Martin’s Blog

The baseball postseason has begun. My beloved Arizona Diamondbacks are nowhere to be seen despite leading the awful National League West for most of the season. They had a great start but then slowly bled the lead away until the LA Dodgers acquired Manny Ramirez and started winning games at the end of the season to take the division.

The last few weeks of the baseball season are very interesting. Throughout most of the 162 game season, with teams playing about 6 games a week, it really doesn’t matter whether you win today or tomorrow. The best record in the major leagues (out of 30 teams) this year was the LA Angels who won 100 games and lost 62. So you have your rotation of 5 starting pitchers, give people a day off whenever they need it, and try to come up with a way to win 3/5 of your games.

But in the last week it suddenly becomes real. You’re 1 game behind with 5 to play and you say to your best pitcher: “You’ll pitch on short rest and we need you to pitch the whole game.” CC Sabathia pitched 3 games in 9 days for the Brewers down the stretch and did an amazing job.

But today Sabathia gave up 5 runs in less than 4 innings so maybe it takes a toll.

In many ways baseball is the opposite of cricket. Games are worth much less because they’re so random and so numerous. Another duality is the worth of an out. In test match cricket a top 6 batsman who’s in double figures should be expected to contribute another 50 runs so should only take a single if he’s 98% certain of making his ground. In the White Sox – Twins game the other day I saw a runner tag up at third and head for home on a fairly shallow fly ball (that was the second out) to centre field. He was thrown out at home ending the innings. But it wasn’t a bad play: the next guy up would have had a maybe 1/3 chance of scoring the runner plus a smaller chance of scoring himself. So in that circumstance a 50% possibility of a run is worth taking.

I watched a fair bit of the AFL finals series. It was surprising to see the Hawks get up without Buddy kicking 10 goals but good on them.

I’ll watch the NRL grand final this weekend. I don’t know who to support though. It’s hard to hate a suburban Sydney team these days but I still dislike Manly. And I certainly dislike the Storm. I worry about rugby league: it was my childhood brand of football and from this far away it just doesn’t seem like it is a viable professional sport.

But the sporting question that takes up most of my thoughts is the composition of the Australian test team to take on India. I don’t believe that Krejza is worthy of his spot on the team. Perusal of David Barry’s facebook status updates will verify that I thought this before he bowled 20 overs and took 0/123 this week. I’d play Casson straight off the plane or McGain straight out of the physio room. But if neither of them turn up I wouldn’t pick four quicks. The last time Australia played four quicks Tait barely got a bowl and Ricky got into over rate trouble. I’d recognise that Clarke/Katich will do a fair bit of bowling and pick Watson as the all rounder with Haddin at 8 and just the three specialist bowlers. But I’m not at all confident that that’s the right thing to do….

I have less trouble picking the India team. After watching some of the India-Sri Lanka series I would drop Dravid and Ganguly and pick whichever of these talented young batsmen the selectors like: Sharma and Kohli will have got some confidence from their last innings so bring ‘em in.

The basic criteria are power and fielding ability for position players and arm strength for the pitchers. I’ve probably picked more Australians than is justified but they just feel more like baseballers than Indians for example. I probably should have picked more South Africans but I don’t like them.

I’d like to see this. I feel that with a years training the batsman would be solid in the field and occasionally score some runs. The pitchers would be more hit and miss but if you can throw accurately at 95mph you really only need to develop one other pitch (changeup or splitter perhaps) to be effective.

Catcher: Adam Gilchrist
First Base: Kevin Pietersen
Second Base: Michael Clarke
Third Base: Herschelle Gibbs
Shortstop: Ricky Ponting
Left Field: Shahid Afridi
Center Field: Andrew Symonds
Right Field: Andrew Flintoff

Starting Rotation:
Shane Bond
Brett Lee
Shoaib Akhtar
Mitchell Johnson
Dale Steyn

Bench:
Brad Haddin
Brendan McCullum
Cameron White (Designated Hitter in AL games)
Dwayne Bravo
Shane Watson

Bullpen:
Nathan Bracken
Stuart Clark
Shaun Tait (Closer)
Makhaya Ntini
Mohammad Asif
Zaheer Khan
James Franklin

Manager: Shane Warne