Baseball College

1. Chris Carpenter must work both sides of the plate and throw his off speed pitches for strikes. With all the movement that he has (in either direction) with his fastballs, he can get away with mistakes out over the plate if he is mixing up speeds. If he can’t establish his curve ball, however, the Tigers hitters are going to be sitting on the hard stuff all night.  Mission accomplished - unbelievable performance.
2. Give the crowd something to cheer about early. How about a 1-2-3 inning and then a run or two in the bottom of the first? A crowd that is in the game for the whole game will make a very tough environment for the Tigers to play in.  One for two ain’t bad, and we ended up scoring first, so that’s a plus as well.
3. Go to the opposite field against the lefty. I’ve said it before (In game 2 actually), and I’m gonna say it again. Let’s be unselfish and go the opposite way against this lefty (unless he is constantly busting us inside).  He did go inside a lot, and I still don’t think our approach was that great, but it didn’t have to be that good with Carp pitching the way he was.
4. Forget about game 2. If everyone is still dwelling on the pinetarhandgate, then it could be tough to rebound and win tonight. If the Redbirds use the Kenny Rogers situation as fuel for the fire, we could be a very dangerous team tonight.  Dangerous indeed.
5. If we must be behind heading into the bottom of the ninth, let’s try to keep it around 1 or 2 down. I have all the faith in the world that we can get to Todd Jones if we have to, but it would be much easier if we were only down a couple, or, hell, even ahead going into the ninth inning. Let’s give Wainwright’s filthy curve ball a chance to display itself.  Disregarded.
Let’s go to game 4 with a 2-1 lead shall we?  OK.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Analysis. 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.