So when is Jeff going to Walz off with his first NC?

[pinotbear]

stirring

didn't know you were a fan of Shakespeare, DC! "something wicked this way comes!"

 

[boontonbomber]

Talking about getting ridiculous.

1. If you think a team that busts through to the NC game and in the process knocks off the pre-tourney unanimous pick as champion to have been just lah-lahing along and playing over their heads the whole time against everybody, then I would really love to take advantage of you in a high-stakes poker game. My wallet could use some fattening.

2. On the question of whether the better team always wins, as noted, you can go on saying that the Patriots were the better team in Super Bowl 2011 and should have won, gosh darn it. I simply say that the better team won. If your expectations were upset, my profound apologies. I know that the 1988 LA Dodgers had no right beating Oakland, but they were still the better team in the WS.

3. RT stated that Louisville was not a top 10 team in 2013, and I pointed out that the final poll showed them to be the #3 team. What part of that do you not understand? If you want to go back to early-March polls and say that Louisville was not a top 10 team and that UConn was the #3 team in 2012-13, that's your right. And you might as well cite some November and preseason polls in your future factoids about a team. Personally, in my admittedly strange accounting, UConn finished #1 last year and Louisville was voted #3.

no right beating oakland? "good pitching beats good hitting" is one of the oldest truisms in baseball. the mighty A's hit 0.177 in that series. the A's pitching was good,also, just not as good. it was no upset, rather it was no contest. stick to basketball.

 

[DobbsRover2]

no right beating oakland? "good pitching beats good hitting" is one of the oldest truisms in baseball. the mighty A's hit 0.177 in that series. the A's pitching was good,also, just not as good. it was no upset, rather it was no contest. stick to basketball.

Absolutely right, a season like Hershiser's comes around once every 180 years or so, and you can actually win a WS riding two hot pitchers (Orel and Belcher), which is hard to do in the regular season. But the A's Bash Brothers lineup of Canseco and McGwire, with Baylor, Parker, Lansford, Henderson, and a nice-hitting Stan Javier had megaton more hitting than a Dodgers lineup of 1-AB Gibson (beautiful as it was) and um ............ well Steve Sax was occasionally good for a hit and Mike Marshall could play well enough when his head was screwed on right.

There is usually a limit to how much ground a good pitching corps can make up for a feeble batting lineup (628 runs during the season and next to last in OPS in the NL even with their bigger bats around, and mainly missing Scioscia and Gibson, and the traded Pedro Guerrero for the WS) when the opponents' 800-run lineup is so dominating and pitchers like Dave Stewart, Bob Welch, Storm Davis and the fearsome Dennis Eckersley are throwing well. Bob Costas had it pretty much dead-on when he said that this was the worst team ever to take the field for a World Series, but they were still by far the BETTER TEAM in the 1988 WS. And I have a few stats to prove that notion, such as 4 wins.

And some of the great pitching corps have gone to World Series and been smacked around by a great hitting lineup. Now you could say that then they didn't have good pitching, but then it's a slippery slope definition for how you define good pitching. The tired old line about "good pitching beats good hitting" is one of those cliches that sportscasters throw out that should get them thrown out of the booth, just like in basketball and football when they say that "a good defense wins the games." I have seen so many crushingly good defenses get lit up by smart offenses in both sports, that when I hear that line I just think, "stick to not spewing dumb cliches."

 

[boontonbomber]

Absolutely right, a season like Hershiser's comes around once every 180 years or so, and you can actually win a WS riding two hot pitchers (Orel and Belcher), which is hard to do in the regular season. But the A's Bash Brothers lineup of Canseco and McGwire, with Baylor, Parker, Lansford, Henderson, and a nice-hitting Stan Javier had megaton more hitting than a Dodgers lineup of 1-AB Gibson (beautiful as it was) and um ............ well Steve Sax was occasionally good for a hit and Mike Marshall could play well enough when his head was screwed on right.

There is usually a limit to how much ground a good pitching corps can make up for a feeble batting lineup (628 runs during the season and next to last in OPS in the NL even with their bigger bats around, and mainly missing Scioscia and Gibson, and the traded Pedro Guerrero for the WS) when the opponents' 800-run lineup is so dominating and pitchers like Dave Stewart, Bob Welch, Storm Davis and the fearsome Dennis Eckersley are throwing well. Bob Costas had it pretty much dead-on when he said that this was the worst team ever to take the field for a World Series, but they were still by far the BETTER TEAM in the 1988 WS. And I have a few stats to prove that notion, such as 4 wins.

And some of the great pitching corps have gone to World Series and been smacked around by a great hitting lineup. Now you could say that then they didn't have good pitching, but then it's a slippery slope definition for how you define good pitching. The tired old line about "good pitching beats good hitting" is one of those cliches that sportscasters throw out that should get them thrown out of the booth, just like in basketball and football when they say that "a good defense wins the games." I have seen so many crushingly good defenses get lit up by smart offenses in both sports, that when I hear that line I just think, "stick to not spewing dumb cliches."

i think it's fair to say that the dodgers won that series because their good pitching shut down the bashers( 11 runs in 5 games). hard to say cliche, with an example like that staring you in the face. and because of their pitching, the dodgers certainly had every right to win that series. your spouting off about all of the great A's hitters only serves to help back up my point. and it's far from the only example of that happening in the series. good pitching is often the key in a short series. oh, and costas is a blowhard ,whose next game in any sport will probably be his first.

 

[DobbsRover2]

i think it's fair to say that the dodgers won that series because their good pitching shut down the bashers( 11 runs in 5 games). hard to say cliche, with an example like that staring you in the face. and because of their pitching, the dodgers certainly had every right to win that series. your spouting off about all of the great A's hitters only serves to help back up my point. and it's far from the only example of that happening in the series. good pitching is often the key in a short series. oh, and costas is a blowhard ,whose next game in any sport will probably be his first.

Um, so how many examples of your hard-and-fast "great pitching beats great hitting" dogma can you dig up? What happened in 2006 when Detroit had the best pitching staff in the MLB (from the AL no less) but couldn't do the job on the good-hitting Cards? The 2008 Phillies and the 2009 Yankees had crushingly good offenses and torched great pitching corps in the WS. How about in 2004 when the best offense by far in the Red Sox crushed pretty much the best pitching corps with the Cardinals on the other end? Etc., etc.

Seriously? I mean, provide at least a morsel of a fact before stating anything about something "staring you in the face," which is a line I heard over on the Summitt a number of times with as little relevance. Great offenses destroy great (but inadequately prepared defenses) more often then the opposite because they have more weapons and can take the action where they want to. But the Maginot Line believers can feel smug in their delusions. Whatever.

I will grant you though that Bob Costas is a blowhard, but he is a lovable blowhard who is much loved by Dodgers fans for the blessing he bestowed on them in 1988.

As to how this all relates to WCBB, it's just that the Husky defense is a great bedrock to base a team on, but when the offense does not execute on all cylinders against a top opponent (first three ND games), they likely go down.