Having watched Holliday for 4 months in Oakland, I can tell you that both my girlfriend and I predicted Holliday would drop the fly ball yesterday-predicted it once we saw him lumbering in.

He’s certainly hustling more than he did for the A’s. And I have seen the comments about “advanced fielding metrics suggest that Holliday is outstanding.”

Sorry. For 100 games I saw him stagger around out in left, misplaying balls and allowing extra bases regularly.

I know Cards fans have seen the improved version. His at-bats are definitely more energetic. But he isn’t a young Barry Bonds in left. And while I don’t think dropped balls will be common for him, not getting to balls at all will be.

The very fact that Holliday makes that play 998 times out of 1000 is why he’s the goat. Did other players fail in critical situations? Yes. But their odds of success were not nearly as good. And unlike Franklin’s failures (or Ryan’s, or whoever else), the Dodgers were not involved. That is, once the ball was in the air, no Dodger was making it more difficult for Holliday to catch the ball. Whereas, Dodger players were making it more difficult for Franklin to get outs, Ryan to get hits, etc.

It’s also worth noting that Holliday’s backwards K in the 1st inning of game 1 was absolutely abysmal, and crippling to a tremendous chance of blowing the game open before the Dodgers even came to bat in the series. If you believe in the idea of setting the tone or whatever…

Indeed, a little part of my soul died with Holliday’s error.  But that’s part of baseball.

Incidentally, I’m not sure what to think about Holliday’s strikeout in game one.  If you look at the pitch f/x for that at-bat, you will see that not one of those pitches was actually in the strike zone.  Moreover, the first pitch of the at-bat, which was called a ball, was virtually identical (probably actually identical horizontally) to pitches three, four, and five.  So, maybe Holliday should have swung anyway after two strikes, but pitch five was *not* in the strike zone, and it would be hard to defend the umpire on the grounds that he was calling a consistent (though wide) zone.