SPANISH HARLEM – The World Series is over and I won’t lie to you, I barely saw more than a couple innings of each game. My viewership mostly consisted of checking to see who was winning and what the final score was. With that said, I only have a few quick things that I want to talk about… so let’s get it to it.
Atlanta Braves
Congratulations are in order and I would also like to add a Thank you. I don’t know if I could take the Houston Astros winning another championship. It would go something like “See, we don’t need to cheat to win,” and that would have sucked balls. Once it looked it like it would be the Boston Red Sox or Astros representing the American League in the World Series, I knew I would be rooting for the National League to win it all. Thankfully, the Braves took care of business.
In hindsight, Atlanta’s run through the playoffs was one of the most heartfelt stories in some time. They lost one their best players, Ronald Acuna Jr., early in the season but continued to stay competitive in the NL East. Key trades at the deadline provided them with more fire power for their offense and one of those players, Eddie Rosario, was named the WS Most Valuable Player. This was a team that could have sold their assets and looked forward to next season, but management did the opposite and because of that… they are champs.
Starting Pitching
With analytics taking a more important role in making important decisions, it is now being asked by many in the media if starting pitching is undervalued in the post-season. While the Braves won relying heavily on their relief pitchers, I think it was more because of their situation than them not trusting their starters. Baseball is constantly evolving and the idea of not letting a starter pitch through the lineup more than twice is growing among the league but teams won’t fill their team with guys that can only throw more than two innings. We have seen the method work for the Braves but I know it won’t work over a full season. That would be asking multiple pitchers to pitch more innings on consecutive games and no team will be able to keep that up.
That’s it for today, come back tomorrow for Cam James.
Until next time…
