The reference wasn’t to his IQ. 
Enjoy! Between us, we’ve got the series covered; my wife and I are going on Wednesday night and taking the kid. 
Should be doubly interesting because my wife’s a Braves fan. 
You’d have just as good a chance as I do of buying tickets online, and as the father of a 5 year old, I don’t really have time to wait in line at the stadium box office, assuming they make tickets available there. I expect I’ll be watching the playoffs on TV.
Goddamn Phillies. They own the Reds. We get the jump on Doc and Mike Leake melts down. We haven’t taken a series from them since like 2002 or 03. Shit! This is my concern with my team: starting pitching. Arroyo, Leake and Bailey can’t consistently give quality starts, and the playoffs are looming. Crap!
The Phillies ain’t gonna be in the playoffs. Leake will probably be the emergency starter in the playoffs. Other teams would dream of such problems.
From tonight’s Globe article about Bob McClure being sacked:
What a complete disaster. With the caveat that we don’t know how much meddling Larry Lucchino is doing, I don’t get what the hell Ben Cherington is on about. Throw the blame for albatross contracts at Theo Epstein’s feet if you must, but I can’t help but think that he would have stomped down on this juvenile bickering and chain-of-command crap long ago. Cherington seems to have no ability to exert authority to deal with these issues, and if it’s some innate failing of his then they need to find a better GM and if it’s Larry Lucchino putting on the choke chain then Ben needs to grow a pair and either demand some latitude and respect from his bosses or quit.
I am so sick of this team. It’s not even just that they’re bad or comically dysfunctional, it’s that they’re all so damned unlikeable. I can’t think of any player I haven’t been actively annoyed with during the season save maybe Pedroia, who just gets a free pass from me pretty much no matter what, and Ellsbury, because he never opens his mouth. And ownership is such a bunch of hypocrites complaining about these negative leaks when they’ve been using the same technique for years. Not so fun when it’s turned on you, huh, guys?
I know that, but this is the issue: the Reds have been feasting on bad teams. The Phillies, despite their woes, have good pitching. Ergo, this is a test of sorts. Reds didn’t exactly pass with flying colors. We will not be playing craptastic teams in the playoffs.
Glad I didn’t stay up to find out who won last night’s Nats-Braves game! Looks like we were handed a gift in the 13th. madmonk, did you stay for the whole thing?
Dave Johnson’s gotta stop his Frank Robinson imitation with this one-reliever-per-inning bit. It almost came back to bite us last night. Whatever happened to long relief?
They’ve played more than their share of bad teams during the streak - but since the break, they’ve swept the Cards, split four with the Diamondbacks, and taken 2 of 3 from the Pirates. That’s 7-3 against over-.500 teams. So they’ve been tested against good teams lately, and done pretty well.
Given that bit of recent history, I’d write yesterday’s game off as one bad game, until there’s reason to say more.
Eh, maybe you’re right. But the Cards aren’t really the same powerhouse team they were even last year. I’m still on the fence about the Pirates and the D-backs are just okay. The NL Central isn’t all that great.
Guys who can handle the role get told by their agents that the big money is in starting (which is true), and that starting is in such short supply that they can go get one of those jobs in free agency. Or their own teams don’t have adequate starting (which is also true, for most teams), and put them in the rotation. Plus, the standard now is a five-man rotation, not four, in addition to expansion, so there’s more starting jobs due to those effects too.
Tru dat, but all the same, the Cards and Bucs have about the same records as the Dodgers and Giants. And if the Reds win their division but win fewer games than the Nats, they’ll be playing the Dodgers or Giants in the first round. So they’ve been tested by teams as good as they’ll likely be playing in the first round, and have passed the test.
And if the Nats and Reds meet in the NLCS, neither team will have been tested by a team as good as the other, really, so all bets are off. Sure, they played each other back in April and May, but both of these teams are playing at a much higher level than they were back then.
It’s gonna be one hell of a series, if it comes to pass.
A five-man rotation has been the standard since about 1979; I think Earl Weaver was the last holdout, and that’s the year he switched. And even then, MLB had 26 teams. Sure, it’s got 30 now, but that’s a long time to make that adjustment. And the big money’s always been in starting and closing, yet teams always had long relievers in the 1980s.
Last night, for instance, the Nats used 6 relievers for an inning apiece. None of those guys was capable of going 3 innings? I just don’t buy it. And that’s the sort of ‘long relief’ I’m talking about - 3 innings instead of 1 inning or less. So that if your starter can just barely get through 5, you can hand the game over to a guy to pitch the 6th, 7th, and 8th innings before handing it over to the closer, rather than sending out one guy for each inning.
Also, speaking just of this particular team, the Nats happen to have a proven sixth starter, a guy named John Lannan, who has started in past years, and gets called up every time they have a doubleheader to pitch one game, then gets sent back down to AAA. He’ll undoubtedly fill Strasburg’s spot in the rotation once the brain trust decides Strasburg’s season is over, and while he won’t be Strasburg, he’ll do a respectable job. The notion that he can’t pitch long relief is silly, and I have no idea why the Nats don’t use him as the long man while he’s waiting to step into the rotation.
Unless, of course, they simply don’t believe in having a long man. That’s what I’ve concluded.
Anyway, the Nats are up by 6 as a result of a lucky 13th (inning), which is their biggest lead of the year. The worst they can come out of this series with now is a 4-game lead, and a sweep would put them 8 games up. They’re 30 games over .500, they’re 23-7 for their last 30 games, and in general, they’re making my head spin. Baseball in DC hasn’t been like this in my lifetime, and then some.
I didn’t. It started an hour late because of rain delay. I left during the 8th because I had an early morning conference call, went home and watched through the 11th and finally went to bed after Werth got caught out with the bases loaded.
I was surprised at a)how many empty seats there were for such an important game and b) how many Braves fans there were at the game.
A few teams were running 4-man rotations into the early 1980s. The Blue Jays usually ran with a 4-man rotation in the Bobby Cox years, using a fifth starter only when the schedule was especially heavy (back then there were still a few doubleheaders now and then, too.) Weaver was still usually on a 4-man rotation in 1982, and many teams used the fifth starter only when needed, as opposed to today’s teams that will often refuse to skip a turn even when off days would allow it.
Don’t know if anyone caught this story about Jim Joyce, the umpire who blew the Armando Galarraga perfect game, saved the life of an Arizona Diamondbacks employee last night before the D-backs game.
Nice to see a feel good story from sports every now and then.
Well, first place teams ALWAYS feast on the bad teams, that’s the way it works. Cincinnati is not particularly unusual in this regard by any means. Against the four other teams that would make the playoffs as of right now, they’re 17-15, which is pretty normal. Just going back a number of years it looks to me like most World Series winners play between .500 and .600 ball against the other playoff qualifiers. Some are even a bit below .500 (well, until the playoffs started.) Even the awe-inspiring 1998 Yankees lost over a hundred points of winning percentage when playing a fellow AL playoff team; against everyone else they were better than .750, against the playoff qualifiers, .647.
If you think about it, the Reds going 17-15 against a bunch of other teams who are well above .500 is actually impressive. It speaks well of them. It’s not like they get plowed by the other contenders; when the NL big boys get together it’s a fair fight. I think that’s really all you can ask when the playoffs roll around.
Thanks for sharing that. I hope she recovers. I still think Jim Joyce is a class act.
I suppose you are right. I guess its when your team reels off as many wins as the Reds have lately, you start to expect that dominance to continue.
You’re right about Cox in Toronto; I’d forgotten about that.
Weaver had gone to a 5-man rotation in 1979-81, adding Steve Stone to the Palmer-Martinez-Flanagan-McGregor quadrumvirate. In 1982, the story seems to have been that he simply had no fifth starter: Steve Stone was washed up, Mike Boddicker and Storm Davis weren’t quite ready yet, and he tried putting perennial long man Sammy Stewart into the rotation, but Stewart was never quite able to make the jump to being a starter. His return to the four-man rotation that year really appears to have been more a matter of necessity than design. And of course, we don’t get to see whether he would have gone back to a 5-man rotation the following year, because he retired.
Well, mired as they are in the depths of a one-game losing streak, they clearly have no chance tonight. 