Brewers pitching or Cardinals hitting?

[Oldcity]

Many on here were lamenting how terrible the Brewers pitched in the NLCS but didn't want to give much credit to the Cardinals' ridiculous offense. Many were also saying that the Cardinals wouldn't be able to pitch to Texas' lineup. My thought was, 'How in the world will Texas be able to pitch to St. Louis?'

 

The Cards are doing what they've done all playoffs, and really, all season: mashing. Their offense is probably the best the NL has seen in a long time. Sure, the Brewers didn't pitch great, but the Cardinals crushed almost every mistake.

[MNBrew]

I totally agree. It's been easy to lament the Brewers' lousy pitching and how they could've pitched certain guys but didn't (e.g., busting Pujols inside a few times). But with how St. Louis has been hitting just about everyone, I'm not sure the Brewers could've done anything more to have ensured any better fate.

 

Plain & simple, the Cardinals' stretch of hitting may well carry them all the way to another World Series championship -- much as I hope that won't be the outcome! -- they've just been that good.

[trwi7]

They pitched like crap against Arizona too except for Gallardo.

[markedman5]

Not sure what you are saying? The Rangers pitching has controlled or shutdown the Cards in 3 of the 4 games.

 

Last night was ugly but it was only 1 game......

[Ennder]

To be fair Holland tonight is getting pitches 2 inches inside called a strike. The entire Brewers series pitches on the inside corners were called balls consistently. When the ump won't give you the inside corner it is really hard to pitch there. If we had this strike zone our games would be low scoring too.

[Ennder]

Watching the final 3 innings and I can only reiterate, the strike zone was a complete joke, there is a reason that the Brewers series was so high scoring and tonight's game was so low scoring and it really had nothing to do with the players.

[markedman5]

The Rangers held them down both games in St Louis as well.

 

If you honestly think that Holland with his dominating stuff didn't pitch better then Marcum and Greinke tonight then you are kidding yourself. http://twitter.com/#!/SI_JonHeyman/status/128316967286353920

 

 

The Rangers are pitching better then the brewers did and it has little to do with the umpires. All umps miss pitches.

[Oldcity]

So bad timing I suppose, as I posted this without seeing the game tonight. My point is there were really good offenses in the playoffs. For the most part, offenses have been better than pitching staffs during these playoffs. The Brewers aren't any exception.

[logan82]

Bring on the robots umps. I for one think the Brewers series was heavily influenced by the human ones.

[MNBrew]

Per the computer-generated strike zone, the NLCS umps consistently called low &/or outside pitches to RH hitters as strikes. The Game 5 Dotel/Braun matchup screwed Braun badly in that way because it got so extreme -- there was a pitch that Molina "framed up" but actually grabbed about 6 inches off the ground that got called a strike -- so what choice did Braun have at that point but to swing at anything (of course, he still swung & missed at the pitches in the zone later in the AB, but he was dead meat by that point).

 

I think the original point is that, after Game 3 last night, the Cardinals just tore apart another pitching staff much in a way very reminiscent of what they did to the Brewers. So a "those suckers just keep bludgeoning every opposing pitcher" reaction was a very natural one. . . . Not to mention that this thread was started & my first reply came while tonight's game was in the 1st or 2nd inning. . . . So just a normal human reaction after all the Cardinals offense last night.

[Ennder]

The Rangers are pitching better then the brewers did and it has little to do with the umpires. All umps miss pitches.

 

They may be pitching better but this is completely wrong. If you watched the game they seriously were consistently calling pitches outside the strike zone as strikes and in the Brewers series they consistently were calling strikes balls. The umps play a huge role in how good a pitcher pitches in a single game. Velocity always helps of course because if the ump is making you come deeper into the zone velocity is what is going to save you.

[JohnBriggs12]

Except for Gary Darling who was fine in game 1 and would have been the ump had it gone to game 7, the umpiring was inconsistent. But that's true all year as there are only a handful of good umpires in the game. Brewer pitchers left hittable balls over the plate to a team with locked in hitters and didn't counter them by backing them off the plate. It's almost as if they were afraid of getting warnings because LaRussa was in the other dugout.

[joepepsi]

The Brewers were down 4-0 in the top of the 1st due to poor outfield play by Kotsay and Hart. The pitching was good enough to win that game for the Crew.

 

Games 5 & 6 were equally poor defensive games which they buried themselves early.

 

Better defense and the Brewers win at least one of those 3 games. The Cards offense is very good, The Brewer rotation was disappointing, but it was Brewer defense that kept the series from going to game 7.

[SoCal Brew Crew Fan]

I wouldn't go so far as to blame the umps for the Brewers losing the series or for Marcum's implosion, but I agree the zones were tight. I'd be all for replacing the umps with technology. I don't get why people are enamored with the human element in the game. Humans were smart enough to design systems to overcome bad judgment...there's your human element. I'd rather pay some MIT folks to implement a better umpiring system than pay these jokers what they make...baseball and society would be far better off.

[Thurston Fluff]

Better defense and the Brewers win at least one of those 3 games. The Cards offense is very good, The Brewer rotation was disappointing, but it was Brewer defense that kept the series from going to game 7.

 

The same could be said of Texas in game 3. One blown call and a couple defensive miscues and the flood gates opened.

[Ennder]

Oh yeah, I never meant to say the zone is why the Brewers lost, just why the games were so high scoring.

[CheezWizHed]

Ok, we looked at pitching, hitting and defense... How about coaching? The coaches sit down with the pitchers and catchers and devise a game-plan, right? How to attack each hitter.

 

After seeing each other several times this season (including twice in the NLCS for Grienke and Marcum), did our coaches (help) fail by poor game planning? Did we try to do the same thing as always and the Cardinals were ready for it? I'm sure they looked at film and figured out what a certain pitcher was trying to do to them.

[TheCrew07]

In baseball the pitcher is in complete control of the game as he gets to choose pitch and location, everyone is just reacting to the events he initiates.

 

Of course there is good hitting, but good hitting is taking advantage of an opportunity that presents itself, very few hits in a game are going to come on what would be qualified as a good pitcher's pitch.

 

I'm not one to make excuses for performance, nor did I have time to watch every pitch in every game, but I will say that I didn't see much good pitching, I saw hitters taking advantage of bad location. One can blame the umpires or whatever one chooses to conjure up as a reason, but the simple truth is that every single MLB hitter will crush pitches up in the zone over the middle of the plate or they wouldn't be MLB players in the first place.

[nate82]

I'm not one to make excuses for performance, nor did I have time to watch every pitch in every game, but I will say that I didn't see much good pitching, I saw hitters taking advantage of bad location. One can blame the umpires or whatever one chooses to conjure up as a reason, but the simple truth is that every single MLB hitter will crush pitches up in the zone over the middle of the plate or they wouldn't be MLB players in the first place.

Well the blame that people are putting on the umpires that I have seen and what I saw from the games is that the umpires called a bad strike zone. Balls that were thrown that should have been called strikes were being called balls on a consistent basis game 5 was a perfect example of this in the NLCS. There was a couple of pitches to Braun that were out of the strike zone low and away that were called strikes and they were nowhere near the strike zone. While there was a ball that was thrown on the corner in the strike zone and would be called a strike by about 99% of the umpires in the league were being called balls. It was like there was the normal strike zone and the corners were not in play if they were close and then there was a second strike zone where balls that were thrown off of the plate and clearly balls that were being called strikes. It wasn't the reason why the Brewers lost but it was a horrible strike zone throughout nearly all of the six games played.

To the original question there is never a single answer why a team loses a game or a series in baseball it is usually a combination of things. In the NLCS it was a combination of the Brewers leaving runners on in scoring position, defensive lapses, and poor pitching. Never once did the Brewers pitchers challenge the Cardinals on the inside of the plate except for game one of the series. The Brewers offensive was horrible while batting with 2-outs and runners on while the Cardinals were playing almost perfectly with 2-outs and runners on. I believe the Brewers only scored once or twice with runners on and 2-outs while the Cardinals scored a whole lot more. It really was a combination of things that doomed the Brewers you can't really point one thing out that killed the Brewers in the NLCS.