He was outstanding. Kept controlling the counts, got strike one with a real good pitch and then got better after that.

– TLR

So to whom was LaRussa referring? It was near-no-hit Ramon Ortiz, of course. But he easily could’ve been talking about Jason Marquis (at least through six innings). Marquis’s effort in Washington capped the team’s best five-game rotation of starting pitchers of the season, in terms of Game Scores: The group of Suppan, Carpenter, Weaver, Reyes and Marquis had an average Game Score of 69.2 for the last five games. The last time the team’s starters were that hot was July 9-16, when Anthony Reyes punctuated a 64.6 GSc run. But that string was broken up by the All-Star break, so Chris Carpenter had two starts, making this recent performance even more noteworthy inasmuch as it involved the entire rotation.

As good as the starting pitching has been, the offense — outside of The Great Pujols — was anemic this weekend. Using Runs Created, Albert accounted for 42% of the team’s offense over the last four games:

When I see that ball’s a homer, I say, ‘Yes!’ It’s unbelievable. I can’t sleep tonight. I can’t wait to go to my house to watch the TV and watch how hard we hit the ball.

– Ramon Ortiz

Okay, so about whose home run is Ortiz referring? You’re probably onto the joke by now, but it’s not hard to envision a pitcher actually enjoying a replay of a home run of the caliber Albert his yesterday, is it? As for Ortiz, we know he had never hit a home run before, so we can’t urge the usual “act like you’ve been there before.” But at 33-years-old, and with three outs to go in his no-hitter, we thought his home-run trot was rather bush league. By the way, what’s with the “we hit the ball”? He’s either a lost Seinfeld character (“the first-person-plural talker”?) or he’s been hanging out a little too long with Ryan Freel.

I think there’s always a little pride thing. You never want to lose regardless, but if you’re going to lose, you want to fill the columns, which we ended up doing. Albert had a gigantic home run.

– Scott Spiezio

You’d think Spiezio played in New York or something, talking about wanting to “fill the columns.” All the same, he’s right. All game long, Mike Shannon and John Rooney spoke of RFK’s power alleys as being “death valley,” so Albert’s upper-deck blast was particularly amazing. The home run seemed to overshadow Ortiz’s performance in a similar way that Pujols’s NLCS home run off Brad Lidge eclipsed the Astros’s ultimate pennant win as the lasting image of the series. Ortiz may have won the war, but Pujols’ win in the battle was the more memorable of the conflict.

Speaking of Leonard Shelby, Miles’ single in the ninth to break up the no-hitter was reminiscent of his hit off Lidge in Houston back on July 8. Miles is one of those unquantifiable “tough outs.” He may be one of the weaker hitters on the team in terms of OPS (.687), but for some reason, you have more hope of Miles getting on base when the chips are down than you do of, say, Juan Encarnacion (.772). Perhaps it’s because Miles has the superior cumulative WPA on the year (0.01 to -0.47). Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t give away at-bats by grounding into a double play by swinging at the first pitch after the previous three batters singled, homered and walked ahead of him.

We decided we’re going to back him off. Whether it’s two or three days or whatever it takes. It started to bite him a little bit, and it’s gotten worse.

– TLR on Juan Encarnacion, nursing an injury

If Edmonds isn’t able to return in time for the playoffs, and Juancarnacion continues to suffer from his “bites,” the Cardinals could roll into their first-round playoff series with an outfield of John Rodriguez, Preston Wilson and Chris Duncan. It’s surely not what one might’ve envisioned back in April — certainly not for a playoff-bound team. But they could do worse — say with Taguchi (.691 OPS), Encarnacion (.772) and Wilson (.784 ). Both Duncan (.989) and JRod (.817) are offensive upgrades from Taguchi and Encarnacion. The problem, of course, is defense.

He came up short, but we decided it was worth a bottle of Dom anyway.

– Nationals’ general manager Jim Bowden, shortly after presenting Ortiz with a bottle of champagne

Something tells us that two innings of no-hit ball would’ve been good enough cause for Bowden to pop that bubbly.

I don’t consider him a guy that can throw a no-hitter. But he almost did it today.

– Miles on Ortiz

Not to take anything away from him, but we had some pitches that we skied or just missed.

– Gary Bennett

Man, the guy no-hits the Cardinals for eight innings, and this is the respect he gets!? You’d think his name was Don Stiehr…

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 1:04 pm and is filed under quotebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.