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Wild Pitches: Score 'em anyway you can By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
| Run of the week Who says the Colorado Rockies don't know how to get a runner home from second base? Heck, last Sunday in Cincinnati, they got a runner home from second base in a way no team probably ever has. In the fifth inning, catcher Sal Fasano, hitting .133 at the time, thumped a two-out double. But that wasn't even the most unlikely event of the inning. One pitch later, with Rockies pitcher Denny Neagle at the plate, Reds catcher Kelly Stinnett attempted to throw the ball back to pitcher Lance Davis -- and managed to fire the ball past Davis and all the way into center field. The ball nestled into the Bermuda Triangle between second baseman Todd Walker and centerfielder Ruben Rivera. And by the time Walker ran it down, Fasano was able to score all the way from second. Standing up. On a throw back to the pitcher. "Sal says to me later, 'That never happened to me before,'" Rockies coach-witticist Rich Donnelly told Wild Pitches. "I said, 'Sal, that never happened to Deion before. Nobody's ever scored from second on a throw back to the pitcher.'" "That's a play we've been working on with Sal for a while," Rockies manager Buddy Bell quipped afterward. "First, we have him hit a double, then have him act like he's going to get picked off." Hot Stove League of the week A few days before the fashionable new NexTurf surface at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium messed with the sanctity of the NFL preseason, it tried its best to deep-fry a couple of baseball teams. The temperature on the field during a Phillies-Padres game Aug. 9 at the Vet was recorded at 148 degrees. Which just went to prove what a superior surface NexTurf was to old-fangled AstroTurf. Two years ago, on a similar day, the old turf heated up to 160. After that game, Phillies outfield-quotesmith Doug Glanville said: "I'll never look at another piece of bacon the same -- because now I can relate." But after this game, Glanville said a mere "148-degree sauna" was "not baconesque." "However," he told Wild Pitches, "it did remind me of what it would be like if you took Mom's apple turnover out of the oven with your bare hands. Of course, only if your hands were laced with lighter fluid." Disciplinarian of the week Three members of the Detroit Tigers were suspended by baseball discipline-czar Frank Robinson this week for their roles in that wild brawl in Kansas City last weekend. The funny thing was, the only member of the Tigers who was ejected after that brawl, coach Doug Mansolino, wasn't one of them. Mansolino did have a chance to plead his case to Robinson over the telephone, though. But afterward he wasn't sure how well he'd pleaded. "I can't say he was poker-faced, since he was on the phone," Mansolino told Booth Newspapers' Tigers beat writer, Danny Knobler. "But he was poker-voiced." Rundown of the week It may not have been one of those rundowns that your high school coaches will show you for guidance and inspiration and proper rundown technique. But the Chicago Cubs will never get tired of watching it, anyway. They had runners on first and second with one out in the ninth inning of their Aug. 7 game with the Rockies. Joe Girardi roped a single to left. Ricky Gutierrez took off from second on his way to scoring the winning run. And then ... Oops. Gutierrez rounded third -- and, in poetic Cubs fashion -- fell down. What happened next, in the words of Girardi, was simply "chaos." Gutierrez was hung up between third and home. Sammy Sosa was hung up between second and third. And Girardi figured the least he could do, just to complicate things, was try to get hung up between first and second. So, as Gutierrez scrambled back toward third, the Rockies ultimately settled on trying to run down Girardi. Various Rockies tossed the ball back and forth, back and forth. Girardi lurched in one direction, then the other, then the other. Sosa sneaked back into second. And suddenly, Gutierrez -- after several false bursts -- took off for home. Just as Girardi gave up and stopped, Gutierrez skidded in with the winning run. And a house full of people at Wrigley Field alternately celebrated and tried to figure out what the heck had just happened. "All I know," said Rich Donnelly, after witnessing this fiasco from the Rockies' dugout, "is that every Cub was in that rundown except Ernie Banks. And that rundown took longer than it took for us to hit in any inning." Rumble-bumble-stumble of the week Speaking of tumbles, Randy Johnson reminded us again Monday why he's known for his pitching exploits, as opposed to his hitting exploits. In the seventh inning of a game against the Pirates, he lined a ball into the right-field corner that might have been a triple for Tony Womack. Which meant even the Big Unit thought it was a double for him. Or at least he did until he was two steps beyond first base -- and lost a hub cap or something. Down he went, leaving him no choice but to retreat safely to first, as the entire population of the BOB erupted in a Frasier-esque laugh track. "I think everybody was laughing but me," manager Bob Brenly told the East Valley Tribune's Ed Price. "I had a small stroke in there. I don't like to see the big guy on the ground." Best quotes of the night: Time to congratulate those Milwaukee Brewers for posting the Round Number of the Week. Tuesday, they struck out for the 1,000th time this season -- a full two weeks earlier than any other team in history had ever done that. So needless to say, the Brewers are shopping at a very special K-Mart. They're on a pace to strike out 1,389 times this year -- which not only will break the all-time record, set by the '96 Tigers (in a game against the Brewers, ironically), but break it by 185 KKKKKKKKKKKKs. "Maybe if we break it at home," catcher Raul Casanova told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Drew Olson, "they'll set off fireworks or something." Ichirism of the week Another historic event in the life of Ichiro took place last week: His first career at-bat against John Rocker. Naturally, the crowd at Jacobs Field buzzed noticeably. "I heard the crowd," Ichiro said afterward. "I thought John Rocker must be very popular here." Lucky 13 of the week Just because only one team in the history of the American League had ever scored 13 runs in the ninth inning didn't mean no team would ever do it again. But if any team ever did, you probably didn't figure it would be a team that had just finished scoring exactly one run in five straight games. That would be those never-a-dull-moment Detroit Tigers. And on Aug. 8 in Texas, locked in a 6-6 tie after eight innings, the team that couldn't score two runs a night suddenly forgot how to make an out. All nine Tigers in the lineup batted before anybody made an out in the ninth. Eventually, 17 Tigers came to the plate in the inning. Three of them got two hits in the inning. Shane Halter had an RBI double and a grand slam. It was the first time the Tigers had scored 13 runs in any inning since Ty Cobb's 1925 Tigers did it in the sixth inning of a game against Babe Ruth's Yankees. But who, Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler asked manager Phil Garner, would have dreamt that this team would be the next to do it? "Don't ask me," Garner said. "Just start writing. I've never seen anything quite like it." Six-shooter of the week In that same game, the Tigers did yet one more thing they hadn't done since 1925: Damion Easley became the first Tiger since Cobb himself to get six hits in a nine-inning game. Cobb did it, by the way, against the St. Louis Browns on May 5, 1925. This whole Tigers team hadn't gotten six hits in a game 11 different times this year -- or in about 10 percent of its games. "There's been a lot of times our whole team didn't get six hits," Garner said. "I got six hits one week -- and I was hot." Easley, on the other hand, wasn't so hot. Until the night before this game, he'd been 0 for his last 18. What a sport. Single of the week It was the most anxiously awaited single since Pete Rose passed Ty Cobb. From July 18 until Wednesday, the great Mark McGwire hit 11 home runs and, as the world so enthusiastically counted along at home, no other kinds of hits. No singles. No doubles. No triples. No bunts. No bloopers. In the meantime, to almost no acclaim, Braves shortstop Rey Sanchez had extended his own mirror-image streak of 258 consecutive hits that weren't home runs, to absolutely no fanfare. And when you think about this homer-crazed age we live in, Sanchez's streak might be more impossible than Big Mac's. Well, Sanchez's homerless run continues. But McGwire's all-homer run finally ended, with a fifth-inning single Wednesday off the Reds' Chris Reitsma. Big Mac's excited reaction to all this clamor: "You guys write about the stupidest things. It's a silly stat. I like singles just as much as home runs." Inside job of the week Until last weekend, no National League catcher had hit an inside-the-park home run in six years -- since the Pirates' long-lost Angelo Encarnacion did it on Aug. 19, 1995.
Every game is an adventure for the Devil Rays. So the finish of their 4-3 win over the Twins last Saturday fit right in. In the eighth inning, Chad Allen hit a groundball to second baseman Brent Abernathy that hopped up on him -- and got stuck in the button flap of his shirt. After a moment of brief panic, Abernathy yanked the ball out of the shirt and threw Allen out. So he was able to avoid a life sentence in blooper-tape eternity. "But I don't know what I would have done if it had gone all the way in my shirt," he told the St. Petersburg Times' Marc Topkin. "Run to home plate and just stand there?" Box score line of the week Devil Rays pitcher Ryan Rupe, Thursday vs. the Yankees: 5 2/3 IP 9 H 11 R 10 ER 3BB 6 K, 2 HR, 1 HBP Stat of the day Rupe became the fourth pitcher this year to give up 11 runs in a game -- and the second Devil Ray to allow at least 10. (Bryan Rekar gave up 10 to the Indians on May 11.) Quote of the day "Every fastball I threw, I felt like it got hit and got hit hard," Rupe said, perceptively. Box score line of the week (minor league dept.) Keith Brandon, Gulf Coast Tigers, on Aug. 8 vs. Gulf Coast Royals -- in RELIEF. 4 IP 17 H 9 R 9 ER 0 BB 2 K Stat of the day Brandon gave up as many hits in four innings as he'd allowed all season (in 14 appearances) before that. Hard to do. Trifecta of the week On Aug. 7, pitching on his 28th birthday, Reds closer Danny Graves did something that no pitcher had done since the hey day (brief as it was) of the Seattle Pilots. He gave up three home runs in an extra inning (the 11th) -- to the Giants (Barry Bonds, Andres Galarraga and Marvin Benard). The Giants hadn't hit any home runs that day in regulation. Last pitcher to give up three homers in an extra inning, according to the Elias Sports Bureau: Vicente Romo of the late, great Pilots, on May 16, 1969, against the Red Sox. "I know one thing," Graves said afterward. "Hopefully, I'll never ever pitch on my birthday again." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Wild Pitches appears each week. |
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