Ride a pained pony

What goes up
Must come down.
Spinning wheel
Got to go round.
-- David Clayton-Thomas, "Spinning Wheel," 1969.

As the Boston Red Sox board a flight for St. Louis, there is some good news and some bad news to be shared, and the bad news is not that Curt Schilling (soon to assume the stately title of Prince Valiant) may have taken his ankle for its final ride on the strength of Dr. Morgan's Wicked Pissah Sutures of Mystery. Rather, the bad news is the Red Sox simply aren't as good as they've looked in the first two games of the World Series. The good news is they aren't as bad as they've looked, either. Not to get all Don "Rickles" Rumsfeld on you or anything, but that's the truth. The Sox have had a run of (gasp!) Yankee-esque luck in going up 2-0 on a very good St. Louis club. Last night, Mark Bellhorn's game-winning poke clanged off Pesky's Pole, just able to stay fair in a stiff breeze that, two pitches prior, had shoved a similar bid several rows foul. In Game 2, Mike Matheny and Reggie Sanders both hit bullets right at Bill Mueller to end two innings with Cardinals on base and a rally brewing.

In aggregate, however, this Series has proceeded suspiciously according to script. Both teams feature strong offenses: the Cardinals with four menacing gentlemen whose numbers suggest they spend their free time driving railroad ties through robust sheets of corrugated iron, and the Red Sox with Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz sandwiched between a collection of street urchins surprisingly adept at not making outs. The question coming into these two games was whose pitching would be able to navigate these treacherous waters while suffering less damage. The numbers predicted the answer would be Boston, and so it has been thusfar. The Sox have been remarkably adept at containing the Cards' big four and exploiting a very weak bottom of the St. Louis batting order. Tony La Russa's hurlers, on the other hand, have not exhibited the same facility, due in large part to the fact that there is no soft underbelly in Boston's nine. Fortunately for the Cards, Boston's nine are now Boston's eight for the next three games.

This loss of the designated hitter, coupled with The Law of Averages, augurs that the Boston bats are unlikely to continue teeing off on the opposition's starters with such casual aplomb, but the oft-overlooked Law of Pedestrian Pitching reminds us that they just might. Kevin Millar hasn't exactly set anyone's hair on fire in these first two games, and the Sox have managed a healthy tally nonetheless. And while the Boston lineup is indisputably weakened by his absence, the fact remains that the bottom three "hitters" (charitably speaking) for the Cards will still be lousy. The Sox will maintain their advantage in offensive depth. If their pitchers can continue to make hittable pitches a finite resource for the Cardinals' meat, the Sox will enjoy further success in that aspect of the game as well.

It is still far too early to draw any broad conclusions about this matchup, but this Series has given an early indication of supporting one of the great hidden axioms of baseball: that it's better to have concentrated talent in the pitching staff and diffuse talent in the batting order. Said axiom will not be elaborated upon at this time for two reasons: (1) as previously mentioned, this Series is not over, and (2) it's bedtime.