6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: Mets 6, Dodgers 1

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Friday, April 30, 2004

Mets 6, Dodgers 1

When you have a box score like this

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
New York	0	1	2	0	0	0	0	2	1	6	10	0
Los Angeles	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	8	0

you have to start asking yourself important questions like

Why did this happen?

And then you look at the player lineup:

Los Angeles	AB	R	H	RBI	BB	SO	LOB	AVG
Roberts, LF-CF	3	0	0	0	1	0	1	.269
Izturis, SS	4	0	3	0	0	0	2	.321
Bradley, CF	3	0	0	0	0	2	3	.266
Grabowski, LF	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	.063
Green, 1B	3	0	0	0	1	1	2	.264
Lo Duca, C	4	0	1	0	0	0	1	.411
Encarnacion, RF	4	1	1	0	0	0	3	.241
Beltre, 3B	4	0	2	1	0	0	0	.363
Cora, 2B	4	0	0	0	0	0	2	.190
Weaver, P	2	0	1	0	0	1	0	.300
a-Ventura, PH	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	.385
b-Saenz, PH	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	.143
Alvarez, P	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	.000
c-Ross, D, PH	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	.200

And then you realize:

LoDuca shouldn't be batting fifth.
Beltre shouldn't be batting seventh.
Roberts, Bradley, and Green killed us tonight.

That is, Tracy lost this game, because the team had enough hits to win it, just not consecutively. If there's a valid criticism of Tracy, it's that he can be stubborn and irrational about building lineup cards. Today was one of those days. Weaver kept the team in the game, but it wasn't to be. In Tracy's defense, there was no predicting that the top of the order would go 3-13, but there's no reason to think that Beltre didn't deserve a promotion to at least the five spot, if not the four spot.

Official recap

Update: let me amend that. Tracy didn't lose this game, the players did. But that said, the loss didn't need to be so lopsided.

// posted by Rob @ 12:13 AM link // 0 comments