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" Wednesday, October 3, 2007 Los Angeles Angels vs. Boston Red Sox, Game One: 4-0, Red Sox Scott Raab: Gotta love small ball. Chone Figgins opens the first inning with a single, goes to second on a groundout, and takes off for third with Vladimir Guerrero swinging away. Vlad pounds a hard-hopper to Lowell at 3B, who throws him out at first.  Figgins, who managed not to get hit by the batted ball, now sits at third with two outs. Garret Anderson fans to end the inning. Six innings later, the Angels get their next hit. Look, I like Mike Scioscia, and his managerial record speaks for itself. But what in God&amp;#039;s name is Figgins doing? Does he not score from second on a single? Of course he does. Is it a plus for Guerrero, a Hall of Fame hitter, to see Chone take off for third during his first at-bat against Josh Beckett? No. There is zero edge to be gained here. It&amp;#039;s stupid baseball. Vlad and Manny -- nobody, including Bonds, I&amp;#039;d rather watch rake than these two. Check out their baseball-reference.com pages -- this is Manny&amp;#039;s and this is Vlad&amp;#039;s -- and warm yourself in the glow of their pending immortality. I remember Manny as a skinny kid; he was 21 when he tasted his first cup of MLB coffee with the Tribe in 1993. Late in 2000, I was reporting a story about another baseball star; during a call with this other player&amp;#039;s agent, he referred to Ramirez (whom he did not and does not represent) as an &amp;quot;enhanced&amp;quot; player. By steroids is what he meant, and I know that because I asked him. It wasn&amp;#039;t part of the story I was working on. It wasn&amp;#039;t something that bothered me much, either -- I have no doubt about the pervasiveness of PEDs in baseball, and I have long since stopped idolizing the men who play the game. For me, &amp;#039;roids fit right into the narrative of the history of the game, and it&amp;#039;s not a subject I waste time fretting or arguing about. But one thing about the conversation did floor me: If an agent dropped this so casually into a talk with a magazine hack working on an unrelated feature story, there&amp;#039;s no way that every beat writer on every newspaper and sports mag in the land wasn&amp;#039;t aware of what was going on. No way.  And not only with Manny. And Barry. And Sammy. And Mark. ***** Jay Levin: Speaking of Yankees fans being idiots, I spent the better part of an hour this week trying to explain to this guy that I don&amp;#039;t care what the YES Network is saying, Andy Pettitte is not in fact a &amp;quot;big-game pitcher.&amp;quot; Andy Pettitte has pitched well in many big games over the years, yes, but he&amp;#039;s also totally shit the bed in the postseason nine times, by my count. Maybe this is just semantics, but I don&amp;#039;t think you call a guy a big-game pitcher after nine bed-shittings. Josh Beckett -- he&amp;#039;s a big-game pitcher. This was his sixth postseason start, and he&amp;#039;s given us five gems now, three of them shutouts. He did shit the bed in that other one, but then again he also had that four-inning relief appearance on short rest, clinching the 2003 NLCS in Game 7. I mean, if Beckett isn&amp;#039;t a big-game pitcher, then there is no such thing. The Pansies of Anaheim slapped their way to 12 groundouts and 8 strikeouts, none of them apparently those &amp;quot;productive outs&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve heard so much about. They took all of 38 pitches in 31 trips to the plate, compared with 73 for Boston. But I&amp;#039;m sure that&amp;#039;s just a coincidence. Also, Boston seems to have a pretty nice bench.  Philadelphia Phillies vs. Colorado Rockies, Game One: 4-2, Rockies Scott Raab: Good ballgame. Tough, tough loss for the Phils. Maybe the shadows helped Jeff Francis early, but when he blew Chase Utley away with a high heater in the 6th -- his third straight K of one of the best young hitters around -- all the shadows had fled, along with the Phightins&amp;#039; chances of making this a competitive series. Matt Holliday is a nice ballplayer, but all this MVP talk is proof that the Sabermetric Revolution has yet to sweep through the press box. A generation ago, Bill James began writing about the crucial importance of a player&amp;#039;s home park to his numbers; further studies have proved this beyond all dispute. And it&amp;#039;s no secret that Coors Field -- humidor or no -- is an extreme hitter&amp;#039;s park.  So if a guy like Holliday -- a corner outfielder whose only real strength as a ballplayer is his bat -- puts together what looks like an MVP season, the first thing you look at are his home/road splits.     Home BA: .376   Road BA: .301    Home OBP: .435  Road OBP: .374    Home SLG: .722  Road SLG: .485   Holliday also hit 25 of his 36 home runs at Coors.  This isn&amp;#039;t any one-year aberration; this is how Holliday performs. In short, Matt Holliday at Coors produces like an inner circle Hall of Famer, or Barry Bonds in an off-year. But in truth, he&amp;#039;s a below-average left-fielder, a pretty good -- not great -- hitter, a complete idiot for sliding headfirst into home plate, and a guy whose name does NOT belong in any sane MVP discussion. That he&amp;#039;s being pimped this way says more about media idiocy than it does about Matt Holliday. (Not that everyone agrees, of course. The fine folks at Baseball Think Factory took strong exception to my line of thinking on Holliday.)  By the way, kudos to today&amp;#039;s home plate ump Dale Scott. His strike zone was fair and consistent, and his ball-strike poses were excellent, a model of crisp, understated grace.  ***** Jay Levin: Anyone who watched that second inning knows that it could have been much, much worse than three runs for Hamels. I don&amp;#039;t know if I believe in the must-win Game One, but this was something like that for the Phillies. Their strategy in this series was &amp;quot;win two with Hamels and then figure out something else later.&amp;quot; It isn&amp;#039;t going well. Just a brutal, brutal day for Chase Utley, the best player on either team (write it down). Four strikeouts, and he only made contact for a foul ball twice. The ump called five strikes on him and only one ball. Ugly. Howard and Rollins weren&amp;#039;t much better, either. So they basically got zero production out of the top four spots. The Phils suffered for not finding room in the lineup for Jayson Werth, who hits lefties harder than anyone else on the roster. Watching Victorino beat out a double-play in the 8th, it was hard not to think that that dubious feat was far short of what Werth might have done. Werth watched the final out from the on-deck circle, by the way. I credit Clint Hurdle for giving his starter a quick hook after the 6th. Francis had only thrown 94 pitches, and he&amp;#039;d rung up eight batters while only letting six on base. After the two solo shots, he did get six more outs without giving up any runs. Fact is, though, the Phillies were starting to hit Francis hard -- for four innings it was strikeouts and groundouts, but after that, the balls were getting to the outfield.  The series has plenty of off-days, and Hurdle has a very deep bullpen. There may have been no obvious reason to yank Francis, who was having a nice outing, but that move may have been the difference in a close game.  Visit the Baseball Blog Archive Don&amp;#039;t agree with something you&amp;#039;ve read? Kick dirt on Scott Raab and Jay Levin&amp;#039;s pants by e-mailing esquirebaseball@gmail.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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