MLB: June

I have been in the stands for three of Yasiel Puig’s first four major league home runs. This guy’s sure got a lot of folks in LA feeling like maybe the Dodgers aren’t completely irrelevant this year.

Ugh Reds. Just ugh.

Mets and Marlins went 20 innings, 6.5 hours.

Poor Shaun Marcum went 8 innings and had only given up 2 hits (15 straight retired) before he ran out of gas. And no pitching coach to give him a breather / relief pitcher more time.

Mets have lost 7/10 to the Marlins who have won only 17. That puts the fish right in line with the 1962 Mets winning percentage (40/160).

Do you mean if the Fish HADN’T played the Mets? If so then they would be worse than that; without the Mets they would be on pace to go 32-130.

With the Mets, they are on pace to do BETTER than that, 45-117. Okay, not a lot better.

O man the Cubs are already 15 games behind. They gotta start producing more runs and winning games if they wanna be competitive this year

The Marlins have won 17 games. 7 vs. Mets, including tonight (June 8). They have four more games scheduled, plus the Tropical Storm Andrea makeup; and who knows where that’ll be (the four are in Miami).

Tonight, both teams were running out of pitchers. The Mets way-way-overextended Shaun Marcum - not even giving him a pitchers-coach respite after giving up two hits after being awesome into the 20th inning. I half-expected some edict from Bud Selig to parachute down and let the managers off from considering their shortstops pitching. Sucks that Marcum had to take the loss (and a lot of other crappy losses vs the Marlins) after a great performance.

The 1962 Mets were way better than either of these clubs.

On the up side, there are 7 teams out there worse than the Dodgers.

I hate losing to the Cardinals…

What’s kind of amazing to me is that the Mets are about as bad as the Astros record-wise.

If they are going to be this bad I would rather them go all the way and get the higher draft pick next year.

Still, Mattingly is pissed that the hurt players aren’t going to the DL and I don’t blame him. Look at what he put out yesterday.

RF Puig
SS Punto
1B Gonzalez
LF Van Slyke
3B Cruz
CF Schumaker
C Federowicz
2B M.Ellis
P Magill

That’s shameful. That’s not a major league club. Puig is amazing, and Gonzalez has been fantastic, the rest of that team should be in AAA.

Highlight from a highly weird baseball game last night (in which the Red Sox blew a 6-0 lead to the Rays, blew an 8-6 lead in extra innings and looked sure to lose with the tying run in, the bases loaded and nobody out, but miraculously escaped and won in 14 innings):

John Lackey hit Matt Joyce with a pitch square in the back after getting two outs in the sixth inning, precipitating a near brawl and getting pulled from the game. Later, Lackey said that the Rays were hitting everything he threw (very true, they were smacking him around most of the game and he was lucky to give up only 4 runs) and he threw inside because he wanted to get part of the plate back (!), but hitting Joyce wasn’t intentional.

Suure.

If you’re upset over getting hammered, pitch better and stop the idiotic squawking about not being conceded “part of the plate”.

Totally rooting for Chien-Ming Wang tonight.

Good luck with that! Meanwhile, I’ll be rooting for Gerrit Cole.

He’ll probably get shelled. Whenever the Bucs face someone coming up to the bigs, they make ‘em look like Cy Young. Cole’s a #1 overall pick. It would be nice if he did well, but this is a move due to injury and it might be a little premature. Cole’s got velocity and stuff, but even with a high-90’s fastball, he’s hittable. I’ve heard it might be because of his consistent release-point, but I’ve never seen him play myself. Gonna miss his debut tonight as well, as my local cable service sees fit to broadcast freakin’ COLLEGE games all the time. I think they want us all to go to the MLB.com subscriptions or the like.

Likewise.

Cole’s first batter was a three-pitch strikeout, with 96,96, and 99mph fastballs. He hit a 2-RBI single in his first ML at-bat, against Tim Lincecum. He allowed two runs on seven hits in 6 1/3 innings. He threw 59 of his 81 pitches for strikes and at one point retired 13 consecutive batters.

Only 2 strikeouts, but no walks. A solid debut, but not a “walks-on-water” sort of performance. I’ll happily take it, since this early call-up was due to Wandy Rodriguez going on the 15-day. They had him primarily sticking to his fastball, but he has a sick slider which didn’t see much use today. Hope he puts it all together for us as a #1 or #2 before we have to trade him or lose him to free-agency.

From the random stat department, I saw on another message board that Pedro “All-or-Nothing” Alvarez leads all NL players in HRs since June 2012, with 36.

Established: the Reds can convincingly beat the Cubs. Yay?

Resolved: Ian Kennedy, pitcher for the D-Backs, who has been leading the league in hitting batters for 2 yrs running at least, after beaning 2 Dodgers last night, should be suspended by the Commissioner until after the All-Star break.

Well, old Chien-Ming got roughed up for 5 runs in 7.1 innings, and it might have been worse if the White Sox hadn’t committed several ghastly baserunning mistakes. Wang was saved from the loss when Bautista hit a home run with two out and nobody on in the ninth inning.

That was a fun little brawl, wasn’t it? I particularly liked Belissario trying to flip a Douche-back into the camera well.

Well, the team escaped without injury, and it was a typical basebrawl - more of a scrum. I enjoyed watching McGuire waltzing with Matt Williams and wondering how that would turn out if it escaled. I think Mark would acquit himself pretty well, he grew up with a lot of brothers.