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Great win! Hicks was slightly erratic, but just enough to keep the hitters unsettled and pitched a nice 1-2-3 ninth.
Nice Wee Willie reference. The to key to hit ’em where they ain’t is to hit ’em. Keeler had a career K rate of 1.4%. Yes, that’s a decimal between the 1 and 4. I realize they weren’t throwing 90+ back then, but it wasn’t underhand slow pitch either. Amazing really.
if I remember right keeler had an unorthodox batting style similar to how ty cobb hit I believe. they could place the ball to a certain extent where they wanted but sacrificed power. hard to do as well with a traditional style but it was still a great job by carpenter.
Got lucky late and won huh?
Jedd with a 3 run blast to win it. Nice to win. It would be nicer to win back to back for the first time in a bit. Seems like a monumental task recently.
Good things happen when you get good starting pitching. If our starters could duplicate Hudson’s performance from tonight this team would look so different.
I am not so worried about the offense especially if Shildt will ever wise up and move Goldy down to 3 or 4 in the lineup. He would be so much more effective if he was batting with runners on base. The sabermetric geniuses must be telling Shildt something different.
I found this image of Keeler. Choking up is a lost art.
The only guy I’ve seen do it is Joey Votto. Saw it the other day when watching the Reds and Cubs play on MLB Network. By the way, his at bat resulted in a K.
You couldn’t tell it from his face right after the game, but Gyorko probably felt like he contributed for the first time in a Card’s win this season. And without his smash we would be looking at the brooms today.
Well, to be fair, the score was already tied when Gyorko pinch hit, but given how things have gone lately, I get why some assume the worst is just ahead. The offense surely got Carlos Martinez off the hook.
Naturally the partisan crowd went crazy for the the late inning heroics yesterday and it looked to me that Fowler was the first guy out of the dugout to greet Gyorko and he was jumping up and down. I don’t remember much of that happening last season.
His .271 is not the +/-.150 he was hitting last season. He had one of the better months of his career in April batting .343 (.188 in Apr.’18) and although he has come off that pace (.208 – May), he has shown he still has the ability to help the offense and not drag it. Oh, and it may be just temporary but he is batting first. His defense is better this season after he was an embarrassment late in the ’18 season perhaps due to a foot injury. Consider on May 26th of last season he was at .158BA/.276OBP/.288OPS
A couple of notes: ’19 Fowler in day games .208… night games .313. Batting 7th .314 and we’ll see what happens if he continues to hit at the top of the order. The revved of version of Fowler sure beats what we got in ’18. And the biggest plus for the team is that so far the negative distraction is gone.
Glad to revive some Wee Willie Keeler interest. There is a great article in a recent SABR publication about the early days of professional baseball, mostly 1880s through the early 1900s. It surmised that while they call it the “dead ball” era, the ball was not necessarily all that much more “dead” than it was later on. And some guys did muscle up and try to hit the ball a long way.
But the best approach to get on base was to put the ball in play, because defensive equipment and skill was still evolving. As people worked at the craft more, and the technology of gloves and equipment improved, the defense continually converted more balls in play into outs. As that happened, the offense had to compensate, which resulted in Babe Ruth primarily showing that hitting the ball over the defense was the best way to produce runs.
And as we got into the 1900s, it became apparent that successful pitchers usually were bigger guys. So you started seeing bigger men on the mound, guys like Mathewson, Cy Young, Ed Walsh etc were the most successful, along with better defense and the game changed from a lot of runs in the 1890s, to not nearly as many in the early 1900s.
So anyway, I apologize for rambling on if this is boring to you. I find it fascinating, but I know not everyone cares about that sort of stuff. But Carp’s shortening up and just placing the ball reminded me of how they played the game way back when.
I was so happy to see Carp beat the shift. Beating the shift does 2 things. 1) You get a cheap hit on pitches away, or by bunting. 2) If done often enough, it makes the opposing team reduce the exaggeration of shifts.
Nice picture of Keeler. If I was a coach I would make choking up with 2 strikes mandatory.
I am beginning to think that there is some bad gree gree on batting #1. Dex took that place two games ago and so far he has struck out 5 times and been hit in the foot once while Carp has begun to look much better out of the #1 position. Now all the writers who said he HAD to bat #1 have to make up some story about how their theory is not wrong…..lol
This is why we need to get Goldy out of the 2 hole.
This is Paul Goldschmidt's 13th at-bat with a runner in scoring position this month. https://t.co/Vixn3asX9P
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) May 26, 2019
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