6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: Death In The Afternoon: Cardinals 10, Dodgers 3

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Thursday, May 12, 2005

Death In The Afternoon: Cardinals 10, Dodgers 3

Different day, same story: as with yesterday's embarrassment, the Dodgers walked right into the Cards' meatgrinder, only this time with the addition of godawful fielding, including a borderline "gimme" play at second by Oscar Robles that, according to some accounts, was not a fielding mistake, i.e., he actually was on the bag and the umpire was wrong.

I turned this one off after the third, after it became clear the Dodgers would lose it. Jon thought otherwise in the comments thread (see #202), but c'mon -- these are the fargin' Cardinals, a team that's walking away with their division, one any contending team will have to, well, contend with in the postseason. You don't hand those teams fourth, fifth, and sixth outs and expect to recover.

Charlie Brown imitates Dodger pitching

They didn't, of course, and no thanks to Tracy putting rambling wreck D.J. Houlton back on the mound to emit four more runs. He's shown no more talent on the mound lately than Charlie Brown did; keeping him out of the game should have been obvious from the get-go. But obvious and Tracy don't seem to go together well, and so I leave it for my polynomic friends at the erstwhile Fire Jim Tracy to express my (ahem) puzzlement over his late maneuvering. Regarding Tuesday's fiasco:

Apparently, one of DePodesta’s roster-building rules is never to leave Jim Tracy very much rope to hang himself with. This is how he dealt with Roberts, Encarnacion, Martin, and Mota. When Tracy started using them in strange situations and strange ways, they were gone. Erickson, after tonight, I suspect will be no different.
So, Jim. You don’t save your bullpen. You still had to use six pitchers. In fact, without another miracle comeback, you would have been wasting your bullpen in the service of a blowout.

... and again yesterday:

I wanted to set this out separately. Every so often there arises an event so heinous that you must remove the person who committed it from the game immediately, because it can only get worse. This is called The Grabowski Principle, after the particularly stark example of it yesterday—Kevin Jarvis’s two out walk to Jason Grabowski, leading into Tony LaRussa letting Jarvis then pitch to Izturis and Choi.
Tonight, scuffling but one strike from getting out of the inning, Brad Penny gave up a basehit on an 0-2 fastball to the pitcher, Jeff Suppan. The Grabowski Principle was not followed, and chaos ensued.

... and again today:

Hi! If you’re looking for the guy who used to run Fire Jim Tracy, he got so fed up with the Dodger pitching staff that he stopped studying for the bar and decided to become a monk cloistered in the hills of Switzerland. My name’s Larry, and I’m a Devil Ray fan! The Devil Rays are the coolest team in the Majors. We have a lot going for us!

But FJT assumes the above is due to managerial incompetence. Another equally plausible explanation exists: Tracy's brutal and repeated failures to pull guys early enough from their pitching duties are a plea for help, in much the same way that a chronic gambler puts his airline tickets to Las Vegas on the refrigerator where his spouse can find them, or a Senator runs for re-election. That is, Tracy knows these guys are useless junk, and gives them thank-you-sir -may-I-have-another duties. We await and encourage other logical explanations, as there must be some reason the Dodgers resigned Tracy, an act this blog endorsed, and there's no way I want to look stupid come September.

Recap

// posted by Rob @ 9:00 PM link // 0 comments