Joe Morgan and Jon Miller nearly gave me a heart attack

I didn’t get a chance to watch any of last night’s baseball game.  I heard Cliff Lee was pretty good.  I mean, I actually heard it: I was listening on the radio.  Bringing the experience to me aurally were ESPN’s normal Sunday night baseball TV announcing duo of Joe Morgan and Jon Miller.  While a fantastic ballplayer in his time, Mr. Morgan as an analyst doesn’t provide a lot of…analysis.  Mr. Miller neither offends nor excites me when listening to his work, which is probably a good thing for a national baseball announcer.  Anyway, it’s uncertain they’ll be back on ESPN next year.

I’m not in to bashing mainstream baseball analysis.  I know that it’s not for me, and that lots of people watching the game might be comforted by having a Hall of Fame player providing that analysis.  Besides, who could top this?

To last night’s game: in the 8th inning, Joe Morgan was going on about how good Lee looked while steamrolling the Yankees lineup, even in the 7th and 8th innings as his pitch count climbed over 100.  Mr. Morgan said that while Lee wouldn’t pass “the pitch count test,” he was passing “the eye test.”  Since I couldn’t see how Lee looked, I confirmed via text with fivetoolwill that “he looked great.”  Still, I had reservations about Lee coming out for the 9th inning.  He’d already thrown 122 pitches, which topped his previous season-high of 120 set in Game 5 of the ALDS against the Rays.  I won’t claim to know enough about the effect that throwing 120+ pitches in consecutive starts would have on the rest of Lee’s postseason performance, but Ron Washington has to balance that risk of hurting the Rangers’ chances at their ultimate goal (winning the World Series) with the immediate goal of closing out last night’s game.  Either way, the two options seemed to be to leave Lee in for the 9th, or take him out for Neftali Feliz, the Rangers best relief pitcher.

That is those WERE the two options, until the Rangers added six runs in the top of the 9th, essentially putting the game out of reach.  As the Rangers kept adding on, the only obvious choice (to me) was to bring in one of the Rangers other relievers to save Feliz.  An 8-run lead is very hard to squander in one inning.  Jon and Joe seemed to be agreeing with me.  There were a few exchanges like this during the top of that 9th:

Jon: Well, that question of whether or not Cliff Lee will come back out for the 9th inning is now moot now that the Rangers have added on.

Joe: Yup, it’s no longer in doubt whether or not Cliff Lee will start the 9th.

I quickly realized that Jon and Joe WEREN’T ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING.  Yes, they were acknowledging that the Rangers scoring was affecting the probability of Lee coming out for the 9th…but weren’t indicating how.  Based on Ron Washington’s poor bullpen management in game 1 and the lunacy that sometimes comes out of Joe Morgan’s mouth, I had a moment of panic that Lee might actually pitch the 9th in some bizarre, out-dated, “finish what you started” show.

Of course, Ron Washington still brought out Feliz and used him unnecessarily; and, of course, Morgan and Miller defended the move, saying things like “you’re going to have to use your bullpen” and that he was already warm, so you might as well use him.  The point of all of this is that, while Joe Morgan can make some wrong-headed comments as an analyst, he’s just one of many people in baseball doing things that just don’t make sense to me.

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