Well, we had our first “home game” in Mexico City this afternoon, and here at the end of it I find myself in an absolutely filthy mood. A big part of that, I’m sure, is how the game ultimately turned out. Some portion is also that, like others have remarked over the last couple of days, it seems grossly unfair that, in a divisional series, one team—the Diamondbacks, in this instance—got the “honor” of being assigned as the home team despite the fact that we, like the San Diego Padres, are playing very far from home in fact, and in facilities and at an elevation that are both deeply unfamiliar and likely uncomfortable for both teams.
And given that end-of-year tiebreakers, should they happen to come into play in September when postseason berths are being decided, have division records and whatnot pretty high up on the list, having two less actual home games, in our actual home park, against a divisional foe puts us at a distinct disadvantage, and makes these games much more high-stakes for us than they would be otherwise, and much more high-stakes than they should be. It seems distinctly unfair, and also pretty wildly unnecessary, at least if one’s primary interest is Major League Baseball. But more on that later, I suppose….I’m supposed to be a recapping a baseball game here.
So I suppose I should get to it.The Padres brought former Rockie German Marquez to play today, while we brought Zac Gallen. Since we were pitching “at home,” Gallen got to go first, and while he was hardly wowing with his control or his efficiency—of the seventeen pitches he threw in the top of the first, only eight of them landed for strikes—he did retire the top of the San Diego lineup in order, and put up a welcome zero. Marquez did the same to us, in the bottom of the first, but with rather more efficiency, needing only thirteen pitches to sit down Geraldo Perdomo, Ketel Marte, and Corbin Carroll in order with two looking punchouts and a grounder to short.
Gallen was a bit better in the second, recording another clean inning with two strikeouts of his own, and only throwing fifteen pitches. In the bottom of the second, meanwhile, we managed to make Marquez work a little bit harder, to say the least. Adrian Del Castillo flew out to center and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. rolled a grounder to second for two quick outs, but then the bottom half of our lineup showed that they, at least, had gotten their bats through customs.
Ildemaro Vargas kept his hit streak going with a line-drive single to shallow center, Nolan Arenado hit a shot that glanced off Manny Machado’s glove and wound up in left field for another single. Jose Fernandez, today’s designated hitter, roped a line drive double into the gap in left center to drive in Vargas and Nolan. Then Alek Thomas stepped to the plate, and on the third pitch he saw from Marquez demonstrated what hitting a fly ball at 7,300 feet above sea level can do for your offensive production: View LinkSteve and Tom, who were our broadcasters today, kept describing the hit as “towering” and so on and so forth, but if you look closely, he kind of got under it and hit it pretty much off the end of the bat, and if you look at where it lands (in what I presume is a bullpen area just over the right field fence), I don’t think there’s any way that ball goes for a home run in any MLB ballpark.
But what the heck? We’ll take it. 4-0 DBACKSAnd that was the Diamondbacks One Big Inning on offense. You may have noted in the “dek” or the tagline for this post that One Big Inning laid Brandon Pfaadt and the Diamondbacks low, but this wasn’t it.
You may not have noticed, but the Diamondbacks definitely seem to have OBI problems fairly frequently, not only in terms of our pitching but also in terms of our offense. For our offense, it manifests a bit differently—we score a chunk of runs in one inning of the ballgame, usually early, and after that it’s, well, nothing. Crickets.
So it was today.Maybe we should give that phenomenon a slightly different acronym, to distinguish the offense problem from the pitching problem. Maybe call the offense one Only One Big Inning, or OOBI. Yeah.
I think that works.Anyway. Gallen allowed his first bit of traffic in the top of the third, though to be fair it was hardly his fault. With out out already recorded, Zac threw a knuckle curve to Padres catcher Freddy Fermin, who hit it right back up the box.
It hit Gallen in his right shoulder and then dribbled away onto the infield for a single. The trainers came out, they had Gallen throw a number of practice pitches off the mound, and when they were satisfied, they went back into the dugout and Gallen finished up the inning with a grounder to second and his third strikeout of the game. That was the end of his outing, however, as presumably the shoulder started to swell and stiffen up, and by the time to top of the fourth rolled around Brandon Pfaadt was warming up in the bullpen, and it was announced that Zac was out of the game due to a “right shou