Sunday, Day of Rest

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Wow. 5 hours and 14 minutes (plus) later, the Indians manage to win a game that was oh, so loseable. (is that a word?) Two games in Boston, the top #1/#2 starter tandem, and they lay two eggs. And yet the Tribe escapes with a split. Every Indians fan out there (and I wonder how many were there at Jacobs Field until 1:30 in the morning) should be extremely pleased with that. Facing Beckett and Schilling, it could have been worse, regardless of my predictions for Schilling. The Red Sox have to be a little deflated, at least. Well, exhausted at least. Hopefully the Tribe booked Sunday night hotel rooms!

Jhonny is the man. Betancourt is absolutely lights out. Trot Nixon (batting only because Travis Hafner--by the way who would have figured he could dunk a basketball--is slow) comes up huge with a hit that he'll never forget. The pile-on begins. And Franklin Gutierrez shows maybe why Wedge let him bat six times with an at bat that only a Volvo sign kept off Lansdowne Street (or maybe the Mass Pike.)

I feel, at this moment, the same way about the Buckeyes and the Indians. Excited and hopeful about where they are, yet entirely unsure about just how good they are.

After LSU and Cal lost today, the Bucks are sure to be #1 (and may have been regardless of the Cal game) when the BCS standings come out this week. But have they been tested? Will they be? How good (or bad) is the Big Ten?

Michigan State looked red-hot, then lost a good game to a good team Wisconsin. And then let Northwestern score 48 points on them. Not red-hot any more. Red-hot Wisconsin then lost to red-hot Illinois, and then lost again to Penn State. Michigan loses to a freakin' I-AA team and then gets killed by a pansy-ass Pac-10 team. Then proceeds to win five straight, including games over Penn State and (formerly) red-hot Purdue (who had already been beat by the hopefully great Buckeyes.) Illinois looks great, beats two top 25 teams, and then proceeds to lose to Iowa, who had lost eight (!) straight Big Ten games. So basically the Big Ten is either a group of pretty damn good teams who just beat up on each other, mediocre and inconsistent teams, or wildly inconsistent but always dangerous teams. All of which makes me think of the rest of Ohio State's schedule: "Huh??" But at least they control their destiny. After being in the midst of LSU fans this week, I started to panic about OSU being left out in the BCS cold.

The Indians return home and need HUGE offensive games in games 3 and 4, regardless of how good (or bad) Jake Westbrook or Paul Byrd hurl it. With some of the clutch hitting we saw all last series, and more than a little luck, we will get C.C. in a very important game Thursday for some redemption. And if that doesn't work, Fausto for some redemption. Do you sense a theme?

Oh yeah, speaking of mediocre, inconsistent, certainly not horrible, and quite possibly dangerous, the Browns face the winless Dolphins Sunday.

C.C. is still our best pitcher

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Ok, the first game went not so much how we wanted. We weren't going to sweep. Our hitters can't play "Kill the Yankees" forever. But this is one game in a seven game series. A series long enough to tell you (unfortunately?) who the better team is. But let's hope when C.C. was on the bench, staring onto the field after he got pulled, he was thinking "There is no f*cking way this is happening to me again." Fausto and Jake, let's go baby.

Separated at Birth?

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Yankee Pitcher Mike Mussina & Jake Ryan, the Bo-Hunk Heartthrob from 16 Candles 

 

Doug Mientkiewicz & our own Tom M.

Last minute thoughts

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I don't want to rehash all the previews, or go position-by-position on the Red Sox-Indians ALCS that starts tonight, but just a couple quick thoughts and some links for your reading pleasure.

If I had to pick one of the first two games that I liked more than the other, it would be the Indians stomping on Schilling's grumpy old neo-conservative fat ass Saturday night. Yes, he's tough, yes, he's had some postseason success (with a possibly fake bloody sock), but I think the Indians can retire his ass while we're busy doing it to other fat old pitchers. Fausto should be electric also, after seeing him face A-Rod in the ninth, I can't wait to see Big Papi and Manny face him.

If Manny launches a 700 foot home run against C.C. and sits at home plate and poses like he did against the Angels, I expect the next pitch he sees to be right into his thorax.

Not sure about the Amish look, but who am I to judge?



King Kaufman of Salon blames Borowski for his doubts about the Indians:

If the Sox can take a lead into the late innings, they should be able to hang on. You can't quite say that about the Indians.

It's kind of looking like the Red Sox's year, which is how it looks for two or three teams every season right before they get eliminated. The Sox appear to have the ever-so-slight edge because of their hitting and bullpen. Then again that might just be my astigmatism.

I'm going to go with the Indians because of those top two starters, and because I'm tired of Indians fans whining in the letters threads that the Indians get no respect because they're not the Red Sox or Yankees. Now they can whine that I've picked them, which of course means that this is the Red Sox's year after all.
Prediction: Indians in seven.

Slate Magazine (not exactly a big sports publication) actively asks "Do the Indians have the guts to dump Joe Borowski?"

Some great links-to-links. Deadspin is posting blog snippets about each of the surviving teams. "Why My Team Makes Me Happy." See the Indians posts here. Also the other teams here.

And my prediction: Indians in 6 games. Although I wouldn't mind them winning in 5--at home. Indians will rough up Schilling and Dice-K. Pronk will be going to town on that right field wall. And JoeBo will do just fine. The Red Sox might have two World Series MVPs starting the first two games, but hopefully in a couple weeks we can say we had one too.

Wow!

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Something to chew on that you will undoubtedly hear a dozen times over the next two days.

On July 24, C.C. Sabathia gave up one run in seven innings, falling 1-0 to Dice-K and the Red Sox.

On July 25, Fausto Carmona gave up only four singles in eight shutout innings, beating Josh Beckett and the Red Sox 1-0.

The Indians have the best one-two starting pitching combo in the league, and Westbrook can be pretty damn good at times. That will hopefully be the difference in the series. That, and whether the Indians "had a down year" stars (Hafner and Sizemore) and "stop swinging at crap" players (Peralta and Garko) can continue the Indians recent trend of actually scoring runs.

It's been so long, I forgot how great playoff baseball can be. Every half inning, every pitch, so tense. Especially in person. Although the game 1 ass-whipping that I witnessed in the flesh did not have the tension of game 2, it was still pretty amazing. Too bad I had to watch the extra innings of game 2 with 20,000, errrrr, 5,000 Maroon 5 fans at The Q.

Like Bill Livingston said, starters on 3 days rest are 29-52 since 1995 in the postseason. I supported Wedge's move, thinking that a rested Byrd might just be more effective than a tired Sabathia Wednesday. He certainly wasn't "amazing", with all the baserunners. But he was gutsy, and he epitomizes the Indians this year. You can tell by the "Got Pronk?" shirt that he wore after the Indians clinched the division. These guys all love each other.

Some of you are familiar with Bill James' (who works for the Red Sox now) Pythagorean theorem, which uncannily can predict a team's record based on runs given up and runs scored against. (Surprisingly, "runs scored" is a better prediction than the idiotic way teams' offenses are measured...batting average.) Last year, the Indians won 12 games less than they should have. An amazing anomaly, suggesting a underperforming team (or more likely, a fluke.) This year the formula had them winning 92 games, 4 less than actual, suggesting that maybe they weren't quite as good as their record. The Red Sox, on the other hand, underperformed by 7 games.

Can the national media, and by this I mean ESPN, please give the Yankees story a break? I don't care if Torre comes back or not, I don't care if Posada, Rivera, Pettite come back. I don't care if Scott Boras makes the case that A-Rod is worth a half-billion to a billion dollars to a team's regional sports network as he chases both Hank Aaron Barry Bonds and Pete Rose. Why don't we start talking about the teams that actually win a postseason series this year?

And by that I mean other than the Rockies. Of course, winning 17 out of 18 games including a 163rd game where your MVP candidate scored the winning run while sliding 15 feet on his face is a pretty good story. I, for one, would like to see C.C. batting in Coors Field. Thin air + 300 lb. batter = bye bye.