News
Cards' finale in Washington rained out
Lohse scratched as starting pitcher prior to postponement
By Lisa Winston / MLB.com
05/03/09 5:30 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- It was a busy two hours for Cardinals right-hander Kyle McClellan on Sunday afternoon.In that period between right after 12 p.m. CT, when he was announced as the last-minute substitute starter against the Washington Nationals in place of scheduled pitcher Kyle Lohse, and 2:29 p.m., when the game was officially postponed indefinitely, Lohse went from reliever to starter mode, while also handling the duties of Cardinals player representative to start discussing the makeup game scenarios.
He handled both with the equanimity necessary for a reliever.
"That's kind of life in the bullpen, you know?" said McClellan, who would have been making his first Major League start since cracking the big league staff to open 2008. "All of a sudden, the phone rings, and you have to get ready to go."
McClellan, who has a 3.09 ERA in 11 games this season, has had tastes of all of those mentalities. The club's 25th-round pick in the 2002 First-Year Player Draft, he was a starter for the first four years of his pro career before undergoing Tommy John elbow ligament replacement surgery, after which he was shifted to relief.
Knowing that had the game started it would have inevitably been stopped intermittently by rain delays, Cards manager Tony La Russa opted to go with a "rotation by relief" so that he could give his eight-man bullpen some work and not mess up his regular starters with short stints.
The choice to hand the ball to McClellan, who had not pitched since April 28, was not a hard one.
"He's rested, and he's got starter stuff," La Russa said. "The only negative to that is that if we'd played, it would have been hard to get him five innings, so you kind of set him up for either a loss or a no-decision, which is not your favorite thing to do."
McClellan understood that and was fine with it, had the game been played.
"It's just like being in the bullpen where you have to get ready quick," McClellan said. "Obviously, I wasn't going to go out there and throw 100 pitches, so my goal would have been to get as many outs as quick as I could and try to save some of the bullpen after me."
The game would have been the last in a four-game series between the Cards (17-8) and the Nationals (6-17), a series which St. Louis led, 2-1, after winning the first two games before falling Saturday afternoon.
A steady rain started falling early Sunday morning, and the forecast didn't look promising, but while other games on the East Coast were being postponed, including the Mets' game at Philadelphia, just two hours north, the Cards and Nationals held out hope that they might be able to get the game in.
That optimism had a lot to do with scheduling.
This was St. Louis' only series in Washington this season, and the options to schedule a makeup date in D.C. are, in the words of Nationals president Stan Kasten, "really ugly."
That's not an exaggeration. The two clubs share three mutual off-days between now and season's end, and all conflict with an MLB rule that teams cannot play more than 20 days in a row without a day off.
So while the Cardinals waited out the rain delay in the visiting clubhouse, the fill-in starter, McClellan, was also manning the phones to see if he could start figuring out the options.
"Right now, we're in the middle of trying to get that figured out," said McClellan. "This is my first time doing this, but I just got off the phone with the scheduling people, and they're waiting to hear from the Nationals about what they would like to do."
So for now, the situation remains up in the air. If no waiver is received to play on one of the off-days in Washington, the next likely option will be to play a doubleheader during one of the teams' games Aug. 28-30 in St. Louis and split the gate.
Lisa Winston is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
