The Point Spread Column

By: Bob Johnson   Date: April 23, 2006

Yesterday was plain bad and although I make no apologies or excuses for the work I put in on the games, the results were bad. Two nights ago we had the Padres with Peavy who was in excellent form and mowing down the Mets with a 2-1 lead. Padres manager Bochy decided to take Peavy out when the Padres loaded the bases in the bottom of the 7th. They didn't score. The Mets made mincemeat of the Padre bullpen. They sent up 47 year old pinch hitter Julio Franco in the 8th and he became the oldest player in MLB history to hit a home run. The Mets scored 6 runs and won 7-2. If Peavy stayed had of stayed in the game he would have had a complete game win. The Mets said that they could not hit him. He allowed only 4 hits in 7 innings and was going strong. Last night the Giants took an 8-5 lead into the bottom of the 9th and let Colorado score 4 runs and win 9-8. We had 3-3 tie games with both Atlanta and the Angels late last night and both fell apart with shoddy bullpen work. They pay these bullpen pitchers in the range of four to nine million dollars a year. Have you checked the average salary of any mediocre player in Baseball? If you have a son in school that is an athlete, urge him to get into baseball.. not football. Baseball players make much more money, they are injured less and they have longer careers. To be truthful, over the last few days, I dabbled with a new system in baseball and it has done nothing but take me off of games I liked and put me on losers. I am done with that little experiment and I expect we will get back to winning baseball games soon. The NBA playoffs start today and there will be several excellent opportunities for us there.