Hi Everyone —
Got a special treat for you: At 7 p.m. ET Tuesday evening —we’re going to have a live online event with the fabulous Jane Leavy about her new book Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It. Jane will answer questions, offer some strong baseball views, and happily engage with everyone! We’ll send out the link tomorrow … along with a full essay from Jane herself. This will be a blast. Jane isn’t holding back.
Brilliant Reader Nato sends in his color-coded scorecard from Game 1 of the Brewers-Cubs’ series.
He explains the color code like so:
Purple = offense
Blue = defense
Magenta = strikeouts and a few other non-hit non-defense outcomes
Orange = home runs
Green = miscellaneous (in this game, two defensive indifferences)
There’s no wrong way to score! Quite the opposite — every scoring system is beautiful in its own way.
Crazy day over here after a crazy weekend, so let’s just offer five quick thoughts this morning with lots more to come:
Thought 1: What’s going on with the young pitching?
I don’t know what sort of blubber Toronto’s Trey Yesavage was putting on the ball Sunday, but the Yankees had no chance against him. Yesavage is 21 years old, this was just his fourth big-league start, and he pitched 5⅓ innings without giving up a hit. He struck out 11 of the 18 batters he faced.
This was just days after 24-year-old Cam Schlittler, making his 15th big league start, became the first postseason pitcher to ever throw eight shutout innings and strike out 12 while walking nobody. And he did this against the Boston Red Sox in an elimination game.
Is this the new Moneyball — calling up some hard-throwing kid a few weeks before the postseason so that you can pitch him in a pivotal playoff game? Are these young pitchers simply immune to the pressures? Is the key now to send out a pitcher that teams have never seen before?
Thought 2: Small sample sizes.
On Saturday, the Mariners led the Tigers 1-0 in the top of the fifth when Kerry Carpenter came up to face Seattle’s George Kirby. You already know how much broadcasters LOVE small sample sizes — they just love to tell you that Joe Shlabotnik is batting .600 against Damon Rutherford, when he’s just three for five — and in this case, they had a doozy of a small sample size to talk about: Carpenter was four for 10 against Kirby and all four of his hits were home runs.
And then, Carpenter hit a home run to give the Tigers the lead.
Thought 3: I loathe the day off between the first two games of a series
I know, I know, momentum is talked about too much in sport, and particularly in baseball — “momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher,” Earl Weaver said, or anyway he usually gets credit for saying it — but I miss the traditional rhythm of a baseball series. That is to say, I miss Games 1 and 2 being played back-to-back and THEN a travel day …
That gives the series a flow. A storyline. On Saturday, the Brewers utterly demolished the Cubs. On Saturday, the Phillies outplayed the Dodgers but lost anyway. I want to see how those teams will react THE NEXT DAY. I realize that MLB would like to stretch out the postseason for as long as they can because, you know, money, and that’s how the NBA does it or whatever. But waiting two days to find out how the Cubs and Phillies will respond to losing Game 1 isn’t the same thing.
Thought 4: Original Spinal Tap lyrics
This is so wonderful. Do you know Spinal Tap’s hilariously raunchy song “Big Bottom?” The key lyrics in the song are:
My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo
I’d like to sink her with my pink torpedo
But that’s not the original lyric that Christopher Guest wrote. No, his original couplet was:
My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo
I want to catch her like Al Gionfriddo
I guess they went away from this because it would have made no sense for a British hard rock band to remember Al Gionfriddo’s catch of a Joe DiMaggio blast in Game 6 of the 1947 World Series. BUT that line is so utterly wonderful; rock and roll is the poorer for it not being used.
Thought 5: Vladdy Jr. is unstoppable
When Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is locked in, the way he seems to be locked in right now, there’s simply no way to pitch him. His father was like that, too. They wouldn’t just get hot — all great players get hot — they would become mythical. When Vladdy Jr. came up to the plate with the bases loaded and the Jays already up 5-0, I was looking at Yankees reliever Will Warren and thinking, “This poor guy doesn’t have a chance.”
He didn’t. Vladdy Jr. blasted the first grand slam in Blue Jays postseason history, and there was no doubt about it coming off the bat.
The Yankees, I’m sure, don’t feel entirely hopeless about being down 2-0 in this series. They come back home now, and the Blue Jays are basically out of pitchers and have to throw Shane Bieber in Game 3; he has made just nine starts in the last two years. There’s every reason for them to think they can take this series back to Toronto for a Game 5. BUT, Vladdy Jr. is the X-factor. He can wreck the Yankees’ hopes and dreams all by himself.
