Around the League with Rich Kincaide

The most interesting thing I saw on the diamond last night was not Dontrelle Willis and the Detroit ‘pen one-hitting the Rangers (interesting though that was). It was, rather, the sight of Cleveland’s Kerry Wood blowing a 5-2 lead in the bottom of the 9^th in Kansas City with two outs to get and the bases empty. The sequence off Wood went like this: homer, homer, 5-pitch walk, triple, sac fly, ball game. If Wood had held the lead, Detroit’s lead in the AL Central would be 2 games, not 1. It was the pitch count, again. Talk about dumb managing. Cliff Lee, the Cy Young Award winner last year—yes, that Cliff Lee—had a 5-2 lead and did not come out to pitch the 9^th because, presumably, he’d thrown too many pitches (101). So on comes Wood to blow it. His ERA is now 8.31 and he’s allowed 4 home runs in 13 innings pitched. Lee, the guy they yanked, has allowed 3 homers in 62 innings. Just for the record.

At the other end of the end of the game spectrum would be Heath Bell of San Diego. I saw him come in to finish off the Giants last night and get a load of this: Bell is 10-10 in save situations and has allowed a grand total of zero earned runs this year. Right-handed hitters are hitting (or, to be precise, not hitting) .000 against Bell. They are oh-for-24 against him and that’s amazing.

So was Willis last night. A 1-hitter into the 7^th and he only walked two and if he can regain his form the Tigers have a shot at the division. Hard to believe, but the win was the first for Dontrelle as a Tiger. We mentioned Kerry Woods’ ERA a moment ago. Willis last year had an ERA of 9.38. For the record, that placed him 635^th in the Majors and dead last among pitchers with at least 24 innings pitched. He finished 293^rd out of 316 pitchers if you only count those who pitched in the American League. Willis looked a little better than that guy on Tuesday night in ending Texas’ 7-game win streak, extending the Tigers win streak to four and giving Detroit 9-straight home wins over the Rangers.

On to hockey…

I was covering the Wings-Avalanche Western Conference Final in 1996 and on the flight to Denver after Detroit had lost Games 1&2 at home, I dug out my Stanley Cup Media Guide, (Detroit to Denver is a pretty long flight and I had some time on my hands), and I went through all the best-of-seven series’ in NHL history to see how teams fared after losing the first two games at home. I finished just as we were on final approach and it was then that I knew the Red Wings had sustained a fatal wound. The number was something a little over 95% -- the percentage of teams which had lost the first two games at home and had gone on to lose the series. Detroit, I knew then, had just a little more than 4% chance of coming back against Colorado. The Wings won the next night as they split the two games there to get the series back to Detroit, won at home to get the series back to Denver, but lost Game 6.

The 2009 edition of that same Media Guide, Total Stanley Cup, tells us that heading into the current playoff year, teams which have won Games 1&2 have gone on to win in the best-of-seven format 87.3% of the time. So, we can safely say that statistically at least, Detroit’s probability of winning this series against Chicago now stands at close to 90% after the overtime win over the Black Hawks Tuesday night—Detroit’s 4^th straight OT playoff win against Chicago dating back to the 1995 Western Conference Final.

That said…

I can think off the top of my head of 3 occasions where the Wings won the first two game and did not win the best-of-seven.

The first (which I have only read about) was in the early 1940’s when Detroit became the first team in pro sports history to lose a best-of-seven series in which it led three games to none when Toronto came all the way back to beat them in a Stanley Cup Final series.

Another (which I listened to on the radio when the games were in Detroit because the home games weren’t on TV then—it’s true, you could go to a theatre to watch them otherwise it was Bruce Martyn and Budd Lynch on the radio—and watched on TV when the games were in Montreal) was the 1966 Stanley Cup Final in which Detroit won Game 1 and Game 2, in Montreal no less, before dropping four in a row to Canadien—I said it the way I wanted to, Canadien—three of them on home ice at the Olympia.

Yet another was in 1993 when the Wings beat up on the Maple Leafs good in the first two games, outscoring the Mapleo’s 12-5; dropping four of the next five including two in overtime at home, including Game 7.

So, this thing isn’t over. Not just yet.