“I love being in a city that’s playing October baseball, where you can just feel everyone captivated by the ball club, everyone prioritizing baseball above all else. It’s a great phenomenon.” — Theo Epstein.
There is joy in Wrigleyville. Seventy-one years of frustration and agony and torment and tears of heartbreak came to ecstatic and joyful end last night. Hours after Anthony Rizzo caught the relay from Javier Baez to complete the game-ending double play in Game 6 against the Dodgers and send […]
When you look at how far the Dodgers have gone, winning a Division Series and five games into a Championship Series, it’s pretty remarkable that they have done that with only two starting pitchers. And, when you stop and consider it, that’s exactly what the Rangers were trying to do […]
John Smoltz brought it up during last night’s game. Something the Rangers saw all summer long. The more you run relievers out, the more you risk them having a bad night. Even with good relievers. It’s just human nature. Nobody is perfect, unless your name is Andrew Miller. The […]
He’d pitched in only four games in his major league career. A total of eleven innings. He was 1-0 with a really nice 1.64 ERA. His first big league game ever came on May 30 against the Rangers in Cleveland, in a game Texas won 9-2. Coming into the game in […]
The average temperature in Chicago in February is twenty-six degrees. Lows, with the wind chill, can regularly be in the negative thirties. It seems the dead of winter has come early to the Chicago Cubs bats. Just six lousy hits in two games, five of them weak singles. No runs in […]
Dear Cleveland: You are welcome. You are welcome that Texas’s pitching tired out Toronto’s offense. Toronto hit so many home runs and scored so many runs in the first round against Texas pitching that they came into the second round of the playoffs too exhausted to continue. Andrew Miller owes […]
Some 241 pitches were thrown in last night’s Game 2 of the National League Championship Series. Only one mattered. Only one out of 241 was anything anyone could do something with. In the top of the second inning, Cubs’ ace Kyle Hendricks, the NL ERA champ, put one lousy pitch […]
The two teams with the longest championship futility in baseball took one step to championship glory yesterday. The Cleveland Indians, fresh off winning the World Series in 1948, took a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven against Toronto, beating the Blue Jays 2-1. They won Game 2 pretty much the […]
So that’s how you beat the Toronto Blue Jays? With pitching. Who knew? What a novel concept. I hope the powers-that-be for the Texas Rangers were watching last night’s Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. It featured the team that has beaten theirs six consecutive times in the […]