Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Game of the Day (9/1/14)

Phillies 7, Braves 0 (hits). Philly's Cole Hamels faced Atlanta's Julio Teheran.

As no-hitters go, this one was pretty lively. Hamels walked two Braves in the first, with Jason Heyward and Emilio Bonifacio ending up at third and second by the end of the inning. The same thing happened in the third, although this time it was Heyward and Freddie Freeman being left in scoring position. Meanwhile, the Phillies scored in the top of the third on a Cody Asche double and a pair of productive outs, but the Braves hung within a run until Hamels singled and Jimmy Rollins tripled him home in the sixth.

Hamels walked Freeman again in the bottom of the sixth. The Phils broke it open in the top of the seventh on an error, a pair of walks (one of which was to Grady Sizemore, who pinch hit for Hamels), and a three-run Ben Revere triple. Jake Diekman worked a perfect seventh, Ken Giles did the same in the eighth, and after RBI singles by Revere and Ryan Howard in the top of the ninth, Jonathan Papelbon retired the Braves in order to finish off the no-no.

So... what's the consensus on combined no-hitters? Individual ones are great, of course. Combined ones... I mean, they're kind of cool, I guess, but they seem inherently less interesting than the individual ones, which makes it a question of degrees.

The subjective WPL bonus I award for a no-hitter is 3 points (that is, roughly half the score of the best nine-inning game in the database). If, hypothetically, you trim that down to 2 for a combined no-hitter, yesterday's best game would then be Marlins 9, Mets 6, a see-saw battle in which each team blew two leads before Miami finally put it away in the eighth.

The right answer, of course, is that there's not a right answer; we're measuring a subjective quantity to begin with. If you'd rather watch a close, high-scoring game that could have gone either way than a combined no-hitter, I'm not going to argue with you. Personally, I could go either way; it would probably depend on whether the Cubs were involved in either game (and on what side), or who the featured players were, or any number of other factors. Because that's how subjectivity works.

No comments:

Post a Comment