It’s game 1. You don’t ride Sale through 100 pitches for the first turn or two. Do you want Sale to dominate the first half then tire again?
There will be mistakes and things we don't take into account when it comes to decision making, and it's mental that people are going this crazy over decisions already, however, he did make some errors out there.
I don't blame him for taking Sale off. Perfectly fine decision. His issue was with Kelly and then Smith. He can't help that those two shit the bed, and they should have been more then capable of shutting them down, but it was pretty clear early they weren't and Kimbrel should have at least been warming up. Come in, get us out of the 8th and then we can get somebody else in for the 9th.
JBJ didn't look like he was near getting a hit yesterday so I would have also pitch hit for him in the 9th to try and keep the inning going.
It's the way we lost which hurts. It's a long season and there's nothing to worry about yet, but it kind if feels like every game is going to count in the race with the Yanks, this year.
We always tried to convince our kids that it wasn't good to ever get to up or to down over a game. Stay steady. I had a hard time buying into this way of looking at things myself. Yesterday - the first game of a season that we hope is filled with good things. A game that we were dominating what looked for the longest time to be a much weaker team. First game - you get through it but boy oh boy this one was painful.
I agree with this philosophy and I’m not sure why a veteran manager like Francona employs this and nobody else does. Francona uses his best reliever in the highest leverage situations (Miller). It might be the 7th or 8th, but that’s where the game may be won or lost. Francona does have the benefit of having Cody Allen as well who a top notch level closer. Most people would just stack them 8th-9th, but he’ll use Miller in the 6th or 7th depending on situation. I think we will eventually see a shift towards this. Pens with 2 closer level pitchers, one reserved each game for traditional closer role and the other as a swing guy capable of neutralizing jams before the 9th
Not at all. And this is the type of bullpen management Phil Mushnick at the NY Post keeps complaining about. Why wouldn't you let Barnes go out for a second inning when he looked so good in his first one. But the modern method is to limit guys to one inning and to base a lot of it on matchups.
Barnes has never been a multiple inning guy though. I think Cora's expectation that a combination of Kelly and Smith to get 3 outs and not give up 4 runs is reasonable. It'll be interesting to see how he works in the other bullpen arms early in the season. Bullpens are always a work in progress the first 2 months. Hard to get too angry over one loss.