Sunday, October 11, 2009

I Know I'll Have More To Say Later, But...

...the weirdest thing is that the season ended in broad daylight.

Comments:
Watched one of the most depressing games I've ever seen in person (only thing that matches it for me is the 1996 Big East Championship), walked back to my car, got in just in time to hear Castiglione read Green Fields of the Mind. Even his heart wasn't in it this year. Usually he reads it pretty triumphantly, or at least trying to help people feel a little better, but it was just a giant bummer this year listening to him read it.

Daniel Bard for 2010 Closer!
 
I hate to sound like a broken record, but it comes down to the same thing over and over again: when you fish into your bullpen to use more relievers than you need in a given game, the chances of finding one who's having a bad day go way up.

And I refer not to Papelbon, but to Billy Wagner. Wagner's a good pitcher, but I think in that situation the right move would have been to allow Bard to continue pitching, and try to get another 10 or 14 pitches out of him. Which might have finished the eighth inning without further damage. The only downside would be making Bard unavailable the following day, which obviously is a speck of dust compared to the alternative.

I should be used to this by now, but Tito has a way of getting the blood boiling all over again when he pulls this crap.

Anyway, it's probably unproductive for me to talk about this stuff now. I'll leave it you, Jere, to sort it all out.
 
That game was absolutely not Wagner's fault; the "double" by Abreu to lead off the inning should have been scored an error on Youks, who had a play on the ball. And yeah, it's bad that he walked Vlad, but he also struck out Hunter and got Morales to ground out. He did his job. With that said, I wouldn't have disagreed with trying to get one more inning out of Bard given the way he was pitching.
 
AJM, that's absolutely a fair comment about Wagner. I guess I just lost it when he walked Vladimir Guerrero, who is usually unwalkable. The loss was a group effort, as losses usually are.

I'm still in a state of disbelief.
 

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