In case you haven’t heard, Mets starter Steve Trachsel pitched horribly in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series in St. Louis Saturday night. But readers of the New York Times‘ sports section, and of baseball columnist Murray Chass in particular, have certainly heard the news loud and clear.
In his next-day column Sunday, Chass was relatively easy on Trachsel, writing: “The Mets as yet do not have a stage name for Steve Trachsel. Dreadful? They will figure it out if they can ever climb out of the hole in which he buried them with his abysmal pitching in last night’s 5-0 loss to the Cardinals.”
On Monday, as Chass compared Trachsel’s start with Oliver Perez’s adequate, winning start in Game 4, Trachsel came in for a full, scathing analysis. Trachsel, who departed with a thigh injury in the second inning, “could barely give the Mets five and two-thirds batters,” Chass wrote:
Of the 12 batters Trachsel faced, 10 reached base. It wasn’t the worst postseason performance ever, but it was one of the worst and, revealingly, it left some mid-level, non-uniformed members of the Mets’ organization angry enough to question Trachsel’s behavior, although not quite angry enough to let their names be attached to their comments.
“He took himself out,” one person said, incredulous.
The team “needed a big game” from Trachsel — who despite a 4.97 ERA actually compiled a 15-8 record this season thanks to league-high run support — but “What the Mets got was dreadful pitching,” Chass wrote beneath the headline, “Shadow From a Miserable Night Still Hangs Over Trachsel.” Dissecting his pitching line, Chass added: “It’s difficult to imagine a worse performance, but Trachsel, Elias [Sports Bureau] said, was the seventh starter in the last seven postseasons to last an inning or less.”
“The Mets won’t have Trachsel to kick around anymore,” Chass noted, with his contract up at season’s end. “Barring an emergency, the Mets have probably seen the last of Steve Trachsel.”
But Times readers had not seen the last of Chass slamming Trachsel, as I noticed over my breakfast cereal this morning.
“The stench of Steve Trachsel’s start in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series won’t go away. Not even yesterday’s all-day rain, which forced the postponement of Game 5 last night, washed it away,” Chass began his column today. (The front of the Times‘ sports section had a different take on the precipitation in St. Louis, which apparently has certain anthropomorphic qualities: “Rain Lets Glavine’s Role as Ace Soak In.”)
“It hung around yet another day because new information came to light,” Chass continued, explaining that Elias has now determined that by one standard, Trachsel’s start indeed was the worst in a postseason game. With 83 percent of the batters Trachsel faced having reached base, Chass wrote, “Trachsel was thus the first pitcher to make a postseason start, face at least 10 batters and have more than 80 percent of them reach base by way of a hit, a walk or a hit batsman.”
“It is possible that as time elapses, additional information may come to light as to how dreadful Trachsel’s performance was,” Chass noted in graf five, before finally offering a reprieve. “But it’s time to move on and look at the pitching for the rest of the series.”
This reader is glad of that — and, if he’s still peeking at the papers, Steve Trachsel probably is, too.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.