Get through tonight and we've got a real shot at this. Gotta hope James, Scrubb, Taylor, and Raley can give you 4 decent innings. Paredes and Pressley 3 innings between them. Then you pray that Raley, Garcia, and maybe Sneed don't crap the bed if they have to get you some outs.
Hinch never trusted Greinke to go deep... but he also had a vastly superior bullpen. their record in Greinke’s starts last year was pretty good, despite him rarely going past the 6th... so the manager did successfully navigate those games to wins. But yeah, I would expect this has bothered him for awhile and he finally had a prove-it moment to justify his stance.
I think we need to score more than 4 runs to win tonight, lets hope we have a Dodger like outburst in the 1st inning and we can coast with the back of the bullpen this game
Tougher for who though? Aren’t they in the same boat... and technically facing a stronger lineup? they do have the better bullpen... but our hitters have already seen all their guys now.
One addendum to Mantle and Jackson: Mantle played his whole career in the pre-division/expansion era, and Jackson his whole career in the pre-wild card era. They didn't get to face theoretically weaker division series opponents.
If I was going to say something gave an advantage to Springer and Altuve, I'd go with the flubber ball over having to face guys like Sale, Kluber, anyone wearing a Rays uniform.
He pitched 2 scoreless innings in game 3. First time he's gotten through 2 scoreless innings out of the bullpen all year. His stuff looked good. But there was very little pressure at that point (albeit, they still had a chance in the 9th, and forced the Rays to use Castillo).
imo I would much prefer Framber on short rest than seeing what the bullpen can do for nine innings. Anything can happen in a single game, but i'm not sure that anything less than 6+ runs is going to get it done this evening and that's a tall order against the Rays' pen.
