FanPost

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory Redux

I know it's easy to type this now, but as soon as Morrow did not come out to pitch the 8th I told my son we were going to lose and I should have said so in the gamethread. Unfortunately three observations I made after our last 2 blown games are pretty much entirely appropos again tonight. The three observations, in italics, lifted word for word from my post 2 days ago are:

1) At what point do our starting pitchers get to pitch past the 7th inning? Morrow is cruising at 102 pitches, why not let him see if he gets an 8 or 10 pitch inning. If he doesn't it's no different than yanking Rauch , Janssen, or tonight's 8th inning mystery guest Frasor after they put guys on base.

2) (T)onight Scrabble is brought in to do his lefty specialist thing but is left to give up key hits to righties An instant replay tonight pretty much, as effective as he was early, clearly there isn't a 9th inning plan yet that's any better than the 8th inning "try the next guy" plan.

3) (N)ot having a real 3rd baseman or 1st baseman on the roster right now isn't helping things We all love Johnny Mac and he may be among the better defensive 3rd basemen out there but the error he made at the time he made it is not something winning teams do (yes it's his first error of the year, I know). And the Juan Pierre slap hit could not have come as a surprise, Rivera is playing pretty deep and takes a bad angle back to the ball making it nearly impossible for Zep to get there. Both plays could just as easily have been missed by regular corner infielders but with Lind on the DL we don't have any.

And I'm not necessarily blaming the manager, or the players, just wishing that when a pattern of behaviour results in the same outcome that maybe they change the pattern. These kind of losses take a lot out of the team and its fans!




Editor's Note: This is a FanPost written by a reader and member of Bluebird Banter. It was not commissioned by the editors and is not necessarily reflective of the opinions of Bluebird Banter or SB Nation.