31 games left: Winning 21 games gets us to 89...which has for a long time been the likely Over/Under number. In MLB Baseball, a 21-10 stretch is darn near like running the tables. If I've done the math correctly, which is always problematic, a 52% team has just less than a 1% chance of going 21-10. Running the tables, indeed.
And we're talking about a 52% team with two broken 1B, a CF OPS'ing .569 in August and Smith on the decline. Sigh. BTW, remember WAY back when Martin his 9 homers in 187 April-May PA's? The question of whether that was illusory or not came up.Well...it was: He's hit 5 in 287 PA"s since. But I won't complain too much (although I do think he swings for the fences too much). Way back in the spring we all recognized that at 90 OPS Martin was a heck of a player. At 80 he was borderline and at 70 he wasn't much. He's at 90+ now. Glad we got him. I will say that his late-inning whiff last night, with two on, was a feeble effort. Darvish poinded him away and our guy came out of shoes trying to bean somebody in the RF stands. Hey, a rip the other way would have plated some runs nicely and was likely even possible. Sigh...
Did it look like Cruz was seeing the ball badly lst night. I though he missed several creamable (but hot) fastballs vs. Darvish in their last match-up. His miss-by-a-mile whiff on the curve ball that done him in was fairly un-Cruz-like.
The guys who put wood on the ball were our pesky guys: Marte, O'Malley and even Lind, who took something off his double swing to go get the curve nearly in the dirt.
But I digress. We were talking about running the tables.
21-10 is essentially that. Do you have one of those spare Seavers laying around Doc? 6 starts from Tom Terrific between now and the finale wouldn't hurt us at all. Hey, Seaver was just 24 years old in '69. 6 games from a Seaver-ish Taijuan Terrific (age 24, btw) would do nicely as a replacement.
Time to quit being a kid, kid.