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Post by Admin on Oct 21, 2018 18:55:17 GMT
The Los Angeles Dodgers set up a World Series with the Boston Red Sox after beating the Milwaukee Brewers in their National League Championship decider. Yasiel Puig and Cody Bellinger hit home runs as the Dodgers won 5-1 to seal an overall 4-3 victory.  The Dodgers, who lost to Houston in the 2017 World Series, last claimed the Major League Baseball crown in 1988. They will begin the 114th edition on Tuesday at Boston in the opener of the best-of-seven championship final. Left-handed Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw entered in the ninth and retired the last three Milwaukee batters to send Los Angeles back to the World Series.  "It doesn't matter how you get there," Kershaw said. "To get to go back from last year, it's unbelievable. It's a testament to these guys.  |
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2018 18:46:28 GMT
It wouldn’t be baseball in October without one of the game’s annual rituals: Social-media sleuths deciding that a Major League Baseball player is cheating in the postseason.
This time it’s Boston Red Sox pitcher Matt Barnes, who was one of the relievers the Red Sox called on to secure their win Sunday night in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series against the Houston Astros.
Videos have been circulating that allege there’s a foreign substance on Barnes’ arm that many believe to be pine tar. A pitcher cheating in the postseason? It’s type of sexy headline that the sites like Breitbart will pick up and will have someone at Barstool Sports screaming that Barnes needs to be punished.
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2018 18:49:06 GMT
For the second night in a row, L.A.’s Ryan Madson looked more like an arsonist than a fireman. The 38-year-old was sharp through the NLDS and NLCS—certainly better than he’d been during the regular season, with a rough home run habit and a 5.47 ERA. But he’s now pitched in nine of the team’s thirteen postseason games, and this week, he hasn’t held up well. In Game 1 of the World Series, he inherited two runners and allowed both to score. In Game 2, he inherited three runners, and… you guessed it. Madson relieved starter Hyun-Jin Ryu with two outs, bases loaded, to face Steve Pearce. He proceeded to throw his fastball five times in a row, missing in the same spot with all five—a five-pitch walk that, really, should have been a four-pitch walk. There’s no such thing as a good bases-loaded walk to tie a game, of course, but this one looked especially bad.  |
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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2018 19:52:30 GMT
 Max Muncy hit both of them out the park. First, his game-winning home run, a 382-foot solo shot, in the bottom of the 18th inning. Then, the first question at his postgame press conference after he’d lifted the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 3-2 victory over the Boston Red Sox in Game 3 of the World Series. “In what sort of crazy dream do you go from being unemployed at the end of spring training to hitting a walk-off home run in the World Series?’’ a reporter asked before adding, “That never happens.”  |
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2018 18:50:05 GMT
The last we saw the hero of the Red Sox’ 9-6 win in Game 4 of this World Series on Saturday night, he was disgustedly firing his glove into the pitching mound as the three-run homer he’d allowed was still sailing into the night.  To understand why Eduardo Rodríguez was ultimately so pivotal to the result–and to Boston’s 3-1 series lead, and to the fact that new rings will now almost certainly be theirs–we first need to review the state of affairs about 19 hours earlier. By the wee hours of Saturday morning, Boston manager Alex Cora had exhausted every tactical trick he had to attempt to win Game 3 and to try to leave little doubt about the series’ ultimate outcome. Over the course of a record seven hours and 20 minutes and 18 innings, he had used all of his position players and nine of his eleven pitchers–including Nathan Eovaldi, the scheduled Game 4 starter whom Cora instead called upon to throw 97 pitches in relief–in an all-in attempt to give the Red Sox a 3-0 series lead, and then as many as four straight shots to win one more. It hadn’t worked. A finally tired Eovaldi had allowed a game-winning, opposite-field blast to Max Muncy. And now Cora had to face the possibility that the Dodgers’ 3-2 victory represented not just one victory, but two, given the depletion of his pitching staff. There were no analytics, and there was no precedent, that Cora could cite to explain why that wasn’t true. All he had left was faith. |
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