Marlins 11, Cardinals 3
I definitely don’t like what happened, but I was kind of forced into throwing a strike. I threw a couple low and the one that got up, he hit out. I threw some outside that were low that were pretty good. I throw that many fastballs, one of them leaked up and that’s the one he got.
– Anthony Reyes
After Dan Uggla reached on an error a single to left to load the bases, broadcaster Rick Horton noted that Reyes lacked a double-play pitch. But Iron Cap retired Miguel Cabrera, the most prolific hitter in the league, on a shallow fly and then struck out Jacobs. Reyes had struck out Willingham in his previous at-bat, so give credit to Willingham for grinding out a 3-2 count and fouling off a couple of tough pitches before his slam. It was a professional at-bat on both sides, and the hitter happened to win it. It of course seemed worse coming as it did on the heels of Iron Cap’s last start. And given the team’s chronic lack of run support for Reyes, the impact of the slam seemed all the more dire. Iron Cap’s HR/G is still pretty good at 1.00, but if it seems that many of the home runs that he has allowed have put the team in hole, it’s because they have. Almost half of the home runs that Iron Cap has yielded on the season have been with the score tied:
That’s more than the other starters (we didn’t include Randy Keisler or Todd Wellemeyer), which of course is probably due to a larger sample and therefore flatter curve.
It wasn’t a great game, but we didn’t lose ground. We’ve put ourselves in a position to do something. So you look at it like what it is, one game. You move on to the next series and sweep this one under the rug and get ready to play tomorrow.
– Jim Edmonds
Ironically, the writer who quoted Edmonds did all he could to look at it like anything but one game. Joe Strauss, who writes as if he just couldn’t wait until the Cardinals lost a game, has a unique ability to describe a glass that is half-full as if it is nearly empty. Merely a single loss — something that happens to even the best teams 40% of the time — Strauss’s game was a "setback" that "featured several negative trends that an ascending team hoped it had left behind. " But other than noting the team’s fielding errors, he doesn’t offer any other "negative trends." Yet, rather than refer to what really matters — their standing relative to the first-place team in the division — he twice refers to the fact that the Cardinals failed to get to .500 last night.
He wasn’t blame-free. He threw a lot of pitches for the amount of time he was out there.
— TLR
Unlike his predecessors this week, Iron Cap got himself in trouble by walking three batters, as many as the entire staff had allowed in the first two games of the series. But the fact that he had to get four outs in the second and third innings certainly didn’t help his pitch count.
Give them credit, but we did not have a good defensive game.
– TLR
If I’d have gotten back quicker and found the wall, it probably would have been an easier play. I tried to time it because I thought I was closer to the wall, and I misplayed it.
– Chris Duncan
With Rick Ankiel’s ascendancy, coupled with some bad at-bats of his own, Duncan seems like the team’s invisible man lately. And yet he’s still second on the club in Runs Created (65) and Win Shares (17), both behind Pujols. But with Ankiel wowing crowds with his arm when he’s not doing it with the bat, Duncan can’t afford to slip in the field and regress to memories of 2006. Duncan’s blunder and official errors by Scott Rolen and Ankiel didn’t help Iron Cap’s cause. The team’s poor defensive performance caused us to wonder if Reyes suffers more generally from defensive malaise, but his team has a .691 DER on the season and a .726 for him.