Interleague Begins (again)

Well it's that time of a year again. Yup, it's time for interleague play to begin...again. I never really understood why they play one series of interleague games before the real interleague match ups begin, but that's for another day. So there are certainly a lot of boring match ups out there: Yankees and Astros should be a mismatch (but you never know). And Mariners and Padres? Jeez, there might be like 3 runs scored in that entire series. But one match up for tonight that intrigues me: Blue Jays and Rockies. This is not really because of the teams, though. It's because of the pitchers. The pitching match up for tonight? Ricky Romero and Ubaldo Jiminez.

Now if you look at their stats side by side, Ubaldo certainly is the better pitcher. At 11-1 with an absurd ERA of 0.93, he is clearly the best pitcher in baseball right now (sorry Strasburg). But Romero is no slouch, either. In his second season in the bigs, Romero has a 5-2 record with a 3.06 ERA and 86 Ks in 85.1 innings. In his last start against the Yanks, he dominated, going 8 innings giving up only 2 runs. He was certainly very impressive.

Besides the great pitching match up, it should be intriguing how Jiminez does against such a home run happy club like the Jays. I saw first hand what they could do when they played the Yankees. I also noticed that they seemed to have a real hard time hitting really good off speed pitches. Andy Pettite racked up a season high 10 Ks against them using mostly his curveball, and Javy Vazquez got 9 using a variety of change ups, curves, and sliders. Jiminez is known for his 100 MPH and great sinker and splitter. He does have a slider and change up so it will be interesting to see if Cy Jiminez uses a lot of those pitches.

So that should be a great match up. And another interesting interleague match up? Mets and Orioles. Mets, a terrible road team; Orioles, just a terrible, terrible team. Should be interesting.