Editor's note: I started this two weeks ago, and it is as such now horrendously out of date. So it goes. It was originally just titled "Nine Times."
A: Neither. It refers to this:
Beck and I caught ASU's opening game against Milwaukee-Wisconsin in the Round-of-64 regional playoffs. ASU, in the grand Nyetian-attended-Div-I-school tradition, is ranked #1 in the country and boasts a RIDICULOUS, all-around lineup of super-studs. They won their first 24 games of the season, have top-notch starting pitching, slick fielding, and batting stats to die for - granted, college numbers are often gaudier than their wooden bat-gained MLB counterparts, but check out this lineup. The salient points:
1. They are batting .338 / .436 / .539 *as a team.* Yowsers.
2. Their opponents, for reference, have batted .239 / .324 / .331.
3. They have scored 8.3 runs per game while giving up 3.8-ish.
4. They draw 6 walks per nine innings while giving up 2.3.
5. Their pitching staff K's 9 per game.
6. They hit over one homerun per game, playing in a quite spacious home stadium.
The numbers are all there; I could go on, but let's just "suffice it" - this is a dominant, nearly perfectly constructed baseball team. In person, it's even bigger - they take the Bill Jamesian approach and take lots and lots of pitches at the plate; they foul off two strike pitches like nobody's business; they hit TONS of line drives. It's a juggernaut - granted, there are some "ASU 26, Northern Illinois 1" games in there that undoubtedly inflate things a bit, but this team has easily achieved "helluva" status.
Which takes us, however obliquely, back to the post title. This is arguably the best team in the country and is ranked as such. And in the game that Beck and I watched, against a vastly inferior opponent - theoretically the 64th seed in the tourney - ASU made no fewer than 9 mistakes. In order:
1. In the first inning, after one MW player had closed his eyes and tapped a seeing-eye single to left, the next batter hit a grounder about three feet to the right of the ASU shortstop. He kicked it, blowing a sure double play. Sounds like a physical error... but the SS did not hustle to get in front of the ball, he took a half-step and attempted the needlessly more difficult backhanded play. Mental error, in that he skipped the higher percentage play. Instead of the end of the inning, there were then runners on 1st and 2nd with one out.
2. The next batter hits a shot right back to the pitcher, who, instead of turning and setting his feet, whirls and fires the ball into left center. The SS snagged it , but with a dive off the bag, killing the easy double play. So instead of the end of the inning, again, bases are loaded with one out. MW scores on a sac fly a few pitches later.
3. Slugger Kole Calhoun gets hit with a pitch in the bottom of the 1st. With one strike on clean-up hitter Riccio Torrez, Calhoun gets picked off of first by the catcher. Inning over. Why was Calhoun that far off the base, w/ 2 outs and the cleanup hitter up? Ugh.
4. In the bottom of the 2nd, with 2 outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd, ASU drills a single to center field. One run scores, and the ball is thrown into the middle of the infield. The runner on 2nd failed to get a secondary lead on the 2 out pitch, and so is just rounding third as the CF catches the ball... the third base coach stops him. Meanwhile, the MW firstbaseman forgets to come to the middle of the diamond to cut off the throw - so no one catches it, and the ball bounces around the middle of the infield. This runner would have scored easily with a secondary lead, and would have scored anyways if the third base coach had noticed the absent first baseman and sent the runner afterwards. So this is almost two mistakes, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
5. But we won't give the single hitter the benefit of the doubt, as he did not aggressively round first. There's no first baseman in the middle of the diamond, so someone - the 1b coach? - should have noticed this; that ball is either going through to the plate, or it's going to bounce around the infield. Either way, an extra base is there for the taking, and it goes untaken. And natch, the next batter hits a shot into the hole b/w 3rd and short... the SS makes a great play to dive and stop it, and his only play is to 2nd to end the inning and prevent the run that already should have scored. And that's a play that should not have been available, because that forced out runner should have been at second, not first. Another run lost.
6. Later in the game, with the bases loaded and 2 outs, the Sun Devil at 2nd gets over-zealous... and gets picked off by the catcher. Another rally killed.
7. Just to round things out, another Sun Devil missed a sign and got picked off at third. If the catcher could have picked off someone at home, he could have completed the rare pick-off cycle. Alas... just another rally-killing mistake. And this one is perhaps, say, three times as bad, as there's ample evidence at this point that the hombre behind the plate has a runner-picking-off hose.
8. Later, a killer - with runners on 1st and 2nd and no outs, playing with a team that has no one with an OBP under .350, the coach orders a bunt. This is stupid enough in its own right, but the bunt is perfectly placed down the third base line, and the pitcher can't get to it in time... except that the runner on first either missed the sign or thought the ball would be caught in the air (a bizarre thought), because even though the batter is through the first base bag already, the runner on first is only half-way to second. He's gunned out, and what would have been bases loaded no outs becomes 1st and 3rd with one. The next batter hits a run-scoring single that quite overtly does not score a second run...
9. And our favorite - conference player of the year Zack McPhee laces a shot down the right field line in the bottom of the 8th, in a 6-2 game that is being played with aluminum bats, and tries to stretch it to a triple. Dude has 14 triples in 60 games this year, so he has the wheels / bat for this sort of thing, but you guessed it, he is gunned down, making the first out at third. And yes, this was followed by a single that would have scored him and his wheels anyways. I, predictably, made a lot of fun of him when this happened. This may or may not have had something to do with my pregame beverage:
Total aside - that is a four dollar 22 oz. Guinness from my friends at Cornish Pasty Company, a FRIGGIN' AWESOME dining establishment that Beck and I discovered that evening. A Cornish pasty is effectively a gourmet British-style hot pocket, with more flavors / combinations than you can imagine. SO GOOD! There were at least 25 varieties that I could have tried - we elected to split the sausage, cheese and potatoes version - so we will be going back soon and often.
But seriously, as you may be able to imagine, I spent the bulk of this game giving a running commentary on these mistakes and other plays on the field, and special thanks to Beck who, per usual, put up with my nonsense. Despite the mistakes, it was a fun game, and capped by some delicioso Yogurtland concoctions (their Pecan and Pralines flavor is a local winner, imho).
But back to those mistakes - what gives? This is how the #1 team in the country operates? That's *nine* mistakes in a post-season, elimination-is-at-least-close-by here game. In baseball, a sport notorious for happenstance, where the best teams ever only win 75% of the time. You're going to hand runs away in a situation like this? With the continuous rhetoric of "champion teams are like X" that gets ballyhooed all over the place, you would think at least one of those X's is "does the little things right." None of this mattered in the acute sense, of course - they relied on their dominant pitching (some of the MW batters were blatantly overmatched) to win 6-2, beat up on Hawaii the next day, and beat up on Hawaii again to advance to the super-regional (which, now that I'm finishing this two weeks late, we know they won; they're in the college world series and starting things in Omaha tomorrow (Sunday)). So these mistakes get buried, or just noted as "gaffes" in the course of the narrative, and things move on. But I've got to wonder:
1. Do they just exhibit some kind of reckless attitude that benefits them overall via aggression but just results in these sorts of goof-ups?
2. Are they "playing down to the competition" - is there some kind of measurable effect that their concentration is down when they play against the likes of MW?
3. Are they just so good in other aspects of the game that handing away runs like that never really catches up with them? So the carrot works for their hitting and pitch-taking and all of that - those pay off - but the stick is stickless, as they can routinely get away with these mistakes because they are so badly going to outplay opponents in those other respects.
It's that last one that interests me - I am sure those players get yelled at after the game for these mistakes, but is there maybe some underlying sentiment of "yeah, but whatever" coming from everyone involved that makes that yelling lack the teeth to compel correction? The outcomes are not guaranteed, of course - it could catch up with them and cause them to get upset, or it could never catch up with them, and they could waltz on to the world series title despite habitually handing runs away on both sides of the ball (note misused football metaphor there :) ). One would *think* that the better opponents would make these things matter more, and maybe ASU amps its little-things concentration up for the bigger opponents. Still, the habit of letting these things go against weaker competition exposes the team to unnecessary risk, and whether the risk manifests itself in a disastrous upset or not in the next few weeks (note - it didn't, or at least hasn't yet), I still like to think that it's important to note that it's there.
And yeah, because this is the all things Ultimate blog, I've got to think about this w/r/t Sprawl. We've got more talent this year than in years past, I think, but it's a given that we are going to run into the ASU-esque super-stud teams. And they'll likely outmatch us. But unlike ASU, we're going to have to maximize our chances via every available avenue. I.e., we can't afford to have three runners picked off in a game, as those runs are going to get us those 15-13 victories. Or, um, something.
All of this is to point out the perhaps obvious, but reinforced-by-direct-observation point - it's not necessarily the championship teams that do all the little things right. Sometimes they just don't have to. But it might be the teams that are looking to grab upsets that have to. Good thing to keep in mind in the coming months...
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