Series teaches lessons

You know what will be the biggest baseball media event in spring training next year? The fielding drills by the Detroit Tigers’ pitchers.

It is one of the first drills they work on in spring training — coming off the mound to field a bunt — and teams work on it so much that everyone is sick of doing or watching it after a couple of days.

Yet here you had the Detroit Tigers fielding bunts in the World Series as if they had never done it before.

And it won’t be just in Detroit. In every camp next February, there will be a little extra attention on those drills. You can bet managers and coaches will invoke the names of Joel Zumaya and Fernando Rodney and the record number of errors that were made by Detroit pitchers.

Tigers manager Jim Leyland even spoke about how the errors that haunted the Tigers were a staple of their spring training workouts.

“We worked at it all spring, and we haven’t worked on it since until we had that week off [before the Series],” he said. “We did a pretty good job all year long. We had the week off, so we had to put some drills in. In the American League, you don’t handle a lot of bunts and stuff. We knew we were going to do that this series, so we worked on it during the time frame we were off, and quite frankly we didn’t execute it during the World Series.”

This is a new one in the designated hitter debate — the lack of bunting in the American League because pitchers don’t hit now becoming a fielding advantage for the National League. Will that now become the new strategy for the NL in interleague play? Bunting like mad because AL pitchers can’t field?

Who knew that it would be the Tigers’ pitchers who would be their downfall, and who could have known it wouldn’t have been the pitching that did them in? It was pitching that led the Tigers to the World Series with great young, arms like Justin Verlander and Jeremy Bonderman, and it clearly was the direction of Leyland that led them there as well.

But in the Series itself, it also was pitching that gave the St. Louis Cardinals their 10th World Series championship after outstanding performances by Jeff Weaver, Albert Reyes and Jeff Suppan. It also clearly was the direction of Tony La Russa that managed to get the Cardinals turned around after limping into the postseason with just an 83-79 record.

“Since the first game against San Diego, it was the way our pitching rose to the occasion, front end and back end,” La Russa said. “It’s tough to score when you’re facing good pitching.”

Leyland said “Dave Duncan and the Cardinal pitching staff probably did the best job of anybody all year of pitching to us. And they really hadn’t seen us that much. They did a tremendous job.”

Duncan has been La Russa’s pitching coach and right-hand man since their days in Oakland.

So back here in Washington, what can Nationals fans take from this World Series for their hopes of their own franchise?

The most obvious would be that three years ago, the Tigers were the worst team in baseball, having lost 119 games, so it is possible for teams to make great strides and change from losers to winners. But in order to do that, you need two things — pitching and the right manager.

Right now the Nationals have neither.

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