Until this post-season, Detroit pitchers were best known in October for the unprecedented five errors they made in the 2006 World Series that undermined the Tigers’ effort to beat the St. Louis Cardinals
Win or lose these seven years later, the Detroit pitchers, namely the starters, have performed with dazzling effectiveness. They have not been alone, though. Starting pitchers have produced performances that have made this their post-season. Hitters need not apply.
In 29 post-season games through Wednesday night, 30 pitchers, or an average of one of the two starters in each game, had pitched six or more innings and allowed two or fewer runs, earned and unearned. Those figures compute to a 52 percent ratio.
According to Elias Sports Bureau, during the regular season, in which 4,862 pitchers started 2,431 games, pitchers went six or more innings while giving up two or fewer runs 1,943 times. That computes to 40 percent, not as impressive as the post-season ratio.
“I hate to sound like a cliché,” said Dave Dombrowski, the Tigers’ general manager, “but when you have premium pitching it beats premium hitting. I think right now you have teams with the best pitchers playing. They have pitchers who have dominating stuff. When they’re throwing well, and right now they seem to be throwing well, they can beat good hitters.”
During the season, Elias said, the team leaders in the 6-innings, 2-runs parameters were Washington with 80 such games, Los Angeles with 77, Detroit with 76 and Cincinnati with 75.
In this post-season, the Dodgers and he Tigers had the most of these starts, 7 each, and the Cardinals had 6. Individual leaders were the Dodgers’ Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander of the Tigers and Adam Wainwright of the Cardinals, each with three.
Verlander and his fellow Detroit starters went even further in their dazzling performances. In three successive starts over two series, they pitched a significant number of hitless innings.
In Game 5 of the division series at Oakland, Verlander didn’t permit a hit until two were out in the seventh inning. In Game 2 of the league series in Boston, Max Scherzer held the Red Sox hitless until he had two out in the sixth.
In between those two starts, Anibal Sanchez pitched six hitless innings against Boston in the opener of the league series. However, Sanchez had thrown 116 pitches, walking six and striking out 12, and manager Jim Leyland took him out.
Three relievers held the Red Sox hitless in the seventh and eighth innings, but Daniel Nava singled to center field against Joaquin Benoit, the Detroit closer, with one out in the ninth.
Jim Leyland, the Tigers’ manager, found those games more enjoyable than the ones the Tigers subjected him to in the 2005 World Series.
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” Leyland lamented.
Verlander made two of the five errors the pitching staff committed, and he was joined by Todd Jones, Joel Zumay and Fernando Rodney in making costly mistakes that contributed to seven costly unearned runs.
Four times Detroit pitchers failed to throw to first or third base accurately. By now, Leyland’s staff has learned to throw accurately to home plate.
Before that 2006 debacle, no pitching staff had ever made more than three errors in a World Series. The Tigers beat that mark before Game 4 was over. Pitching staffs on six teams had made three errors, the most recent being the 1997 Florida Marlins, according to Elias.
As far as pitching memories are concerned, you might want to remember Wainwright’s division-series game against Pittsburgh. A 6-1 St. Louis victory, it has been the only complete game pitched in this post-season.
Pitchers aren’t allowed to pitch complete games any more. They aren’t trained to pitch complete games. What would Robin Roberts and Ferguson Jenkins say about that sad state of affairs? A hundred what, they would ask, the term pitch count sounding like a foreign language.
In defeating the Pirates in Game 5 of the division series, Wainwright threw 107 pitches and survived. He didn’t need relief during the game, and he didn’t need a transplant or a transfusion after the game.
Wainwright, as noted earlier, has been one of the leading pitchers in the playoffs, pitching that lone complete game and working seven innings in each of two other starts.
The Cardinals, though, had nothing on the Dodgers. Through Wednesday, the Dodgers had a 2.51 post-season earned run average to the Cardinals’ 2.57. In the American League, the Tigers had a 2.62 e.r.a. while the Red Sox were at 3.18.
Based on pitching, alone the Tigers and either Dodgers or Cardinals would make for a tighter World Series. Nothing, however, has been decided as I write this so I think I’ll let everything play out rather than tell you who’s going to win.