2006 NLCS New York Mets vs. St. Louis Cardinals

Also, last row of the section = wind blowing directly on you for 5 hours.

Nice touch: Psycho theme on PA when LaRussa comes out to mound.

I don't wanna see Trachsel throw another pitch.

this is really funny though (mainly because he was a Yankees fan)

= I DON'T LIKE WHITES AND LATINOS.

i guess on the plus side there's a chance for the Cards to get swept three years in a row. 12 consecutive WS game losses has to be some kind of record, if 8 isn't already.

To be fair, Weaver has been a much better pitcher in the last few weeks, not just against the Mets.

tigers/mets series would have been so good.

This shit ain't ovah, you ninnies! Carpenter didn't exactly stump them on Friday.

by comparison:
DET Tigers: .867 OPS, 2.92 ERA

The Tigers vs. A's was the World Series as far as I'm concerned. The NL playoffs is like watching the losers' bracket.

wtf is wrong w/ me. i feel like the Cards have been in it the last 5 yars.

None of the playoff series have been particularly compelling. The NLCS is at least competitive, but it's hard to look past the mediocre play.

xpost

The Cards began a similar turnaround about midway through Game 2 of the NLCS, with El Taco Grande and the frigging Soup Man providing the heroics along with noted power threat So Taguchi. If they can pull off the upset, the WS will be contested by two teams that pretty much collapsed at the end of the regular season and miraculously got their shit together for the playoffs. I can't think of another recent WS matchup that featured two teams that went from so bad to so good quite so dramatically.

Hah, yes, I stand corrected re: Yanks/Tigers.

Tigers/Yankees was the WS!

Did Miller ask Morgan on ESPN Radio if those two solo HRs count as MANNAFACTURED?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Weaver

apparently he was a TV analyst inbetween his two stints managing the O's.

"weaver on strategy" is a great book, one of my dad's favorites.

John Madden is around that age and ... oh, wait.

(I'm not flummoxed, I want to gut Jeff Kellogg)

It was brutal for both teams though. Glavine got some calls that were just baffling.

What I found highly amusing was the sequence that followed on Fox. The FoxTrax graphic, which has consistently shown the umpiring to be a disaster, popped up briefly. Before it could be activated, the game went into a commercial break. They didn’t return to it until a batter had been retired, at which time they highlighted the replay with some sponsor’s logo, and “showed” that the pitch was just on the outside corner.

Now, take this with a very large grain of salt, but I’m just distrustful enough of the powers involved here—-Fox and MLB-—to speculate as to the timing of the graphic and the information it provided. To have that tool, which had consistently shown the home-plate umpires missing pitches time and time again, show up to confirm perhaps the biggest called strike of the series, and to do so after ten minutes, after it had nearly been used in the immediate aftermath of the pitch... it just seems terribly CONVENIENT. The pitch didn’t look like a strike, Valentin didn’t think it was a strike, no one I talked to thinks it was a strike.

Regardless of whether that pitch was called correctly or not, the inability of these umpires to call a consistent, correct strike zone has been one of the biggest stories of the postseason. It’s not just big strikeout calls that change games. Take Yadier Molina’s at-bat in the fourth inning. Home-plate umpire Jeff Kellogg called a 3-1 pitch well off the plate a strike; Glavine threw essentially the same pitch on 3-2, and Molina had to swing, because even though it was not a strike, he couldn’t be certain the guy making the call was going to see it that way.

Keith Law, over at ESPN.com, has dubbed it the “Heisenberg Strike Zone,” which is a label I can’t top. Until and unless we concede that humans can’t do the job with the precision needed, however, we’re going to continue to see baseball games worth millions of dollars decided by funcationaries making a few thousand.