Suns > Lakers
Know why the Lakers can't win their series against the Suns? Because it doesn't matter how good your game plan is (very good) or how faithfully you execute it (pretty well) if your players just aren't very good (they aren't).
Sunday, April 22. 2007
Harden to miss next start
The inevitable has happened: Rich Harden will miss his next start. Brad Halsey will apparently pitch in his stead. No analysis is needed to show that this is a bad thing. At least Chad Gaudin has emerged as a viable starter in Esteban Loaiza's absence, right? Six starters and all. UPDATE: Susan Slusser has since updated her post to reflect that Milton Bradley could be hurt with a recurrence of his hamstring problem. If he went on the DL, as she noted, that'd make it easy to bring up Halsey for a quick start without worrying about which reliever the A's are going to send down to make room (since Harden won't go on the DL - the A's hope to have him back sooner than they could get him on the mound if he had a DL stint).
Umpire snatches defeat from the jaws of victory?
I've got four pictures to show you. They're screen captures from the late innings of today's A's-Rangers tilt. I didn't start "watching" the game until it was already bases loaded, one out in the eighth, with Sammy Sosa at the plate and Justin Duchscherer on the hill. The below thumbnail (click for the full image) captures what happened:
What on earth happened there with balls three and four? Aren't they right down the middle of the damn plate?
Ok, so the A's got a couple of calls in the top of the night as well. Check out Mark Ellis and Jason Kendall's at-bats, focusing on pitch one in Kendall's at-bat and pitches one and three to Ellis:
But then the kicker came against Nick Swisher. Check out the last pitch in the at-bat, the pitch on which he struck out looking.
That's like a foot outside and low!
So I guess the real question is whether these are actually accurate depictions of where these pitches were being thrown. How good is GameCast at this thing?
