I just didn’t make the pitches. I fell behind, tried to come in and missed inside. And the last one wasn’t close either — four bad pitches. Our game plan was to attack him with the fastball away, because he tries to pull everything, and my stuff matched up good for that situation. It just didn’t work out that way.

– Chris Perez

Perez is now the worst on the team in BB/G, behind even Randy Flores (which is saying something). Perhaps we’re a little late to the party on this one, but the fact that two of Tony La Russa’s favorite relievers in June — Flores and Perez — are so walk-happy struck us that La Runcan is more tolerant of walks than of fly balls, the areas in which Flores and Perez are weak and strong, respectively, and in which Iron Cap Reyes is exceptionally strong (he leads the team in BB/G) and relatively weak.

For the life of us, we don’t understand the preference; can someone make a rational case for it?

I just got to where I thought it was going to be, and when I got there, it wasn’t. I just misplayed it, I guess. I think it cut, because I was right there. I was calling it, and all of a sudden, it was behind me.

– Rick Ankiel

We’ve heard of rampant friendly scoring around the league this season, and Ankiel’s non-error misplay is the latest example. (We suppose that if he had played it better and gotten a glove on it, it would’ve been ruled an error.) Ankiel receives a lot of just credit for his amazing plays, but his fielding account needs to be similarly debited for his ostentatious (and sometimes errant) throws and misplays like Sunday’s blooper in the clutch.

That’s one of those things that makes you enjoy this level of competition. Both clubs had chances. Lot of heroics to get something going, a lot of heroics to stop them. What a great competition.

– TLR

The surest sign that the team successfully pulled itself up from the KC series by its bootstaps: After losing in extra innings, its manager talks of "enjoying the competition."

We got beat. but it was a great series and a great game. Today’s not one of those games where you’re walking with your head down and kicking stuff.

– Joel Pineiro

For his part, Pineiro was perhaps more lucky than good, striking out only one, while allowing a home run (53 FIGS). One of the reasons that the loss was so tolerable was the way the bullpen was deployed. We’ve complained on more than one occasion about how TLR seems to save his best relievers for last (sometimes resulting in them not being used at all), rather than deploy them in a best-first approach in extra innings (or in high-leverage situations). Sunday, however, the relievers appeared in some order of their expected FIP ERAs:

In retrospect, using the rookie Perez in the eighth was unwise. But we commend TLR for using Springer and K-Mac ahead of Isringhausen, Villone and Parisi (and resting the overrated Franklin and underwhelming Flores).

Except for last year, I’ve always been a .300 guy.

– Nick Stavinoha

True, the rookie has a lifetime minor-league batting average of .302. But we’d rather he focus on being a .350 guy — on-base percentage, that is (he’s subpar in our book with a .346 OBP in his minor-league career). Bragging about batting average, this guy clearly didn’t come up through Oakland’s farm system!

I wasn’t going to let (Pineiro) lose that game.

– La Russa, on bringing in Perez to relieve when the go-ahead run came to bat in the eighth

What a ridiculous reason for making a move.

We play the same every day. I don’t care if we’re up or down by nine or 10. Even if we’re down by a mile, we’re going to scratch for an inch because an inch is more than a centimeter.

– Ron Villone

Who says lefties are strange, anyway?

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 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.