The Chris Moeller Archives

2012 Postseason thoughts

I realize the Yankees are always the top story, but that was a pretty cool game in the District Friday night. I am absolutely tickled by the Cardinals' postseason, post-championship success so far, but there's no need for me to go into great depth reviewing the Cards/Nationals series. One team wanted it more than the other. The CM Blog called it five weeks before the series began.

This blog, 9/10/12--

Wow, I say also to the Washington Nationals following through with their Stephen Strasburg pitch limit. Strasburg is 15-6 for the 86-54 Nationals, who haven't won anything ever, even when they were the Expos for four decades, but perfectly healthy, the pitcher has been shut down for the year because of the number of pitches he's thrown. Unbelievable. 

The right decision? Of course it isn't. It borders on the fraudulent, but that's for Nationals fans to decide. I'm just glad he's not on my team. It's kind of funny to think of Chris Carpenter as a contrast. Carpenter is a two-time World Series champion with a 9-2 career post-season record, and a guy who has twice missed a year and a half to arm surgery (2002-2003 and 2007-2008). Think he would trade either championship for either medical procedure? Just as Strasburg is departing the pennant race, the 37-year-old Carpenter is about to be activated and re-enter another one, despite having had "season-ending" thoracic nerve surgery on July 3rd. I guess some guys like pitching and some guys don't.

The Nats are lucky though. Now Strasburg gets the entire winter off from pitching. Maybe they should hold him out of Spring Training, too, just to be safe. And the first half of next season.  And...

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Something else I accurately predicted in this space once: Major League Baseball would not move to fully implement instant replay until the Yankees got screwed by an umpire's bad call in an important game.

Here comes all the instant replay you could want.

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Surprise, surprise. You stick taxpayers with a bill for $313 million, and they start to feel entitled. The thousands of empty seats at the new Yankee Stadium for games one and two of the American League Championship Series, four seasons after the park opened, are a hilarious postscript to the team's impressive pilfering of the New York City treasury.

Last night, stadium ushers were reportedly instructed by the club to sit down and help fill in the empty seats so embarrassingly visible on television. It's almost worth the Yankees advancing this far in the postseason tournament just to hear that story.

And you can't blame it all on the new higher ticket prices at the state-of-the-art "House that Ruthlessness Built." Even the $15 tickets through the re-sellers couldn't move on Sunday. But if the team has any luck at all, they've played their last game at Yankee Stadium for the year.

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I just coined that phrase "House that Ruthlessness Built." That's mine.

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Commissioner Selig says he wants to do away with locker room champagne celebrations. Hmm. It's times like these that I'm sorry that so many fans actually believe that a league commissioner holds a dictatorial position, and also that the commissioner may himself believe it. Why does baseball still have a commissioner anyway? He's just an employee of the owners pretending to be impartial. The office of the commissioner is such a 1920 idea, which, come to think of it, may explain why now he's pushing for Prohibition.

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I would like to reiterate that Giants catcher Buster Posey did not win the "batting title" of the National League. His teammate, Melky Cabrera, did- according to all of the rules of the game in place at the beginning of the season. Cabrera's mid-season drug suspension should not disqualify him. This is like proclaiming George McGovern the winner of the 1972 presidential election after Nixon resigned.

posted by CM @ 7:12 PM