Father Curt

Curt's take on yesterday's game against the Twinkies. I love reading his post-game blog posts. They are rather illuminating. I found a couple things interesting while reading this (and some of his others). On occasion he will use the plural first person while talking about a pitch, i.e. "Tori fouled off two fastballs in to run the count to 1-2 and we threw a real good split for a swing and a miss for strike three." [emphasis added] People always play up Tek's ability to call a good game, but it gives this belief a lot of credence when Schilling phrases his actual pitching in this manner. It's not just "I struck him out" but "We struck him out." Truly the battery is a team, and hearing Schill talk about how great Tek is at calling games, not only explicitly in the past, but implicitly with statements like this, impresses me quite a bit. It just helps to cement the immense amount of respect I have for the Captain, and legitimizes an ability of his that is very difficult to quantify.

Schilling also talks about how the wheels came off in the seventh yesterday. Again, baseball in general, and pitching in particular, is a funny thing. On the one hand, a pitcher can be absolutely cruising through the lineup and then all of a sudden seem to lose control and serve up meatballs where before he was dealing pure nastiness. On the other hand, the margin of error is extremely small when pitching to major league batters. Half an inch can be the difference between a whiff and a home run. Even a "good" pitch - well-located right on the edge of the zone, for instance - can be hit. It takes finesse to succeed, and there is a certain amount of pure mechanics and physics involved in this: arm angle, release point, trajectory, velocity, etc. But there is that ineffable human element, that part about the pitching game that escapes the understanding even of one of the game's most successful veteran pitchers:

My management of the game unravels [in the seventh inning, after getting one out and giving up a single], for no good reason. One out, number nine hitter up and a four run lead. If you were to make a list of things that absolutely cannot, ever, under any circumstances happen, walking this hitter would be the clear cut number one thing on this list. Sure enough I don’t even make it close and walk him on a 3-1 fastball. My mistake here is not getting it together at that very moment. For 6 2/3 innings I’ve been as focused as I can be pitch to pitch, hitter to hitter, out to out. The game is still very much in hand here but even though it’s a lesson I’ve learned and relearned hundreds of times in the past 20 years it still for some reason, happens. Castillo goes to 1-2 and in my mind, instead of thinking and focusing on making that next pitch, I’m thinking about getting out of the inning. I know he doesn’t strike out much so I know the focus needs to be on locating whatever it is we are going to throw.

I can’t say why I wasn’t or why I didn’t, but I didn’t.

Lack of concentration? Fatigue? Thinking ahead rather than focusing on the moment? Perhaps a combination of all these factors, but in Schilling's own words, he doesn't even know why he lost it at that point. I just found this an interesting passage in his entry.

He's also got a few words on Clemens' going to New York. To sum up: Who the funk cares?