As of this writing, neither Josh Johnson nor Roy Halladay have allowed a base runner in their game tonight. Sure, the game doesn’t start for a few hours, but don’t get bogged down in the technicalities. They’re just that good.
Roy Halladay And Josh Johnson: Two Of Baseball’s Best Square Off
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It’s hard to get better than a Johnson/Halladay match-up. There might be pitchers you’d prefer over Johnson if you were picking the second-best pitcher of the game, but considering that the Marlins and Phillies are atop the NL East, separated by only three games, this is as good as a match-up is going to get. So the next step is to wait for the game. Talk about it a little bit. Dig through Halladay’s game logs before doing the same for Johnson. Talk about it some more. Watch an ESPN preview of it. Watch people on the MLB Network talk about it. Wait for the game some more. Wait and wait and wait...
...and the game will end with both pitchers giving up six earned runs and leaving after four or five innings.
That’s what always seems to happen, anyways. Last year before the NLCS, a million words were written about the Game One match-up of Roy Halladay and Tim Lincecum. Writers dug through the playoff ledgers of greats like Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, trying to see if they had a head-to-head playoff match-up with anyone who could be considered a peer. The anticipation and hype would have been oppressive if it wasn’t completely justified. It was a special pitching match-up, and it did deserve the hype.
Then this happened. Both pitchers were good, not great. It was an exciting game, but not necessarily because of the pitching. It could have been a Bronson Arroyo/John Lannan match-up if you redacted the names from the box score. And it was a masterpiece from both sides compared to the similarly anticipated Cliff Lee/Lincecum showdown in Game One of the World Series -- a game that ended with 18 runs between the two teams.
It’s easy to get cynical because you remember the ones that disappointed, but sometimes it works out just as expected. Here are three of the best from last year -- not an exhaustive list, by any means, so if you remember any, please chime in.
Jimenez entered the game with a 0.87 ERA, and he was coming off a 13-strikeout performance against the Padres. Kershaw was trying to rebound from the worst start of his career -- a seven-run nightmare in which he couldn’t make it out of the second inning. But both were (and are) considered two of the brightest young pitching stars in the game, so expectation were high ... and they should have been . Each pitcher allowed only two hits over a combined 15 innings (and to think, Jonathan Broxton was able to get there in just one inning!) while striking out 14. The only run allowed by either starter came on a ball that deflected off Jimenez’s glove into right field.
This one was in the middle of a pennant race, with both teams trying to climb to the top of the AL East and secure home field advantage for at least one round of the playoffs. It’s also the kind of game that would drive grizzled old-timey folks nuts, as both pitchers were pulled after eight shutout innings because of pitch counts. You know that Bob Feller and Lum Harris would have been good for another eight innings back in the day, but as it was, Price and Sabathia had to be satisfied with eight innings of scoreless baseball.
Both pitched magnificently, and even though limiting a pitcher’s workload is an admirable, sensible goal, there really is some magic lost when you get to the bottom of that box score and see, “Balfour, W (2-1)/Mitre, L (0-3).” The upside is that we should, in theory, be able to watch Price and Sabathia for longer, but part of me wishes we could revisit the era of pitchers taking shutouts into the 12th inning because that’s just what they did. Sounds like fun.
Hey, those two again! I wonder if they’ve ever hooked up in a good pitchers’ duel before.
| IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO | |
| Roy Halladay | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| Josh Johnson | 7 | 7 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 6 |
Oh. Well, except for Johnson getting shellacked for that unearned run, it seems like that game featured a little bit of pitching.
So sometimes the duels do turn out to be exactly what you expect them to be. Sometimes they don’t -- it’s part of that freaky little sport called baseball -- but there’s a reason why we get excited about the great match-ups. Sometimes, if not often, they lead to great games. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to sit in front of the TV and wait for the game to start. Only about five hours left. I’ll just close my eyes and imagine how awesome the pitchers’ duel is going to be. Don’t see how I’ll be disappointed after doing that for a few hours.
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