sent buddies to stadiums all over the country to film future Michigan opponents in an attempt to decipher signals. 

But there’s one problem here: As this scandal unfolds in real time, doesn’t the CFP committee have a responsibility to at least try and figure out whether Michigan is beating opponents by an average of 35 points per game because it cheated in a way that gave the Wolverines a real, tangible advantage?

Over the years, the selection committee has accounted for all kinds of odd factors in ranking teams because its job isn’t just to look at data but to understand what it’s looking at and why. Several years ago, you even had former committee chair Jeff Long parsing a Stanford loss at Northwestern because the game kicked off at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Yes, they actually discussed body clocks. 

Is that kind of granular discussion necessary to figure out the four best teams in the country in a given year? Probably not. But part of what gives the committee its self-appointed gravitas is the notion that it goes through every detail and looks at every factor that causes a team to win or lose.

And we’re supposed to believe that a major cheating scandal hanging over the head of a playoff contender should just be ignored?

During a conference call with the media, which Corrigan led by saying the committee was “impressed with how (Michigan) dominated their opponents,’ I asked what seems like a pretty obvious question during all of this. How can a committee properly determine that Michigan is the third-best team in the country if they didn’t even discuss whether part of their dominance was using information they obtained by breaking rules? 

At that point, CFP executive director Bill Hancock stepped in and provided what was surely a well-planned answer: “Michigan has played well all season. Fact of the matter is, no one knows what happened. We are dealing right now with allegations only. The committee makes its judgments based on what happened on the field, and clearly Michigan has been a dominant team.”

After 10 years of listening to the language of the CFP, what he’s saying is clear. The committee just isn’t going to get involved in this story in any way, shape or form. And given that the NCAA is unlikely to finish any kind of substantive investigation before the end of this season, it means Michigan’s only real obstacles for making the playoff are probably Penn State and Ohio State. 

“You have to remember that these are allegations at this point and not facts,’ Hancock said in response to a second question about Michigan. “So there’s no substantive evidence that anything happened that might have affected the game. All the committee does is evaluate what happens on the field during games, and that’s why we are where we are.”

But this isn’t your typical NCAA scandal like we saw in the old days, when a player might get suspended because he got paid to sign some autographs. As comical as the Stalions story is in so many ways, nobody who understands or works in football could possibly deny that the alleged extent of his sign-stealing operation was designed expressly to give Michigan the information edge over its opponents. 

If that information was obtained through means that are outside the NCAA rulebook — and sending spies to film sidelines would indeed be a blatant violation — it’s completely fair to question whether Michigan is as good as the margins it has been putting up. 

And that just … didn’t come up in the room at all? Hard to believe and even harder to endorse as an operational principle for a group of people that is supposed to be digging deeper than the final scores. 

If there’s any encouraging news in all of this, it’s that we know Michigan’s sign-stealing operation is over. Stalions is suspended, and if the allegations are proven, unlikely to ever work in college football again. The Wolverines, who haven’t played anyone with a pulse yet, are going to have to face Penn State and Ohio State without Stalions’ help. 

If Michigan wins those games, it will be in the playoff without asterisks or caveats. If it doesn’t, a lot of things about the Wolverines’ success the last couple of years will start to look fishy in retrospect. 

And after Tuesday, it’s now all abundantly clear. No matter how embarrassing this story gets, no matter how many details come to the surface as the next few weeks unfold, the CFP committee is going to take a pass on holding Michigan to account. 

Say this for FIFA. It never misses an opportunity to do the wrong thing.

In the least-surprising development ever, Australia announced Tuesday it would not bid for the 2034 men’s World Cup, clearing the way for the world’s most prestigious sporting event to go to Saudi Arabia. FIFA insisted it will “conduct thorough bidding and evaluation processes” before officially announcing the hosts of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups, but president Gianni Infantino and his minions gift-wrapped the latter tournament for Saudi Arabia, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman specifically, long ago.

Who cares about human rights, the oppression of the LGBTQ community, the complete disregard for women or the upending of soccer’s traditional calendar? If MBS is willing to shower FIFA with billions, and spend just as much on the tournament, Infantino and FIFA will gladly turn a blind eye to his sports washing.

Better yet, they’ll happily help MBS and Saudi Arabia do it.

“FIFA’s failure in 2010 to insist on human rights protections when it awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar is a major reason why serious reforms were so delayed, and so often weakly implemented and enforced. FIFA is now required under its own human rights rules to take these lessons seriously and take firm action,” Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, said in a statement issued by the Sports and Rights Alliance. 

“It would be a first step to salvage the already tarnished reputations of 2030 and 2034 World Cups with supporters.”

A nice thought. But anyone with any knowledge of FIFA, particularly FIFA under Infantino, knows that’s never going to happen.

Infantino and soccer’s global governing body have routinely sold the beautiful game out to the highest bidder. Remember the men’s World Cup in Qatar last year? Qatari officials reneged on their promises of better treatment of foreign workers, tolerance for the LGBTQ community and consumption of alcohol, and Infantino and FIFA responded with a shrug. As if they were powerless bystanders instead of it being, you know, their tournament.

So long as the checks are clearing, they don’t really care who they do business with or what heinous things those folks are doing.

Nor, apparently, do they care about the damage they’re doing to the game.

Oh, Infantino and his surrogates will spout high-minded nonsense about bringing the game to a long-ignored audience. But the Arabian Peninsula will have been home to two World Cups in a 12-year span while the rest of Asia will have gone 30 years without having the tournament.

Soccer-mad South America has had the World Cup just once in 45 years, in Brazil in 2014, and it’ll be at least 24 years before there’s hope of the full tournament coming back to the continent. Africa is getting the World Cup for a second time — but only because Morocco was willing to throw in with Portugal and Spain for the 2030 event.

Then there’s the continued disregard FIFA has for the women’s game. While FIFA did a mad rush to line up hosts for both the 2030 and 2034 men’s tournaments, it won’t choose a site for the 2027 World Cup until next May.

And FIFA is so eager for all that Saudi money it’s willing to overlook the fact the kingdom’s interest in soccer has traditionally been a narrow one, as evidenced by its women’s national team beginning play less than two years ago. Or that Saudi Arabia’s searing temperatures will require the World Cup to be moved from its traditional summer window again to the late fall or early winter.

FIFA has never much cared about doing the right thing and, under Infantino, they’ve abandoned all pretense about it.

MBS is a master at sports washing. Through the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, he’s bankrolled LIV Golf. He bought Newcastle United of England’s Premier League and gave Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Karim Benzema and other international stars truckloads of money to play in the less competitive Saudi league. He’s floated the idea of a bid for the 2036 Olympics.

And now Saudi Arabia is almost certain to host a World Cup, arguably MBS’ biggest coup of all.

‘We truly believe in the power of football to inspire future generations. We are committed to ensuring that a 2034 FIFA World Cup in Saudi Arabia helps grow the game across different corners of the globe and inspire future generations,’ Yasser Al Misehal, president of Saudi Arabia’s soccer federation, said in a statement.

‘Being awarded the right to host the tournament would be an honor and privilege.’

For the Saudis, sure. For FIFA, it’s yet another dark day.

Infantino and FIFA can, and will, defend giving Saudi Arabia the men’s World Cup in any number of ways. But the truth is, when you do a deal with someone like MBS, the blood on his hands gets on yours, too.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.