Ok so I figured I'd wait a day to post this just so that I could make sure that the streak, whether positive or negative, was actually not just a one game thing and seems like some interesting things occurred in the games on Tuesday. Now to break things down for the last 2 days we had 2 back to back losses for the Cardinals, one blow-out win and one close loss for the Blue Jays and two close games for the Orioles, one win and one loss. Now there were some specific things to look at in these games that definitely bring the results into better context, so let's get to it.
First off we have the Cardinals, still second in the National League because of the winning streak that the Pirates have going but even so the rest of the National League teams are doing much worse so they are ways ahead in the wild card race. Now in the first loss against the A's the offence seemed to have been clicking since they scored 5 runs right? Well thats not entirely true, the team just took advantage of Milone's weakness to the long ball, so all of their runs came through home runs. In addition they were only 1-11 with runners in scoring position and only scored these runs in 2 innings, so this all means that they were unable to take advantage of runners on base in order to further their score, 5 times to be exact. In addition to this their fielders made 2 errors, which contributed to the score that Oakland achieved in the game and as we all should know Jake Westbrook is not that great of a pitcher anymore, especially when he only lasts 4 innings, allows 10 hits, 6 runs, 2 walks and only strikes out 3. Overall not the greatest performance by the Cardinals but of course you can't really make a conclusion about one game so lets look at the following game. Now this game was again a loss, agains the Angels 5-1, and the pitchers were Lance Lynn and Jered Weaver. Ok so this game went fairly similarly to the previous one in that one of the people who made an error in the previous game made another during this game (Matt Carpenter), the offence went 1-7 with runners in scoring position and the offence still had a high number of hits. Now the difference is that all of the Angel's runs came in the 2nd inning, when Lance Lynn had a hiccup in his delivery as he only allowed 2 base runners after that inning. So it seems the pitching is not a problem however the offence and defence still needs to get itself together to an extent to avoid slipping any further back in the standings.
Now the Blue Jays, again being frustrating. So the first game looked at was the 8-3 blow out win against the Detroit Tigers, which was somewhat of a surprise for me, as I expected Dickey to implode against one of the best offences in the MLB. However that sure did not happen, Dickey did a pretty great job on closing the door on the Tigers only allowing 2 runs and getting a fair number of strikeouts and ground ball outs. The offence followed suit as well going 3-7 with runners in scoring position, got a good number of hits and their runs didn't come over just one or 2 innings, which means they DID eat into the starter and didn't just take advantage of one or two break down situations on the part of the starter. Now what was disturbing is that before this game began we found out that Edwin Encarnacion, Adam Lind and J.P Arencibia are day to day, which is worrying as 2 out of 3 of those players have been our offensive core and the third can be a difference maker at times when he gets the right pitch. However they still managed to overcome it. Now of course from this one might expect something similar the next game similar to what you'd expect from the Cardinals games. They started off the game similarly to their last in that they pounced on the starter, Doug Fister, VERY early as they scored 4 runs in the first inning and then two more in the second. However the Toronto starter Chien-Ming Wang pitched worse than Fister and allowed 6 runs in the second inning, unfortunately much like his previous outing his sinker was fairly flat, in didn't have it's usual sinking motion, and his control was a bit off as more than half of the pitches he threw were balls. However once he was pulled out our bullpen dominated for the most part for the rest of the game, with the exception of the one run that Neil Wagner allowed in the 8th and unfortunately his deflection of Jose Reyes' return is what cost the Jays the run. Now one thing I've talked about a fair amount that I believe honestly stopped any hope the Jays had of coming back was the Umpiring, in the bottom of the 9th their was a few really bad blown calls, so much so that when the last batter, Jose Reyes, came to bat the count was 2 out none on when it should have been 2 on and none out. This is because there was a bad call at the first batter, which meant that Emilio Bonifacio should have been on base then the up blew a foul ball call, which first wasn't a foul and second hit Kawasaki and thus he should have been on base too and considering the speed that Bonifacio has I can guarantee you he would have had no trouble making it to third and with Reyes, Bautista and DeRosa coming up they would have easily come back. Either way I just have a BIG thing against the terrible umpiring this year as many strikes/balls have been blown in games I've watched (both Jays and others) and then theres the self righteous umps like Angel Hernandez that make me think they should just replace all of them.
Ok so finally we have the Orioles, now theres honestly not much to say about these two games as it's just the same style they've been playing at for the past week or so, which is scoring under 5 runs per game, while still getting a steady amount of hits and coming within 2-3 runs of winning or losing and their pitchers don't give up a huge amount of runs. Now what I'm more interested about is the fact that the Orioles just put together a trade with the Chicago Cubs for Scott Feldman, and the reason I find him interesting is because he is a ground ball pitcher who has spent the brunt of his career in Texas one of the worst hitters parks in the league. Despite this he still was able to keep a respectable ERA and win-loss ratio and given that the Orioles have a better defence than the Rangers and that Camden Yards is a fair bit less homer friendly than Rangers Ballpark I expect he could be a very successful pitcher with Baltimore and not to mention he had a time at Texas when he was managed by Buck Showalter so he has an established relationship with the Orioles skipper and Buck knows what Feldman is capable of.
-Eric
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