Game 88 Recap: Braves 7, Rockies 8

Yeah, well, anywhere else we could have swept. But at Coors field, that equals a split series.

has completed 6 or more innings in 8 of his 16 starts this season. In 11 of those 16 games, he had more than 85 pitches. In fact, in 10 of his starts, he has thrown 90 or more pitches. One of his starts in which he didnt get 6 innings and 85+ pitches was when he had a no-hitter going against the Yankees until he was hit by a ball hit by Joba.

When is the last time the Braves were up by 5 or 6 runs or even more???

But go on…keep making stuff up. This is fun.

But not your honesty.

KK gets pulled after 6 because he often has a line like this : 6IP, 3 R, 3 ER, 5 H, 2 BB, 3 K, 91 pitches. That’s not a dominant performance, and generally, if a guy is pitching like that, 6 innings is all you want from him.

His last start is really the only one that fits the criteria you mentioned, in which he was pitching effectively and was pulled after 6 innings while only throwing 85 pitches. And in that 6th inning, he’d been dominant all day before allowing a HR immediately followed by a single, so Bobby wanted to get him out of there while the Braves were clinging to a 1 run lead. And guess what? Our bullpen threw three scoreless innings to get the win.

We were still short two guys we would normally have had available. If JV had been healthy enough to pitch this game, we could have had Medlen in the BP as well as Valdez and it wouldn’t have cost us anything.

I get what you’re saying, but this is a bullpen that’s really short on reliable arms to begin with, so going down the stretch, we had 2 fewer options than we would have liked, given that we only got 4+ innings out of our starter, and there’s no long relief man in the pen.

It’s nice to see that some people still think clearly after a tough loss!

1) Our pitching then was much, much better than now.
2) Back in, say, 1993-2000, he had no problem letting Greg Maddux go 8 + innings on opening day, if he said he could. But this year, he didn’t really let anyone really stretch themselves out at all during the month of April. None of these guys have been on the team beyond last year, so he doesn’t have the comfort level with his starters that he did with his three aces back then.
3) Kawakami hasn’t been incredibly efficient-he’s only made it past the 6th inning twice due to pitch count/effectiveness concerns. So that’s at least 3 bullpen innings every 5th game.
4) Derek Lowe is no Greg Maddux. He’s no Tom Glavine. He’s no John Smoltz. Despite getting the “Innings eater” label, he’s not out there giving us 7-8 innings every outing. The last time he went 7 innings was 7 starts ago.
5) Our 5th starter spot has been incredibly unsettled. Jo-Jo Reyes was ineffective, Kris Medlen was only effective for 1.5 starts, and Hanson is young enough that we don’t want to run his pitch counts too high.

We led the league in fewest runs in all of baseball allowed every single year from 1992 – 2000. This year, we’re like 6th. Maddux and Glavine were posting sub 3 ERAs every single year. They had the ability to throw complete games at under 100 pitches (Glaine had a 78 pitch complete game once), and it wasn’t very rare to see them finish 8 innings at under a hundred pitches. So they could just go longer without throwing a ton of pitches compared to what we have now.

If you look at the game logs this year and check, you’ll find that if you remove the games in which starters were very ineffective, they’ve very often topped 100 pitches. It’s not like Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz were out there throwing 120 every game. Out starting pitchers now just aren’t as efficient as those guys were, so they can’t go as far.

you are almost across the line of making too much sense. That is not allowed after a loss!

Sure, Medlen had only thrown 75 pitches….but….

He’d allowed 3 earned runs through 4 innings on 2 home runs, he started the fourth inning, allowed two men to reach base, and hadn’t recorded an out. The go ahead run was at the plate, and he’d already allowed 2 home runs in the game. Then you’ve got a left handed batter at the plate with a righty on the mound, and immediately behind that left handed batter are the three guys who’ve done the most damage in this game.

And the Braves were sitting on a 5-3 lead. And the Braves were in their last game heading up to three straight days off. And then the guy Bobby puts in there immediately induces a double play and a fly out to get out of the inning. But that’s a bad move?

And then he stretched out a left handed specialist with a CAREER 5.79 ERA over three seasons(prior to that game) out for 31 pitches, and he needed to pitch longer? A man that righties are batting .330 against for his career. So you’d have left that guy in?

Also, for the record, Manny Acosta isn’t a superstar reliever, but when he’s pitching on 0 days rest (ie, back to back games) he allows an opponent OPS of .600, with a WHIP of 1.06. In short, for his career, he’s actually been better pitching in back to back games. The numbers don’t lie. So, congratulations on inventing “facts” to support your argument.

Medlen was struggling all day. He was laboring to get to the 5th inning (using 76 pitches to get there). He had already given up 3 runs, 6 hits and 3 BBs and the first two batters of the inning were on base. He needed to be pulled, and was.

And yes, Cox brought in Logan, who pitched great for the two innings he was in there. But, he is primarily a lefty specialist who had already pitched more in this game than he had in any other game this season. Seriously, you guys complain that Cox uses his BP too much, but complain when he pulls guys? I don’t get it.

And then we run into Acosta. Using Acosta with a 4 run lead should be ok. If you are ever gonna use him, might as well be with a big lead right? Or, would you prefer we use one of our other arms? Wait, we are already down 2 arms (Medlen and Logan), we shouldn’t use Soriano in this situation. That leaves us with EOF, Moylan and a rookie. So, Acosta it is.

Acosta sucked. We need to do something about this. We don’t really want to use Soriano or Moylan (due to recent heavy workloads), nor do we want to throw a rookie into this situation (runners on, game on the line), so we gotta use EOF. EOF comes in, does a great job.

Crap, now EOF has to bat. Well, here we are in the late innings. I don’t want a reliever to bat in this situation. We gotta PH for him.

Well, crap. Now we gotta pitch another inning and are down to Soriano, a guy who has never pitched before and Moylan. Let’s throw Moylan. Well, Moylan blows the lead and the game.

Last inning, might as well use the rookie.

Nothing wrong at all with the way Cox managed this game. You can blame him for other games, sure, but not this one.