That Sucked

Once again, hats off to Jeff Weaver, who has clearly been replaced by his evil alter-ego from a parallel dimension. Meanwhile, in that evil parallel universe, the Evil Cardinals go down 2 games to 3 against the Evil Mets, behind yet another terrible outing from staff ace Weaver. Evil Glavine was aided by the very consistent strike zone of Evil home plate umpire Jeff Kellogg, and the Evil Mets’ bats came through with timely evil hits in the evil clutch.

And is it just me, or are there a lot of Jeffs working for the Cardinals? Suppan . . . Weaver . . . Kellogg? Ha ha! Oh, I kid because I love.

If, along with Star Trek, I can somehow work a reference to Dungeons & Dragons into this post on my sabermetric baseball blog, I will complete the nerd trifecta. Hooray! I wonder what the prize will be? A retroactive date to the Senior Prom? Fingers crossed.

But for real, it seemed like the Cardinals hitters made an adjustment to Glavine from Game 1 to deal with his pitches away, away, away; and when some calls didn’t go his way, it seemed like Glavine didn’t make any adjustments of his own. The bullpen was once again great, giving up only one run in five innings and pitching out of some tight jams. But pitching lights-out from the bullpen doesn’t do any good if you can’t score any runs, as Darren Oliver can attest. And as good as Jeff Weaver was (and he did a fine job, credit where credit is due) he got a lot of help from overanxious Mets hitters, who made something like 37 one-pitch outs.

So far we’ve had two laughers and three close games. But interestingly, in each one the team that has gone to the bullpen first has lost. Which tells me two things: 1) that these teams both have strong bullpens, and 2) that victory or defeat has largely depended on the strength of the starting pitching, which I think means that the Mets are fucked. I guess that’s three things.

So, after the game tonight, does anybody want to run through The Keep on the Borderlands? You can borrow my +2 sword.


Sweet. I am now King of the (d)Orcs.