Ok so what I'm referring to in the title should be fairly obvious, first we had a rather strange performance by the Blue Jays on Friday where their starter for the day only gave up 1 run. Now don't get fooled by this Ortiz may have done well but he did so while allowing 4 hits, not that big of a deal, and walking 5 and if you watched the game he didn't exactly have the best control out on the mound. The strangest thing I found was that news sites were pumping up Ortiz's outing as a great sign and then also throwing Lester's 1-hit complete game as a huge deal as well. This isn't pretty far from the truth because like I said if you watched the game you could see Ramon Ortiz didn't have that great of control and ended putting a lot of people on base, he was bailed out by the defence a few times and made a pickoff error. Then as well the same goes for Lester, he didn't have the greatest control either, the Blue Jays offence just clicked into 'swing for the fences' mode again and didn't get , which can be seen by the fact that he only got 5 K's on the whole game, which is less than his usual K/9. Either way it was a bit annoying to see the Jays take a step back after doing much better in the series against the Rays, but then came the Saturday game.
I had looked at the match up of pitchers a few days ago and figured the Red Sox would probably have it in the bag since they mashed Buerhle before but surprisingly he only allowed 1 runs on 5 hits and 2 walks, the polar opposite of his last outing. Now I haven't gotten a chance to watch the game as of yet because of the time difference between Australia and North America but I plan on it and just from looking at the box score I can see that more than half of the line up had a hit of some kind and 3 players who earlier in the season would lack any plate discipline took a walk or two. Now thats good news for the development of the offence, and Darren Oliver and Casey Janssen did a great job of closing them down, remember Oliver's run was unearned and was a function of the fielding error by Kawasaki so I wouldn't pin it on him since it was an infield fly that was missed and gave up the run. All in all though it seemed to be a good game since unlike a lot of games played the Jays were able to come back, score a run in the ninth and win it.
Now we have the Cardinals over Friday and Saturday, and boy was that a surprise and not the offence on either games but Adam Wainwright and Shelby Miller, both of which who managed to throw complete games. Now Shelby Miller threw his 9 innings while only allowing 1 hit, the first batter of the game, and then retiring 27 batters in order with no problems and striking out 13. Now when any pitcher strikes out 10 or more batters its impressive but when you do it against a team thats hot and hitting like crazy like the Colorado Rockies it looks even better. Now the Cardinals were lucky they got this performance from Miller and thats because Garland did a pretty good job for the Rockies and the Cardinals offence was only 2 for 10 with runners in scoring position meaning they didn't get those big hits when it really mattered. Overall stellar pitching performance that makes more of a case for Miller to become a permanent fixture in the Cardinals rotation.
Then came the Saturday game and Adam Wainwright stepped on the mound and if you read my last post involving Wainwright you should have been expecting something good but what he did was much better. He worked through 9 innings allowing no runs, 2 hits and 1 walk. Unfortunately he wasn't able to top Miller's performance the previous day but similar to the Friday game it was good the Cardinals had that work from Wainwright since they were again pretty bad at hitting with runners in scoring position, 4 for 15 to be exact. Just another stellar outing by Wainwright showing that he was deserving of that extension that he signed earlier in the season.
And then just to top off pitching performances that were extremely noteworthy we look at the Met's Matt Harvey. Just like Shelby Miller Harvey is a rookie getting his first starting chance in the majors and boy has been wrecking shop on the mound, and this week was no exception. Harvey, going up against the White Sox managed to take a perfect game into the 7th, and usually would be taken out at that point but not Harvey. He continued on and took the game through to the 9th before handing the ball over to closer Bobby Parnell to close it out and the Met's scored in walk off fashion in the bottom of the 10th. Now this was impressive as there aren't many one hitters or perfect games that were taken into extra innings, you can count them on one hand, then like Miller he stuck out a crap load of batters, 12 to be precise, making for eye opening pitching by the rookie.
It's like I told my father at the start of our fantasy baseball season, 'this is going to be the year of the prospect' and I think it's only just begun at that.
-Eric
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