Aces in the Hole: CC Sabathia and Johan Santana
With the season winding down, their teams pitching staffs in disarray, and needing to win, the Mets and Brewers turned to the two best pitchers in baseball to take the ball on short rest and they both delivered.
First Santana, coming off the highest pitch count of his career, took the hill on 3 days rest for the first time as a starter and shutout a solid Marlins lineup, allowing 6 runners and striking out 9. One timezone away, the Brewers Ben Sheets could not respond as he suffered through 2.1 terrible innings before being relieved. Since throwing a shutout against the Padres 3 weeks ago, Sheets has been injured and ineffective. Who knows if he'll even pitch in the playoffs, but if he does, he'll have to regain his form from earlier in the season if the Brewers want to last long.
The next day however was a different story. For on this day, the Brewers had the only man on the planet who could out do Santana: CC Sabathia. Sabathia, pitching on three days rest for the third time in a row, pitched even better than Santana had the previous day allowing just one unearned run on 5 baserunners, only one of whom got past second base. Less than an hour later the Mets failed to beat the Marlins to force a playoff, they celebrated in Milwaukee for the first time in 26 years.
This brings me to my point. The one thing I don't like about the wild card is that teams do not have equal schedules. Why should the final playoff spot have been decided by what the Mets did against the Marlins or what the Brewers did against the depleted Cubs? Baseball should have stepped in and changed the schedule forcing the Brewers to play the Mets for the final spot. A playoff when tied would not be the same as both teams were going to move mountains to try and win yesterday depleting themselves to a point that the playoff would have been won by the team that could still stand after the dust settled.
No, we could have had a Sunday of Johan vs. Sabathia for all the marbles. That would have been one for the ages. Too bad it never happend. Maybe we can get something close in the NLDS with CC vs. Hamels in game 5, but thats asking a lot.
First Santana, coming off the highest pitch count of his career, took the hill on 3 days rest for the first time as a starter and shutout a solid Marlins lineup, allowing 6 runners and striking out 9. One timezone away, the Brewers Ben Sheets could not respond as he suffered through 2.1 terrible innings before being relieved. Since throwing a shutout against the Padres 3 weeks ago, Sheets has been injured and ineffective. Who knows if he'll even pitch in the playoffs, but if he does, he'll have to regain his form from earlier in the season if the Brewers want to last long.
The next day however was a different story. For on this day, the Brewers had the only man on the planet who could out do Santana: CC Sabathia. Sabathia, pitching on three days rest for the third time in a row, pitched even better than Santana had the previous day allowing just one unearned run on 5 baserunners, only one of whom got past second base. Less than an hour later the Mets failed to beat the Marlins to force a playoff, they celebrated in Milwaukee for the first time in 26 years.
This brings me to my point. The one thing I don't like about the wild card is that teams do not have equal schedules. Why should the final playoff spot have been decided by what the Mets did against the Marlins or what the Brewers did against the depleted Cubs? Baseball should have stepped in and changed the schedule forcing the Brewers to play the Mets for the final spot. A playoff when tied would not be the same as both teams were going to move mountains to try and win yesterday depleting themselves to a point that the playoff would have been won by the team that could still stand after the dust settled.
No, we could have had a Sunday of Johan vs. Sabathia for all the marbles. That would have been one for the ages. Too bad it never happend. Maybe we can get something close in the NLDS with CC vs. Hamels in game 5, but thats asking a lot.
Labels: CC Sabathia, Johan Santana, wild card
posted by Andrew Manning at
5:13 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home