4 and a half hours? Seriously??

My prediction blog of October 3rd has proven to be roughly half prescient. My National League prognostication has been golden. I had the Dodgers playing the Cubs in the championship series. My American League guesses were a disaster. Both the Red Sox and the Rangers are gone, demonstrating once again why I never place wagers on sports.

Last night's Dodgers/Nationals game was a classic, but for all the wrong reasons. The 9 inning game took 4 and a half hours to play, an hour and 6 minutes to play the seventh inning alone. Why? The plague of modern baseball...overmanaging. Washington manager Dusty Baker blazed through 6 pitchers trying to get 3 outs. This is matchup baseball taken to rediculous lengths. None of the pitchers that he brought in from the bull pen were as talented as the first guy he took out, Max Scherzer. But, the 210 million dollar starting pitcher gave up a home run on the first pitch of that ill-fated inning, his 99th pitch of the evening and that was it. Oh, the dreaded pitch count! Why, we can't let our delicate flowers extend themselves beyond 100 pitches because their valuable arms might fall off!! So, let's trot out guys who aren't good enough to be starters to get one out because maybe they struck out the same guy two years ago in a spring training game. Matchup baseball sucks. Nats fans will never know if their high priced ace could have gotten out of that inning or not because Dusty never gave him the chance to prove he was worth his contract. I wonder what Sandy Koufax was thinking as he watched this game, the guy who started three of the Dodgers last ten games of the season one year to assure them a chance to go to the World Series, pitched three complete games, giving him 385 innings pitched for the season. Today's ironmen pitchers pitch 220 innings in a season and are lauded for their durability. Give me a break.

So, I made it to the end...one o'clock in the morning to watch Clayton Kershaw come in on 24 hours rest to get the final 2 outs. I made it to the end, but probably 10% of baseball fans joined me. A game that could have and should have been played in 3 hours tops. I think Lucy speaks for fans everywhere...