I figured there'd be one tonite anyway, so I thought I'd kick it off early with something to read while everyone avoids working
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• October 10, 2005 | 9 30 a.m. ET
Playoff Schedule may flip; so may Astros ( Keith Olbermann )
NEW YORK - Several New York Yankees players were told last night that Major League Baseball would “flip” the schedules of the next round of the playoffs, giving them, or the Los Angeles Angels, an additional a day to recover from about 5,000 miles of air travel in under 30 hours.
Unless those players misheard or misunderstood - or unless common sense makes an unlikely comeback - the American League Championship Series would thus open Wednesday and not tomorrow, and the National League event would open tomorrow and not Wednesday.
Some sources insisted the switch was part of an informal deal among the players' union, management, and the television networks. The Yankees and Angels players agreed to play last night's game in primetime ( and not in the afternoon ) , thus denying themselves the chance of an early evening flight to the West Coast and a slight chance of getting to bed before midnight Pacific Time. As the quid pro quo for that, the survivors of the team's decisive fifth game would be rewarded with a full travel day on Tuesday. Those sources' information could not be confirmed as of early this mornng.
This would come as something of an unhappy surprise to Manager Phil Garner of the Houston Astros, some of whose strategy in yesterday’s epic 18-inning win over the Atlanta Braves was probably predicated on a seemingly ironclad assumption that his team would have two days to recover from the Sunday marathon, and not just one.
The manager of the Chicago White Sox, Ozzie Guillen, would probably be none too pleased either. His team efficiently swept the Boston Red Sox in three games and had earned the advantage of facing a road-weary opponent that a Tuesday opener would provide.
Instead - if those Yankee players are correct - baseball is to justify the “flip” as a merciful gesture to whoever wins the Yankees-Angels series tonight. The teams were rained out in New York Saturday and were thus forced to play here last night, then take red-eye flights to Southern California for the decisive game of their series tonight, with the winner then being forced to again fly overnight for the opener in Chicago Tuesday.
This would be baseball’s way to give either the Yankees or Angels a fighting chance against jet lag and exhaustion, but of course it would be seen merely as a sop to the Yankees ( some of whom, even before they had earned the right to the all-night flight to Anaheim, were complaining about it ) , and a disservice to the Astros and White Sox.
As of the end of last night’s game in the Bronx, a baseball spokesperson insisted no “flip” decision had yet been made, but confirmed it was still being considered. The correct route, of course, would have been to make the decision or at least announce its possibility before Sunday’s games and not wait until after the Astros and Braves had finished up.
And how they finished up!
Last April, in the freezing dugout at Shea Stadium here, a Houston player I didn’t recognize sidled up to me and said, simply, “The other team’s quarterback must go down, and he must go down hard.” When I looked at him blankly, he gently scolded me. “Remember? You used to say that on SportsCenter?” I told him I remembered but he must’ve been pretty young the last time he actually heard it. “High school,” he finally calculated.
Kid’s name - and he was a 25-year old rookie who would hit just .248 with only five homers for the Astros this year - was Chris Burke, and he’s now a lot more famous than he was in that dugout last April. It was Burke’s homer with one out in the bottom of the 18th inning that let Houston prevail in the longest post-season game in baseball history, 7-6, over Atlanta ( for the obsessive, like myself, the teams did not shatter the record for most innings played by two teams in one post-season series in one day - the Detroit Wolverines and St. Louis Browns played two full games of the marathon 1887 World Series on one day that year - October 21st ) .
The number of epic moments in “The Burke/Clemens Game” may well be uncountable. The key might’ve been Atlanta’s Adam LaRoche - who had earlier hit a seemingly cinching Grand Slam - watching the ball, the fielders, and everything but his own third base coach’s wildly windmilling arms, and getting himself thrown out of the plate in the 7th inning, instead of scoring what would’ve been Atlanta’s 7th run.
Part of the mystery of the Braves’ perennial post-season failures may be contained in an awful anniversary. It is now just about a decade since Manager Bobby Cox has gotten away with pitching a starter on three days’ rest in the playoffs. Since Greg Maddux won Game Four of the 1995 World Series on short rest, the Braves have now lost on all six occasions when Cox has tried to sneak a starter back early. He often has not had many other options, and often ( as in this game ) it wasn’t even the starter’s fault, but it still reflects Atlanta’s often fatal - and fatally-timed - pitching weaknesses.
So my predictions here are now one-for-three with one still outstanding.
YANKEES, ANGELS, TIED AT TWO APIECE
Atlanta - whom I had picked here to beat the Astros - left 18 men on base. 18! By contrast, last night in New York, the Los Angeles Angels stranded exactly one. They had blown their few chances against the Yankees by bad base-running and throws ( one example of each from Vladimir Guerrero ) . The Yankees won 3-2, and considering that in their Game Three loss they overcame one five-run Angels’ lead and nearly erased another, there is nothing in the Angels that suggests they are unbeatable in a Game Five at home.
The two teams played incredibly crisp baseball - as if they had a plane to catch (which they did, as it proved). Their first three games were not particularly enthralling - in fact, clearly the strongest part of the series had been the radio work of my friends Dan Shulman and Dave Campbell, who are, simply, the best announcing team in baseball.
WHITE SOX ELIMINATE RED SOX, 3-0
Got this one pretty good ( Boston didn’t even take the two gratuitous victories I forecast for them ) . Chicago manager Ozzie Guillen was on the radio with Dan Patrick and me the day before the decisive game, and I asked him how he’d succeeded in stifling Boston’s big bats, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. He said he told his pitchers to focus not on them, but on the guys batting ahead of them, Johnny Damon and Edgar Renteria. Those Boston batters came to the plate 28 times in the three games and reached based exactly four times each. Thus, even though Ramirez homered twice and Ortiz once in the series, the Boston hitting machine never got started.
This outcome - and the holes throughout the Boston pitching staff - should underscore what a terrific job Terry Francona did in managing the Red Sox into the playoffs in the first place.
CARDINALS ELIMINATE PADRES, 3-0
The Cards’ domination of San Diego, and the Jake Peavy fiasco in Game One, obscured some very ominous data for St. Louis. Not only did Larry Walker go hitless in the series and get banged up going for a fly ball in the finale, but the Cards scored 21 runs - 10 driven in by Reggie Sanders, and 11 by everybody else.
Worse even than the offensive inconsistency was one of the worst imaginable performances by a bullpen in a sweep. Five Cardinals’ relievers pitched a total of eight-and-a-third innings - and gave up 16 hits and eight runs. If they perform similarly while the Astros are close, the Cards are going to get smoked.
I’ll wait to give you a formal prediction here until the American League Series is settled.
NOTES
This is why I love baseball - and periodically still write about it: It will always surprise you, even if you’re sitting on the bench, waiting for the monsoons to stop long enough for them to get in the ballgame.
Pedro Gomez, the ESPN reporter, was passing the time with me when his old friend Felix Rodriguez passed in front of the dugout. In the last year-and-a-half, Rodriguez had gone from being a very good relief pitcher with the San Francisco Giants to a not-very-good relief pitcher with the New York Yankees, but he had remained one of the sport’s most popular people.
Pedro went out to greet him and they conversed in Spanish. When he returned to the bench, he had a smile on his face. “One of your viewers,” Gomez said. “He said to me ‘Is that the guy who used to be on ESPN? Who does the news for NBC on cable? I watch him all the time. He’s great.’” I don’t know who was more surprised - Pedro or me.
This is not a gratuitous means of getting Rodriguez’s compliment into a blog. It’s designed to underscore the variety of people who’ve identified themselves to me or my staff as regular viewers of
Countdown - the people I’m thinking of as we’re putting together special items like the upcoming report on the coincidences of the last four years in which bad news for the Bush Administration has been followed within days by a terror alert or similar terror-related news story.
It also emphasizes that the typical depiction of sports figures as self-absorbed and detached from reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Among the Countdown “baseball” audience are big league managers Bobby Cox ( Atlanta ) , John Gibbons ( Toronto ) , and Ned Yost ( Milwaukee ) - players, we have Todd Jones of the Marlins and Jeromy Burnitz of the Cubs, and among retired stars : Tommy John, Jerry Coleman, and, to my eternal surprise, Phil Rizzuto ( “maybe some day you’ll actually hit the camera with that crumpled-up piece of paper.” )
Comments/ predictions? E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
