For Phillies Phans this is the apocalypse. Chris Carpenter held the “can’t miss” Ashburns to just three hits, and the upstart Cardinals went on to take the NLDS three games to two in a sparkling 1-0 win in Philadelphia, ending the Phillies post-season dream of another October World Series appearance. Phillies fans were so disappointed, they didn’t even boo.
The Philadelphia loss was as surprising as the poor performance of Charlie Manuel’s team, which couldn’t put together enough hits to cage the Redbirds. “Actually, I don’t know what to say,” Manuel said, following the loss. “I just got through talking to our team, and basically when I look at it, we played 162 games, and definitely we had the best record in baseball.”
But the best record (and the best pitching staff), wasn’t enough to carry the Phillies into the NLCS — with Phillies’ fans describing their team’s elimination as “a crushing disappointment.” The depth of the loss is reflected in the Philadelphia blogosphere: “Thud” was the headline of The Good Phight, while Beerleaguer led its coverage with “Failure In Philly.”
But while baseball’s blogworld focuses on “the Phailure in Philadelphia,” Friday’s loss was more the result of Chris Carpenter’s pitching performance than the poor hitting of Ryan Howard & Company. Carpenter walked none and struck out three, taming Halladay in what Cardinals’ manager Tony LaRussa called “a dream match-up” of Cy Young winners. Carpenter threw 110 pitches, 70 of them for strikes. It was a Phorgettable night in Philly, but not in St. Louis.
Of course, there are teams in baseball that would love to have bragging rights to a 102 win season — including the one right here in Washington. But expectations were so high in Philadelphia that what will follow now is an off-season of recriminations, and an effort to find that one missing piece that Phillies’ fans think they need. It might be ugly. “There are no two ways around it: 2011 is a failure for the Phillies,” Crashburn Alley said. Oh, boo-hoo . . .
If you watched Tim Kurkjian last night on ESPN, then you know just how close he came to an on-air myocardial infarction. In the history of the game, he said, what viewers just saw was history — the best night of baseball ever of any regular season. The best, as he repeated, in 200,000 games. In fact, he’s right — it might well have been.
Unless, of course, you’re a fan of either the Boston Red Sox or Atlanta Braves. For both of those clubs, and their fans, the “night to remember” was a belly-up sinking that compared with the loss of the “unsinkable” Titanic: it just wasn’t supposed to happen. Fans will focus on the Red Sox, of course, but down in Atlanta the despair was as keenly felt. You only have so many shots at this, and this may be one of the Braves’ last.
“When you’re in a slump as a team, you find a bunch of different ways to lose,” third baseman Chipper Jones said after the Bravos dropped a nail biter to the Phillies. “Bats go silent. You get wild on the mound. You walk in runs. You find different ways to lose and we sure did over the past couple weeks.”
Okay. But still — the most improbable of improbables was not the Braves loss to Philadelphia (let alone the Redbirds whitewashing of the Astros), or even the fact that somehow the Tampa Bay Rays came back to take a 12 inning victory from the Yankees, but Baltimore’s epic ninth inning walk off victory against the Nation. “Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” the unsinkable Molly Brown said as she saw the Titanic go down, stern first.
And that’s what we all said, last night, when Robert Andino put a Jonathan Papelbon offering just off the glove of Carl Crawford in left field to score Noland Reimold and give the Orioles (the Orioles!) a walk-off 4-3 win in Baltimore. There’s a reason why fans keep their mouths shut when they’re watching a no-hitter in the ninth, just as there’s a reason why you don’t pitch Tim Wakefield eight times in the middle of a divisional race just so he can get his 200th win. (What the hell were they thinking?)
Here’s some other things you don’t ever do, no matter what. You don’t calculate that you have an inside shot just because the Rays are playing the Yankees, you don’t headline that you have “the best team ever” at the beginning of a season, you don’t describe the Iraqi insurgents as “pushovers” — and you don’t call a ship unsinkable when it’s sitting in Belfast Harbor: you don’t flirt with icebergs.
So . . . so don’t rewrite the rules. They remain, the rules. You don’t tempt fate, which is what the Red Sox did all of September, and it’s what they did last night. It’s call hubris, and it’s been around since Homer. “I’m pretty shocked,” Red Sox arm John Lester said. “Not only with the Rays game, but in our game, we’ve got the best closer in baseball. That stuff doesn’t happen to him.” Oh, c’mon. Sure it does. This is baseball.
The Washington Nationals will not be able to finish the 2011 season at .500 — and you can thank the bottom feeding Florida Marlins for that. Bryan Petersen sent the Nationals home a loser last night, stroking a walk off two out home run to make the Marlins winners, 3-2. The loss put the Nationals at 79-81, with one game to play.
The home run, off of lefty Doug Slaten, clouded an otherwise successful night for starter John Lannan, who pitched six innings while giving up only three hits. But the story of the night was on the side of the Marlins, whose starter — Javier Vazquez — might well have pitched his last game before retiring. Vazquez went nine innings while giving up only five hits to the Nationals, an exclamation point for what the team needs to find this off-season.
Despite the loss, the Nationals were able to contribute a highlight: Michael Morse hit his 31st home run of the year. Though it’s hardly a surprise, the dinger means that Morse will finish the season as the Nationals’ top slugger, leading the team in batting average (.303), home runs (31) and RBIs (95). “I put in a lot of hard work, and I’m glad that it paid off,” Morse said following the loss.
The Mess in Atlanta: Last night’s starting pitchers for the Red Sox and Braves — Erik Bedard and Derek Lowe — oughta tell us something about where those teams are. And they didn’t disappoint: Bedard lasted just 3.1 in the Red Sox win in Baltimore, while Lowe lasted just four in the Braves’ 7-1 loss against the Phillies in Atlanta . . .
We’re no fans of the Cardinals, but it’s hard to take the Braves seriously. Atlanta’s rotation is badly hobbled: Tommy Hanson has a tear in his shoulder, Jair Jurrjens has a sore knee, and Lowe (who looks like he should be on the DL) is shot-putting the ball in the hope that it ends up somewhere near the plate. You can’t go into the playoffs like that — well, you can, but you won’t win . . .
. . . because, while the Nationals keep winning in Philly, they still have seven games to play and, no matter what they do, will finish no better than third. We’re not just being killjoys: while it’s wonderful to see our Anacostia Nine play so well (especially at “Nats Park North”), there are some among us who (in the middle of the 7th inning last night — and then again in the 8th) stood up and screamed — “that’s just great, but where were you in June?”
The answer oughta be obvious: trying to find a pitching staff. That the Nats have now won consistently, when it counts the least, is evidence that (finally), that seems to have been done. John Lannan didn’t pitch brilliantly last night, but he fought hard and well (he’s not the same pitcher we saw last year), and a whole handful of other arms have now emerged: Milone and Peacock, and Wang and Detwiler — not to mention Jordan Zimmermann and Stephen Strasburg (and, just maybe, Livan Hernandez). And those are just the starters.
Then too, the bats have nearly ended their slumber: the Nationals pounded out ten hits last night, which included home runs from Danny Espinosa (his 21st, setting a Nationals rookie record), and the vastly underrated Wilson Ramos (who hit his 14th, which is none too shabby). More importantly, the Nats shook off their disturbing habit of serving tea to men on base — eight were left on base last night, but that number is going down, and they’ve damned near returned to the league mean.
As important (we think) is that the Nationals are now 9-8 against their in-division rivals — with the bonus that Nats fans have started to stream north. That an indication (perhaps), that Nats fans are anticipating what might (might) happen next year. “It’s a fun time,” Danny Espinosa said of his visit to the not-so-friendly confines of The Bank. “It’s a fun game to play against them. I want to play them hard because I know we can beat them. We are showing that. For myself, personally, I enjoy playing against the team.”
Those Are The Details, Now For The Headlines: We’ve decided to change the description of the New York Mets — they’re no longer “the chokes.” That description more aptly fits the Atlanta Braves, who barely showed up to play the Marlins last night in Miami, and lost to the stinking Fish. It wasn’t even close. Now they know how it feels. The Braves now lead the Cardinals (who woulda thought — and certainly not us), by a single game and some spit. The Cardinals surprised everyone (including their own fans) and rallied to beat the Mets in St. Louis, 6-5 . . .
The first game of the 2010 World Series wasn’t exactly a pitcher’s duel. The pumped-up Fox Television special of a “classic match-up” between two great pitchers (including one whose post-season numbers were right up there with Sandy Koufax and Christy Mathewson), turned into a sloppy slugfest (six errors, 18 runs and 25 hits) that ranks with some of the worst played games in World Series history. It’s not as if San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy didn’t know it. Bochy all but admitted that the game could have been more cleanly played, but he shrugged philosophically: “We’ll take the win,” he said after the completion of the whirlwind 11-7 tilt. “We were expecting to win,” Ranger Elvis Andrus reflected, “but they played better than us. That’s just the way it is.”
Well, that’s right — the Giants played better than the Rangers. But not by much. While Lee (vying for post-season honors with some of the all-time greats) looked merely human — 4.2 innings, six earned runs — McCovey righty Tim Lincecum pitched like the head-in-the-clouds hippie (5.2 innings, 8 hits, four runs) his detractors criticize him for being: he allowed four hits in the first two innings, gave up a double to the opposing pitcher, and ran a runner back to an unoccupied base. While the post-game Giants touted their dominance over Lee (whose curve just wasn’t working), the truth is that Lincecum looked like he wandered into the game by accident. Then too, you have to believe that without Brian “Beach Boy” Wilson’s shut-em-down appearance (and using him shows you just how desperate Bochy was to finish the game), the contest might have been tied in the 9th — and won by the Texans in the 10th.
There have been plenty of poorly played World Series games (this certainly isn’t the first), and there’s no guarantee that such an indifferently played first contest will mean that this version of “the Fall Classic” won’t be classic. After all, the 1960 Yankees-Pirates series featured two teams with solid rotations who couldn’t pitch a fig when it came to October. The Yankees made the Pirates look silly in three of those games (by scores of 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0), but then lost the series on one of baseball’s most exciting moments. That probably won’t happen here, but an 11-7 score is hardly a fair indictation of things to come: the Giants still boast one of the best staffs in recent post-season history, while the Rangers’ order is capable of putting Mantle-like numbers on the opposing scoreboard. But it’s only a seven game series, and with Cliff Lee’s outing behind them, the Giants have to be optimistic — particularly if they win tonight.
The Year of the Pitcher may well turn into the year of the underdog, with the lowly, no-acount, we-can’t-hit-worth-a-damn San Francisco Giants slaying the pound-em-out hit-heavy Texas Rangers. Really. It could happen. But don’t tell San Francisco Giants fans. McCovey Chronicles is emblamatic of how the team’s followers feel: they can’t quite believe their good fortune, remain puzzled about how a team with three top pitchers (and not a whole lot else) can be playing for all of baseball’s marbles and reminisce about all those San Francisco might-have-beens. The 2000 version of the Giants (who did not get beyond the NLDS), and the 2002 contenders for the title, were far better teams than the 2010 McCoveys (these fans contend) because the current Giants lack the big bat that would make a World Series win a lock. “That 2000 team…man. They were stacked,” McCovey Chronicles notes. True. But they didn’t win the Series.
Back in 2000, J.T. Snow, Jeff Kent, Rich Aurelia, Bill Mueller and (oh yes) Barry Bonds were a near-cinch to lead San Francisco to the promised land. But it didn’t happen (not even close). And the reason it didn’t happen wasn’t because the Giants didn’t have hitting, it’s because the front three of Livan Hernandez, Russ Ortiz and Shawn Estes couldn’t compete with the New York Valentines, who were led into the NLDS by Mike Hampton, Al Leiter, Bobby Jones, Glendon Rusch and a bullpen spearheaded by Armando Benitez — the class of baseball’s closers. The Apples outfield looked mediocre (Derek Bell, Jay Payton and Benny Agbayani — for God’s sake), their infield was filled with holes and, much like the 2010 version of the McCoveys, everyone wondered where the Mets were going to get their runs. They didn’t need to. Even the Mets’ mid-rotation pitchers were better than the Giants’ hitters. In game four of the NLDS (just as an example), Bobby Jones bested the Giants’ line-up, holding the McCoveys to (count ‘em) one hit. Barry Bonds was .176 for the series. The Giants went home and the Mets went on to eat the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS.
The temptation here is to compare the 2010 Giants with the 2000 Mets, though comparisons of one team with another in different years is always chancy. Yet, for fans of the McCoveys to reminisce about that “stacked” 2000 team misses the point — their pitching was very average. If that. The 2010 version of the San Francisco Giants is totally different: they are pitching dependent, counting on runs from a handful of slap-and-tickle vets like Andres Torres, Edgar Rentaria and Juan Uribe (the absolutely key Juan Uribe), a couple of bench veterans (Pablo Sandoval and Aaron Rowand) and a rookie whiz (Buster Posey). But forget that. Here’s the true comparison. In 2000, the Valentines rode into the World Series against the Yankees on the strength of their arms: and hit a buzz saw. Why? Because the Empire’s arms (Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Orlando Hernandez) were damn near unbeatable. So ignore the hitters, and consider this: the 2010 Giants are “stacked” with pitching — and boast the best front three (Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez) in the post-season since the 2000 Yankees made the Mets look silly. Don’t kid yourself. It’s still the year of the pitcher.
Giants Win The Pennant! Giants Win The Pennant! The San Francisco Giants are the champions of the National League, edging the Philadelphia Phillies 3-2 in the sixth game of the NLCS. The Giants depended on timely hitting and an it’s-all-over-but-the-shouting bullpen to seal the victory, their first since 2002. Over at MLB Network, all world commentator Harold Reynolds called it “one of the greatest upsets in sports history” — a statement that many in the Phillies’ dugout might agree with. After all, the Giants had to win against the most fearsome front three in the majors, and had to close out the season in a ballpark whose fans are ferocious (and even nasty) partisans. But for those who have watched the Fightin’ Phillies in 2010, this NLCS ended like the tolling of a bell, with Philadelphia doing the predictable — fighting for hits with men on base, playing indifferent defense and gingerly skirting a bullpen that has only one he-won’t-ever-choke reliever. Still . . . it’s not so much that the Giants won, it’s that the Phillies lost. Right?
Not exactly. For where the Phillies were weak (hitting with runners in scoring position), the Giants were strong — slapping out 13 hits (13!) against Philadelphia’s best-under-pressure arm and throwing five relievers (Affeldt, Bumgarner, Lopez, Lincecum and Wilson) who held the Phillies to five hits and no runs in eight innings of work. The McCoveys dodged bullet after bullet, while Phillies’ fans waited vainly for their South Philly Nine to put the Gigantes away. It never happened: because the Broad Street Bashers were anything but. Through six games they failed to hit when they needed to. Get this: Philadelphia actually outscored San Francisco in the series, 20-19. But so what? The Giants won the closest, toughest games — while Philly failed to score when it counted. Roughly translated, here’s what the final box score meant: the Giants outhit the Phillies (a .244 BA for the series vs. the Pathetics .216), outpitched the Phillies (Lopez and Wilson virtually skunked Ashburn bats) and out-clutched the Phillies (Cody Ross hit .350, Juan Uribe tallied two GWRBIs).
Philadelphia fans bemoan this years Puzzling Phillies, arguing that at key moments in the 2010 campaign, their team’s bats went inexplicably silent. But in this case, there’s nothing inexplicable about it: the Phillies ran into San Francisco’s bullpen. The Giants will face the Texas Rangers, in San Francisco, starting on Wednesday.
