WHY JUST ONE WIN WOULD MEAN MORE TO VERLANDER
Astros ace is ready and willing to remove goose egg from his World Series record
Justin Verlander has won a Cy Young Award, an MVP, an ALCS MVP, an ERA title and five strikeout crowns.
He is also the first pitcher in baseball history to go 0-5 in the World Series.
Earlier this series, he pointed out that, in today’s game, pitcher wins aren’t considered that meaningful.
But, with a chance to lock down Houston’s second World Series title in three years on Tuesday night at Minute Maid Park, the 36-year-old made clear that he was kidding.
“I mean, yeah. I think wins matter,” Verlander said. “I think that was a little bit of a joke.”
The veteran right-hander, who won 21 games in the regular season with the Astros and struck out a ridiculous 300 batters, lost twice in the championship series with the Detroit Tigers in 2006 and once in 2012. He got his first World Series ring in 2017 with the Astros, but was 0-1, and failed to win a Game 6 that would have been the clincher.
But Verlander doesn’t have the same kind of spotty post-season record that has plagued other great pitchers of his generation like Clayton Kershaw and David Price. Over his 15-year career, he has a 3.33 ERA in the regular season. In the playoffs, it balloons all the way up to … 3.35.
Still, this season he is 1-3 in five post-season starts, with a 4.15 ERA. He has also struggled in the first inning in particular, giving up home runs in three of them.
Gerrit Cole, who won Game 5 with a dominant nine-strikeout performance, said he is highly confident in his ace teammate.
“He’s prepared. He’s ready for this moment,” Cole said. “We’ve been communicating back and forth throughout the whole series on how we were going to make an adjustment to what we were seeing and how we were going to attack.”
Verlander acknowledged that a win on Tuesday would make up for some of the struggles of the past. “That would obviously be a moment that would be — that I would cherish in my career if that were able to happen,” he said.
Lance Barksdale, the homeplate umpire on Sunday night in Game 5, made an excellent case for the introduction of robot umps with several baffling calls.
The most controversial of them came in the seventh inning, with Cole facing Victor Robles in a 4-1 game. Robles appeared to work a walk that would have put two men on base and bring the tying run to the plate, but Barksdale punched him out on a pitch that was high and outside, ending the inning. The Nationals’ dugout basically freaked out.
Washington manager Dave Martinez, though, practised some serious diplomacy in his post-game comments. “You know what, I will not ever sit here and criticize an umpire,” he said.
“I’ve known Lance for a very long time and he’s really good.
“And that’s all I’m going to say about it. I’m not going to sit here — I know there were some choice words, but that’s just in the heat of the moment.”
This was probably wise strategy, given that ripping the calls would have just earned Martinez a fine, and also the enmity of an umpire crew that will work the remaining games in the series.
Houston manager A.J. Hinch said, basically, stuff happens: “There’s so much emotion that goes on in these plays, and depending on which side you are on, you’re going to have that reaction of — I haven’t seen it on video.”
Hinch also noted that his dugout basically freaked out earlier in the same inning, when Ryan Zimmerman was awarded a walk on a pitch that was usually called a strike. “Whichever side you’re on, you’re going to sort of react that way,” he said.
More alarming was a moment in the sixth inning, when Nationals pitcher Tanner Rainey appeared to drop a curveball in for a third strike on Michael Brantley. Catcher Yan Gomes got up to head back to the dugout, as all catchers have done since the dawn of time, but Barksdale didn’t give him the call. In an exchange between the two caught on camera, the umpire told Gomes he didn’t call the strike because, essentially, Gomes was being presumptuous.
Bring in the robots, already.
Martinez said that while he’s still hopeful right-hander Max Scherzer will recover enough from nerve issues in his neck to pitch in a possible Game 7 on Wednesday night, the Nationals manager is not thinking about what he would do if he couldn’t go. “You know, right now my focus is on Game 6. We’ve got to treat that as Game 7 right now,” Martinez said. “There won’t be a Game 7 if we can’t get a Game 6.”
This checks out. But Martinez also said he isn’t ruling out that a cortisone shot that Scherzer received on Sunday will work some magic.
“My understanding is, it takes about 24 hours for this injection to really work. So we’re going to try to give it 24 hours. As we all know, Max, he’s probably going to try to push it a little bit. But we want him to just try to let this medication kick in a little bit and then see where we’re at.”
But first, Game 6.
Eventually, the camel’s back couldn’t take it anymore.
Or, in the case of Vladimir Tarasenko, it was his shoulder that finally caved in. It was only a matter of time. It’s the same shoulder that the St. Louis Blues forward underwent surgery on two summers ago and which he dislocated during last spring’s playoff run.
That shoulder, which was on the pointed end of 50 hits in 26 games, seemed to sum up how the Blues had bullied their way into becoming Stanley Cup champions. The only problem was Tarasenko didn’t just save his shoulder for the playoffs.
When the season started, he and the rest of his teammates were back ramming themselves into everything that moved as they charged headfirst into defending their title. Ten games later, Tarasenko is undergoing yet another surgery and will be out five months or more.
Surprised? Well, you shouldn’t be. Weeks earlier, Don Cherry had pretty much predicted something like this would happen.
“They cannot play a regular season like they do the playoffs,” Cherry said of the Blues in an
Oct. 19 Coach’s Corner segment. “The game is not the same and they’re trying to play the game like they do in the playoffs: tough, honest, good hockey. No, you’ve got to play the sweetheart game … they’re playing rough, tough hockey. Wait until the playoffs to do that.”
Cherry, of course, is the same commentator who had previously lamented that the Toronto Maple Leafs were not tough enough to go deep in the playoffs. And while he might be correct, there is a difference in the two statements.
Teams, such as the Leafs or Tampa Bay Lightning, might need to get tougher to win a Cup. But it’s a problem for another day. The regular season isn’t about finishing checks and blocking shots. It’s about winning games with speed and skill, while staying healthy.
It’s why a team such as St. Louis, which was dead-last in the overall standings in early January, was able to ramp up its physicality and go on an unprecedented run to a championship. But it’s also why a team such as the Washington Capitals, who also played a heavy game en route to claiming their first ever Cup in 2018, went from winning it all to being bounced in the first round a year later.
“I just think it’s hard to win back-to-back when you play that physical grinding style of hockey,” said Capitals head coach Todd Reirden. “I think when you see a team like Pitt that played a speed game where you’re relying on your speed all the time and flip a lot of pucks out to space and chase pucks down, their personnel wasn’t based on playing physical at all. That’s totally the opposite of what our team did in the Stanley Cup.”
There’s a balance between playing physically and not physically breaking down by the time the playoffs arrive. The latter is basically what happened to the Capitals last year. Other teams, such as the Bruins, rely on skill to rack up points in the regular season and then save their “Big Bad” moniker when they need it the most.
“The thing is, if you look at regular season compared to playoffs, it’s different hockey is what it is,” said Los Angeles Kings captain Anze Kopitar, whose team missed the playoffs a year after beating up on teams to win the Cup in 2014. “In order to get into the playoffs, you have to be fast and skilled and everything.
“Playoffs is a little bit different. You have to wear teams down. That’s what it is. It’s not as high-scoring as the regular season. You obviously still have to have some grit and some hard-nosed guys that do that. But it’s a fine line. You’ve got to play consistent. That’s what it comes down to.”
Maybe Toronto will be able to flip the switch when the time arrives. After all, Tarasenko was averaging just 1.15 hits per game during last year’s regular season before ramping up to 1.92 in the playoffs.
For the Capitals, the change between the two “seasons” is less dramatic. Washington entered Tuesday night’s game against Toronto with the best record in the Metropolitan Division. And the Capitals are doing it by blending speed and skill with physicality. Alex Ovechkin not only had nine goals in 13 games. But he, along with Tom Wilson and Garnet Hathaway, are ranked among the top 20 in hits.
Playoffs is a little bit different. You have to wear teams down. That’s what it is. It’s not as high-scoring as the regular season.
It’s a style of play that could be difficult to keep up for 82 games, not to mention four rounds of playoffs.
“I wouldn’t say it’s physically exhausting over a whole year,” said Wilson. “It’s more that there’s more skating involved in our game this year, there’s more you have to go the distance to finish the check.”
According to Reirden, the extra skating could be worth it, especially against smaller teams like the Leafs and the Lightning.
“We have some speed, for sure,” Reirden said. “But we’re also not that fun a team to play against … and we know that two years ago our success as an organization in winning a Stanley Cup was based on a speed game that was a heavy game. It’s what’s set us up for success for a good regular season and hopefully a long push into the post-season as well.”