Don't Be Too Hard On This Guy.

He's hard enough on himself.

I don't hit on baseball very often, but with all the doom and gloom I'm hearing around town this morning, I thought I'd try to offer some solace. I watched the first hour of the game on TV and caught the rest here and there on the radio. Stupid job! Anyway, I saw Albert blast one out of his Pujols and put up enough runs to ultimately win the game. That swing of the bat seemed to really take the gas out of the fans of the Padres. Everyone is second guessing the decision to let Peavy pitch to the Cardinal slugger. Interestingly enough, no one was bitching about it when Pujols went down looking in his first at-bat. Now, I'm typically one to rag on Bochy for his little league style mentality-the same mentality that results with the murderers row of Mark Bellhorn and Todd Walker coming up with the bases loaded and one out in the 7th-but letting Peavy pitch there was the right call. I would have been happy to walk Pujols in every single at-bat of this series, but you have to let your ace off the leash there. No top tier pitcher is going to want to lay down for any batter, be it Bonds or the Babe. The real problem with Peavy is that he knows he's not going to get a lot of support. He typically goes up against the other teams big name guy, and the Padres batters fold like CJ in a home game of hold'em every time. So Peavy pushes. His mistakes snowball. Two ER is hardly a bad game but he has a hard time shutting the door once it opens. It gets him in trouble, and the other team coasts through our line-up with ease. I know, I know, where's the solace Colossus? The solace is this: In a five game series, there's no way we see Carpenter more than twice. Jeff Weaver goes tomorrow, and Lord knows he's good for what ails ya. So, the Padres don't get the revenge sweep. Big deal. I still think we do it in four ( I think we'll get Carpenter next time, personally). And you should too. The Cards are the freakin' underdogs this year. Go Padres!!!