Rob:
You know, when our friends at Slate asked us to write about the World Series, I suspect that they wanted us to write from a different angle than anyone else. But tonight, frankly, that’s impossible. Because in a game as lopsided as this, where the box score looks like a spring training game broke out in the middle of the World Series, Bob Brenly has somehow managed to make a decision that completely hamstrings his team’s chances of winning tomorrow. And I bet that just about everyone is going to be talking about it.
Of course you pull Randy Johnson early. The minute Danny Bautista doubled to make it 9-0, I would have had Mike Morgan lightly tossing in the bullpen, and he would be warming up in earnest when Matt Williams drove in the D-Backs’$2 12th run. Arizona were granted an enormous gift tonight—they had the opportunity to have both Schilling and Johnson available to pitch in Game 7, without affecting the outcome of Game 6 one iota.
Only three times in the history of baseball has a team blown a 12-run lead. Granted that one of those times happened this season—to the Seattle Mariners, no less—was there really any chance that Mike Morgan, Greg Swindell, Bobby Witt—and, yes, Byung-Hyun Kim—couldn’t have held the Yankees off for six innings? Johnson had thrown 45 pitches through three innings. Maybe Brenly wanted him to throw five innings to qualify for the win, who knows. After five innings, Johnson had still thrown only 69 pitches, and the score was 15-0. Even if Brenly pulled Johnson at that point, with the season on the line tomorrow, he probably could have thrown two innings easy, maybe three.
And he’s certainly going to be needed to throw a couple of innings, because Curt Schilling isn’t going to be able to go nine tomorrow. The funny thing about this decision is that it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which it doesn’t come back to bite Brenly in the ass. Schilling threw just 88 pitches in Game 4, and was spent. Coming back a second straight time on three days’ rest, what makes Brenly thinks he’s going to be able to go any farther?
At some point tomorrow—regardless of the score—Schilling is going to run out of gas, and Brenly is going to have to turn to his bullpen. And at that point, he’s going to finally realize that his second-best reliever—thanks to some piss-poor managing in Games 4 and 5—is a mental wreck, and his best reliever, the best pitcher in the game in 2001, is physically exhausted, because he threw seven innings and 104 pitches the night before.
