Gary, Keith & Ron blast blown call
Only one group of Mets is in championship form, and it’s the best three-man booth in baseball. Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling were positively vibrating with rage that their team won a game on Thursday. Just watch:
Michael Conforto leaned over the plate to get “hit” by Marlins reliever Anthony Bass, forcing in the game-winning run. As replays made clear, the pitch was a strike, and Conforto did not make the required attempt to avoid getting hit. But the arbitrary boundaries of what can and can’t be overturned on replay meant that the call on the field stood. Mets win.
Cohen, Hernandez and Darling are not in that class of announcers who openly despise the game they’re supposed to be presenting. They just have a strong sense of justice. The ever-sharp Cohen immediately pointed out that the call wasn’t reviewable, but he was just as agitated as Hernandez and
Darling about the ending.
“He stuck his elbow right into that pitch!” Cohen yelped when the replay made that clear. As soon as the umpires ruled that the Mets had won, all three men let out a clearly displeased “Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
“You’re trying to get it right,” Darling said. “They don’t get it right. So why even have replay?”
Good question, as always, Ron.
paying so he can play elsewhere.
Consider the Yankees bat Gary Sanchez (.278/.350/.667 early on) seventh on Wednesday, even with Aaron Judge and Voit both out of the lineup. When those bats return, there’s almost no pathway to Gary returning to the heart of the lineup barring a plague — but the recently vaccinated Bombers are immune to that. So yeah, runs will come.
The Yankees coaching staff has had success with activating the thunder in a few position players close in age to Odor (Voit, Hicks and Gio Urshela are shining examples). But until then, that friendly yellow foul pole seems so much further than 314 feet.
PITCHING FOR DAYS
The Bombers are relying on two arms in Corey Kluber and Jameson Taillon who have not been healthy or pitched extensively in over two years, and both showed promise in their first turns through the rotation.
Kluber’s command was shaky — again, it’s been two years — but his stuff looked sharp enough in his first outing last Friday.
The Klubot was sitting at 90 on the radar gun with his fastball, a notch below the two-time Cy Young winner’s Cleveland prime, but the movement was there, as he was at times, backdooring a vicious two-seamer against righty bats. With reduced velocity, Kluber will need his command to be elite to be good (or good to be decent), but he didn’t look injured, and that’s a huge win.
Meanwhile, Taillon threw his fastball into the mid-90s while painting the edge of the strike zone with all his pitches during his Wednesday match against the Orioles, his first in 707 days. (Read that twice, then once more just in case.)
Taillon flubbed a couple of locations in the fifth inning, leading to solo shots to Cedric Mullins and Anthony Santander, but the seven strikeouts and zero walks speak to a man who was completely in control and had the look of a frontline starter.
But that’s not all: Gerrit Cole looked like the consensus best starter in the American League, and Jordan Montgomery flashed a nasty curveball in his outstanding first start. When Domingo German faltered, Mike King pitched six brilliant relief innings against a tough Toronto lineup — demonstrating why he deserves to be on the fifth starter bubble right alongside Deivi Garcia and Clarke Schmidt. And so far, despite missing Zack Britton in the early months, the bullpen’s worst enemy has been the new runner on second rule, one of many 2020isms they would probably like to leave in the past.
Injury risk is real, but the Yankees flashed a deep stable of arms worthy of getting key outs in the playoffs.
at that time — blazed the trail. He was back at Augusta National for Woods’ first win in 1997. The first Black man to play the Masters was simply not going to miss seeing the first Black man winning the tournament.
“It always amazed me that presidents of the United States would be giving these different awards to athletes for their athletic prowess, and here was a man that changed the lives and changed and put a spoke in the wheel of segregation in South Africa and was never given the awards that he actually duly deserved,” Player said.