Comments on: Game One Recap

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:35:18 +0000

Jonas, haha, we have a php page here that we can copy our article to, hit “link” and it automatically probes for players to link to. Doesn’t work for every single player, but about 95%.

Jay, yeah, I was scratching my head (not literally) at the decision to let Vlady run. Then again, I’m a fan of the Phillies, who bring in a pinch-runner for Pat Burrell in the 7th or 8th every game so I’m fairly used to it.

By: Jonas

Jonas — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:10:41 +0000

Eric, that’s a pretty obscene amount of links there. Do you have to dig up the URLs to player pages individually or do you just have to enclose the players’ names in double brackets or something and it generates the link automatically? I’ve always leaned toward the latter.

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:54:39 +0000

Eric,

Good points. I’ll concede dual victories….

And yeah – where the heck was Reggie Willits when he was needed? And why didn’t the Angels bunt to Lowell more? He looked almost as gimpy as Vladimir. And why did Big Mike leave Shields in to get slapped around in the ninth inning of a still close game? Shields didn’t have it, why let him labor?

By: Eric Seidman

Eric Seidman — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:28:21 +0000

Guys, I completely agree, but that’s not what I was intending to point out. What I meant is that Youkilis recovered that ball ridiculously quickly. He couldn’t catch it and then smacked his glove on the ground, which just happened to snatch up the ball. We see plays like that all the time where the ball kicks around and the runner can easily make it to third.

Vlady shouldn’t have considered it an automatically dropped ball, like you guys mentioned, but if Youk drops it and the ball kicks around or he has trouble recovering, the dynamic changes. I’m not admonishing him, but without a quick recovery by Youkilis, it’s at least a very close play.

Plus, why on earth wasn’t he pinchrun for?

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:24:39 +0000

I have to agree with Nick on this point, as I had wanted to point out the same thing. Vlad seemed ridiculously far from first to be truly curious about the outcome of Youk’s pursuit of the pop-up.

If Kevin catches that ball, as he nearly did, it’s an easy double up on first (and yes, the pitcher was standing on first to cover) as Vlad was at least 70 feet away. I’d wager to guess Kevin may have even had a chance to make a diving catch, get to his feet and win a foot-race back to first against Vladdy.

Guerrero needed to be going all out to third as soon as he noticed the bloop, or he needed to be a little ways off of first to wait and see whether to retreat or move to second.

Bad baserunning. Out at third with that effort each and every time.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:07:07 +0000

A comment about the base running by Vlad: was he too far off the bag to make it back to first if the ball was caught? and if so, why on earth would he be not running all out to begin with instead of watching to see if it would be caught to only be doubled off? Not to mention, I think that if that play happens 10 times, with the way Vlad ran the bases, I would wager he gets thrown out 9.1 times out of 10 by a gold glove first baseman throwing to a gold glove third baseman. I think Youk could have made a much better play on it, not to mention throwing it within 20 feet of the bag; and he still got Vlad easy.