Jake Peavy defies Giant odds
— -- WASHINGTON - These are the games Vegas never sees coming.http://espncms.prod.espninfra.starwave.com:2021/SiteEditor/index.htm#/content?contentId=11637054
In one corner: Stephen Strasburg, finally pitching that game he was drafted to pitch, lighting 99 mph flames in the first inning, as 44,035 Washingtonians spun their rally towels.
In the other corner: Jake Peavy, the kind of guy those handicap kings might describe as an overwhelming underdog. Owner of a 9.35 lifetime ERA in October, and zero postseason wins. Traded away by the last-place Red Sox 10 weeks ago, with a 1-9 record and a 4.80 ERA officially stuck to his permanent record.
If you just read those two paragraphs, you wouldn't have to be a descendant of Jimmy the Greek to know how Game 1 of the National League Division Series was supposed to turn out Friday.
Except these are the October baseball games that forget to follow the script. These are the games that make October special.
How, you wondered, could Strasburg and the Nationals possibly get outdueled, in this setting, by Peavy and the wild-card Giants? Because in October, stuff happens. Life-changing stuff. And on Friday afternoon at Nationals Park, it happened to Peavy.
If he'd never been traded to the Giants in July, "we might not be where we are right now," said Brandon Belt, after a pulsating 3-2 Giants victory that put his franchise in the record books, with an unprecedented (for any NL team) ninth straight postseason win, dating back to the 2012 NLCS.
And the truth is, they really might not be playing these games in the October shadows without their biggest July import, because Matt Cain needed elbow surgery, Tim Lincecum was sputtering, and there was nobody to call up. So when the manager, Bruce Bochy, said Friday that Peavy "saved us," he wasn't exaggerating.
But did anybody think that at the time? It was the Jon Lester trade that was supposed to change the landscape of this October. Or was that the David Price trade? Wait, we meant the Jeff Samardzija deal. Or maybe the John Lackey trade.
It turned out, though, that the Peavy trade was another one of those moves that teach us an important lesson: It isn't always the Richter-scale-rattling deals that put the right pieces in place for the teams bound for October.
Sometimes, it can be a below-the-horizon deal for a 33-year-old right-hander who was convinced his career wasn't over - and found himself pitching for a manager (Bochy) who had known him for years and believed the same thing.
"Sometimes, when you're in a rough patch, change is good for everybody," Peavy told ESPN.com after one of the most important starts of his career. "You know, Boston is such a special place. And I would never trade my experience there for anything. I'll always remember how blessed I was to play there. But ... it just wasn't meant to be. It's nobody's fault. It's just one of those things.
"But when you get traded, you wipe the slate clean. You've got guys in this room, they don't care what you've done in the past. All they care about is what you're going to do with them. I have a manager and this coaching staff, they just believe in me. Not to say that anybody in Boston didn't. But it's been a great feeling. I've been able to iron some things out mechanically. And it's all worked out."
It took Peavy a few starts as a Giant to smooth out his mechanics and collaborate with pitching coach Dave Righetti to tweak his pitch selection - with fewer fastballs, more variety and a greater emphasis on using the inner half of the plate. But once Peavy clicked all that into place, he turned into a season-changing figure for this team.
He went 6-2, with a 1.64 ERA, in his final 10 starts of the regular season. And then all he did Friday, in his first postseason trip to the mound as a Giant, was take a no-hitter into the fifth inning, on the way to 5 2/3 innings of two-hit, zero-run baseball, against one of the best offensive teams in the league.
By the time he gave up his first hit, his teammates had done what they always seem to do this time of year. They scrounged up a couple of blue-collar runs against Strasburg. They turned down the ballpark volume by grabbing a quick 2-0 lead. Then they started counting down outs.
And watching their man Jake Peavy breathe his customary fire out there.
"How can you not enjoy that guy?" laughed reliever Jeremy Affeldt. "I mean, he competes with himself. He competes with the ball. He yells at the ball. What an awesome competitor. He's definitely one of a kind. I saw it when he was in San Diego a little bit. But to see the way he yells and screams and competes, I think guys feed off that. It puts an energy into the game."
"I get a kick out of everything he does," said the rightfielder, Hunter Pence, who isn't exactly a robot on the field himself. "He's funny. He's intense. And I like his passion."
Peavy had actually promised his friends before this game that no matter how loud and how often he yelled at himself, he was going to get through his day curse-free. Asked if he managed to pull that off, he stammered: "Um, I think. Maybe. OK, I think I might have slipped once, in the dugout. But hey, I did my best."
And let's all applaud him for that, at least. One of his most animated outbursts of the day, actually, came after he'd already left this game, in the sixth inning. His two-run lead was dangling on the edge of the cliff. Rookie smokeballer Hunter Strickland was staring down Ian Desmond with the bases loaded. And if the Nationals were going to spin this game in the other direction, this was the moment.
Except Strickland whooshed three supersonic fastballs past Desmond - at 98, 99 and 100 mph. And Peavy came pirouetting off the bench to greet him, spewing a message that Strickland later described (loosely) as, "Let's go. Or something like that."
"He saved that game," Peavy would say afterward, once his heart had stopped pounding. "That was a huge moment."
But as huge as it was, it just fit right into the fascinating fabric of a team that has been defying Vegas' reviews of it for years now.
Just a couple of months ago, Peavy was trying to end a surreal streak of 18 straight starts without winning a game - tied for the longest drought by any pitcher in the last 35 years. And then, here he was, in this game, completing an unforgettable journey by going from that low point to winning the first postseason game of his mostly distinguished 13-year career. So this was a day, he said, that "means the world to me."
"I'd never been through anything like I went through this year," he said. "They start to count you out, you know? You've got people saying your career's done and this and that. So to grind through that and come out and finish the way we did, and then go out and get a playoff win in Game 1, it's just very gratifying. I feel very blessed."
Yeah, he was aware that he'd never won an October baseball game before, just like he was aware this summer that he'd gone 18 straight starts without a win.
"But everything," said the man who defied all those geniuses in Vegas, "has got an expiration date."
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