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Justin Verlander’s Location Problem
Headed into last night, the Tigers were the favorites to win the World Series in large part because they had Justin Verlander, and people tend to favor teams who have ace starters in the playoffs. Last night, however, Justin Verlander did not pitch like an ace, and the Giants jumped on him for five runs in four innings of work – as many as he’d allowed in his previous seven starts combined.
So, what went wrong for Verlander last night? At the risk of oversimplification, his problems can essentially be traced to two factors:
1. Bad location
2. Good hitting
Who Should Close For Detroit?
After Jose Valverde’s meltdown in Game One of the ALCS — that followed his meltdown in Game Four of the ALDS — Jim Leyland had finally seen enough of Papa Grande in the ninth inning, and turned to Phil Coke to serve as the guy on the mound in the ninth inning for the rest of the series. However, he hasn’t anointed Coke as his new closer yet, and hasn’t committed to any specific direction for how he’ll handle ninth inning leads in the World Series. So, who should get ball if the Tigers have a lead in the ninth inning tonight, presuming Justin Verlander even lets Leyland take it from him in the first place?
It should probably depend entirely on who is coming up to bat. The Tigers best chance to win is by having multiple closers, including Jose Valverde.
Mike Matheny’s Rookie Mistake
First, let’s start off with caveats. The Cardinals offense didn’t score a single run last night, so there was probably nothing Mike Matheny could have done to change the final result. The Giants rally from the point of contention consisted of a broken bat base hit that no one had ever really seen before, an infield single, and a pair of ground balls to shortstop that weren’t handled properly. From a retrospective point of view, it’s impossible to look back at the third inning and think that the decisions made by the Cardinal manager were the cause of the team’s downfall.
At the same time, however, the way Matheny handled the third inning is a mistake he needs to learn from.
Game 7: Matt Cain vs Matt Cain Impersonator
Tonight, the Giants and Cardinals play one game for the National League pennant. The Giants have Matt Cain rested and ready to go, and he’ll likely be called upon to carry a significant workload to get through the right-handed heavy Cardinals line-up. On the opposing side, the Cardinals will start Kyle Lohse, who simply isn’t as good as Matt Cain. However, for this year at least, he did a pretty amazing impression of the Giants ace.
Jason Motte and the Two Inning Save
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.