holiday hurly-burly has caught up to me; posting late and light today. before marquis' next start i'll take a look at his game last night and see what i see. i can say that the box score sure looks like last year's marquis -- five whiffs, no walks, and a 16-5 groundout-flyout ratio. the same was not true of last week's two-hitter against washington, which -- though welcome -- featured a 12-12 ground-air split and, frankly, came against a weak lineup in a pitcher's park. so yesterday's repeat performance would seem to offer far more encouragement. danup attributes it to fastballs down in the zone, while bellyscratcher sees plain ol'-fashioned confidence. whatever it is, i'm sure we're all glad to see it. i said last week that marquis' last five or six starts would be among the most important games left on the regular-season schedule; the longer jason's re-emergence continues, the more true that becomes.
i may as well add that admire the hell out of the guy for hanging in there. for all his frustrations this summer, he has never let them detract from team goals. perhaps his manager did, but you never heard jason frothing over with negativity or defensiveness. if he gets it back together in time to rescue his spot in the postseason rotation, he will have earned the reward in full measure. i'm rooting for him.
more on carp-v-clemens for cy young: the stat frat is beginning to crack. my colleague marc normandin at Beyond the Boxscore clearly wants to come down in carp's camp, even if the numbers still seem to say clemens (or even willis). aaron gleeman at hardball times thinks clemens should get it but allows that "Chris Carpenter has amazingly pitched well enough to make it a close call". if you want to relive their showdown from saturday night, cardnilly live-blogged it --- great read even if you watched the whole game.
also, in case you missed this comment from yesterday's game thread, hummingbird posted a list of teams that had both the cy young and mvp award winners.
