Thanks. No miracle comeback last night for the Yankees as the bullpen game strategy worked again for the Jays. Didn’t relax until the final out though as Yankees have a lot of firepower.
Will be interesting to see whether Toronto continues to go with a three man starter strategy for the ALCS. I expect not because it is a longer series and Bassitt should now be healthy. Bigger question is whether Bo Bichette, their best hitter, is able to play. However Jays had lots of offence in ALDS without him.
My apologies to Yankees fans but I expect they have already seen this video anyway.
I expect Ortiz and Guerrero Jr know each other well. Ortiz and Guerrero Sr were both born in the Dominican Republic in 1975 so starred for their teams in roughly the same period. Ortiz has probably known Vladdy Jr since he was a little boy.
Felt a bit sorry for Jeter and Rodrigues in the video but they took it as well as they could.
There are not many Canada-born MLB stars so I have always liked Vladdy Jr (born in Montreal).
I read Bichette was improving and he hit off both Bassit and Scherzer in a sim game.
I assume they will go Gausman-Yesavage-Bassit for the first 3 games and if they think Scherzer is an option he would go G4 or they would do another BP game.
You kind of expect it when a star like Vlad goes off, especially against the Yankees and he did going 7/19 with 3 HR and 9 RBI. But you don’t really plan on Ernie Clement going 9/14 or Daulton Varsho going 7/16. And they even got contributions from Barger, Lukes, Schneider, Straw who were all over 300 and while Kirk didn’t hit much, he did add 2 big bombs early that set the tone for the series.
I think Bieber will be the 3rd or 4th starter as he pitched much better than Scherzer down the stretch. Must be hard to tell a guy like Scherzer that he is not on the ALCS roster but they left him off the ALDS roster.
Not watching the video. No need to feel sorry for Jeter and A-Rod, both have had phenomenal careers, and Jeter has more championships than both those guys combined.
Interesting article (if you need a copy I can paste it), but the innumerate cannot pass up an attempted dig:
And for the “never bunt” crowd: the chance to score one run is slightly higher with a runner on third base with one out than with a runner on second base and none out. The Phillies had the bottom of the order coming up — starting with infielder Bryson Stott, whom the Dodgers had evaluated as a good bunter.
Funny, because he uses analytics to try to debunk the analytics crowd.
I’m not sure anyone uses the phrase “Never Bunt.” Often people decry bunting in every inning except the late ones. A team never knows early in a game how many runs they will eventually need to win, so why waste an out? In later innings, the number can be quite clear: in this case it was one. Sometimes a team needs one more run just so they can get three additional outs. That’s how valuable "outs left " are.
The problem with the bunt is that teams don’t do it as much as they used to, and seemingly don’t practice it much, so they’re not prepared to adjust to something like the wheel play on defense. I would have loved to see Stott try and drag the bunt to the first base side, or maybe pull back and try and slap it at the charging third baseman or gaping hole at short!
I’m hopefully it will be better since the game will be in Milwaukee and they seemed like they had a lot more energy games 1/2 but they looked like crap last night and night before they had a number of opportunities to take the came but couldn’t come through.
I’m readying myself for the playoff disappointment. That seems to be the Brewer’s thing.
Hope it is not permanently devastating for him as it was for another Phillies reliever 33 years ago.
Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams never pitched as well after giving up the three-run walk-off home run to Joe Carter that gave the Jays the 1992 World Series. He was devastated by the events of that inning.
Or worse. Donnie Moore for the Angels. Hopefully Kerkering puts it behind him like Mariano Rivera was able to do. Not that Kerkering is likely be the next Mariano but one of the things that made Mo so great was not dwelling on past mistakes even if those mistakes were few and far between but as great as he was he had at least 3 high profile playoff blown save or losses - Cleveland 97, Arizona 01, Boston 04 - oddly all on the road.
