Transaction Analysis: ... (05/10)
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May 10, 2007 Prospectus TodayA Postseason Preview?
I truly love baseball, and a game like Wednesday night’s Indians/Angels tilt is the kind that reinforces that love. There were sparkling individual performances of all types, terrific pitcher/hitter battles, some interesting decision-making, and some late-game heroics. Throw in the best seats I’ve had in a while—section 221, row J, if you know Angels Stadium—and it was a fantastic night. The game turned on the smallest of plays. Nursing a 2-0 lead, and having thrown just 66 pitches through six innings, Indians starter Paul Byrd faced Erick Aybar leading off the seventh. After falling behind 0-2, Aybar chopped a ball off the plate high in the air, and beat it out for an infield single. Now working from the stretch, Byrd fell behind Kendry Morales 2-0, then grooved an inner-half fastball that Morales launched on a line into the right-field bleachers to tie the game. An inning later, Gary Matthews Jr. hit Fernando Cabrera’s first pitch into nearly the same spot for the game-winner. Byrd had the Angels in check for the entire game up to that Aybar single. He scattered six hits, one an inning, without walking a batter. In fact, he threw more than four pitches to just two hitters in the first six frames. It was a perfect storm, a pound-the-strike-zone pitcher (at his best, Byrd is a Jon Lieber type) going up against a team that loves to swing the bat. Byrd seemed to have much better command from the windup than he did from the stretch, and the numbers supported this notion; for the game, he threw 80% strikes from the windup (43/54), 63% (26/41) from the stretch. When Aybar reached and he fell behind to Morales, there was a sense that he was in trouble, and he was.
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