After 3 games, 1-2. A lot of excitement about Soriano's lineup placement, which caused the media to exasperate poor Lou Piniella. Sports teams are really in a fishbowl; every move is dissected endlessly. Really, it is a minor issue and not one that fans really care about.
A lot of ink is used to examine minor moves made by teams, and in the absence of a bigger piece of news, it gets magnified in the 24-hour news cycle. And so now Piniella has reversed the order of Soriano and Theriot. In years past, this would not warrant much interest. Now it is a major story, some kind of big deal.
Did it help the Cubs to win today? it is possible. But I think that if they got some hits today, it had a lot to do with Ben Sheets not being the starter.
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My issue is a lack of complete games by starting pitchers. If you got a one hitter going, you better be bleeding with your arm falling off if you are going to be taking out of a game.
I honestly believe that the holds and ave stat have influenced managers decisions.
Pitch count is also absurd. Let your pitcher finish what he started.
I think it was ok that Piniella went to the bench. Don't you agree that Marmol is a reliable reliever? Sometimes he is just awesome. I would have felt completely confident in Marmol to finish the 8th and Wood to get the save after that. After all, it was Pittsburgh. No sense in stretching Dempster too far against the Pirates in April. How many years has it been since he pitched 8 innings?
Do pitch counts matter? Of course they do! It's like situps, pushups, or running. The more you do the more tired you get, even if it doesn't show. Number of pitches is absolutely appropriate to guessing how tired someone is. The only qualifications you can put on it are 1) number of fastballs, more being better for endurance and 2) amount of time in minutes that the pitcher has been able to rest between innings.
I agree that the explosion of stats has influenced manager decisions, and I see a lot of flagrant cases of this. LaRussa practically invented the modern save when he started using Eckersley for ninth inning save situations only. The stats have changed the usage. If this Cubs-Pirates game were played in the 1970s, Piniella would have left Dempster in, waited for some trouble, and then gone to Wood directly for the last 1-6 outs. Bruce Sutter used to go over 100 innings regularly. Sutter, though, never had a good season after 1984.
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