Our plucky heroes sunk the Cardinals’ battleship yet again, winning 4-2 by capitalizing on some hilarious miscommunication between Cards’ skipper Tony La Russa and his bullpen coaches. I find my faith in humanity shaken a tad when teams can afford to pay players $25 million a year but let a simple thing like misunderstood phone calls get in the way of sending the proper reliever into the game. Even my 13-year old cousin knows that TEXT MESSAGING is how you communicate your message clearly in a noisy environment. Sheesh!!
I didn’t see the game, but I read a detailed summary and facepalmed a number of times. Both Wash and TLR seemed intent on giving the damn game away — asking players to bunt or steal when it didn’t make sense, intentionally walking players with nobody else on base, and other blunders (such as Wash batting his best hitter — Napoli — eighth). We baseball nerds call those moves “giving away outs,” which is never a good strategy. Outs are like crisp $100 bills — they are the currency of baseball. You only have a few and should only give them up if you get something of equal or greater value in return. Otherwise, hold them close and don’t let them slip out of your wallet.
Despite that, we find ourselves up 3-2 in the series, able to clinch it Wednesday if our pitching can hold the Cards at bay and somebody besides Napoli can squeak a few hits out of the infield. Jaime Garcia is on the mound for the Redbirds; he struck out 7 last Thursday but we had Colbayashi on the mound to do the same to them. Since we’ve seen Garcia a few times now, we’ll hopefully be able to hit him better this time. Of course the same danger is there for Colby, and the Cards will be on their home turf, making the climb a tough one — home teams win 52% of the time, controlling for everything else.
Related Links:
- Joe Posnanski’s post on the bullpen phone fiasco
- Timely NYT article on this antiquated technology, involving Lance Lynn, who was also involved in last night’s bullpen-phone-related incident/fiasco, and the Philadelphia incident that TLR also mentioned in his post-game press conference after Game 5