Ok, so yesterday I told Jacob that you should never leave a baseball game before it was over. After all, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over” was first said by a ballplayer, and Tuesday’s game proved the saying.
And then last night happened.
Both me and Jacob were ready to turn the TV off before it was over, but, hey, lightning can strike twice, can’t it? So we stuck with it to the bitter end. That meant even watching Atlanta score in the 9th, which was just adding insult to injury (as Meemaw likes to say.)
We all expected the team to be amped up after winning yesterday, and, instead, they barely showed up. No wonder they lost. They didn’t even get a man on base until the 4th…and then it was only because Seager got a walk. You don’t win ballgames that way. Even the “rally” in the 5th (when they scored 2) seemed like too little too late already.
The pitching didn’t exactly help. Y’all may see already where I’m going with this, but there’s no way to disguise the fact that Urias sucked. 8 hits, 5 runs, 2 walks and only 3 strikeouts? And, oh yeah, 3 of those runs were fuckin homers. Yeah, fine, he got to 92 pitches like Dave Roberts said he would (Roberts’ figure was 90), but, shit man…at what cost? Although the damage was already done in the 1st inning, he should have gotten Urias out sooner.
Oh, but wait: the bullpen is needed tomorrow already, and is probably close to gassed…so we couldn’t rely on them the way we did as recently as yesterday…when another of our starters sucked. So we had to lose with Urias.
And why, you may ask, did Urias suck?
I sure as heck have got a theory. Raise your hands if y’all see what’s coming… My favorite manager fucked up Scherzer’s rest by playing him in Game 5 of the NLDS, and, when he came out on Sunday, he sucked. Then, really for no good reason, and when he should have known better following the Scherzer mess, Roberts put Urias in on Sunday for the 8th inning in which, oh yeah let’s not forget, he basically lost the game for us. That messed with Urias’ rest schedule…and, just as it fucked up Scherzer, I’m sure it fucked Urias up too.
Read back a few entries to where I said that it might make more sense to play Urias on Thursday and regular rest instead of on Wednesday. I was probably right, although we’ll never know how Urias would have pitched tonight. But playing him on Sunday was as boneheadedass as I said it was, that’s for sure.
The reality is that, if we lose this series, it’s going to be in large measure because of our pitching. There’s nothing wrong with Scherzer, Buehler and Urias. Any team would be lucky to have them. But they all totally sucked on their starts in this series. We can be charitable about Scherzer and Urias and blame their meltdowns on Roberts, but you can’t blame him for Buehler’s performance on Tuesday. Maybe he was just gassed from having pitched more this season than he ever has in his life. We’ll never know, either. All pitchers have bad days…but having all your starters have super bad days one after another has got to be more than just bad luck…
I dunno. Maybe the Braves are just the better team (although I’d still say that we lost last night’s game; the Braves didn’t win it.) But it stands to reason that, if we beat the best team in baseball in the NLDS, we should be able to beat a team which had less success than San Francisco during the regular season. That’s of course why we’re the favorites to win the series. Now lightning seriously is going to have to strike twice. Yeah, we came back from being down 1-3 last year, and I reckon it’s possible…but not if we play the way we did last night. It hurts to say it, but last night was a game we deserved to lose.
I’m still trying to tell myself to believe, and I’m going to try and be as positive as I can be tonight. But after a defeat like last night, that’s gonna take some work.
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