Blowing a two-run 9th inning lead after an utterly random Adam Bernero gave you five and two thirds of 1-run ball? Believe it. Instead of heading towards a 4th straight win, the Royals instead notched loss #74 before 30,000 riveted fans in Northern Ohio.
In all, just a fairly typical letdown game -- well, insomuchas a team can have a collective mindset and an outsider such as I can diagnosis it-- sliding towards just more random data. Cleveland's got a better team and some bad things happened in the 9th. It happens. I'll save the moral evaluations to whomever's writing the next David Ortiz/Arod story.
Still...
At some point someone might want to examine Bell's robotic adherence to the Burgos as Closer formula. While I generally disregard the standard hokum regardint the nervous of steel and heart of gold or whatever we're supposed to believe "Closers" need over and above what just good pitchers need, perhaps its time to give Burgos a different assignment.
In his 52 appearances, how many 1-2-3 innings has Ambiorix managed in 2006?
Eight.
Granted, there have been some non-one-inning outings in there, but only on eight occasions has he just had a nice clean inning. If its not walks, its hits allowed. And all this equals runs. On May 4th after a second consecutive 1-2-3 inning, his ERA stood at 2.19. At the moment, its at 5.79.
5.79 isn't good anyway, and its made worse by the extra effort at run-allowin' needed to climb so high.
Burgos ERA by month:
April: 2.61 ERA (10.1 IP)
May: 9.98 ERA (15.1 IP)
June: 4.63 ERA (11.2 IP)
July: 1.42 ERA (12.2 IP)
August: 7.94 ERA (5.2 IP)
Of course, theres also the matter of MacDougal's injury, then subsequent trade to factor in. And, we all fondly remember the approximately three day long experiment with Elmer as the Closer.
I know its late, and we've picked a bad time, but it seems curious to me how the same organization can employ an essentially random starting rotation, but be so lock-step regarding the later innings.