It was a day for champs to go down.
Both the reigning National League and American League champions were ousted in the Division Series with close losses.
The Dude moved on by the slimmest of margins. He dethroned the Outs and sent him off with a tie-breaking loss.
In a dramatic rally, that included the craziest of all occurrences, an 8-inning, complete game loss, the Dude forged a 10-10-2 tie and due to the JLB playoff tiebreaker rules, he got the 5-3 win.
To have that happen, Dude had to get a save from Ryan Madsen and just 5 strikeouts on offense to the 11 strikeouts by the Outs on Sunday.
Outs could have won it in the nightcap with a hold from Joe Smith or a save from Zach Britton but he benched them. Smith got the necessary hold, but we'll just leave it at that.
So, for the fourth time in JLB history, someone moves on via the JLB tiebreaker. Right now, we’ve had it happen in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. So watch out in 2019.
On the other side, the Gamblers made sure the Crox wouldn’t move one with a ridiculous week on the pitching side, posting a 10-1 mark with a 2.06 ERA and 87 strikeouts. Taking 8 of the 11 pitching categories was all he needed to pick up the 12-9-1 win.
Stephen Strasburg was the difference here going 2-0 with a 0.00 ERA and 18 strikeouts in 14.0 innings.
Finally, the pitcher wins a big matchup for him.
Crox was done in by poor relief pitching, including Walker Buehler who joined Kelvin Herrera, Pedro Baez and Jeurys Familia to give up a combined 15 runs in 6.2 innings.
Crox still finished with a 3.81 ERA despite their struggles, but that was no match for the Gamblers 2.06 ERA.
CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES
Big Ol Country Breakfast and the Cheese Steaks both join the fight this next week as the championship series get underway.
At this point, the Cheese is going for World Series title No. 2, and his second in three years. The Gamblers is going for No. 3 and it would be his first since 2010. That’s when he won his second in two years.
He had won the prior year in 2009 when the Slammers and Gamblers tied 11-11-2 after 7 days. The Slammers won due to ESPN’s silly top-seed wins rule, so we agreed to play on for 7 more days. We were tied again after that, so we played for 2 more and after 16 days, the Gamblers won.
That next year we enacted the tie-breaker rule.
Ah, and we’re back to that.
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