Now the World (Series)...

It’s been a wild postseason so far, and many are expecting the madness to continue in the World Series. Tonight, the Colorado Rockies, winners of 21 of their last 22, face off against the Boston Red Sox, who staged another October comeback to defeat a talented and balanced Indians team in seven games. In Game One tonight at Fenway, the regular and postseason leader in wins, Josh Beckett, will face off against Rockies ace Jeff Francis, who has won his first two postseason starts. With limited time at my disposal, I’m going to spare you the complete position-by-position analysis and get down to business here.
Boston has the two best postseason hitters in the game on their team (Ortiz and Manny) but top to bottom Colorado has a better lineup. That’s not to say (as half the talking heads are) that the Rockies’ lineup is invincible; nor is it to say (as the other half of the talking heads are) that it is overrated; the truth lies somewhere in between. I see the Rockies’ lineup as comparable to the Indians’ lineup. That’s a compliment, but it doesn’t mean that I think they will fare any better against Beckett than the Indians did.
The Red Sox, although I’m not enamored with their rotation as a whole, have a clear advantage in the starting pitching department. The Rockies rotation, top to bottom, is filled with (very slightly) above average pitchers who will struggle to get outs against the heart of the Red Sox order. Yes, they looked great in the NLCS, but it’s one thing for Francis, with his league average regular season level ERA and WHIP, to dominate the Diamondbacks, with a leadoff hitter who batted below .240 and whose best batter is pitcher Micah Owings; it’s quite another to do it against a team with the best 3/4 combo in all of baseball. I expect the Red Sox to hit Colorado starting pitching early and often, beginning tonight against Francis. Of course, once the Rockies get past Beckett (the best big game pitcher in the league), they should be able to do some hitting of their own. Schilling hardly resembles the dominant pitcher he was in 2004, and Matsuzaka has looked tired and wild during the postseason.
Once the game gets to the later innings, both teams have two solid bullpen pitchers that will hold the opposing offense in check: Okajima and Papelbon for Boston, and Fuentes and Corpas for Colorado.
The defensive edge goes to the Rockies, who have quietly played the best defense in all of baseball this year. The Red Sox defense has been quite good as well (far better than it was in ’04), but it will take a hit when the Sawx travel to Colorado and have to play Ortiz in the field, and deal with lead-footed Manny having to cover more ground in left field.
You certainly can’t discount the advantage of a team getting hot during the playoffs (after all, the Cardinals did win it all last year), but Colorado’s long layoff and the way the Red Sox have played over the last three games have nullified that advantage for the Rockies in my estimation. I know that the Rockies took two of three from Boston in July, but that is ancient history. I also seem to recall the Yankees going undefeated against the Tribe during the regular season before being dominated by them in the first round. The bottom line is that this series will boil down to the same thing that it did during the Angels/Sox, Indians/Yankees and Sox/Indians series—starting pitching. Colorado doesn’t have a single starting pitcher that scares me, and I therefore can’t see them winning this series. I see them beating up on Dice-K and avoiding the sweep, but nothing more.

My Prediction: Red Sox in Five

Using a pitching Wedge from the green or How to misplay pocket rockets

I’m trying to decide whether or not Eric Wedge would make a good poker player. He clearly has “nerves of steel”; his managerial decisions, however, suggest he might be better suited for the roulette table.

I know I’m not the first person to bring this up in a blog post today—everyone from Jon Heyman to Drew Carey thinks that Wedge’s decision to pitch Paul Byrd tonight could end up costing the Indians the game, and possibly the series—but I would like to point out that I saw this moment coming, before the series even began, when the Indians announced the starters for all five games before playing a single inning.

Throwing Sabathia and Carmona in the first two games was, of course, a no-brainer. Having Jake Westbrook pitch Game 3, in Yankee Stadium? That, I’m not so sure about. During two regular season meetings, Yankees hitters crushed just about everything Westbrook threw in their direction, piling up 17 hits (including five home runs) and 12 runs in just 8 2/3 innings. But, as the other possible starter Paul Byrd was also ripped apart by the Yanks in his only start against them (2 IP 7 H 7 R), and the Indians won the first two games of the series after going winless against New York during the regular season, let’s disregard past history and just think about this strategically.

In Game 1, the Tribe threw out Sabathia, a prototypical left-handed power-pitching ace. In Game 2, they pitched Fausto Carmona, a righty sinkerball pitcher who relies on keeping the ball down and off the plate to induce hitters into hitting weak groundballs. 2-0 Indians: So far, so good. Then it gets a little tricky. Normally you would want to start your third best starting pitcher in Game 3 of a playoff series, but you also need to consider the match-ups and your other personnel. Enter Jake Westbrook, another sinkerball pitcher, but with weaker velocity and less control than Carmona. Why would you pitch Carmona Lite after pitching Carmona? It makes no sense to me. The Yankees saw nine innings of hard sinkers in Game 2, and were able to have their plate approach from that game carry over into the next game. When the same pitch that they were looking for in Game 2 was slower and more hittable, the Yankees were, predictably, very successful hitting the ball against Westbrook in Game 3. Why not throw Byrd, a control pitcher who relies on a wide array of off-speed pitches, in Game 3 instead of Westbrook? I’m not saying he’s a Cy Young candidate, or even more than an average pitcher, but he would have at least given the Yankees a different look. And Byrd’s numbers during the regular season (15-8 4.59 ERA 1.39 WHIP) were comparable to Westbrook’s (6-9 4.32 ERA 1.41 WHIP). It’s not like I’m suggesting you not throw Sandy Koufax and vintage Randy Johnson back-to-back (on my all-time fantasy team) just because they’re both left-handed power pitchers. There is little to no drop-off in pitching ability between Westbrook and Byrd, but when Wedge started Westbrook after Carmona, it put Westbrook at an unnecessary disadvantage against a team whose collective batting eyes were already adjusted to hitting his only effective pitch.

Even though I KNEW Westbrook was going to get rocked in Game 3 before the series even began, I would be willing to give Eric Wedge a pass if he would just, even for a moment, consider changing his starter for Game 4. Wedge picking Westbrook over Byrd suggests a blind belief in groundball pitching over flyball pitching (Byrd’s career ground ball to fly ball ratio is less than 1) hindered Wedge’s ability to effectively analyze his team's match-ups, which leads me to believe that he is, despite reports to the contrary, capable of intelligent thought, because in many situations, this would be a sound strategy to follow. But by picking Byrd over Sabathia (and having Carmona as a fall-back plan for Game 5) for Game 4 Wedge has indicated to me that he is a) incapable of distinguishing between talent and mediocrity, b) stubbornly sticking with the game-plan he came up with before the series even started because he’s a republican and hates change, or c) is THAT guy at the poker table who has pocket aces but refuses to bet anyone out because he wants a bigger payoff (i.e. having the optimum setup of Carmona and Sabathia for the first two games of the ALCS). As I can’t come up with any other reasonable excuse for not using your best pitchers to close out a series with a potentially dangerous opponent, I’ll give Wedge the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is looking ahead to the next series. In that case, I see what he’s doing, but I don’t like it. “THAT guy at the poker table” does come away with a big pot about half of the time; the other half of the time, though, he loses big, and often loses it all. I would rather save the roulette strategies for $5 buy-in games with my suitemates, and play the odds when dealing with the fate of a $70 million baseball team, but maybe that’s just me. Of course, this could be a moot point if the Indians “break out the boom sticks” (thanks, Sportscenter) again against Yankees starter Chien-Ming Wang (they torched him for 9 hits and 8 runs in 4 2/3 innings in Game 1), but as a fan of this talented, young Indians squad, I’m not feeling very confident at the moment.