Quote:
Originally Posted by ben voyonsdonc
It is unjustifiable to go up against the most dangerous hitters in one of the most dangerous lineups in the highest leverage situation possible without using one of your two highest leverage arms. It wasn’t even a split advantage for Little - he had get through both Raleigh and Polanco who are both more dangerous hitters from the right side to get to lefty hitter Naylor.
I am pretty confident that Schneider would have gone to Dominguez to start the inning if it was a regular season game. Because of his control concerns, Dominguez is a guy who isn’t a great “fire fighter” who will come in to strand runners. It’s always better to give him a clean inning. If anything, you bring Dominguez in to start the inning and if he ran into issues, it makes more sense to use Little to clean things up because of his ground ball rate.
Why he would deviate from the plan in the biggest game of the season is astounding to me.
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I truly think that Walker and Schneider was focused, with the 3 batter rule, on not letting Naylor beat them.
They’d rather have left hander there against him than anyone else. So he gets the first two batters as a “warmup”.
And the logic seemed that the two batters before Naylor are having to change sides of the plate as some sort of in game mind ####.
Many flaws in that logic:
I’m sure those guys switch sides 70 times per season in game. It’s not gong to affect them at all.
The two guys you’re assuming will struggle with the Herculean task of switching sides in a game are the the MLB home run leader who hit just as many HR from one side as the other, and a guy that has won 3 games this playoffs with timely hits. This wasn’t getting to the dangerous lefty leadoff hitter by having to breeze past the 8 and 9 guys, it was to go past the HR champ and a solid clutch hitter.
All this loose theoretical matchup/logic holding on by a string, Schenider shreds any hope of that coming true by bringing in a lefty who has statistically been terrible the last 7 weeks, and whose body language and confidence in himself has shown that over that time. Any of us in this thread going in to pitch after he gave up the Raleigh HR would’ve had more confidence to get Polonco and Naylor out than Little had in himself.
The fact that Schenider and Walker concocted this idea for likely most of the top of the 8th, and convinced each other that it was the right move at that time with that player in that situation, with no one else (Mattingly?) to question it, is as concerning as anything.