About the Baseball Wild Card Playoffs

I was watching the bottom eighth inning of the Milwaukee Brewers/Washington Nationals National League Wild Card Playoff Game Tuesday night after missing most of the contest because I was at work.  The Brewers had a 3-1 lead that they had been nursing for a few innings and were trying to ride out the rest of the game with only six outs to go against the Nationals, who were playing at home and were up at bat.  The Milwaukee closing pitcher Josh Hader quickly began to experience control issues, often throwing wildly and once even hitting the Washington batter on his wrist with a terribly inside pitch.  Aside from being frustrated that after 162 games in the regular season these two excellent teams would depend on just one game to decide their playoff future, I couldn't figure out why the Brewers manager Craig Counsell kept Hader in the game in spite of the fact that he obviously couldn't properly place his pitches.  But kept him in he did, which ultimately resulted in the Nationals scoring three runs in that inning and eventually winning the game 4-3 to advance to the series against the Los Angeles Dodgers...

Before deciding to keep his pitcher on the mound despite it being clear that he didn't have his "stuff", there was one of those meetings on the field in which I'm sure Josh Hader insisted that he was good to stay in there...but if you're a manager you should know that just about all of the pitchers will talk like that.  I've seen this happen in other games over the years, as well as the opposite: a manager, apparently thinking that he's some kind of genius, will pull a relief pitcher who is doing very well just because the next opposing batter bats from the other side of the plate, or some other factor...I can't count how many games were blown this way when the new, incoming pitcher turns out completely ineffective...

Well, after last night's Tampa Bay Rays 5-1 American League Wild Gard game victory at Oakland...in which the Rays relief pitching was spectacular (zero bases-on-balls and eight strikeouts)...we're finally down to real multi-game playoff series instead of these one-game all-or-nothing fiascos.  In the American League Tampa Bay is going up against Houston while the New York Yankees square off against Minnesota.  As mentioned before, in the National League, Washington will now once again try their hand against the favored Los Angeles Dodgers...Atlanta and St. Louis will play the remaining series, each one best-of-five.  They should all be entertaining, predictably foolish pitching decisions by the managers notwithstanding...