Peavy Goes Down And Pads Go Down With Him.

True to form the Pads never gave up in their first game of the series against St. Louis even though they ended up losing 8-5. The loss came after Ramon Hernandez struck out with 2 out in the 9th and the bases loaded. The Pads never give up no matter what.

The troubling part of the game was Jake Peavy's unusually bad performance: 8 runs in less than 5 innings. Turns out the reason Peavy did so poorly is because he started the game with at least one broken rib. The broken rib wasn't discovered until an MRI was taken after the game. Peavy appears not to have known that he had the broken rib before the game but he did know he had an injury. It's not clear from these stories (here and here) whether the team knew about it but the trainer appears to have been in the dark.

Peavy's strongest suit is his intense competitiveness and his talent will be missed. If he failed to tell the team about his rib pain before the game then it's not the team's mistake, it's his. If he did tell them, the question is what did they do to investigate the injury. Either way, it's looking like it was a huge mistake to let him start game 1 of this series.

Of course, Peavy's problems on the mound don't account for the Pads failure to push any runs across the plate in the first innings when they had several chances. But that's the Pads' offense we've seen all year.

Pedro Astacio's gonna have to dial it up on Thursday to tie the series for the return to San Diego. A good chance given Pedro's outstanding performance in the last month of the season.

-tdr