THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I was actually at this game.  In addition to the incredible duel between Gooden and Tudor—scoreless through 9—it had the nice touch of a game-winning 10th inning HR by Cesar Cedeno (!) off Orosco (the first batter up after Gooden left).  This was during Cedeno’s wildly improbable stint as Jack Clark’s replacement, in which he went .434/.463/.750 for a month.  Then Tudor shut down the Mets in the bottom of the 10th for the CG win.  Great time to be a Cards fan among 52,000 very quiet Mets fans.

I remember watching this game on TV in St. Louis.  Awesome!  The insanely good ace of the ‘Evil’ Mets tosses nine shutout innings.  So Tudor tosses ten!

I believe I can still picture Tudor’s getting ready to throw a pitch in more detail than I can picture any hurler of the past ten years.

That’s *really* neat that Guy got to be there, and rootin’ for the good guys!

Silver King:  yeah, a great game.  Gooden and Tudor finished 1/2 in the CY vote that year.  And the Cards and Mets had the best records in NL. 

I actually attended an even better Mets-Cards game at Shea two years later (from Cards fan perspective, not a classic game).  Cards came to town in Sept. 1987 with a 1.5 game lead, but Mets were surging (they had been 9.5 back at All-Star break).  First game of the series the Mets managed to knock Tudor out early, and were leading 4-1 after 8.  Ozzie walked to lead off the 9th, but Mets then got two outs.  Shea was rocking:  2 outs, 3-run lead, this game was over and Mets were a half game out.  McGee singled to make it 4-2, but it still seemed hopeless.  Then Terry Pendleton his a line drive to dead center that just never came down until it cleared the fence to tie the game (and his wasn’t the Atlanta MVP Terry Pendleton, this was the punch-and-judy 10-H-a-year Terry Pendleton).  You have never seen 50,000 people go from screaming excitement to stunned silence so fast.  Cards scored two in the 10th to win the game, won again the next day, and never looked back.  Here’s the game: 
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1987/B09110NYN1987.htm

And weird thing is that BOTH of these games took place on 9-11.

Is the Burnett -Beckett game played this year between the Yankees and the Red Sox on August 7th going to be given consideration?  Or does it not count because neither starter pitched more than seven innings of what became a fifteen inning game?

(I found the game on Retrosheet by looking up the Yankees game log for 2009, then scrolling down to the one game that lasted more than five hours)