After a 3 1/2 hour rain delay, the Cardinals and Giants resumed play last night with St. Louis holding a 3-1 lead after seven innings. Mike Matheny had already used Trevor Rosenthal, Edward Mujica, and Mitchell Boggs in relief, so he needed to get six outs to secure the victory and only had his closer available from the group that is generally entrusted to hold leads. Joe Kelly, Fernando Salas, and Marc Rzepczynski were available if he wanted to play the match-ups, but instead, Matheny just told Motte that he was going to get six outs instead of three.

For Motte, this is actually becoming the norm in October, and he’s proving to be pretty good at it.

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Prior to playing on the biggest stage in professional baseball almost all ball players must take the long bus rides, live off late-night fast food runs and toil in the near obscurity that can be minor league baseball. For some players on the 2012 playoff clubs those memories are a little fresher than for others. With work well underway on the 2012-13 Top 15 Prospects lists at FanGraphs – due to begin in early November – I thought it might be fun to look back and see what I wrote about those players during the previous three annual prospect reviews. Below are excerpts from what was originally written.

The San Francisco Giants organization has received some key contributions from its system at key positions over the past three years, including catcher, shortstop and starting pitching. The club probably could have benefited even more if a little faith and commitment had been shown to some of its young players, such as Brandon Belt.

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Ben and Sam discuss how the postponement of Game Four hurt the Yankees, talk about how terrible at baseball Hunter Pence appears to be and whether he’s always looked like that, and conclude by revisiting the widespread anti-Cardinals sentiment among baseball fans and examining their own emotional allegiances.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Contract Crowdsourcing: Third Basemen
2. Erotic Image: Likely Free Agent Kevin Youkilis
3. Today’s Playoff Games

Contract Crowdsourcing: Third Basemen
Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. FanGraphs is asking readers to estimate the years and average annual dollar values likely to be received by certain notable free agents. We continue today with third basemen. (Click here for more on the contract crowdsourcing project.)

Other positions: Catcher / First Basemen / Second Basemen.

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Instructional league is a tough place to get a complete look at a player but a great place to get a broad sense of a number of players.  In the regular season, a scout will sit on a minor league team for 5-6 games and get a full look at all the notable prospects.  In instructs, the same 5-6 day look will get you 2-3 games and 2-3 camp days.  The rosters are typically larger than the normal 25, with the Pirates listing 93 players on their instructs roster.  Most clubs sub out the whole lineup around the 5^th inning, so even seeing a prospect start 3 games only amounts to a 1-2 game look.

Where a full report from a pro scout could be up to a paragraph on each tool and a summary, instructs reports are typically a handful of sentences in total.  So, my reports from instructs will be these abbreviated impressions, unless it’s a player I got a full look at during the spring.  The Yankees recently closed camp, so I’ll start this series with a three part look at their players from instructs.

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There’s a thing about rain-outs. Actually, there are two things.

1. They suck.
2. In theory, they should offer neither team an advantage.

The first one’s pretty evident. Where once there was supposed to be baseball, now there is no baseball, thanks to the rain, and that sucks. The second one seems pretty evident as well. Instead of there being baseball between two teams on one day, there will be baseball between the two teams the next day, with each team having been identically inconvenienced. But the reality is that the inconveniences aren’t always identical, and that’s what we observe in the ALCS between the Tigers and the Yankees. Rain delayed Game 4 by a day — so far, at least — and this has without question worked out in the Tigers’ favor.

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In the ninth inning Tuesday night, Eduardo Nunez of all people put together a good at-bat and took Justin Verlander deep over the left-field fence. What the home run meant was that the Yankees had narrowed the deficit from 2-0 to 2-1. What the home run also meant was that a Tigers starting pitcher allowed a run in the ALCS. It was the first run charged to a Tigers starter in the series, and Tuesday night was Game 3. And for funsies, in the last game of the ALDS, the Tigers’ starter threw a shutout.

This is the big story at the moment. That the Tigers are running out some amazing pitching, or, because of the media being the media, that the Yankees are running out some ice-cold hitters. Those are different ways of saying the same thing, and in fairness, we have to assume that it’s both. The Tigers’ pitchers have been good, and the Yankees’ hitters have been bad, and that’s weird because this regular season the Yankees had the best team offense in baseball. They’re not scoring, but they ought to be scoring, and now they have to win four games in a row if they want to avoid elimination.

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Episode 261
Dayn Perry, contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and author of two books (one of them serviceable), is in Detroit, where he is actually covering the ALCS for an actual and accredited internet site.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr and 2 min. play time.)

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This post isn’t really about Joe Girardi, even though his name is in the headline and his decisions from yesterday are the inspiration for this post. It’s about Girardi in that he’s a human being, but it’s not about Girardi as a specific human being, because — as I think the results of the poll I put up last night show — there are a lot of people who would have made the same decisions he did. Because, just like the rest of us, Joe Girardi’s decision making process was formed long before he ever played or managed a single baseball game.

At the risk of generalizing, I’d imagine that most of us had parents who let us try things that they knew weren’t going to end particularly well because we’d learn from the pain we were about to bring upon ourselves. Whether it was pulling the cat’s tail or biting into that delicious looking lemon on the table, they would warn us that it wasn’t in our best interests, but knew that we had to experience the results for ourselves to know that it was something we really wanted to do. And, for many of these experiences, we only had to do it once before we realized that we never wanted to do it again.

We learn how to think in a predictable environment. Punch your brother? Go to your room. Eat your vegetables? Have some ice cream. The actions we take as kids almost always have positive or negative rewards that are designed to teach us what kinds of actions we prefer. As a culture, we teach children that every action comes with consequences, and that they can predict what those consequences will be based on what happened the last time they performed that action. You can describe a lot of parenting as predictable repetition.

That training is extremely effective for most things in life, because many of the decisions we face follow this kind of cause/effect relationship. Most of the time, you can effectively judge what the consequence of an action will be based on your own personal experience of what happened the last time you did that same thing. Unfortunately, that decision making process — the one that works really well in life as a whole — is a miserable failure in baseball.

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