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Small ALCS setbacks snowball into catastrophes as two aces, key hitters struggle under pressure
Published on Sunday, Oct 28, 2007
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
The Red Sox score a run on three hits off staff ace C.C. Sabathia in the first inning of Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Indians lose.
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
Travis Hafner goes 1-for-12 with six strikeouts in the final three games of the series, all Tribe defeats.
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
After Boston's first two batters reach on mis-hit but well-placed infield singles in Game 6, can Fausto Carmona be thinking anything other than, ''How soon will something else go wrong?'' With two outs, underachieving J.D. Drew hits a grand slam.
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
With the Tribe trailing by one run after six innings of the seventh game, the defense fails and Rafael Betancourt is shelled for seven runs in 12/3 innings more runs than he allowed in 30 appearances from July 17 through Sept. 30. Betancourt never gave up more than one run in any of his 68 regular-season outings.
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
That was the Indians' mind-set in the American League Championship Series. What prevented them from winning the pennant after taking a lead of three games to one? It had nothing to do with base coach Joel Skinner holding Kenny Lofton at third or manager Eric Wedge sending Sabathia out for the seventh inning of the fifth game.
Experience gap
The Tribe was woefully deficient in one area: With few exceptions, the team had not been there, done that.
Only Kenny Lofton, Joe Borowski, Paul Byrd and Sabathia, among those who were counted on to play principal roles, had participated in a previous postseason, and the sum total of Sabathia's experience consisted of one start in the 2001 division series, when he was a rookie.
Maybe that's why Byrd is one of the few players who performed relatively well. The lineup Wedge routinely used against the Red Sox included one player (Lofton) who had viewed the playoffs in any other way than seated in front of a television. Neither Grady Sizemore nor Jhonny Peralta, neither Ryan Garko nor Casey Blake, neither Victor Martinez nor Hafner, certainly not novices Franklin Gutierrez and Asdrubal Cabrera had been exposed to the postseason until this year.
Trot Nixon, who started two games and went 3-for-7 in the ALCS, came into the series with the most October experience of any Cleveland player except Lofton, 38 games before 2007.
Red Sox veterans
Compare that with the Red Sox. Manny Ramirez had played in 81 postseason games; Jason Varitek, 39; David Ortiz, 38; Drew, 27; Mike Lowell, 15. Even Julio Lugo had been in five. Only Coco Crisp, Kevin Youkilis and rookie Dustin Pedroia were deficient in playoff experience among the regulars.
As for the pitching staff, Curt Schilling had made 15 postseason starts, Tim Wakefield had appeared in 16 games, Daisuke Matsuzaka had thrown in the Olympics and the World Baseball Classic, which are marquee events in Japan, albeit undervalued in the United States. Josh Beckett, the same age (27) as Sabathia, had six postseason starts before this year.
Does the veteran team beat the new kid on the block every time? No, witness Cleveland's loss to Florida in the 1997 World Series and the Tribe's win over the pitching-poor Yankees two weeks ago. But it helps to have lived through the fishbowl that postseason baseball has become. Remember the Tribe's loss to the Braves in the 1995 World Series? Anyone who watched those games quickly became aware of which team had been there.
Sabathia, Carmona
Sabathia admitted Monday that in the ALCS, he abandoned his studied approach of calm and cool developed over the past 21/2 years. He allowed himself to be overcome with emotion, to surrender to the bankrupt concept that he and only he could save the team. It's an attitude that works well in a film script but usually leads to disappointment in real life.
If you watched Sabathia's radar gun readings, it was all too obvious what was going on. Instead of pinpointing 91-93-mph fastballs, he was launching 96-98-mph (one set off the gun at 99) missiles that were destined to hit their targets only occasionally.
Carmona, in his first full big-league season, was forced to return to the scene of some of his most devastating 2006 failures as a misplaced closer. It was in Fenway Park that Ortiz deprived Carmona of a save by slamming a home run with the Red Sox one out from defeat. This time, Carmona appeared to be caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy: Something would go wrong. Of course, it did.
Blake overreacts
Sabathia and Carmona weren't the only Indians who succumbed to the stress of the moment. When Blake muffed a bouncer that started the Tribe's final descent into ALCS hell in the seventh inning of the last game, rather than chase down the ball, he threw up his hands in disgust as Jacoby Ellsbury hustled to second.
Rather than maintain his concentration on the play, Blake gave in to his emotions. Instead of thinking, ''Get the ball,'' his mind flashed the message, ''You just blew the series.''
When a superlative performance by Beckett enabled the Red Sox who, after all, are richer in talent to win the crucial fifth game, it gave his team the will to fight back without fear. When the Indians discovered they were vulnerable, all it took was one small setback in each game to snowball into catastrophe.
The Tribe's edge in the series always was contingent on getting the most from its premier starters, Sabathia and Carmona, plus a few key hits from the offense, especially Hafner, Martinez and Sizemore. When these players were unable to take the inevitable setbacks of a seven-game series in stride, a seemingly insurmountable lead collapsed like a house of bent baseball cards.
Could anyone have done something about it? Not unless there's a secret vaccination for warding off the effects of inexperience under pressure. Fans want the guilty to answer for their sins. It's got to be somebody's fault, right?
Not this time.
What happened to the Tribe probably is the norm. If most of this team stays together and the Indians reach the postseason next year, the result probably will be different. At least the journey will be different.
Will that be good or bad? Nobody knows. That's why they play the games.
Sheldon Ocker can be reached at socker@thebeaconjournal.com.
No place to go, nowhere to hide and the sky is falling. . . .
Get the full article here.
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