White Sox’ Tactics May Backfire in Next Round

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As good as the Chicago White Sox’s pitching and defense is – and accounting for their park and the DH, this year they’ve ranked with the great Atlanta Braves teams of the ’90s at keeping the other team off the board – you have to wonder how much of what they’ve done to the Angels in the ALCS is simply down to the fact that so many Angels can’t hit.


The way the White Sox solved the eternal mystery of Vladimir Guerrero, the best bad-ball hitter in baseball, made the inadequacy of the rest of the Angels’ slap-hitting lineup painfully apparent. Scrapping for offense with hit-and-run plays, stolen bases, and a reliance on contact is fine, but it also leaves a team vulnerable to superior defense and puts it in the position of having to hit-and-run with the no. 3 hitter, as was done with Garret Anderson last night.


The Sox exploited the Angels’ aggressiveness last night and through the series. It was delightful to watch Jose Contreras throw his forkball with impunity in the confidence that hitters would chase it, and his rising fastball with equal confidence, knowing that none of the Angels could do anything with it.


With presumptive World Series opponents the Houston Astros, though, the Sox staff will have to be quite a lot warier. It’s not that the Astros have a much better offense than the Angels – they don’t – but they do have more players who can do something other than poke the ball over the shortstop’s head or feebly strike out. All pitchers have to be careful with Lance Berkman and Morgan Ensberg, and Houston also has hitters like Craig Biggio and Jason Lane who have to be taken seriously as power threats.


There’s also the question of whether Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has made a mistake in going 36 innings without having his bullpen throw a pitch. In Neil Cotts, Damaso Marte, Cliff Politte, and Bobby Jenks, Guillen has as strong a collection of relievers as any playoff team since, oddly enough, the 2002 Angels. There’s sense in keeping the ball in the hands of your best pitchers, but there’s also some sense in keeping your crucial relievers sharp for the key moments when they’re finally needed.


As great as this team has been all year, and as great as the pitchers have looked, there are still going to be an awful lot of questions surrounding the White Sox once they win the pennant.


***


Are the St. Louis Cardinals failures?


I wondered as I watched the team come unglued in yesterday’s 2-1 loss to the Astros, which put the Redbirds down 3-1 in the National League Championship Series and all but eliminated their chances of winning a second consecutive NL pennant.


Manager Tony LaRussa was exceptionally agitated by some unexceptionable ball-and-strike calls, which he was ejected for arguing; pitcher Jason Marquis was unable to field a bunt and unable to lay one down, failures of fundamental play that may have cost his team the game; center fielder Jim Edmonds was ejected in the bottom of the eighth with a full count, a man on, and the fearsome Albert Pujols on deck after getting into it with home plate umpire Phil Cuzzi.


This was a frustrated bunch, which is understandable. The Cardinals have arguably been the best team in the league since 2000, having won 93 or more games in five out of the last six seasons and advanced to the Championship Series four times in that span. All they have to show for it is a sweep in last year’s World Series, and to get a shot at redemption they’re going to have to beat Andy Pettite, Roy Oswalt, and Roger Clemens in the next three games. (That’s not going to happen.)


While the team has had a lot of bad luck – injuries to ace Chris Carpenter and third baseman Scott Rolen derailed last year’s championship drive, and another injury to Rolen hasn’t helped this year’s – it’s fair to ask at this point if there isn’t something basically wrong with this team, the same way we ask what’s wrong with the Braves, A’s, and now the Yankees.


I’m not convinced there is, at this point anyway – these have been close games, in which the Cardinals have generally played crisp ball. But they do have a clear weakness, which is LaRussa’s preference for well-rounded veterans who don’t do anything badly, but also don’t do anything particularly well.


Players like David Eckstein, Mark Grudzielanek, and John Mabry are all decent enough, and their well-rounded games play well over the course of the long season, but their lack of specific tactical uses leaves LaRussa tied to an inflexible approach and an over reliance on his few best hitters. The result is that the Astros are holding the Cards to 2.5 runs per game so far. Maybe they’d be doing that to any offense, but the Cardinals seem particularly susceptible.


tmarchman@nysun.com


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