That inning’s the DIPS argument in a nutshell. Hampton’s been getting along all his career allowing way too many walks and not getting enough strikeouts. And with a good defense behind you and if you don’t allow extra base hits, you can do that for awhile. But if you can’t make the bat miss the ball, you’re going to have innings where you give up four hits and three runs sometimes, and that’s that.

Note that the two errors in the inning didn’t lead to any runs and all runs are scored earned. Does that mean that the defense in that inning was better than it was last night, when so many “unearned” runs were scored?