Good baseball vs. bad baseball
For those of you who are unaware of major events in sports, the Yankees defeated the Rangers Tuesday night, 14-13. The Yanks trailed 9-0 in the third and made a startling comeback to win the game in the ninth with a Jorge Posada home run. Was this an amazing comeback? Yes. Was this good baseball? No.
The world of sports journalism seems to think otherwise. Sportscenter devoted its final five minutes to an in-depth recap of the game, and it made the front page of papers across New York. When discussing the game, a sober Rick Sutcliffe described the Yankees' gameplay as "smallball--station to station." By all accounts this was a great game. But let's look at the facts.
Good baseball demands good pitching. How could one describe the pitching in a 9 inning game in which 27 runs are scored? Terrible. That's a combined ERA of 13.50. Both teams batted .425. And who pitched? Stars? You be the judge: Koronka, Feldman, Benoit, Bauer, Mahay, and Otsuka for the Rangers and Chacon, Small, Villone, Proctor, Farnsworth, and Rivera for the Yankees. The starters both have career ERAs hovering near 5. Besides Rivera--who, incidentally, almost blew the game--none of these pitchers are worth paying the cost of admission at Yankee stadium to see. As for Sutcliffe's proclamation of "smallball," the teams left a combined 16 men on base.
The players are afflicted with the same mass delusion. Mark Teixeira, in a postgame interview, actually said, "[The game] had a lot of runs. It had good pitching, at times. It had defense. It had balls caroming off runners." While I applaud Teixeira's use of the word "caroming," a word rarely found in postgame interviews, the Georgia Tech grad is either crazy or profoundly confused. As for good pitching, out of the 12 pitchers who pitched, only 3 allowed no runs, and these three combined for a measly 2.2 innings. As for defense, it had 3 errors.
As for me, I'll be watching the Mets against the Cardinals or the Braves against the Marlins.
The world of sports journalism seems to think otherwise. Sportscenter devoted its final five minutes to an in-depth recap of the game, and it made the front page of papers across New York. When discussing the game, a sober Rick Sutcliffe described the Yankees' gameplay as "smallball--station to station." By all accounts this was a great game. But let's look at the facts.
Good baseball demands good pitching. How could one describe the pitching in a 9 inning game in which 27 runs are scored? Terrible. That's a combined ERA of 13.50. Both teams batted .425. And who pitched? Stars? You be the judge: Koronka, Feldman, Benoit, Bauer, Mahay, and Otsuka for the Rangers and Chacon, Small, Villone, Proctor, Farnsworth, and Rivera for the Yankees. The starters both have career ERAs hovering near 5. Besides Rivera--who, incidentally, almost blew the game--none of these pitchers are worth paying the cost of admission at Yankee stadium to see. As for Sutcliffe's proclamation of "smallball," the teams left a combined 16 men on base.
The players are afflicted with the same mass delusion. Mark Teixeira, in a postgame interview, actually said, "[The game] had a lot of runs. It had good pitching, at times. It had defense. It had balls caroming off runners." While I applaud Teixeira's use of the word "caroming," a word rarely found in postgame interviews, the Georgia Tech grad is either crazy or profoundly confused. As for good pitching, out of the 12 pitchers who pitched, only 3 allowed no runs, and these three combined for a measly 2.2 innings. As for defense, it had 3 errors.
As for me, I'll be watching the Mets against the Cardinals or the Braves against the Marlins.
posted by Tim Dees at 12:49 AM
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