And Jacoby Ellsbury, all of thirty years old, needed the day off because he's tired. Much irony?
Now I realize that because of prenatal drugs and advances in medicine and training techniques that today's athletes are bigger, stronger and faster in almost every way. But don't tell me that they're made of the same stuff as the old timers. Because they're not.
There are many recent coddling conventions in baseball in the past 20 years that have become commonplace, but were unheard of in the 70s and earlier.
And one of them that cracks me up is resting players because of a day game after a night game. I can't imagine Pete Rose or even catchers like Carlton Fisk and Johnny Bench being told that they can't play because they just played 15 or 16 hours ago.
Pitch counts are another. Once a pitcher approaches 100 pitches in a game there seems to be grave concern among coaches and broadcasters that he's going to self-destruct. In the '75 world series Luis Tiant was pitching to Joe Morgan with a 3-2 lead in the ninth with the tying and winning runs on base, having thrown 140 pitches. Despite the righty-to-lefty match up there was no thought of pulling Tiant, who retired Morgan.
And similarly, if a closer today, God forbid, has to get more than three outs for a save, it's almost as though he parted the Red Sea. It used to be that if a reliever entered the game in the 7th with a lead, he was expected to finish it.
Of course, there are some external factors that have modified coaching perspectives in the lasrt generation or so of baseball, but player expectations have been lowered quite a bit.
