Rarities

Portland: L, 5-8 (45 PA, .306, .444, .601; 6.3 IP, 17 ER, 24.16 ERA) Confession time: I too often look to see how my little brother’s team is doing each night, and take so much please when something happens that he would consider to be, as the NHS baseball coach likes to say, “ungood.” Can you imagine my delight when I saw that two of his pitchers put up horrendous numbers? I quickly jumped onto the EFL Allocations page to see if either Marquez or Thornton were allocated…and unluckily, as you can see by his score, only Marquez is allocated this month, and only at 33%. Stop making good choices, Mark! The silver lining is that he still lost, and I gained the games I lost yesterday. 

Flint Hill: W, 3 – (-1) (30 PA, .259, .323, .582; 15.3 IP, 2 ER, 1.17 ERA) You might have known, or at least guessed, that the Maddux pitched by Mikolas who is coached by M. Maddux benefited my team. And look at that sparkling pitching line! Which is good because my usually productive offense took the night off (well, Trout took the night off and apparently everyone else was so disheartened they decided to join him by doing NOTHING at the plate). 

Old Detroit: W, 10-7 (34 PA, .355, .412, .645; 2.7 IP, 0 ER, 0.00 ERA) You know whose offense didn’t take the night off? Kaline! Oh, and also DC. And Bellingham. And Haviland. Who cares if this is Old Detroit’s game update. He gets to write about his team all the time, so I am going to use his space to write about other teams. So many teams had great hitting days yesterday. I’ll tell you about them below. 

Pittsburgh: DNP, 0-0 (29 PA, .125, .267, .375; .3 IP, 0 ER, 0.00 ERA) Originally I thought I had miscopied Pittsburgh’s stats for today, because his record, his runs scored and his runs allowed are all almost identical to yesterday. Except for two small changes – he lost .1 runs allowed and he lost .001 PCT. points off the Roseburps. And if you look at his stats you’ll see they were pretty abysmal. He should feel lucky he didn’t lose any of his runs scored.

Haviland: L, 5-6 (26 PA, .250, .308, .625; 2 IP, 0 ER, 0.00 ERA) Haviland had a mediocre day, mostly because they didn’t get quite enough pitching to cover a game. They had 6 hits on the day, and 3 of them were HR (2 by Tyler O’Neill in support of Mikolas’ near-Maddux). Sadly for them, just a day or so after being benched by his manager, Tapia went 4 for 5 with a HR and a 2B. Those kinds of days from recently benched players just make me mad. Except when they happen to other teams. Then they make me happy. 

Canberra: W, 4-3 (30 PA, .296, .367, .519; 5 IP, 1 ER, 1.80 ERA) The Kangaroos did just enough yesterday to eke out a win and hop past the Pears for 6th in the league. They were led by the three players on their team whose last name begins with H (Hoskins, Hampson, Huira) who all OPSed over .900 while the rest of the alphabet decided to go 2 for 17. And what do you know…Snell found his old form, turning into a beautiful butterfly.

Peshastin: L, 4-9 (12 PA, .417, .385, .583; 9.3 IP, 8 ER, 7.71 ERA) Maybe you are like me and you are wondering, “how can someone’s OBP be lower than their AVG?” I was perplexed, so I googled it, and it turns out that a sacrifice fly will not impact your AVG but will lower your OBP. Which is how the Pears did it last night. Too bad their pitching was a little “offlin,” as Eflin gave up 7 of those 9 runs. 

Kaline: W, 8-3 (33 PA, .370, .485, .630; 6 IP, 1 ER, 1.50 ERA) Kaline may have had the best day yesterday, with a complete effort turned in by his offense and his pitchers. An Edgar Martinez Day led by three surprising guys (Mercado, Adames, and Gurriel) and a stellar start from the recently injured Fried (and, apparently, a once again injured Fried).

Cottage: “L,” 7-6 (32 PA, .308, .438, .462; 1 IP, 0 ER, 0.00 ERA)  A very good day from Cottage hitters and not enough pitching from the pitchers (he warned us about this!). Cheese ownership is undoubtedly happy that his two best hitters yesterday were Verdugo and Seager, both from his favorite team, the Dodgers. That is what we call a double portion! It might help to subdue the pain from losing even though he outscored his opponent. 

Bellingham: w 1, L -1; 2-0 (25 IP, .304, .360, .565; no pitching) What a day! If you are only going to score 2 runs, you better hope you don’t give up any runs, and alas, the Cascades didn’t. Harper and Vogt led the team in hitting, and the pitching was non-existent, but that didn’t matter. 

Brookland: W, 13-10 (16 PA, .500, .563, 1.571!!; 2.3 IP, 3 ER, 11.57 ERA) The Outs had 3 batters play yesterday, and their names were Bellinger (2 HR), D’arnaud (3 HR) and Gurriel (0 hits). Two batters combined to score 13 runs for the Outs. How amazing is that? 

DC: L, 6-6 (38 PA, .294, .368, .441; 5.7 IP, 4 ER, 6.35 ERA) The Balk had quite a day at the plate, led by three dudes with frat-boy names (Brock, Andrew, and Ryan). Scooter Gennett repaid his manager’s trust in him with an 0 for 4, though. Tapia got benched and went off, Gennett came off the bench and quit hitting. Makes sense.