Frayed Knot

The pressure in these next two series will definitely fall more on the Nats & the Cubs. The Nats have been a good to very good team and often a betting favorite for five seasons now including three 95+ win seasons, but have won a total of just 3 post-season games over that time so far and have not yet advanced a single round. Now they've managed to update their roster and farm system on the fly during this time and so aren't necessarily looking at a rapidly closing window or anything, but a loss to the Dodgers here and another season of going one-and-out would really start to darken the 'LOSER' stamp on their collective foreheads. If they survive the Dodgers and face the Cubs then they'd be the ones playing with house money, but not here in Round 1. Losing Strasburg and Ramos so late in the year is definitely going to hurt. The Cubs, by virtue of having been the best team nearly wire to wire this season -- plus all that history shit you may have heard of -- have to at least make it to the WS without this season feeling like a failure and reviving all those 'Same-old-Shit' feelings. That will at least bust the 71 year curse even if not the 108 year old one. Going forward, their hitting looks in good shape but their pitching less so and I remember chastising those Met fans who justified feeling OK about losing to the Cards in 2006 with the idea that that year was merely a step up on the escalator which was only going to travel upward for as many season as the eye could see.

Familia had given up [u:209imprk]ONE[/u:209imprk] HR all season -- Will Myers of SD to tie a game w/2 outs in the 9th at CitiField back in August - Mets later won in extras Conor Gillaspie had hit six in just under 200 ABs.

Shit, the last NYM close-out game at home was the Bobby Jones one-hitter 16 years ago. Either we win a post-season round on the road or we don't seem to win it at all.

Just think how good this is going to make the comeback!

Would like to get a quick one here so JF would be available for two innings if needed.

Season on the line, potential winning run on 2nd, who else would you want up?

Can MLB install in this robot-ump thing retroactively to about two innings ago?

OK, it's now a two innings to one advantage to us.

Everybody named Rivera hits today!! Is it too late to add Geraldo to the roster?

We're very good at hitting really high pop-ups so far.

In an alternate Pepsi universe, Odell Beckham Jr scores touchdowns.

Chad Ochoseis wrote: Funny thing - since the Mets and Giants were both 87-75, we'd still be playing this game under the old single wild card playoff rules. But it would be regular season game 163 instead of post-season. And I still pretty much treat this as Reg Season Game #163, the only difference now is that the top two teams in each league play it whether they wind up tied or not. It's like we're in the playoffs but we're not yet in the big boy playoffs.

Getting the WC was nice and all, but the difference between advancing past tonight or not is bigger than any other and losing here would make it seem like you weren't really in the playoffs at all. Not complaining, that's how it should. I just don't want to be the one that goes home so 'Must Win WC' is my satisfaction level for right now. Losing in a round past this one, while disappointing, would be less crushing especially given the relative seasons of the Mets and Cubs, and would at least give us another week of baseball to sink our teeth into. Getting past the Cubs, on the other hand, would suddenly make me one greedy bastard.

Which is why turning points only become turning points retroactively. That game was their 15th loss in 22 games, including five against the likes of the DBacks. And yet, after one more loss the following day (in which they didn't pitch or hit) they suddenly became the team that went 27-12 over their next 39 Confoundingest thing I ever did see.

SF Roster for tonight PITCHERS: Bumgarner * George Kontos Santiago Casilla Derek Law Javier Lopez * Sergio Romo Will Smith * Hunter Strickland That's two lefties out of the pen in addition to the lefty starter. Lopez is their LOOGY - 90 of the 118 batters he faced this year were LHBs. Smith was used more evenly vs L & R CATCHERS: Trevor Brown Buster Posey INFIELDERS: Brandon Belt Brandon Crawford Conor Gillaspie Joe Panik Kelby Tomlinson Ehire Adrianza That leaves out Eduardo Nunez, he was their 3B for much of the second half but strained a hammy in the final week OUTFIELDERS: Gregor Blanco Gorkys Hernandez Angel Pagan Jarrett Parker Hunter Pence Denard Span

Vic Sage wrote: the rule doesn't require the ball to maintain its location in the strike zone all the way through the air space. If it crosses the zone at any point its a strike. So the front plane is a sufficient measure. It doesn't matter if it falls down after that. I think the objection would be that, because of the angle from which a pitch approaches tacked onto any curve it might have, a 2-D scan which looks only at the front of the plate it could miss a pitch which is a hair outside as it crosses the front side but could conceivably still catch a corner before reaching the back of the plate. But as I figured while watching the game last night (via some graph paper and a few doodles combined with some basic trig) even a big breaking curve delivered by an extreme side-slinging hurler still wouldn't move laterally more than about 1/4" or so during its trek from front of plate to back. And the upper limit of the zone should be measured for each player based on film analysis of their position when they actually swing and hit a ball. Because it shouldn't matter how they stand before or after that. What matters is where they are at the point of contact, and if a pitch is within that zone at that point, its a strike, no matter how they stood in the box up to that point, or whether they danced up to the plate when they got up to bat. Yes, that's the way the rule is written and -- at least theoretically and however imperfectly -- how it's enforced now. It also shoots to hell my six year-old idea of a batter squatting back on his haunches in order to draw a walk every time. My father explained to me why that wouldn't work then and it's still the reason why it wouldn't work now.

Zach Britton is an extreme GB pitcher Looking it up: 254 batters faced this season Ks = 74 BB = 18 Ground Balls = 128 Fly Balls = 11 Line Drives = 21 HR = 1 Sac Fly = 0 BAA .162 And when the GW HR was hit there was one out w/runners on 1st & 3rd

Is it true that Showalter deferred using his closer until a "save situation" developed and he never ended up getting into the game? Echoing much of what was said above: Buck never gave that as the reason why he didn't use his star closer Zach Britton -- he of the 0.54 ERA, the 0.84 WHIP, and quite possibly soon the CY winner -- but, yeah, that's what he wound up doing. He had him warming up briefly in the 8th (I think it was) so he at least considered the idea of bringing him in prior to a save situation and he has done so before (including during this season in a game vs Toronto). The problem then became that things fell apart so quickly in the 11th (2 hits on just 4 pitches) that he didn't have time to get Britton re-warmed again by the time the inning was in crisis mode and he desperately needed a ground ball (Britton is an extreme GB pitcher). Next pitch after that = Disaster.

Yeah, I wondered about that too. Not that I claim to know a lot about how Gibbons usually uses his pen, but I know enough to know that it wasn't all that good down the stretch* while the Jays were stumbling to an 9-16 September (before finally winning their final two) which makes one wonder why Gibbons seemed so anxious to get into it so early. * closer Roberto Osuna just by himself had three games during a six outing stretch in mid-late September where he allowed multiple runs in an inning while trying to save games (blew two of them). So naturally last night not only does he toss a perfect inning but the Jays pen overall pitched five perfect. The last Orioles hit was Machado's infield single in the 6th O's pen was good too ... right up until Jimenez coughed up hits on 3 consecutive pitches culminating with the game-ending bomb.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Was Hunter Pence bitten by a werewolf recently? [fimg=300]http://mediadownloads.mlb.com/mlbam/2016/10/04/images/mlbf_1202533783_th_43.jpg[/fimg]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Anyway, has anyone noticed that Madison Bumgarner has a girl's first name? The town where Bumgarner is from near Hickory, North Carolina was/is known colloquially to the locals as 'Bumtown' for the large number of Bumgarners who, for whatever reason, started settling there a century or more ago and where many of their descendants continue to live, including various ones who aren't necessarily related - or at least aren't all that closely related. So as a result of that and his unisex first name -- and this is a story he tells about himself so it at least has the ring of truth to it -- he admitted to once dating a girl in high school whose name was ... Madison Bumgarner.

So the Jays were reportedly deciding between Marcus Stroman and Nelson Liriano for the start tonight and wound up using both - similar to the scenario being discussed in the other thread about whether Terry should consider using Bartolo out of the bullpen on Wednesday. Of course most teams won't have as big a fall-off (at least by reputation) from their 1 & 2 starters to their 3rd & 4th as the Mets do, but they did what they needed to do to move on. And the probable CY winner out of the pen for the O's never makes an appearance despite Buck using seven different pitchers.

I don't know what Buck said to his pitcher during the mound visit just prior to that bomb ... but it didn't work.

And now the Blue Jays and Rangers can resume their "pleasantries" left over from last year. Bat flips anyone?

And then there was the old water bottle which came flying out of the stands just as Baltimore's LF Kim while in the process of catching a deep fly. Every once in a while, just when you think Canadians fit their rep for the most polite folks on the planet, the Canucks or Canadiens lose the Stanley Cup and suddenly the cities of Vancouver & Montreal are over-turning cars and setting them on fire.