And Somewhere in the Darkness…
By 
Best. Pitcher. Evah.
So I specifically arrange to have an engagement to see a movie and get dinner to thwart whatever perverse impulse I might have to watch the Tigers-Yankees game. And although I had only two drinks, I get home and the tee vee is claiming that it is 5-0 Tigers. Apparently they put acid in my Manhattan; I’ll have more about the game when it wears off.
Anyway, as I’ve consistently maintained for years Kenny Rogers is not only likely to keep getting better and better but is an incredible clutch pitcher; there’s nobody I’d rather have out there in a big game.
…Rogers is a kind of amazing story to think about. It retrospect, given how quickly I sneer at people who pointed out that the A’s were 0-9 in elimination games (whoops, guess we can bury that one) to attack Billy Beane, it was particularly silly to write Rogers off, bad as his postseason performance (and his performance against individual Yankees) had been. Part of it, though, is that Rogers really is one of a kind. Of the strongest empirical regularities in baseball is that while pitchers can have a good year or two with bad strikeout rates can’t last. And while everybody remembers his awful last year with the Yankees in 1997, with the exception of one year he got hurt that was the last time he has had a below-average ERA. He hasn’t gone from a marginal situational lefty to a lifetime record of 207-139 on blind luck, and I guess he does it by doing things like coming up with a Dennis Martinez-caliber bender when he’s pitching the biggest game of his life. Performance can never be reduced to general statistical trends, and evidently this is a good thing.
Will the Tigers win? Well, I’m going to have the dignity to get out of the prediction business for the rest of this series, but obviously you can’t ask for more than having Bonderman v. the remains of Jaret Wright at home for the elimination game. I’m quite optimistic, which means we can probably expect to be back in the Bronx tomorrow night…