October 22, 2007

Gratuitous Congratulatory Haiku

Sawx come back again,
Dice-K good enough to hold.
Pedroia rox on.

At least I'll be able to get a couple nights' sleep before the Series starts.

BTW, you know who Pedroia reminds me of? Giovanni Ribisi, the guy who played the medic in Saving Private Ryan. Whenever he comes up to the plate, I keep expecting him to say, "Oh, God! It's my liver!" (Like I said, I need some sleep.)

Posted by Robert at October 22, 2007 11:11 AM | TrackBack
Comments

How about Youkilis's shot off the Coke bottles . . . he's hitting something like .500 for the postseason . . .

Posted by: The Colossus at October 22, 2007 12:14 PM

Yeah, literally a "towering" shot.

My daughter was disappointed when I told her the score this morning. I had to assure her that the game was a lot closer than that for the first six innings. Dice-K forced me to drink more wine than I really had planned...

Of course, it's not necessarily his fault when the strike zone seems to change with each pitch, but still.......

Posted by: Robbo the LB at October 22, 2007 12:37 PM

I also thought the balls and strikes were extremely inconsistent -- not just within the crew and from game to game, which is to be expected -- but as you note, even by the same umpire, from pitch to pitch. My favorite was when the entire infield began to walk off the field (I think Okajima was pitching) after a presumed called third strike for the third out, only to have the umpire fail to give the signal for a strike. Literally every player on the field thought it was strike three.

I think Westbrook's mysterious revival after the third inning was partially because they stopped squeezing him on pitches and started giving him evey borderline call. The guys who seemed the most upset by the calls were the older guys -- Victor Martinez, Lofton, Manny -- these guys have seen a few balls and strikes in their time, and know when they're gettng screwed.

Part of Manny's insane brilliance is that he can adjust for it -- in that one-twentieth of a second he has to make up his mind, he can see the pitch and say "probably a strike, but this guy's going to call it a ball" and let the pitch go by. He'll take pitches 0-2 that he has no business taking.

Either that, or God just really loves Manny.

Posted by: The Colossus at October 22, 2007 02:22 PM

SOMEONE loves Manny, I'm not sure it's the man upstairs though.

Heez a bery bad man.

Posted by: Steve the LLamabutcher at October 23, 2007 10:42 AM