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Wild Pitches By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
| Box score line of the week Our winner, Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, last Sunday at Fenway: 6 IP, 14 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 1 BB, 1 K, 1 HBP. Stat of the day The last Yankees starter to give up 14 hits or more to the Red Sox was Ed Figueroa, who tossed a stylish 15-hitter in a 7-5 loss on Sept. 28, 1976. Quote of the day "All you can say is it was a crazy, ugly game," Pettitte said. Box score no-line of the week Normally, it's the crooked numbers in the box scores that tell the most eloquent tales. In the case of Yankees rookie reliever Randy Choate, it was the absence of just about any numbers. Choate also pitched in Fenway last Sunday, compiling this line: 0 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 0 K, 1 HBP, 5 pitches, 0 strikes. In the course of this cameo appearance, Choate threw two warm-up pitches to the screen, threw another warm-up that catcher Jorge Posada could only deflect on the way by, hit Trot Nixon with his third pitch that counted, then got yanked after going 2 and 0 to the next hitter, Darren Lewis. Asked, by the Boston Globe's Bob Hohler, what he was thinking as Choate was losing track of home plate on his radar screen, Nixon replied: "Was this his first Yankee-Red Sox game?" Minor league box score line of the week The Diamondbacks brought pitcher Jason Jacome back from the Central League in Japan this spring for a shot at reincarnation. He wound up at Triple-A Tucson, where he compiled this line Thursday vs. Omaha. 5 IP, 13 H, 10 R, 10 ER, 2 BB, 1 K, 1 HR, 1 WP, 1 HBP, 1 balk. Jacome gave up five runs in the first, allowed an extra-base hit in every inning and still almost got a win out of this, when his offense rallied to take an 11-10 lead in the top of the sixth. But alas, his bullpen blew a save for him. There's no justice -- even in the PCL. Marathon of the week It wasn't a baseball game. It was a Tolstoy novel. The Yankees and Blue Jays played a game Thursday in Toronto that kept going and going and going. For 17 innings. For 5 hours and 57 minutes. This game went so long, many Kenyans practically would have had time to run the Boston Marathon three times. Next to that Flyers-Penguins five-overtime Stanley Cup game last spring, this was the longest sporting event of the 2000s. It included (among other things) 529 pitches, 35 hits, 31 strikeouts, 35 runners left on base (19 by the Yankees, who won). It also included four different half-innings where a team loaded the bases but didn't score. And above all, it included 21 shutout innings by the two bullpens -- 4 2/3 of which were twirled by the Yankees' Brian Boehringer between the 12th and 16th. During which he threw 77 pitches. In relief. "We saw a stretcher outside our clubhouse," said Joe Torre afterward. "We didn't know whether he was on it." Stupid bat trick of the week Here's just how hot the Twins have been: Last Friday night, in a tense game against the White Sox, rookie center fielder Bobby Kielty hit a bases-loaded ground ball to Sox third baseman Herbert Perry. Perry could have gone for an around-the-horn double play to end the inning. Instead, he threw to the plate. Naturally, Kielty had tossed his bat down to the third-base side of the batter's box. And naturally, Perry's throw hit the bat. And naturally, the ball then bounced into the Twins' dugout, allowing the tying run to score. And naturally, the Twins went on to win, 7-4. When the smoke cleared, Denny Hocking told Kielty: "That's the first time I've ever seen you hit the barrel twice in one at-bat." Bad strategy of the week Ah, but even the Twins aren't hot enough to pull off the old hidden-bat trick every night. They are hot enough, though, that even when they lose, it's not just a loss. It's an adventure. So last Monday, they turned what looked like a routine 5-3 loss to Kansas City into a ninth-inning spine-tingler. They loaded the bases with one out. Up stepped Hocking to hit a line-drive rocket that appeared bound for the right-field corner to tie or win the game. And then ... Royals first baseman David McCarty, just in for defense, leaped, grabbed it and turned into a game-ending line-drive double play. Some teams might look at this as bad luck. The Twins are so out of control, they just looked at it as bad aim. "I was stupid," Hocking alibied afterward. "You don't hit an 8-foot line drive to a 6-foot-5 first baseman. You hit it to a 5-8 shortstop." Crime victim of the week Everybody gets robbed of a hit once in a while. But what's happened lately to Phillies leadoff-quotesmith Doug Glanville is a felony, not a misdemeanor. In the same series against the Cubs, he had one rocket accidentally deflect off the glove of the pitcher (Julian Tavarez) and wind up 100 feet away in the glove of the second baseman (Eric Young) -- and had another bullet hit the glove of a diving Ricky Gutierrez in the shortstop hole, then carom into the air and come back down in Gutierrez's glove as he rolled over. So what's the equivalent of all that in real crime terms? "It's like having your car stolen out of your garage, where the thief leaves a bicycle so you can still get to work," Glanville told Wild Pitches. "Then he calls to make sure you renew the auto insurance." Slide of the week When the Giants visited Milwaukee last weekend, first baseman J.T. Snow ambled up to Bernie Brewer's Dugout before batting practice -- and took a spin down Bernie's new winding slide. "I figured I'd get to see what Bernie feels like," Snow told the San Francisco Chronicle's Henry Schulman. "It seems like he'll be sliding down a lot this year with all the home runs flying out this year. He'll have to get a new suit by the end of the year." Speedball of the week Before Chuck Finley and Tigers knuckleball king Steve Sparks matched up last Saturday at Comerica Park, they didn't exactly look like your classic 1-0 game kind of guys. Finley had allowed seven runs in two innings in his previous start. And going back to his last outing of spring training, Sparks had given up 24 hits in his previous 9 2/3 innings. So was there any doubt that Sparks would throw a complete-game four-hitter, Finley would throw a complete-game three-hitter, the only run would score in the first inning on an infield single, stolen base and two fly balls, and the Tigers would be shaking hands just 2 hours and 3 minutes after the first pitch? Russell Branyan on Sparks: "I bet he didn't even break a sweat." Finley on the breakneck pace: "The main thing is, we made Bud Selig happy. He's been trying to speed up the game." Not-so-grand slam of the week One of the season's goofiest moments took place in Syracuse last Saturday, in an International League game between Scranton and Syracuse. With the bases loaded in the fifth inning, Syracuse's Luis Lopez hooked a shot to left that appeared to curl to the wrong side of the foul pole. But plate ump Andy Shultz called it fair -- for an apparent grand slam. But Scranton manager Marc Bombard burst out of the dugout to debate the call. His argument was so animated and compelling, baserunner DeWayne Wise stopped momentarily to listen. And teammate Aaron Holbert then passed him on the bases. So instead of a strike or a slam, Lopez got a three-run homer out of it. "I've never seen a home run that went foul called fair, and then they catch a runner passing another" Bombard said. "That was a first for me." Comerican beauty of the week There's only one ballpark in our great land where you can hit a ball 435 feet and have it not be a home run. That would be Detroit's Comerica National Park. And Tigers rookie Brandon Inge became its latest victim last Friday. Inge pounded one to the wall near the center-field flagpole, two zip codes away from home plate, off Cleveland's C.C. Sabathia. But all he got was a double out of it. Welcome to the I Visited Comerica And All I Got Was This Lousy Double Club, buddy. Asked by Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler if he could hit a ball any harder, Inge said: "No. It was a 98-mph fastball. And I hit it as hard as I can. It's not possible for me to hit one out there. When I hit it, I said, 'If that ball doesn't go out, I quit.' " This just in: He was still on the active roster entering the weekend. Burglars of the week That old "thou shalt not steal" adage apparently doesn't apply in Canada this year -- the scene of the only two straight steals of home all season. Let it never be said that all Bob Boone does while managing the Reds is write out the lineup card, then kick up his feet for the rest of the night. In the ninth inning Wednesday, he used a pinch runner for a pinch runner, who was running for a pinch hitter. He used Ken Griffey Jr. to pinch-hit for Dennys Reyes. Then, after Griffey walked, he used pitcher Chris Reitsma to pinch-run for Griffey. But when Reitsma moved to second on a walk by Dmitri Young, Boone sent another pitcher, Jim Brower, in to run for Reitsma. "I didn't want Reitsma crashing in there (at home plate)," Boone said. "I want to keep my job another week." Plunkee of the week John Kruk once went more than five years without getting hit by a pitch, whereupon teammate Terry Mulholland observed: "He must have been one hell of a dodgeball player in elementary school." Which is a roundabout way of saying we know who must have lost all the dodgeball games 15 years ago in Lamar, Colo. That would be the boyhood home of Astros pitcher Scott Elarton. And he proved last Saturday just how quick his feet really aren't by getting hit by ywo pitches in one game against the Cardinals. At least he got an RBI out of the first one, since Rick Ankiel plunked him with the bases loaded. "My feet are in concrete in the batter's box," Elarton told the Houston Chronicle's Joseph Duarte, after becoming the first pitcher to get drilled twice in one game since Kevin Ritz, on April 28, 1995. "I actually tried to move on the one from Ankiel -- after it hit me, though. I just can't move." Weathermen of the week Just two homestands into the life of PNC Park, the Pirates have switched bullpens, from the lower bullen to the upper. Why? You ask. "We're in too much of an elite position," reliever Scott Sauerbeck told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto. "How's that for a crossword-puzzle word?" What that means, in non-crossword terms, is that it got a little chilly out there, with winds whipping through the pen and baseboard heaters not working real hot. "We know there are heaters there somewhere,?" Sauerbeck said. "We smelt them -- but we never felt them." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Wild Pitches appears each Friday. |
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