Idiots Write About Sports

An interesting event that incorporated both baseball strategy and Baseball-Planet know-how the other day…

So it’s the bottom of the 10th, Tule and Yolo are tied. Tule, the home team is at bat. Torii Hunter hits a lead-off triple. So he’s on third with no outs. Now, the book here calls for you to set up the force play, so I intentionally walked the next two batters (Robbie Alomar and Jeff Bagwell) to set up a force at home. I brought the infield in, and hoped Dimitri Young would fall down on the job.

Here’s where the dice baseball quirks come in — the pitcher was Doug Creek, who was a CYW. In other words, I roll a 14 or a number with a W, and the winning run walks home. So, obviously it’s time for a relief pitcher. Well, all the B relievers on Yolo have a W, too, but Shane Reynolds had a Z rating. In a bases loaded situation a 14 becomes ball one. Now, Reynolds is also a D pitcher, but really, in a bases loaded situation, _any_ roll of 1 through 11 is going to end the ballgame, no matter what the rating (since even the outs at that point are sacrifice flys), so the pitcher’s overall grade is unimportant. What you need in that situation is the Z.

So this might be the only time in recorded history that it made sense to bring in a D pitcher over a B.

Oh, what happened? Young rolled a 32, which is a fly ball to right, scoring Hunter and ending the game. So all that strategery went for naught.

Sometimes, I’m so damn clever.