Howie Kendrick is a scholar and a gentleman.
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Howie Kendrick is a scholar and a gentleman.
Been waiting for a Nationals post-season win for a long time. Feels great.
Rendon! Hall-of-famer to be. Howie Kendrick! Hit a very good pitch for the grand slam. Juan Soto! He's only 20, but what a player!
Kudos to Straburg, who kept it together after a slow start. He has four good pitches working almost perfectly. It is hard to appreciate his completeness as a pitcher.
Congratulations to all you Nats and Cards fans (ugh that's hard to type). I thought the Braves might finally win a postseason series, maybe they will before I die. Watching that first inning yesterday was like getting punched in the gut. Game 5, at home, season on the line and the game is over before you even swing a bat. Never seen anything like it. I am now pulling for anyone but the Yanks to win.
Meh, Kershaw now has 158+ innings of post season pitching. Given the $30 million per year they are paying him, you would hope for more than average in important games.
The Dodgers now have a pitching problem. They have $46 miliion tied up in Kershaw, Jansen, and Kelly. While Jansen did fine in the NLDS, his last two regular seasons show a clear decline. Kershaw also has lost significant velocity and appears to be nearly unusable in pressure situations. Kelly was just not great signing. The Dodgers have managed their young hitters and those contracts reasonably well. But now they need to fill the gaps pitching wise.
Meh to Kershaw definitely getting into the HOF? OF course, he's getting in. He has the best career adjusted ERA of any starting pitcher. Ever. I could see him eventually falling behind Pedro Martinez, but he's still going to finish way up on the list. In my time as a fan, going back to 77, I'd say Kershaw, Pedro, and Maddux have been the 3 best pitchers, with Clemens losing points for cheating bigtime. Baseball is a sport that largely judges its HOF'er by their regular season careers, which makes sense given the huge sample size relative to postseason. How many career RBI does Trout have in the postseason? The same number I have, I believe.
If you just mean to reinforce that he hasn't been nearly as good in postseason, I already agreed but thanks for rubbing in a tough loss. Almost unusable definitely overstates it. He's had dominant postseason starts. He's had starts when he was dominant until a big late inning, when he would be pulled earlier the way games are managed today. His ability is on an early-ish decline at age 31, though 16-5 with a 3:03 ERA would still be a career year for many. By the way, check out Max Scherzer's career postseason numbers after the Division Series round. They are quite bad.
The Dodgers aren't going away. They have lots of young talent, including pitching (e.g., Buehler, May, Gonsolin), either already established or in the process of doing so. They did lead the major leagues in ERA this year. Kershaw will become overpaid as he continues to get older, but they certainly wouldn't have won 7 straight division titles without him.
Interesting, I went to my first Dodgers game with my grandfather in 1977.* Meh, to his best career adjusted ERA of any starting pitcher. While his stats will certainly merit inclusion in the HoF on his first ballot, unless things change he will have to deal with the legacy of never winning the big one and personally coming up short too often when it mattered(playoffs). Fairly or unfairly, something neither Maddux nor Pedro had to deal with(yes, I know Pedro struggled against the Yankees in the playoffs). Sure, Clayton has had some great starts in the playoffs but he has had nearly as many stinkers(particularly if you take the Bravos out of the mix.)
Yes, the Dodgers will likely be fine in the long run but it has been 31 years and counting.
FWIW, I would prefer to have a Bulldog on the mound whose post-season stats showed improvement over his regular season efforts.
*Ron Cey was a neighbor later in life, Eric Davis lived about a mile away during his time in LA and Campy was just on the other side of Topanga Canyon Blvd. And my sister may or may not have dated a pitcher who started for 3 seasons for the Dodgers.
You can build a new ball park to suit your demographic wants and unwants, but you can't take the stink out of the postseason Braves. Couldn't they have just hoisted a white flag during warmups and save themselves the embarrassment?
Even by their rigorous standards, this was throat constriction at its loftiest heights.
The conversation around Atlanta about postseason failures is just downright hilarious at this point.
I'm pretty glad to have the one glaring exception in Atlanta United, which I fully recognize is a rung below the Failcons/Barves/Dawgs/Hawks (Who am I kidding? The Hawks have had precious few opportunities to truly fail in like 3 decades).
Astros not even mentioned on this page. That is all.
Nobody's around to talk Nats on what could be an historic night (meaning now)!!
Four outs away from the World Series!!!!
This post coming from someone who hasn't posted in a few minutes (er, months)!
GO NATS!!!