Showing posts tagged “ejection”
Adam Sobsey ·
13 Aug 2009, 5:00 AM ·
1 Comment
That ringing in your ears is the postman at the door, and the Bulls keep neglecting to answer. Actually, check that: the Bulls keep leaving the door open for the Gwinnett Braves, who respond each time by charging through it. For the second straight night, Durham took a one-run lead into the ninth inning; for the second straight night, their closer—Winston Abreu on Tuesday, Dale Thayer on Wednesday—let two runs score. Last night’s version was a 2-1 loss. Thayer had Gwinnett down to its final strike before giving up a game-winning, two-run single to Brandon Jones, who had the game-winning homer off Abreu the previous night.
So much about the tune is familiar. The Bulls left 11 men on base and were 2-13 with runners in scoring position; they had 13 baserunners but scored just a single run. Starter Jason Cromer had another excellent outing (it’s becoming almost routine for him), tossing six scoreless innings but getting no run support, as usual. He’s come away with a no-decision in nearly half his starts, even though all but one have been win-worthy. The first two Bulls to bat in the seventh inning reached on errors (both by Braves reliever Vladimir Nunez), but Reid Brignac botched a sacrifice bunt attempt—or so I gather from the play-by-play game recap—and the Bulls ultimately failed to score. Justin Ruggiano struck out again—nothing new there; he’s second in the league—but this time he went postal on home plate umpire James Thomas and was ejected for arguing balls and strikes (well, really just strikes, since he was probably happy with the balls). That forced Ray Olmedo and his .627 OPS to come in and hit cleanup in Ruggiano’s place. As it happened, Olmedo led off the sixth inning with a double. Jon Weber followed with a walk, but guess what? The Bulls failed to score.
Which is to say: the postman kept ringing, but it was the Bulls who couldn’t deliver, and they returned this victory to sender. The best position they can hope to be in when they return to Durham on Friday is a game behind Gwinnett. If they lose to rehabbing Braves stalwart Tim Hudson on Thursday, they’ll be three games back with North Division leader Scranton/Wilkes-Barre coming to the DBAP for a four-game wraparound weekend series. Yikes.
Meanwhile, more roster moves are in the mail. Details follow.
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Baseball, Durham Bulls, Tampa Bay Rays Akinori Iwamura, Brandon Jones, Bulls on the Move, Chad Bradford, Dale Thayer, ejection, Fernando Perez, Gwinnett Braves, Jason Cromer, Joe Dillon, John Meloan, Justin Ruggiano, Michel Hernandez, Mitch Talbot, Postman Always Rings Twice, R.J. Swindle, RISP, Runners In Scoring Position, Shawn Riggans, Winston Abreu
Adam Sobsey ·
9 Aug 2009, 5:00 AM ·
2 Comments
DBAP/ DURHAM—It has turned into a rather dreary homestand for the Durham Bulls, who are a gloomy 3-4 and tied for the International League South Division lead with Gwinnett, which is somewhat comforting until you’re reminded that the Bulls should probably be at least two games up. They just lost a pair of games they should have won.
I was thinking, on the way to the park last night, that one reason for the Bulls’ middling results was that they hadn’t had a really good starting pitching performance during the homestand. The best was Andy Sonnanstine’s three runs in six innings on Tuesday night, which is really only decent, especially when you consider that he allowed nine hits in that game. It counted as a so-called “quality start,” but all it did was reiterate that “quality start”—which designates at least six innings and fewer than four runs allowed—is a poorly conceived statistic: a season of “quality starts” translates to a thoroughly so-so 4.50 ERA.
So it seemed that the Bulls were badly in need of a stopper-like start, even a dominant start, and it further seemed that Wade Davis (pictured, top) was the man to give it to them. He has been a bit inconsistent recently, allowing five runs in three of his last five starts, but in his usual fashion he always competed hard, and it seemed only a matter of time before his determination was matched by results. Sure enough, that happened on Saturday night.
But for the second straight night, the Bulls lost late, 3-2.
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Baseball, Durham Bulls, Tampa Bay Rays Charlie Montoyo, ejection, Jason Childers, Jhonatan Solano, Joe Dillon, Justin Maxwell, Kevin Causey, Marco Estrada, Matt Joyce, Michel Hernandez, R. J. Swindle, Ray Sadler, Rhyne Hughes, Russ Springer, Shawn Riggans, Syracuse Chiefs, Wade Davis
Adam Sobsey ·
8 Aug 2009, 5:00 AM ·
6 Comments
DBAP/ DURHAM—And by “wonder-full,” I mean full of wondrous things. If you’re one of those quick-and-dirty types who stops reading at the jump, let me dispense with the summary:
The Bulls battled back from a 6-2, sixth-inning deficit. They scored three times in sixth inning and twice in the eighth inning and took a 7-6 lead into the ninth against Syracuse. Joe Nelson, the fifth Bulls pitcher, came in to save the game, but he put two men on with a single and a walk. With two outs and a full count on Justin Maxwell, he threw a fastball that tailed back toward the middle of the plate, and Maxwell tattooed it. His long, high drive sailed over the Blue Monster—just foul, it appeared to us, up in the press box. But home plate umpire Fran Burke, the only one of the three officials with a straight-on view of the play, called it fair.
Things went nuts. The Bulls all argued. Charlie Montoyo charged out of the dugout to join them. We watched two replays in the press box, both of which seemed to show the ball crossing in front of the screen that extends from the foul pole—which would indicate a foul ball. Charlie Montoyo implored the umpires to watch the replay on the big screen behind them. They didn’t. The call stood. Montoyo was so mad, he threw not only his hat but also the photos of his kids that he keeps in his back pocket. He went into ultra-argue mode, which is manager-code for Eject Me Now, Please. Crew Chief Kevin Causey complied and ejected him. Montoyo, as if only now realizing just how mad all of this had made him, then had to be held back by one ump while he yelled at another. Finally he departed, but not before picking up the photos he’d thrown. A fan threw beer on the field and was escorted from the ballpark. After the game, which the Chiefs won, 9-7, Bulls’ General Manager Mike Birling had a brief, heated exchange with with one of the umpires.
And that was only one exciting sequence in a game full of them.
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Baseball, Durham Bulls, Tampa Bay Rays Anthony Michael Hall, Baltimore Orioles, Bulls on the Move, catcher's interference, Charlie Montoyo, ejection, Elliot johnson, F.O.B., Fran Burke, Greg Zaun, injury, Jack Spradlin, Joe Nelson, John Hughes, John Jaso, John Meloan, Jorge Julio, Justin Maxwell, Justin Ruggiano, Kevin Causey, Matt DeSalvo, Matt Joyce, Reid Brignac, Rhyne Hughes, Shairon Martis, Shawn Riggans, Sixteen Candles, Syracuse Chiefs, Winston Abreu, Zechry Zinicola
Adam Sobsey ·
8 Jun 2009, 10:56 PM ·
Comment
The Bulls edged Pawtucket again Monday, 3-2, after winning 5-4 Sunday and losing 2-1 Saturday. To complete the sequence, the PawSox need to win 1-0 or 6-5 on Tuesday — but of course, it’s doubtful that they’re mathematicians, and in any case this is a Durham Bulls blog.
Wade Davis bulldogged his way through six scoreless innings. He needed 69 pitches to complete three frames, but stranded seven Sox in the process, bearing down when he needed to; he then settled down and retired the last ten hitters he faced, using 108 pitches overall. He’s now 6-3 with a 3.18 ERA. It was another step in Davis’s evolution, as the big young pitcher made adjustments after laboring early (I’d be curious to know what the changes were) and dominated in the latter half of his outing. His previous start was much the same.
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Baseball, Durham Bulls Clay Buchholz, Dale Thayer, ejection, injury, Julio DePaula, Justin Ruggiano, Modern Diner, Pawtucket Red Sox, Rashad Eldridge, Ray Olmedo, Wade Davis
Adam Sobsey ·
15 May 2009, 1:35 AM ·
Comment
DBAP/ DURHAM—After the Bulls came back from a 5-0 deficit to thump Louisville last night, 11-6, I asked catcher John Jaso (pictured, left) about the pitching performances of Carlos Hernandez (who evened his record at 2-2) and Dale Thayer. Hernandez had been knocked around a little in the first three innings. He really only made three bad pitches, but one was smoked for a leadoff double by Luis Bolivar, who came around to score on a stolen base and a groundout, and the other two were hit for home runs (by a pair of ex-Bulls, Jonny Gomes and Wes Bankston). Thayer was coming off a disastrous outing (scroll down a bit there) in his last appearance on Tuesday, when he imploded after a throwing error by first baseman Chris Richard on what would have been a game-ending double play, and coughed up five ninth-inning runs to lose the game.
Jaso invoked the old baseball adage about luck: Sometimes you make a bad pitch and get away with it. Sometimes you make a great pitch and the hitter lifts a harmless pop-fly that the left fielder loses in the lights for a double. On the other end of things, a hitter may crush a ball for a 400-foot out or send a screaming line drive right at the shortstop; other times, well, you take a weak swing on a pitch out of the strike zone and the left fielder loses your harmless fly ball in the lights. Jaso thought Thayer made good pitches on Tuesday night; they just got hit in the wrong places. A pitcher can’t control that.
You can practice all you want in baseball, and although eventually talent and intelligence will usually prevail over a season, a huge and complicated chain of chance operations dictates dozens of outcomes during every game. Some baseball manager — I think it was Buck Showalter — once said that you were going to lose 60 games a year and win 60, no matter what a manager did: There would be games when your starter got tagged for seven runs in the first two innings, and others when your hitters scored twelve runs. It was what the manager did with the other forty-odd games that made the difference between going to the playoffs and finishing in last place. In the infrequent circumstances when chance evens itself out and skill opposes skill, that’s where managers — and for that matter, players — make their hay. You don’t get very many opportunities, and in baseball readiness is all: you often get a split-second to make the difference that’s there for you to make.
It isn’t all that different from life, really. So many of our best efforts get fouled off by the swings of circumstance, and some of our weaker moves result in unforeseen (and unearned) benefits. The best you can do is practice hard, play your best, and hope that those few dozen games in the balance come out on your side, after the inevitable 60 wins and 60 losses are tallied up on the ledger.
When the Bulls fell behind 5-0 after 2 1/2 innings tonight, they appeared to be headed for one of those 60 losses. But Charlie Montoyo didn’t think so. He took action. Continue reading »
Baseball, Durham Bulls Carlos Hernandez, Charlie Montoyo, Chris Richard, ejection, Joe Dillon, John Jaso, Jon Weber, Justin Ruggiano, Louisville Bats, Luck, momentum, Practice, Ray Sadler, Reid Brignac, Schmacktice, The Roodge
