Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Redefining the “Clean Inning”

by Jason Franz

 The Dickson Baseball Dictionary defines a clean inning as an inning pitched where the pitcher does not give up a hit or a walk.

It’s been no secret that the saving grace of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ success has been their bullpen. While nowhere near perfect, they have been far stronger than merely solid. Let’s say a hardness factor of at least a 7. The D-Backs’ pen currently is the best in the bigs with a league low ERA of 2.53 (Houston is next at 2.63) with a fairly paltry 8 blown saves to the 24 saves converted, 19 by closer Brad Boxberger.

But the two big horses giving the bullpen cart the finger and running to the hill to dominate their inning or two of pitching have been Japanese import Yoshi Hirano and “The Beard,” Archie Bradley.

Hirano has been mowing every comer down, currently sitting with a 1.25 ERA, 33 strikeouts and a stoopid WHIP of 0.97. But the cleanest of his clean inning stats is that he has pitched 24 straight outings without giving up a single run. He has only surrendered one extra-base hit since May 6 – ONE. He has forced eight double plays, which puts him atop the NL for releivers. He has been as lock down as lock down can possibly come.

Bradley has been almost as solid, proving a perfect 8th inning option and developing into one of the very best relievers in baseball. Bradley’s numbers include a 2.08 ERA, 0.95 WHIP and 3 saves. And he’s still one of the most charismatic characters in the league. I keep waiting to see him pull a Sweet Lou Dunbar and start pulling gizmos out of his soup catcher.

But Bradley recently sent the notion of a clean inning the opposite way. While sitting in on a recent edition of the Yahoo! Sports MLB Podcast, The Beard was asked about the barfing episode by the Brewers’ Adrian Houser, a former roommate of Bradley’s. As only Archie can, he went on to top that story with a little on-the-field incident of his own. 

“So, it’s a 2-2 count, and I’m like, ‘Man, I have to pee. I have to go pee.’ So, I run in our bathroom real quick, I’m ready to go. I’m trying to pee and I actually shit my pants. Like right before I’m about to go in the game, I pooped my pants. I’m like ‘Oh my gosh.’ I know I’m a pitch away from going in the game, so I’m scrambling to clean myself up. I get it cleaned up the best I can, button my pants up, and our bullpen coach Mike Fetters says, ‘Hey, you’re in the game.’ So, I’m jogging into the game to pitch with poop in my pants essentially. It was the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been on the mound. And I actually had a good inning. I had a clean inning, and I walked in the dugout and I was like, ‘Guys, I just shit myself.’ They didn’t believe me, then the bullpen came in and they’re like ‘Oh my God, you had to see this’.”



As our founder and spirit guide Neal Pollack will tell you, poop plays. And a good story about shitting one’s pants while on the job will get clicks forever.

at No comments:
The Teams

Friday, June 15, 2018

There's No Place Like Home

by Neal Pollack

It's impossible to persuade a non-baseball fan that baseball is actually an engaging sport. Even a World Cup match between Iran and Morocco contains more intrigue to the uninitiated than your average MLB throwdown. The average midweek home broadcast contains 45 minutes of blather about "hitting mechanics", discussions about the mound-visit rule, and broadcasters yukking it up about who'll pick up the tab for that night's steak. I get it, baseball can be boring.


Only two occurrences make the jaded non-fan look up from their phones and stifle their yawns. The first, a home-run by the home team, creates such a chaos of noise and light that it's hard to act bored.




The other is the play at the plate.

 Wednesday night's Dodgers-Rangers game, an otherwise unremarkable midseason matchup between two teams with very little history between them, saw three separate masterpieces.

The first one got all the attention. In the third inning of a 1-0 game, the Dodgers' Kiké Hernandez hit a line-drive single to center. Matt Kemp was out, as Vin Scully used to say, from me to you, and he chose to take his frustrations out on Rangers catcher "Danger Will" Robinson Chirinos.  A nifty little schoolyard shoving match ensued, and both players got tossed.



An inning later, 53-year-old Adrian Beltre clearly got tagged out on a close play at the plate, involving a nifty throw from the always-mentioned Kiké Hernandez, but the gods in New York called him safe after a disputed call.




Then in the bottom of the 9th, with the bases loaded, Kiké Hernandez dashed home from 3rd and somehow avoided the catchers' tag using a salsa move of which Marc Anthony would approve.



Keep in mind that was the final play of the game. If every game ended like that, no one would ever be bored watching baseball again.
at No comments:
The Teams

Monday, June 11, 2018

Let’s Get Ready to RRRRRUMBLLLLLLE!

by Jason Franz


In the third base dugout, coming in at with 35 wins, 29 losses and one of the most miserable May’s in Major League Baseball history, your first place Arizona Diamondbacks!

And in the first base dugout, treading water just below .500 and having dropped seven of their last 10, the team that nobody wants to like but everybody loves to hate, the generally insignificant Pittsburgh Pirates!


To say the Diamondbacks and Pirates have some history is beyond subtle. Going way back to 2014 (hey, that’s like recalling the 1930’s for a Red Sox fan), these two teams have had an ongoing feud that began when some Pirates pitcher no one can recall hit Paul Goldschmidt on the wrist, causing a fracture and sitting him down the remainder of that season. The D-Backs came right back the next day with Randal Delgado plunking Andrew McCutchen square in the back.



It is on.

Two years later, some dude named Arquimedes Caminero decided to earn some goodwill with his Bucco teammates by going headhunting not once but twice during a 12-1 route of the Diamondbacks. Both former shortstop Jean Segura and current shortstop Nick Ahmed got hit in the head, Ahmed on the chin, which led to then-GM Tony La Russa charging into the Pirates’ broadcast booth to set some “inaccuracies” straight. Whatever, it was good drama.




So, here we are, two more years later and the Pirates are back in town and beanball is already in play. With the Pirates holding a 5-0 lead in the 7th, D-Backs reliever Braden Shipley popped Josh Harrison in the hip with a wild pitch and let another wild one sail over Starling Marte. And because they’re down 5-0, clearly these pitches were intentional, right?

Well, that’s what the Pirates seemed to think because they came right back in the bottom of the 7th to plunk Chris Owings in the back. This led to a 5-run inning to tie the game and the utter unraveling of the Pirates.


Diamondbacks win, 9-5.

Under Clint Hurdle, the Pittsburgh Pirates have hit more batters than any other team. What are the odds the Pirates are throwing at every hitter, the mascot and a couple of the vendors tomorrow?

at No comments:
The Teams

Thursday, June 7, 2018

No-Tation

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that the Dodgers' pitching staff has been bit by the injury bug. More like, "has been completely devoured by a pack of injury werewolves." Eighty percent of the Opening Day rotation is on the disabled list. Clayton Kershaw went on the DL with a bicep strain, came off, pitched five innings, and then left with a back problem. Hyun-Jin Ryu had a groin muscle tear off the bone. Rich Hill has a finger blister so virulent that he's starting to resemble second-reel Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. 

Fucking disgusting.

While Ross Striping and Walker (I am not Matthew Broderick) Buehler have held the line admirably, the Dodgers are still having to dredge the organizational lake to find guys to start games. Yesterday, they brought up a kid named Caleb Ferguson who only had a couple of AAA starts under his belt.


Ferguson didn't make it out of the second inning in a game that the Dodgers lost 11-9 to the lame Pittsburgh Pirates, even though Matt Kemp had so many hits. Then he was placed into a rotating space triangle and shot into the Phantom Zone.

Today's starter, 22-year-old Dennis Santana (ft. Rob Thomas)




literally got pulled from the game while he was throwing his bullpen warmups when Dave Roberts saw that his slider wasn't sliding. He will almost certainly go on the disabled list with a lat injury. This forced Daniel Hudson, last seen giving up many dingers for the Diamondbacks, to "start" the game, pitching one inning. The bullpen threw the entire game, setting a team record for most men to ever pitch in one game in a Dodger uniform (17). A pitcher named "Brock Stewart", who sounds like a stereotypical frat-boy villain, surrendered a three-run homer in the eighth.

And yet the Dodgers still won 8-7 because Joc Pederson and Cody Bellinger have risen to their statistical mean and are now hitting baseballs very far.



Booya. The Dodgers have now won 15 of 20 games and sit in third place, one-sixteenth of a game behind the Rockies or Diamondbacks or whoever. Screw those other teams. The Blue has actual pitchers lined up for the weekend series with the Braves, and then the next two games, I don't know? Are the Winklevoss Twins available?


at No comments:
The Teams

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Padres Fan Catches Foul Ball In Beer, Drinks Beer, Earns Seat In Valhalla

Listen: I was all set to write a blathering piece about how the Padres are showing signs of life, even greatness (well, "goodness"). True, they are in last place - 5.5 games out - but they've gone 6 and 4 in their last ten games, they are scoring (48 runs in their last 8 games), there's some power in their bats (Franmil Reyes has homered 4 times in his last 7 games, and Christian Villanueva leads all MLB rookies with 15 this season). And - this is important! - the NL West is a rancid cesspool of a division. (Waves at Neal and Other Jason.) The Padres may yet reach the .500 mark, which is really all that one can hope for this year.

But really, who gives a shit about all that unimportant nonsense, when we are witness to such wonders:





at No comments:

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Fourth Place With A Bullet

Three weeks ago, the Dodgers were ten games below .500, nine games out, mired in fourth place, and fans everywhere bemoaned what appeared to be a lost season. Now, after a monster weekend Coors Field rout of a Rockies team that appears to be mainlining THC dabs in the bullpen, the Dodgers are now only one game under .500, two games out...and still in fourth place.

None of this makes any logical sense, but I think we all know by now that baseball is stupid. For instance, the Dodgers' four best players this season have been Matt Kemp, who last year seemed fat and done in Atlanta;


Max Muncy, an Oakland reject who looks like he's playing 1st base in between shifts at the Quick-E-Lube; 


Ross Stripling, who has been a professional baseball player for a few years; and Walker Buehler, a child who until very recently was in the minor leagues but now will forever be subjected to hackneyed visual jokes like this:


Meanwhile, four of the Dodgers' five opening-day starters are on the disabled list. Hall-Of-Famer and person who Dodgers' broadcasters drone about Clayton Kershaw has been on the DL twice. Rich Hill's finger erupts into disgusting pustules every time he picks up a baseball. Corey Seager had Tommy John surgery. Justin Turner missed the first quarter of the season with a broken hand and has just been mediocre since he returned. Last year's Rookie Of The Year Cody Bellinger has been epically bad. 




via GIPHY

Oh, you think that's funny, Cody? How would you like to spend the rest of the summer in Oklahoma City, working on your swing?

At the moment, the Dodgers' rotation consists of Buehler, Stripling, Alex Wood, a rookie named Dennis Santana, and, I think, me. This smells like a fourth-place team.

And yet: The Dodgers still look pretty likely to win the division. The Diamondbacks spent a week bailing water out of the hull and have somehow remained on top. The Rockies gave up 33 runs in three games against the Dodgers over the weekend, blowing leads in each of the three games. If that team wins the division, I will eat my Fernando Valenzuela Happy Meal figurine that I've had since 1981. We all have affection toward the Padres, but that's not happening. And if the Giants win the division, all three contributors to this site will lock hands and jump off the Hoover Dam together.

All told, the fourth-place team is really the first-place team. After all, we have Max Muncy. Nothing could possibly go wrong now.
at No comments:

Friday, June 1, 2018

The Arizona Diamondbacks are the Dudley Do-Right of Major League Baseball

by Jason Franz

Into the central region of Arizona at the close of the Twenty-teens played the Diamondbacks of the baseball, lonely defender of Chase Field and fair play. Handsome, brave, daring...and hopelessly lost.

Once upon a time, when serial cartoons that featured characters that more than resemble our first lady and heroines who preferred horses to men, there was a daily show for the children of Arizona responsible for more chronic tardiness than a drunk school bus driver. The Wallace and Ladmo Show was one of the longest-running television programs ever and even featured a former baseball player, Ladimir Kwiatkowski, who played both for Arizona State University and in the Cleveland Indians farm system.

Wallace and Ladmo was home to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends cartoons, which featured perhaps the dimmest of all heroes – yes even, dimmer than Bullwinkle Moose – Dudley Do-Right, doer of good. Dudley was famous for being a handsome and rugged idiot, always stumbling into the traps of his arch rival Snidely Whiplash and whipped around by his horse-loving gal, Nell. 


This is all relevant because the Arizona Diamondbacks have, in fact, become the ridiculous fatuousness of Dudley Do-Right. They present themselves as handsome do-gooders, ready to fight on the side of righteousness, defending opponents in spite of their misguided ways, putting on a sheen on infallibility while their true nemesis wallows in misery of their own doing. Yet, despite it all they are doomed to unravel, allow an 8-game lead to slip through their batting gloves even though the rest of the division is playing .500 baseball and constantly saying, “Everything is just fine.”

 Hell, they even got beat by a guy who looks like Snidely Whiplash.

The irony in all of this is that the team that has managed to stay mediocre enough to grasp first place away from the D-Backs, the Colorado Rockies, the cockroaches of the NL West, are the setting where Dudley exists in all of his ineptitude.

So here we are, waiting to see what dastardly deed the next incapable bad guy can unleash upon the Diamondbacks, much like the miserable Sal Romano of the miserable Cincinnati Reds who outdueled Pat Corbin to snatch away a much-needed series sweep for the Snakes. And now we look to June, with seven games against the truly worst team in the National League sandwiching an away series against the Rockies.

Will Paul Goldschmidt return to his line drive hitting ways? Will the Diamondbacks’ pitchers continue to toes the line despite an offense that scores more runs than gets hits? Can AJ Pollack return to boost the pitiful offense? Or will the true villains of all teams NL West, the San Francisco Giants, find a way to tie the D-Backs to the tracks once again, only to see the Dodgers walk into July making kissy-face with the Chase Field bullpen cart?


Stay tuned to see if Goldschmidt can actually happen!
at No comments:
The Teams
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)