Season Over

I figured I'd jot down my thoughts while they're fresh on my mind before I sulk in my misery.

We just witnessed an absolutely legendary playoff game. This wasn't your typical game 5. We saw a closer throw more pitches than he's ever thrown in an MLB game before, we saw an ace who just thre 110 pitches two days ago (which was also on short rest) come in and record his first ever save, and we saw the most pitching changes ever in a division series. This game will be talked about for a long time for how strange and intense it was all the way through. That's only going to make this loss even harder to deal with.

The Nationals lost because they didn't cash in with runners in scoring position. You can point to about a billion other things that went wrong but if this doesn't go wrong, the Nationals win. Period. Three times the Nationals had a runner on 3rd with only 1 out and all three times they struck out. Twice this was with Werth and just for the record, none of those three runs scored the next batter either. So that's three runs left off the board and if those runs are on the board instead, this post is very different. You simply can't not cash in with runners on 3rd and less than 2 outs. It's a fundamental skill to score a run in that situation and they couldn't get it done. That's why they lost.

Dave Roberts pulled all the right strings. He called on Carlos Ruiz at just the right time yet again to get a go-ahead single in the 7th and then, as we all know, his moves to keep Jansen in that long and bring Kershaw in for the save both worked. It was extremely unconventional managing that got them the win and essentially made this game legendary. People will remember years from now about a closer throwing over 50 pitches and an exhausted ace getting the 2 biggest outs of the year. Roberts did everything right.

Dusty Baker is now 0-9 in potential series-clinching games. I don't believe managers have a huge impact on teams during the regular season because over the course of 162 games, I strongly believe that the quality of the players is what leads to the final win total and not anything the manager does. However, in the playoffs when your season is now shrunk into 5 or 7 games, the manager's every move can be the difference between a WS title and an early exit. I don't know enough about Dusty's earlier series-clinching losses to comment but I can't put any of the blame on these last two on him. In game 4 he had no good options for a starting pitcher and one of his best relievers, who's normally very good on lefties, allowed a winning RBI single to the lefty Chase Utley. Tonight, the moves he made generally worked. Heisey hit a pinch-hit homer and then Robinson followed that up with a single when he was just brought into the game for Zimmerman. The bullpen really let him down in the 7th but he got the matchups he wanted - except for Justin Turner. Turner has actually hit better against righties his ENTIRE CAREER. This is a memo I guess Dusty missed because he kept playing with fire all series by bringing in righties to face him and he finally got burned in the 7th with a 2-run double. This was his biggest mistake of the game and, although I think he shouldn't have made it, his other moves were solid and it's not his fault his players forgot how to lift lazy flyballs to the outfield when needed. This loss isn't on Dusty.

Well there's always next year, but as a DC sports fan I'm left knowing that I'll be repeating this exact sentence again in a year. It was a fun year of baseball for both my teams and they both came up a little short. The difficulty of winning a pennant is how baseball makes you fall in love with it so much and with that comes massive disappointment when you fall short. The Nationals and Orioles both still have a solid core group of players coming back for next year so it should be another exciting season. Let's just hope they let us down a little easier next time.