Cardinals Soar High in World Series Victory

It is hard  to admit that I was wrong, but I was. I didn't believe. I thought there was no "team of destiny," I thought there was no way that the Cardinals could out hit the Rangers. I was wrong. It was after game 6 I knew I was wrong, it was after the Ranger bullpen that I touted as the better of the two gave up TWO, not one, TWO two run leads in the 9th and 10th inning that I knew I was wrong. As soon as Nelson Cruz decided to go all Bill Buckner on his team and blow game 6 with a terrible defensive play I knew the Cardinals were going to be World Series champions.  So before I continue, congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals, you earned it.

The entire World Series was actually watchable this year, the first time in a long time that I have seen such passion about two teams, not many people in my neck of the woods (Upstate New York) care about. Sure you have those people who "just. love. baseball." but I'm talking about the casual fan, tuning in for every game, in fact every pitch of every game. The kind of fans who don't know any of the players names, except for the stars, and who, with every game, learn something new about the manager or second tier players. Heck, even I was bored to death by Rangers vs Giants last year.  But this time I didn't want to miss a pitch. 

Part of what played into that is the story of the St. Louis Cardinals. It has been said so many times over the last month that I'm only going to mention it once: they were 10.5 games back a month away from the postseason and they won the World Series. Those of us that don't believe in "team of destiny" stuff have to stop and think that MAYBE just MAYBE there was something more than just "momentum" driving St. Louis. Just look at what transpired in this World Series. Game 2: The Cardinals blow the game after manager Tony LaRussa, pulls his closer, the Rangers tie the series at 1-1. Game 3: the Cardinals, (or as they could be called for that game, the St. Louis Alberts.) blow the lid off Texas in an absolute drubbing. Game 4: Rangers win, by SHUTTING OUT the red birds in a pitching gem by Derek Holland. Game 5:  the so called "Phonegate game," a game that the Rangers won after a screw up with bullpen phone caused a mismatch, that Mike Napoli took advantage of. Game 6: St. Louis goes down it it's final strike of the World Series against one of the best closers in the game and David Freese hits a 2-run triple. Then, after a Josh Hamilton 2 run HR, Lance Berkman drives in the game tying run in the bottom of the 10th. Finally, Freese hits a walk off HR in the bottom of the 11th to win the game for the Cards. Game 7: It was all over but the celebration from the first pitch. After Freese tied the game in the bottom of the 1st inning the whole stadium knew what was going to happen. Eight innings later St. Louis had the trophy. 

David Freese won the World Series MVP after his
Game 6 and 7 heroics

The Cardinals shouldn't have won this series. They were beaten time after time by the Rangers and yet they wouldn't die. The Cardinals, as strange as it is to say, were the little kid on the playground that gets the snot beaten out of them but keeps getting up. Here's the thing though, that kid eventually wins the fight, whether it's through force or brains he wins, and that's what the Cards did: they won. 

Now, three days after the victory was completed another story line has emerged, the story of the end of Tony LaRussa's career. LaRussa, is without question one of the top 5 managers in baseball history. He has won the Manager of the Year award four times and has won three World Championships and is one of the few to have done it in both the American and National leagues. True greatness is found when the game changes because of one person, and with LaRussa that is the case. Before LaRussa's success no one would have thought to use a bullpen like he did, he changed the game and won while he did it. And in the end he got to go out on top. Congratulations Tony and congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Courtesy of MLB.com

The Battle of Bullpens gives Rangers advantage

The World Series starts tonight at 8p on FOX, the two contending teams have fought HARD to get there, but no part of each team has fought harder then the bullpens.


In the NLCS Tony LaRussa was forced to use his bullpen at an almost unbelievable rate: 55% of the innings were pitched by Cardinal relievers. In only 24.1 innings the St. Louis starters gave up 19 runs to the Brewers, an offense that does not measure up to Texas' in any way.  It is obvious that if the Cardinals are going to win one of two things need to happen: their starting pitchers need to go deep into games AND shut down the explosive Rangers offense OR the Cardinal offense needs to out hit the Ranger offense. Ideally the Cardinals would exercise option number one, however the way they have been pitching throughout the playoffs it appears that, with the exception of any game Chris Carpenter starts, it is going to turn into a slugfest, followed by a battle of bullpens. 

The fact is that as bad as the Cardinal starters have been the Texas starters have been worse. In the ALCS Texas pitching gave up 25 runs, 21 were given up by the starters. The relievers gave up only four runs, on four solo HRs, the entire series. When Texas brought in a reliever the Tigers were completely shut down, allowing the Rangers to come back and win two games in extra innings. The premier reliever in the LCS was Alexi Ogando, who in four appearances pitched more innings (7.2) than all but two starters on both the Cardinals AND the Rangers, and those two starters got two starts. Ogando is the biggest weapon the Rangers have in the bullpen, in his 7.2 innings her had 10 strikeouts, compare that to the "ace" of the team, C.J. Wilson's 11 SOs in 10.2 innings and you begin to understand how dangerous Ogando is. 

Ogando isn't the only weapon coming out of the Rangers' bullpen. Mike Adams and Neftali Feliz have also dominated this postseason, with Adams getting a win and Feliz getting a save in the LCS. In fact, all four of Texas' ALCS wins came out of the bullpen. Normally I would say that this is a trend tat has to stop in order to win a championship, but this year I don't think that is the case. With Ogando, a pitcher who WAS  a starter all year and Mike Adams, a shut down reliever, ready to go at any time the Rangers pitchers can go out there with a "just don't blow it" mentality. Because with the offense they have that's all they have to do, to borrow a term from football, they simply have to "game manage" let the offense do what it does and win the game and the series for Texas. 


I believe that the starters for the Rangers will be able to game manage enough for Nelson Cruz, Michael Young and the Texas offense to win the series, with a little help from Alexi Ogando, in SIX  games. 

Is the World Series in the Cards for the Cardinals?

With game one of the ALCS over baseball fans everywhere look towards Sunday's game 1 on the National League side. With an almost magical run the Cardinals rallied from 10.5 back with a month left to make the playoffs and then vanquished the #1 team in all the Majors when they defeated the Phillies in the NLDS. That being said, the Brewers won the NL Central (the same division the Cardinals are in) giving them home field advantage in this series. Home field COULD play a major role considering the Brewers have been almost un-beatable at home and won all THREE of their home games in the NLDS to advance. 

Adding fuel to an already red hot fire is the budding rivalry between the Cards and the Brew Crew. With players such as pitcher Zach Grienke claiming that, "no one likes (Cardinal's ace) Carpenter," and Nyjer "T-Plush"Morgan calling out Albert Pujols on twitter earlier this year it is fair to say that the Brewers are under the Red Bird's skin.  

This match-up is one that we saw a lot of in the regular season, and there was a pretty consistent result: The Cardinals won. I don't see any reason for that to change. I could go into the stats and give you a pretty solid reason but instead I'm going to simply ask a question: Can the Brewers win on the road? I have yet to see them do that in the postseason and I have serious doubts that the Cardinals, who have been on fire since about August 28th, will lose four games in Milwaukee, their offense is too good and their pitching staff has dominated the Brew Crew all year. So that means very simply: Brewers, if you wanna make it to the World Series win a game or two in St. Louis, if you do that, you've earned it. 

Official prediction: Cardinals in five games. 

Can the Rangers Hunt Down the Tigers?

Tonight the ALCS will begin, matching the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers. Before I continue I want to extend both my congratulations and respect to both teams, especially Detroit. As you may know I wrote a post saying that the Yankees would and should win a decisive game 5 in Yankee Stadium and Detroit stunned me with their poise and pitching ability. 

Now on with the predictions.


This ALCS match-up is very similar to the Tigers-Yankees ALDS match-up. The Tigers should have Justin Verlander go a minimum of two games and potentially three games in the series, a tough task for any offense to overcome. However, the Rangers, like the Yankees, have a prolific offense and can smash the ball from almost any position in the line-up. During the regular season the Rangers had FIVE hitters with over 25 HRs, and they had SIX with 75+ RBIs, and the craziest stat of all is that they had FIVE players within .005 points of a .300 avg. So they score runs with the HR but also by manufacturing runs with big innings (something the Yankees lacked).  The match-up to watch will be how each team's MVP candidate plays in the series: Miguel Cabrera for the Tigers and Michael Young, not Josh Hamilton, for the Rangers. If Young can out do Cabrera from the plate the Tigers will have very little chance to win.  

For the Tigers to win it will be about getting their line-up to start producing at an extremely high level. I feel like most of these games, with the exception of the Verlander games, will be slugfests which means that Cabrera, Victor Martinez and the rest of the Tigers line-up will have to pick it up. It is true that the Tigers rotation shut down the Yankees line-up but the major difference is in the strike-out department. Texas just doesn't strike out as much as New York does. A quick comparison and it is obvious how large the difference between the two teams is: The Rangers had only THREE players with more than 90 strike outs in the regular season, and only one player over 100. The Yankees had FIVE players over 90 K's, three of whom were over 100 SO's on the year (Also, A-Rod had 80 K's through 99 games, so it's pretty safe to assume that he would have been over 100, had he played a whole season.) 

All in all I don't think that the Tigers pitching staff is good enough to hold down the Ranger's explosive offense. It will be very interesting to see how Fister, Scherzer and Procello do in their second straight series against ridiculous line-ups. I don't think they have what it takes to win so I believe that the Texas Rangers will advance to the World Series in six games. 

An Open Letter to Alex Rodriguez

Dear Mr. Rodriguez,
You're kidding right? I mean, you have to be kidding because there's no way I just saw you go 0-4 with three strikeouts in game five of the ALDS, did I?


Oh wait, I did. Well let me just voice an opinion that you have heard before and you are about to hear AGAIN from every media outlet in the greater NYC area: YOU ARE, WITHOUT A DOUBT, THE MOST OVERHYPED AND UNDERPERFORMING PLAYER THE YANKEES HAVE EVER SIGNED. And Alex, that is saying something. You are worse then the Carl Pavanos and the (post-steroid) Jason Giambis, You're even worse then A.J. Burnett, and do you know why? Because with those guys you didn't EXPCET them to come through, they would have mediocre seasons and then have mediocre playoffs, or they would have a good season and have a good playoffs but none of them were like YOU. YOU have great, MVP like seasons (not this season to be fair but most seasons) and then you choke in the playoffs, and I mean CHOKE. There are bandits that got hung from trees in the wild west that don't choke as much as you do in the clutch.


Let's look at last night: seventh inning, down two runs, one out, bases loaded, you come to the plate. You didn't even need to get a hit. All that you had to do was hit a deep fly ball and score a run. That's IT. However you aren't even good enough to do that, instead you struck out swinging.....on a pitch that started inside and kept moving towards you, it was NEVER going to be called a strike and yet you still swung. Alright well I guess I can forgive you because Benoit threw you a change-up and you were looking fastball, so he made a good pitch, plus Tex walked in the run that YOU should have walked in so at least we scored a run. However, you had ANOTHER chance to define your legacy as a Yankee in the bottom of the ninth.


This time there were two outs, no one on base and if you don't get on base the SEASON is OVER, that makes it slightly important for your ass to get on. All the pressure is on you, and guess what: when you sign a contract for over $200 million you are signing a contract that says "HEY I WANT THE SPOTLIGHT ON ME, I WANT THE PRESSURE ON ME. I'M GOING TO COME THROUGH WHEN NO ONE ELSE CAN!!!!!!!" So the Baseball Gods gave you your wish, all of Yankee Stadium and most of the baseball world is watching YOU, watching YOU stare at two pitches that you easily could have launched over the right field fence and then watching YOU swing through a pitch that YOU should have obliterated. And then we watched YOU walk back to the dugout after, for the SECOND STRAIGHT SEASON, making the last out of the playoffs by striking out. I hope you feel good about yourself Mr. Rodriguez.


Now before you go and pull a LeBron and ask, "What should I do?" I'll just tell you. You should go to the front office of the New York Yankees and tell them that you want to re-structure your contract so that you make the minimum amount of money possible for a major leaguer unless you hit over .300 in the playoffs OR get game tying/winning hits in the postseason. I want you to tell them that, because it is clear that you don't feel like you need to EARN your money at all, you just expect us to give it to you, and as of now, you are correct. But before you blow off this letter please do me this favor, look at the other people in that locker room, look at all the fans you let down, time after time and ask your yourself this question: Is the money really that important to me? Because if it is then you aren't a real Yankee, and you will NEVER be a real Yankee. A real Yankee goes out there for his teammates and for he fans, Nick Swisher is a real Yankee, Robinson Cano is a real Yankee, Brett Gardener is a real Yankee, even C.C. is more of a Yankee then you are. So do yourself a favor Mr. Rodriguez and get in the YANKEE mentality because if you aren't in the Yankee mentality then you don't deserve to be in a Yankee uniform. So as Stephen Colbert would say: you're on notice.


Sincerely,
Andy Cahill and Yankee fans everywhere.

Who Will Stop the Rain?

I am going to preface this entire article by saying that I am a fan of the New York Yankees, I am rooting for them to win and thus I have an extremely biased opinion, now that that has been said, we can continue.


After game 1 of the 2011 ALDS was suspended due to rain I tweeted "Assuming Verlander doesn't pitch til game 3 or 4 the Tigers may have just lost this series." I said this thinking that both Ivan Nova and Freddy Garcia would be able to pull out wins, Nova did, Garcia did not. Verlander did end up pitching Game 3 and despite giving up the lead late pulled the win out due to a home run by Delmon Young. 

My first reaction to the loss was, to worry about losing the series. Being down 2-1 in a five game series usually does warrant that kind of reaction, however on more careful consideration I began to become more optimistic about the outlook of the Yankees in this series. The reason being simple: Verlander pitched game 3. This means that he will either, not pitch the rest of the series OR he will have to start on short rest in game 5, in Yankee stadium going against Ivan Nova on full rest. 

When I first saw the suspension of game 1 I thought that it would mean a 2-0 lead for the Yankees, and potentially a sweep. However I now see that it means a lucky five game win for the Yanks. I will be the first to admit that this particular would be 100% luck, if New York had to face Verlander twice in one series they would have very little chance to win the other three games. I will also be the first to admit that I vastly underestimated the Tigers pitchers, especially Max Scherzer who pitched a beautiful Game 2. Now it comes down to Rick Porcello vs AJ Burnett, a matchup that worries me because of Burnett's affinity to allow big innings. However the Yankee bats have been quiet for the last two games and I think Porcello is going to feel the full brunt of that frustration tonight. If New York is going to pick a game to explode offensively, the night AJ Burnett pitches is the night to do it. 

 Assuming there is still a series to talk about after tonight's game the most likely pitching match-up is Ivan Nova and Doug Fister. Verlander could go on short rest, but that isn't really Jim Leland's style, he trusts his guys to do their job and I believe he will go with Fister on normal rest. If Fister does go the Yankees will have a sizable advantage, not because Fister is bad, but because Ivan Nova has been almost unbeatable in the second half of the season and pitching at home he won't have to deal with any outside distractions that could faze rookie pitchers in such a big game. Actually a quick look at the stats and you can make an argument that Nova has been the Yankees best pitcher this season, in 5 fewer starts Nova only had 16 wins to CC Sabathia's 19, and the Yankees have won 7 of his last 10 games (including Game 1). That being said there is no doubt that the Yankees want a game 5 with Ivan on the mound, and he will be, thanks to the rain. 

Know Who You Are

This past weekend, Sept. 17th and 18th, Pittsburgh and Syracuse both agreed to leave the Big East conference and join the Atlantic Coast Conference, more commonly referred to as the ACC. This change began days of speculation that more teams would be leaving the Big East as well as the Big 12 (which has only 10 teams in it), leading to so called "super-conferences." Now, I have sat back over the last 18 months and not really had an opinion about which conference Nebraska should play football in, however I do have an opinion about this latest change.


The reason for my new found caring about conference realignment is simple: this move was made for the wrong reasons. It is true that schools such as Utah, Colorado, TCU and Nebraska changed conferences recently, and it is also true that with the exception of maybe TCU they all seem to have done it less for a competitive upgrade and more for a financial one. But there is a major difference between Utah, Colorado and Nebraska and schools such as Syracuse and Pitt. Syracuse and Pitt are NOT football schools. It is true that both programs have a football tradition, but it is also true that both football programs have been between mediocre and terrible for the better part of a decade.

Since 2001 BOTH Pitt and Syracuse football have ended the season ranked in the AP top 25 a combined four times. When it comes to having winning records Pittsburgh as been able to consistently have over .500 years notching 7 winning season in the last 10 years.  Syracuse, on the other hand, has had only two winning season since finishing 14th overall in 2001. During that same time span Syracuse basketball has won a National Championship and has won the Big East tournament twice, which considering the basketball pedigree of the Big East is impressive. Since it's inception in 1979 the Big East has produced 11 National Champions and 45 Final Four appearances. Big East football has never produced a National champion.


Pittsburgh basketball has also shown an affinity for winning. Despite never making it to the Final Four the Panthers have been ranked in the Top 10 at least once every year since 2001. Five out of those ten years the Panthers have gone to the Sweet Sixteen and came within seconds of a Final Four birth in 2008 when Villanova beat them in the Elite Eight.

At the end of the day some college conferences aren't good at football, the ACC and the Big East would be examples of that, others aren't good at basketball, the PAC-12, Big 12 and SEC are examples that come to mind. These conferences need to know who they are. If you aren't a football conference, if you aren't a football school that's O.K. But ruining one of the best college basketball conferences in the country is not the answer. The ACC already gets a huge amount of air time with teams such as Duke and North Carolina, by leaving the Big East both Pittsburgh and Syracuse are hurting there conference, there teams chances of winning it all and the tradition of Big East basketball. But what they are helping is their own wallets which I guess is all that matters in the end. Even if it shouldn't be.