Division Series Predictions

Here you go, short and sweet, predictions for the Division Series:

• Yankees over Tigers


• Rangers over Rays


• Phillies over Cardinals


• Brewers over Diamondbacks

No special analysis on these picks. I'll save those for the LCS's.

I will say this, I am looking forward to the Sabbathia-Verlander pitching match-up tonight. This is kind of like seeing Koufax go up against Marichal back in my formative years. Let's hope it lives up the the expectations.

Let's hope for a full five games for each series!

72-90

Well, the Pirates season went out with both a bang (six of them, actually - the number of HR's hit by the Brewers in the last two games) and a whimper - Pedro Alvarez looking at a called third for the final out of the season. If there could have been a more appropriate and symbolic ending to the 2011 season, I can't think of it at the moment.

Let me pose a question to you. If, in the dead of winter prior to the opening of Spring Training, if someone had guaranteed that the Pirates would improve their sorry 2010 record by 15 games, would you have signed on for that?

And let me present a quote from the November 15, 2010 edition of this blog, made upon the hiring of Clint Hurdle as new Pirates skipper:

"He also knows what lies ahead. If he can coax 70 wins from this team, I would make him an early candidate for Manager if the Year in the National League for next year."

Based on those two suppositions, you'd have to say that the 2012 Pirates season was a successful one wouldn't you? But of course, to those of us who followed it intently, it sure isn't that simple. We all remember the giddy days of July when the Bucs hit their high water mark at 51-44, and how thay sat all alone in first place after 100 games with a 53-47 record. Then there was that 101st game in Atlanta, the 19 inning "Jerry Meals Game" after which it all seemed to come crashing down upon the Buccos.

Of course, it isn't THAT simple either. No doubt you have all seen the various statistical comparisons of the First 100 Game Pirates vs. the Last 62 Game Pirates, and know that the downfall can be explained very simply, and the reason is as old as baseball itself: the pitching, so stellar, so over-achieving for three and one-half months, simply gave out and came crashing back to earth. This, combined with an offense that never was very potent, spelled the end not only of division title hopes, but hopes for the end of the losing seasons streak.

While I agree that the downfall of the pitching staff caused the downfall of the Pirates, to me, the single biggest story and theme of this season was the failure of Pedro Alvarez to do anything at all at the plate. Coming off a rookie season that filled us with so much hope and optimism, Alvarez had a season of hitting below .200 with only 4 HR and 19 RBI while spending time on the disabled list and having two return trips to the minor leagues. At a game in June with some SABR friends, Len Martin said that Alvarez was the Pirates linchpin, not only for this season, but for all the seasons to come in the Pirates immediate future. As the team heads into the off season, Alvarez is in my mind the most important player and biggest question mark before the team. Was 2011 an aberration, a bump in the road on the way to a stellar career? Will Alvarez, indeed, be the next Willie Stargell? Or the next Brad Eldred?

As fall fades to winter, I am guessing that the optimism that springs eternal in all baseball fans will cause the sorry finish of the Pirates' season to fade, and that memories of the excitement, the baseball excitement, that returned to Pittsburgh in June and July will be what remains. How cool was it to see the Pirates at the top or near the top of the standings everyday, how great it was to look forward to getting to the ballpark or turning on the TV to see the next game, even when you knew in your heart-of-hearts, that, no, they weren't going to win the division, but wouldn't it be great to hang in until after Labor Day and then finish over .500.

To that end, when I look back upon this season, I will remember two very specific games:

June 8. Pirates 3 Diamondbacks 2. The Pirates staged a terrific come from behind win the night before to get to within one game of .500, Zach Duke was returning to PNC Park, and Dan Bonk reached into his own wallet, paid his way into PNC Park, and jumped on the Pirates Bandwagon. At Dan's instigation, Len Martin, Jim Haller, he, and I met up and went to that June 8 game, and, serendipitously, also met up with SABR buddy Marky Bilson as well. In extra innings, the Pirates fell behind the D'backs, and tied the game on a clutch Neil Walker RBI in the bottom of the 10th, and the game was won in the 12th on an Andrew McCutchen walk-off HR. It was a great ball game and a great time spent with some good friends. And the Pirates hit the .500 mark for the latest time in a season since 2003.

July 8. Pirates 7 Cubs 4. Marilyn and I headed down on a Friday night and were part of a sell-out crowd that witnessed what forever will be called the "Mike McKenry Game." It was a back and forth game, several lead changes, and all seemed lost in the eighth inning when McKenry worked and worked and worked the count on Carlos Marmol in a terrific at bat that ended with his first major league home run, a three run shot that stunned the Cubs, caused the crowd to explode, and keyed a win that put the Pirates over .500, where, I believe they stayed until into early August. The most unlikely guy on the team hit perhaps the most important home run in the 11 year history of PNC Park.

Walking over the Clemente Bridge after both of those games was like leaving Three Rivers Stadium back in the day after Steelers playoff wins. No exaggeration. The Pirates front office folks who continually say that ".500 is not the goal" should have been walking over the bridge those nights.

After a scintillating last day of the season wherein the Wild Card winners were decided in amazing fashion, we now await the baseball post-season. Will attempt to squeeze out a predictions posting for you tomorrow. Can't wait, can you?

Friday Night Thoughts

Some quick thoughts on a Friday night....

The Pirates start the weekend with a record of 69-87 and have six games remaining. As each miserable Bucco season unfolds, the goals become more and more compressed, so here are my final thoughts for the last six games:

If they go 4-2, they will avoid a 90 loss season. Isn't that a grand goal to have when in July we were talking about a possible pennant chase? In all honesty, I don't think that they're going to achieve four wins in these last six games, not when three of them will be played in Miller Park

If they go 1-5, they will have won 70 games, the number that I said would represent a successful season if they achieved it. I think that they will win at least one of these final six games, but the route that they have taken to get to 70 wins will not make this season seem to be the success that we might have envisioned it to be back on Opening Day. To further that thought, I would suggest that you check out Dejan Kovacevic's column in today's Trib.

*****
All speculation on the matter ended earlier in the week when Pedro Alvarez indicated that he would not be playing Winter League baseball, despite the Pirates' request that he do so. Opinion is divided on the matter. Both Gene Collier and Bob Smizik feel that it is probably a good idea that Alvarez hang it up for the winter, clear his head, and come to Spring Training with clean slate. Kovacevic's has blasted Pedro for his "selfish" decision not to honor the team's (which has paid him $6 million, by the way) request. I can see both sides of the argument, and probably lean to the Collier/Smizik opinion, but I will say this. If Pedro begins 2012 with the same level of performance we saw this season, his decision not to do as the team asked concerning winter ball will set him up, fairly or unfairly,to join Derek Bell and Kordell Stewart in the pantheon of Pittsburgh athletes who will get merciless treatment form the fans in the stands .

Old Movie Review - "Ace in the Hole"

Regular readers are aware of the fact that I have been on a Billy Wilder kick in recent weeks after reading a biography of him during the summer. This quest was rewarded earlier this week, thanks to Turner Classic Movies and the great invention of this era, the DVR, when I watched Wilder's 1951 movie, "Ace in the Hole" starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling.

In this movie, Douglas plays a many fired newspaper reporter who finds himself working for a paper in Albuquerque, NM. After a year of looking for a story that will get him out of the sticks and back in the big time, he stumbles upon a guy who has been trapped in a mine cave-in. This is his big chance. When he learns that it a relatively simple procedure would enable the rescuers to free the trapped guy within 24 hours, he manipulates a crooked sheriff and mine engineer into using an alternate rescue plan that would take six or seven days to release the guy. By doing this, he can manipulate and milk the story to his own advantage, drawing maximum attention to himself, of course.

This begins a huge media circus that soon careens completely out of control. This was Wilder's follow-up to his classic "Sunset Boulevard" and it was not well received by critics at the time. Perhaps they didn't like how Wilder held up the mirror before them. It was re-released under a different title, "The Big Carnival", and it still never took hold. It wasn't until many years after release, when it appeared on television and later on video and DVD that the movie came to be recognized as the gem that it is. Woody Allen, for example, considers this one of his all-time favorite movies.

As I said, this movie does not paint a flattering picture of the news media, and keep in mind that this movie was made in 1951, long before 24 cable news outlets - and not to mention Larry King! - made the idea of media circuses a common event. Wilder didn't know it then, but he was making a movie about O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, Lacey & Scott Peterson, and Michael Jackson, or anyone of dozens of stories we could all mention if we thought hard enough.

Kirk Douglas is great in this movie. One Internet source I found states that Douglas not winning an Oscar for this movie is a classic case of when the Oscars got it wrong. (In case you are wondering, Humphrey Bogart won that year for "The African Queen.") He is not a nice guy or a likable character, to say the least, but what a performance!

This movie also contains a classic Wilder line. When Douglas tells Jan Sterling, the wife of the trapped guy, to go to a prayer service because it will look good for the papers, she tells him "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." That's right up there with "it's the pictures that got small" in my book.

So, keep your eye out for "Ace in the Hole." It's a great movie.

In My Mind I'm Going to Carolina....

Last week, Marilyn and I took off for a brief trip to North Carolina (and, apropos to the title of this post, we actually did cross the James Taylor Bridge at one point in our journey) to visit our long time friends, Sandy and Gary Carroll, who retired and moved to Southern Pines, NC several years back. It was a most enjoyable trip.

Sandy and Gary have a beautiful home in a golf course community called Long Leaf in Southern Pines. Here is the view, literally, from their back porch:

Not bad, huh? This is the first hole at Long Leaf, which I double bogeyed!

We spent much of our three days in Southern Pines catching up with Sandy and Gary, enjoying their hospitality, eating at some very fine restaurants, and touring the area, including a visit to the famous Pinehurst Golf Resort. It was at Pinehurst's Number 2 course where Payne Stewart won the US Open in 1999 a few months before he died in a plane crash. A statue of Stewart commemorating that win stands just off the 18th green at the #2 Course.

As referenced above, I also played with Gary and two of his playing partners at Long Leaf on Thursday. It was a fun course to play and an enjoyable round. I even played fairly well, carding a 53-50 for the day.

On Friday morning, we left Southern Pines, and drove to Durham to visit our niece Bonny and her husband, Michael and daughters Mara and Sophie. It was a short but delightful visit. On Friday evening, we went to the "American Tobacco District" in downtown Durham. This is an area of old tobacco factories and warehouses that have been reclaimed and redeveloped into offices, retail space, restaurants, and condos surrounding a very cool public gathering space, and beneath an old Lucky Strike water tower, where we saw a very cool outdoor concert. The picture below will give you some idea of what a neat venue it is.

It was an all together delightful experience to get together with old friends and distant family members over the four days we were there.

The trip through North Carolina was also of interest to an old TV fan, because you pass near and through the town of Mt. Airy, NC, which is famed for being the birthplace of Andy Griffith. While we did not stop and visit Mt. Airy, you can surmise from the signs you see along the way on the Andy Griffith Parkway that the area is milking the Griffith connection for all it's worth. The famous fictional town of Mayberry is said to be based upon Mt. Airy, and one of the geographic landmarks is Pilot Mountain, from which I am sure Mayberry's neighboring town of Mt. Pilot was derived.

While driving through this area, we saw signs for the following businesses: Mt. Pilot Storage, Mayberry Camp Grounds, Mayberry Shazzam Go-Carts, and Aunt Bea's Gentlemen's Club.

OK, I made that last one up, but the others are real.

On the way home, we pulled off at a scenic overlook, something that we never do, and got a close up look at the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virgina. It was quite a sight, as you can see below.

Most of the drive is spent driving through the state of West Virgina, and I will put aside all West Virgina jokes and tell you that it is beautiful country. I can only imagine how gorgeous it might be two or three weeks from now when all the leaves turn to their fall colors.

The only negative for the entire trip came when we were within shouting distance of home. On Saturday afternoon, just north of Canonsburg on I-79, we hit road construction and it then took us 64 minutes - yes, that is 1 hour and 4 minutes - to drive the SIX MILES between Canonsburg and Bridgeville. We are grateful to PENNDOT for making it such a pleasure to drive in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And I will close by giving a shout out to one of the great inventions of the era - our Garmin GPS system. That thing took us on our 1,000+ mile round trip journey without missing a turn. How does it do that? We both were lamenting how much we would have loved to have had such a gadget while working and traveling the hinterlands back in the day.

But as with all trips, it is always good to be back home.

Hail to Pitt??

So, back in 2003, Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech left (abandoned?) the Big East to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. At the time, both the three schools and the ACC were decried for their greed and overall lack of integrity. Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg stood tall as a beacon of integrity as he led the charge to hold things together and keep the Big East in tact.

Today, you all know the story....Pitt, under the leadership of Chancellor Nordenberg, as announced that it is bolting the Big East and heading to the Atlantic Coast Conference. So much for integrity, so much for loyalty to your conference brethren. Hey, just exactly whose ox is being gored here?

Of course, if you have been following college athletics for the last few years, ever since the ACC's original raid on the Big East in 2003, really, you know that it isn't really that simple, that black and white, and you also know that the concept of "integrity" has very little place in big time college athletics. Pitt can certainly defend their move to the ACC, and everyone will be dancing the happy dance of joy when North Carolina and Duke come to the Peterson Center on a regular basis. Hey, I'll still be a Pitt fan, so if you want to call me a hypocrite, go ahead, but the whole thing still makes you want to take a shower after you read about it.

Still, I'd love to overhear the next conversation between Nordenberg and his counterpart at Texas Christian, who were lured into joining the Big East beginning next year.

Football Weekend...and a Baseball Item

As it happened, today was the Stonebrook Village picnic. Because of that, I knew that I was not going to be able to watch the Steelers-Ravens game. So, I set the DVR before I left with the idea that I would zip through the game tonight. Well, we did have a radio at the picnic shelter, so I was aware of how the game was unfolding.

I am happy to report that I came home with the knowledge that I have three hours of my life back, since I intend to delete that game without even giving it a glance. Since I saw very little other than the first quarter, and only heard bits and pieces on the radio, I can make no knowledgeable comment on it, other than saying that sometimes a blow out loss can be more easily overcome than a heartbreaking, last minute loss by a touchdown or a field goal. Just ask Notre Dame about that after their game with Michigan last night. No, there are no what-ifs and might-have-beens in a game like that. Just an old fashioned ass kicking that you can file away and forget.

Speaking of that Notre Dame - Michigan game....WOW. That was one amazing football game last night. In case you missed it, three touchdowns and three lead changes in the final 1:12 of the game. An absolutely amazing ball game. If you were rooting for ND, it was a crushing loss, but even that shouldn't lessen you appreciation for such a great ball game.

The only thing about that game that ticked me off was the post-game, on-the-field interview with Michigan coach Brady Hoke. Instead of being caught up in the euphoria of such a remarkable victory, he resorted to the worst kind of coach speak and talked about the mistakes his team made, and said how they all "still had a lot of work to do." Geez, Coach, way to stick a pin in the balloons of all of your players. What a horse's ass.

Pitt now stands at 2-0, although you wouldn't know it from listening to the talk show callers. I do have to say that a six point win over the University of Maine was probably not what Pitt was expecting when they scheduled this game. Things aren't going to get any easier, for the "high octane" Panthers, not even in the weak Big East. They do say that teams do get better as a season progresses. Let's hope so for the Panthers' sake.

In other news, Penn State gets drubbed by Alabama in Happy Valley yesterday. No surprise there, and the Joe Paterno rumblings go on and get louder and louder.

And in baseball news, the Pirates announce a three year contract extension for GM Neal Huntington. A coincidence that the Pirates make this rather important announcement on the day that the Steelers open their season against perhaps their biggest rival in recent years? I think not. The team celebrated this news by losing to the Marlins, which completed a three game sweep for Florida. The season is sixteen games away from being mercifully concluded. Will take more time to discuss the season, GM Neal, and other such matters in the days ahead and when the season concludes in Milwaukee. How appropriate that the Bucco season will conclude in their personal graveyard, Miller Park.