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Well, crap. it sure looked like the Cards were going to get out of there with a split.
I saw some good things but King had an absolutely terrible spring and Marmol should never have used him. There had to be another arm out there.
At least they got one win. Need to get one in SD and finish the trip 2-5 – not great but not the end of the world.
King had an absolutely terrible spring and Marmol should never have used him.
To my way of thinking, the worrisome aspect is that even with all the new guys, King was next man up. Personally, I saw enough of him last year. Surely our system is not so vacant as to not have a servicable middle relief guy in AAA.
Same formula that put us in last place last year.
Keeping Goldy hitting second and putting Gorman, a strikeout risk in the key #3 position.
Using set up bullpen guys in the critical 8th and 9th inning. Should have pulled Palante as soon as the lead off hitter got on. Pallante is not a 8th or 9th inning guy. It is early in the season, why go more than one inning with a relief pitcher.Who are Ollie’s 8th and 9th inning guys. He seems to be cool toward turning the 9th over to Helsley and gives up on him the first time he gives up a run.Why was King even out there. He is not a critical inning guy.
Just to hash the bullpen situation for this game. Romero, Gallegos, and Liberatore were all definitely unavailable coming in. Helsley was iffy because he threw a lot of pitches yesterday. And Kittredge had also thrown an inning yesterday so he was probably limited to one inning today. That left 3 fresh guys: O’Brien, Pallante, and Fernandez. But then today they announced that they put O’Brien on the injured list and had recalled King. However, King had pitched yesterday as well and so he maybe was only good for an inning.
Matz went 5 1/3 and then was getting hit hard. So Marmol pulled him for Kittredge knowing that Kittredge was limited anyway so he counted on him for just two outs. That left 3 innings. Pallante was the clear next choice. Only he really was needed to go 2 because Fernandez has never pitched in MLB so you can’t put him in a close game against the Dodgers. And King isn’t very good, had pitched yesterday, and had a rough Spring. Pallante did great the first inning (7th) and got through quick. Then he gets a quick out in the eighth but leaves a ball a little up for Hernandez and Hernandez hits it out. Then Pallante walks the next hitter and looks to have lost some control. So Ollie made the choice to go to King. To me, the better choice would have been to go out and try to settle Andre down and get him refocused. He hadn’t thrown that many pitches. And, he’s been great against lefties in the past – and Muncy the lefty was coming up. We needed Pallante to bridge the gap to Helsley and cross our fingers that Helsley had enough in his tank.
But here’s part of the problem. Fernandez wasn’t used at all when we were behind big in games one and two. Heck, Gallegos basically pitched 2 innings in game 2. One of those could have went to Fernandez. Or, Fernandez could’ve taken one of Pallante’s couple innings in game 1 which would have made Pallante available yesterday to be used instead of having JoJo pitch 3 straight games. Therein lies the issue. Matheney was always terrible at this sort of thing. I thought Marmol was pretty good at it last season. But thus far the track record is shaky this season.
There is no good reason Fernandez didn’t make his debut mopping up in game 1. In the end though, it is a string of short starts that led us to ruin by running the pen out of arms. DeJa vu all over again.
Jnevel wrote: “But here’s part of the problem. Fernandez wasn’t used at all when we were behind big in games one and two.”
They burned Gallegos AND Romero in game 2 when trailing 5-0 late, with Fernandez never leaving the bench the entire series. If Fernandez can’t be trusted in a 0-5 game late, when can he be trusted? So of course they wind up shorthanded in the highest leverage situation in game 4 with a guy who couldn’t make the team out of ST.
Mind boggling like falling asleep and waking up with TLR back on the top step.
Reading game recaps and John Denton tweets it seems like Marmol considers a 5.1 inning start to be the starter stepping up.
My wife manages the pen better than Oli. She picks him apart every game and not with hindsight either. It’s sad she has better insight than our manager, but she knows baseball. Oh well, maybe we can pick up some more wannabes (her term) this coming deadline.
Against the Dodgers . . . For the first start of the season . . . Yeah, I can see that as “stepping up”. I’d rather get 6 innings the rest of the way, but I’m ok with it this time around.
“Good teams win games they shouldn’t… and bad teams lose games they have in the bag. Up 4-0, you simply can not cough up this game.” — stlcard25
I get that we might accept short starts the first time around. So should we accept that the pen runs out of arms on the fourth short start in a row? Or is that pen mismanagement?
Once the game veers from the FO script, you might as well open a box of spiders in a kingeraten class. Pure chaos.
jj-cf-stl
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My wife manages the pen better than Oli. She picks him apart every game and not with hindsight either. It’s sad she has better insight than our manager, but she knows baseball. Oh well, maybe we can pick up some more wannabes (her term) this coming deadline.its mind numbing how poor his choices were in this series.
The bullpen looked to be one of the few bright spots this spring. A couple of injuries (and forearm injuries, at that) later and it’s depending on some rabbits from the hat, I guess. The Dodgers are a good team with a huge payroll and development budget that will always give them a leg up on teams like us, but facing them with one hand tied behind our back is hardly going to be a fair fight.
It would also help if the offense wasn’t inept 80% of the time. There’s too much talent to be this bad.
Getting the rain and losing O’Brien may be an excuse for some of it. But Fernandez still should have covered some innings early on, which would have given us a better chance last night. I believe it’s mismanagement to some degree.
The pen has lots of good pieces but it feels like it needs someone with a rubber arm that can just cover a lot of innings even with a 4.5 ERA. Right now we have a bunch of guys who are built around giving one inning of max effort and then they’re gassed. That’s kind of the way baseball as a whole works now, but that doesn’t mean every player in the bullpen needs to be like that.
Something to consider. If the FO provides detailed information on game management in a script, as some here suspect, that would also include bullpen plans. Seems to me that coming into the day, having to get four innings from the pen was not an unexpected scenario.
Some blame the FO, others blame the manager. We don’t have enough information to fully assess. But when all is said and done, the manager is the one who is ultimately responsible, whether he deviated from the supposed script or followed it to a “T”.
Whatever it was, it sure didn’t work on Sunday. And as noted, the moves on Friday and Saturday contributed. No days off with what I imagine is a highly-motivated Mike Shildt-led team next up…
Whether it is the FO or Oli you can expect to see more of this until both are gone are until we get a manager who handles the BP in a responsible way! These blown saves happen to everyone but I’m pretty sure the facts will bare out that we are near the bottom in blown saves the last two seasons! Something needs to change but never does!
Why not shorten the bench one guy and carry an extra bull pen pitcher to start the season?
I guess they painted themselves into THAT corner with Carpenter and Crawford….
The extra arm for now seems so obvious.
The pen has lots of good pieces but it feels like it needs someone with a rubber arm that can just cover a lot of innings even with a 4.5 ERA.
That was Stratton last year, but he is gone.
How can your pen be overworked and tired four games into a 162 game season? It’s not like a starter tweaked a muscle on the third pitch of a game and we had to have a bullpen game.
ZTR – they actually aren’t allowed to do that. You can only have 13 pitchers on the club.
They could have brought up Robertson instead of King because Robertson hadn’t pitched the day before so he would have been fresher. But when I watch Robertson, it looks like he’s still trying to work some things out and he likely isn’t ready.
The other alternative was to bring up Robberse. I think he’s scheduled to start tomorrow night. Or, they could have cut someone off the 40-man roster to bring up another choice. But when you have King with his MLB experience and decent numbers last season, he made the most sense. I don’t fault them for choosing to call King up. I just don’t like the bullpen management prior to that point.
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