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| Monday, November 5 Notes on Game 7 By Rob Neyer ESPN.com |
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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4 What does Game 7 mean to a baseball fan? I'll tell you what it means to this baseball fan ... Saturday night, I was up until one in the morning reading "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract." And five hours later I woke up, unable to sleep further because I knew that a Game 7 would begin at the end of the day. And I read more of Bill's new book, raked leaves in the back yard, went out and bought a pair of shoes ... and yet, thoughts of Game 7 were never far from my mind. I wish the baseball season didn't have to end ... but what a way to go, right? Yesterday I wrote an article about the five other occasions on which 20-game winners faced off in Game 7 of a World Series. In a way, though, it's an artificial comparison. Were Hugh Bedient and Christy Mathewson truly similar in 1912? Not at all. Bedient was the youngest pitcher on the Red Sox roster; Mathewson was the oldest pitcher on the Giants roster. Bedient relied on an outstanding fastball thrown from a baffling sidearm delivery; Mathewson still threw hard, but was best known for his famous fadeaway pitch and his pitching intellect. Were Bret Saberhagen and John Tudor truly similar in 1985? Not at all. Saberhagen was 21 years old and relied on great control of his 90-m.p.h. fastball (it wasn't until later that Sabes threw 95); Tudor was 31 years old, and by that point his fastball barely reached the mid-80s. But Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling are, their career records notwithstanding, close to truly similar. Physically, Clemens and Schilling are similar. Schilling doesn't have Clemens' lower body, but they're both big fellows who might have trouble staying under 300 pounds when they're retired. More to the point, they've got similar stuff, as both throw mid-90s fastballs up in the strike zone, and complement the hard stuff with splitters. In terms of their stuff, Clemens and Schilling just might be the most similar Game 7 starters ever. And of course, neither of them disappointed, with both 20-game winners pitching as well as anyone might have reasonably expected. Still, Game 7 was something less than a tour de force for Bob Brenly. Schilling was shaky in the seventh, giving up three singles and all of them line drives. Schilling made enough pitches to stay in the game, though, as the Yanks scored just once to tie. And due to lead off the bottom of the seventh? Curt Schilling, who struck out. This didn't make any sense to me, and it didn't make any sense to Tim McCarver, either. With Schilling having 1) so recently been in trouble, and 2) thrown 90 pitches after three days rest, don't you have to send Erubiel Durazo (or David Dellucci, the forgotten man) to the plate, giving you a shot at taking the lead? Yes, you do. Brenly didn't see it that way, though. Schilling struck out. Tony Womack singled, but was thrown out at second base on what looked like a botched hit-and-run. At that point, I e-mailed a friend the following:
Subject: Yankees win? Alfonso Soriano led off the top of the eighth against Schilling, got behind in the count but battled, sat on a splitter and drove it over the left-field fence. It was Schilling's 95th pitch, and he simply shouldn't have been in the game to throw it. Randy Johnson should have been rested in Game 6, Curt Schilling should have been lifted for a pinch-hitter in Game 7, and Johnson should have been on the mound to face Alfonso Soriano. McCarver said, many times during Game 6, that there wasn't any point in pulling Johnson early, because he's got a “starter's mentality” and wouldn't, couldn't pitch in Game 7 no matter what happened. If that were true, then of course there wasn't any reason to get Johnson out of that game before the eighth inning. But it was not true, as we saw when Johnson did finally pitch. What's been amazing is how each of Brenly's bad decisions with his pitchers during the Series led to another bad decision. Brenly didn't remove Schilling soon enough in Game 1 ...
History will, I suppose, remember Byung-Hyun Kim as the goat of the 2001 World Series. The Diamondbacks won three games, for which the lion's share of the credit should go to Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling. But the Diamondbacks lost four games, for which the lion's share of the blame should go to Robert Earl Brenly, a rookie manager who waited until the World Series to manage like a rookie. That's on Arizona's side of the ledger, of course. If you're a Yankee fan reading this, you probably think that I'm shorting your team. And I am, mostly because there will be no shortage of laudatory things written about these Yankees. They are, after all, perhaps the greatest collection of baseball talent ever. They've won four straight World Series, and their performance speaks volumes for itself. And now, the postscript ... Sportswriters working on deadline have to make assumptions, and I suspect that most of us assumed that Mariano Rivera would take care of business just like he always does. But Rivera made a poor play on a sacrifice attempt -- once again, the Yankees' normally impeccable defense let them down -- and things just started to happen. Brenly did not pinch-hit for Tony Womack, and Womack doubled. And after Rivera plunked Craig Counsell, Tim McCarver said one of the most prescient things that any broadcaster has ever said. With the bases loaded and just one out, the Yankee infield had to play in. McCarver: “Rivera gives up a lot of broken-bat fly balls to the short outfield, which could be a problem with the infield in.” That's not exactly what he said, but it's close enough. The point is that McCarver nailed it precisely, because Luis Gonzalez's Series-winning single would quite likely have been caught by Derek Jeter, if Jeter had been playing in his normal spot. Now, it might be argued that I should rewrite this entire column, rather than harp on Brenly's series (and Series) of mistakes. But I'm not going to do that. That final, crazy, improbable last half-inning of the 2001 World Series gave us a different result than the one we expected ... but one half-inning does not change what came before it, any more than a sunrise takes away the night that it ends. There's a part of me that wishes the Yankees had won, because the 2002 edition will look quite a bit different than the group that came so close to winning yet again. They really were a great team, and perhaps they should have gone out on top. But more than anything else, I'm happy for a 22-year-old Korean pitcher whose life just might go a little easier because the Yankee defense fell apart in the biggest game of the year. |
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