Mo vs K-rod

After Sunday night of watching HBO shows TrueBlood and the series premiere of Hung (jury's out, will give it another shot) I decided to flip on the end of the Mets Yankees game. Pretty interesting situation took place.

The Yanks brought in Mo with 2 outs in the eighth while the Mets were threatening. Mo ended up getting the backwards K and getting out the inning. Score is 3-2 Yanks.

Enter K-Rod to pitch the top of the ninth. The Yanks with 2 outs have runners on 1st and 2nd with Jeter due up and Mariano Rivera on deck. Conventional wisdom is that you need to walk Jeter to get to MO. The Yankees had a token pitch hitter on the on deck circle, but the whole world knows there is no way they are going to pull Rivera and lose him for the ninth (and it is situations like this why NL ball is great, you need to actually use your head as a manager as opposed to just sending up juiced up monsters and saying hit it hard).

What the Mets did next was strange. Idiotic really. They threw a first pitch strike to Jeter....? Ultimately they ended up throwing two more pitches (outside balls) and finally gave the intentional walk to Jeter. The look Jeter gave to K-rod when he pitched to him at first was priceless. He smiled and then looked over the Mo in the dugout like "are you serious here?" Up comes Career 0-2 hitter Mariano with the bases loaded.

Mo actually looks pretty good at the plate and draws a 2-0 count to start. After a good battle he draws a 3-2 count where Krod actually looks scared to just get one over the plate, overthrows, and ends up walking Mariano for his first ever RBI. It was a pretty cool situation where you hardly see two of the best closers in the game square off against each other. Yanks go on to win. Mariano picks up his 500th save, blah blah.