BruisedCrew

I wouldn’t assume that they are going to play Yelich against all lefties just because he played against Robbie Ray. With Ray, you had to expect that he wasn’t going to go more than three or four innings, but against Skubal, and maybe Snell, who would be expected to go a little longer, they might choose to start a right handed hitter and keep Yelich on the bench for later.

The Rays must be loving how this White Sox – Guardians series is going. The pitching staffs of both teams are dying and they might be headed for a game 5 Saturday.

I would stay with 13 pitchers if only because of the possibility of a long extra inning game.

The season was 154 games until 1961 and nobody really seemed to care that much about history and records except when it came to Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s single season record. Commissioner Ford Frick, who had covered Ruth as a reporter and was friendly with him, decreed that anyone who broke that record in a longer season would have the difference noted in the record book. I find it amusing that people seem to care about this in baseball, but don’t seem to be bothered at all as the NFL expanded its schedule from 12 to 14 to 16 to 17 games over the course of the last 60 to 70 years. The NFL season now is almost half again as long as it was in 1960. In baseball records relating to playoff performance are significantly affected by the fact that there are so many more teams making the playoffs now than there were in the past. If changing the schedule to 154 games would mean more off days during the season and a seven game division series I would take that in a heartbeat. I don’t like the idea of playoff teams picking their opponents in the early rounds. All that seems to do is give the selected team some additional motivation because it seems like the team that picked them disrespects them. I don’t think a seeded team should be put in that position.

My post mortem on this subject now that the DS is over. I wanted the Padres instead of the Cubs, and the fact that it worked out that way opened the door to one of the most memorable sporting events I’ve ever attended.. One of my daughters who lives out of state was in town last weekend to run in the lakefront half marathon with one of her sisters who lives in town. A few weeks ago, I asked her if she would want to go to one of the NLDS games and her response very simply was “sure, but not if they’re playing the Cubs“. I couldn’t commit to tickets anyway until we knew the game times because it had to be something that fit with the marathon schedule. She obviously wouldn’t want to go to a 7:30 PM game the night before having to get up at 5 AM to run 13 1/2 miles. But 3 PM on Sunday worked nicely. So, we ended up going to the Sunday game which resulted in something we will always remember. If the Cubs had been the opponent that day we probably wouldn’t have gone, and even if we had it would have been a significantly different experience with 5 or 10 thousand Cubs fans letting everyone know they were there. We saw several small groups of Padres fans, but only enough to be barely noticeable when their team did something good. They rose to the level of a decent golf clap There were no large knots of visiting fans spread throughout the park making sure everybody knew who they were rooting for and reaching over you to high five some of their compatriots. It would have really been unpleasant if the Cubs had won or even if they had led for the entire game until the last pitch like the Padres did on Sunday. Leaving the game on Sunday the fans were obviously euphoric. We did pass a couple groups of Padres fans and I did not see anybody saying anything to them. if the Cubs had been the opponent, I suspect that walk would’ve been a lot different with varying degrees of trash, talking, and taunting that would have tainted the overall good feeling of the experience. A World Series against the White Sox would be something else again. I think I could take that.

I think the letters are kind of corny and almost a little creepy. One last year was OK but I think the schtick is pretty much played out now. He shouldn’t feel obligated to do this every time there’s a big win. The one thing I didn’t like about this one is the reference to Ueck helping to swat down France’s “home run ball.” For anyone who hears that it just feeds the idea that that was clearly going to be a home run when it almost certainly was not, and leads some people to think that the Brewers are lucky rather than good.

I am glad that that didn’t turn into a “Jeffrey Maier incident“ . That was a relatively easy catch for Mitchell, but a fan who had gone for his glove instead of the ball might have kept him from pulling it in If you didn’t see it, the Yankees had what was originally called a game tying home run changed to a fan interference double because a fan reached over the wall to pull in the ball. But the fielder was pretty apparently not going to make the catch. I’d like to think that the umpires would have called fan interference if a fan had obstructed Mitchell. Calling that a home run would have made the roof incident look like nothing. Having low walls like that invites controversy. Old time Brewers fans will remember the incident in game 3 against the Angels in 1982 when a fan reached over the bleacher rail and pulled in a ball that it looked like Ben Ogilvie was going to catch and turned it into a three run home run for the Angels.

He did say something (through his interpreter) that he thought he had a good read on it and that he didn’t know it had hit anything but that it seemed to change direction. I also thought that it was telling that he was moving toward the foul line, not back toward the foul pole. I note that Contreras’ launch angle of 40 degrees, while on the high side for a home run, was significantly less than the 49 degrees for France. There’s probably a good chance that ball would have hooked foul, but most likely wouldn’t have been a HR.

BTW does anybody have easy access to the exit velocity and launch angle for Contreras HR last night compared to France’s on Saturday. When one of the announcers last night said about Contreras HR that it was a moonshot, but “there was no roof to knock it down “ it was pretty apparent that that incident isn’t going to be forgotten soon and will be thrown out as a stain if the Brewers win the series. I’d also like to know if anyone has tried to measure how far that ball was from home plate when it hit the cable.

They would have beaten the Brewers without Ohtani last year based on their pitching shutting down the Brewers offense. Sub in Skubal for Ohtani to go with Yamamoto, Snell, and Glasnow and they are just as strong in that department this year. The open question is whether the Brewers can score enough runs to out score what the Dodgers would get, especially in the games not started by Miz and Henderson. If the Brewers lose tonight and win Friday Miz wouldn’t be available until game 3. The Brewers offensive output in the games against the Padres much weaker SP doesn’t give me confidence about what they could do against the Dodgers

Last night’s game was a reminder of how big.a disadvantage the Brewers will be at if they are fortunate enough to get to the NLCS,. It will be even worse if they lose tonight (which I guess we should expect in a playoff road game with no reliable SP available) and have to lean on Misiorowski to salvage Game 5 While the Brewers have to scramble to cover 27 outs the Dodgers can just call on one of their stable of All Star caliber starters to fill 5 innings or more. The Dodgers also showed why you should ignore their regular season statistics the way you would ignore most teams’ spring training numbers. Kike Hernandez can sit out most of the season but all you have to do is plug him in against an elite pitcher in the playoffs and he hits home runs. And Freddie Freeman can play in the regular season like he’s 45 years old but the playoffs come and he sprays big hits and home runs all over the field.

Ordinarily, I would prefer Patrick as an openerto have a RHP facing Tatis and Machado the first time through. But, he has had a couple of really shaky outings recently, so I wonder if they have lost confidence in him. If he has one of those outings as an opener, the game might be over before you can get him out.

Bed time. Padres are making plays and the Brewers aren’t. Hope Misiorowskl can be better on Friday than he was on Saturday.

This seems strange to me since Bauers has had a hole in his bat for about the last month.

I said before the series started that I thought the Brewers would have to win the three home games to win the series. Nothing that’s happened so far has changed my mind. After the shaky experience in Wrigley Field last year, I’m having trouble being optimistic about how the second tier starters will do in that hostile environment.

It’s possible that Miller may not have bounced back that well from his uncommon 40 pitches on Sunday and might not have been used tonight anyway. I bet he’ll be back tomorrow if there’s a game 4 and there are no family problems.

No, Machado’s out was the third out of the inning. When he was thrown out I took a quick look to see if maybe Tatis had slowed down because there was no play on him and was just crossing the plate.

I don’t know if Machado slowed down or not, but I assume what she was referring to is Machado making sure that Tatis crossed the plate before he was tagged out, not that Tatis could have been thrown out.

I’ve been to hundreds of games over the years and I’m hard pressed to think of one with an ending more exciting than that one. The crowd was unbelievable. For about 3 hours it seemed like it was going to be a disheartening loss with mistakes in the form of a wild pitch and errors leading to Padres runs.

And, based on what they have done in the past, I expect that the roof will be closed today because they don’t want the shadows that you get in late afternoon, even though some of the worst of that is what comes through the windows on the west side.

Maybe they’ll be able to come up with some analysis of this, but in the one replay where you could really see the ball hitting the roof., it looked to me like the ball was deflected to the right instead of back toward the plate. That would be consistent with the ball either coming down short of the fence or foul and the Stat Cast anaysis.

Pulling out the win is going to make going to tomorrow’s game a lot more enjoyable. i’m not going to go through the whole game thread to see if someone else has already made this point. Unless I’m missing something, in the four playoff games today, all of the runs scored were produced by home runs, except forone of the runs by the White Sox, and the two scored by the Padres.

It was never going to be a home run. The only question might have been whether it hit the roof in foul territory and then a foul ball instead of an out.

Nightmare

I expect Bauers to be in the starting lineup somewhere.