![]() ![]() He understands the game, develops plans of attack, stops runners, blocks pitches, frames them. Molina helps pitchers not only excel, but reach their full potential. Really? Baseball is littered with hard-throwing pitchers who never develop, who couldn’t find home plate with Siri’s help and shrink in the spotlight. Or both.” In Game 2, rookie Michael Wacha bedazzled for six innings before giving way to the blowtorch bullpen, Carlos Martinez and Trevor Rosenthal.Īnyone can succeed catching those guys, the narrative goes. There are 17 homegrown players on their roster, leaving Game 4 starter Lance Lynn to say, “It shows that we have people who are really smart or have really good luck. They draft and cultivate talent with alarming efficiency. The Cardinals can pitch, there’s no denying that. He’s the common thread of the Cardinals’ eight-year run that has established them as the National League standard. When it comes to catching, it’s Molina and everyone else. Given his respect for the game, he was always reluctant to make these feelings public.įolks can argue. What former Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has said privately to former players, he admitted last week, calling Molina the best defensive catcher ever. Nobody influences a game or means more to a team than Yadier Molina. And, when it comes to the Cardinals, it is wrong. The 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate has not only endured the test of time, it has determined titles. ![]() LOUIS - There’s a delicate geometry to baseball. He actually attended Yale.Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu Please follow me on or follow me on Forbes.Ĭorrection: An earlier version of the story called Theo Epstein a Harvard grad. And he was sporting a badass beard before you were born. "But when you go to playoffs, you want me to go to war with.” Maybe so, Jonny, but let's remember that Bill James has three more World Series rings than Carl Yastrzemski. “There’s a lot of sabermetrics, there’s a lot of numbers and stuff. FOX Sports' Ken Rosenthal interviewed Jonny Gomes and asked him about the team's surprising success with him in the lineup (The video clip can be found in this link). (The Cardinals, it shall be noted have been one of the sabermetric stalwarts of the NL,and finished 4th in Beane Count this year.)Īll of which led to a strange strange moment in the post-game celebration. This year? The Red Sox were back to a solid fourth in the AL, behind only the As, Tigers, and Rays. Last year? Dead last in the American League. During Epstein's tenure, the Red Sox were routinely in the top five. It was a quick and dirty yardstick of a team's sabermetric orthodoxy. Rob Neyer, Bill James' former assistant, and a stat guru in his own right, had came up with a metric that combined a team's walks, home runs, walks allowed, and home runs allowed into a descriptive stat called Beane Count. In short, exploiting the inefficiencies in baseball's talent market. For all the talk of a new era, the team continued to do the things that were the hallmark of most of Epstein's tenure-surrounding a core of homegrown talent, with cherry-picked veterans who would perform well in Fenway's challenging environment. ![]() Boston reversed the curse and won World Series in 20.Īnd while Epstein left to take over the Chicago Cubs, last year, new Red Sox GM Ben Cherrington had worked under Epstein. ![]()
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