Retrosheet Content!
So I’ve made my first real baseball analytic piece of the year. I was going to include it here, but it’s too long, so I’ll post it next week as All Star Break content. But just to whet your appetites, I’ll ask a question: When teams hit homers, do non-homer-related runs by a team in that game go up or down? One way to think about this is to think of Jeffy’s Rally
Killer Hypothesis, the notion (to the extent that it’s coherent at all, which is always somewhat questionable) that home runs reduce the number of runs of runs you score in a game by non-home-run means. Whaddaya think? True or False?
Have I Missed A Pun for 50 Years?
The San Diego Chicken is now 50 years old. (The chicken itself… the guy who plays the chicken is 70.) It only occurred to me today that the Padres are often jocularly referred to as Friars. Is The Chicken a Roaster or a Fryer?
ASG
I’m too late to make my annual plea that every Brave chosen for the All Star Game develop mysterious flulike symptoms on Monday. Well, too late to make my request surreptitiously. All I’m going to say is that Marcell Ozuna had better take it easy at the Home Run Derby. Seriously, dude. Take a few hacks and lose in the first round.
The Game
I’ve been to San Diego a few times. The last time I was there it was impossible to miss a gigantic homeless problem. Of course, if I were homeless, I would move to San Diego tomorrow. It’s hard to picture any place in the United States that it would be more pleasant to be homeless in. Indeed, why anyone chooses to be homeless anywhere else is a little baffling to me…. unless the homeless were required to wear the Padres’ City Connect uniform.
The homelessness is a buzzkill, but the southern downtown area that includes Petco Park is a delight. It’s like the Battery, but without the unified corporate ownership that gives the Battery a skightly Disneyland vibe (at least to me.) Petco is a cool park in the middle of a nightclub district in a real city. My penchant for authenticity approves. The pic above is from my last trip there.
Through some sort of technical glitch, I ended up watching the Padres feed for this game. The Padres used Matt Waldron, pitcher with the weird repertory of a four-seam fastball, a sweeper and a knuckleball. His knuckleball has a spin rate of around 175 and doesn’t dart like knuckleballs of old. Watching the slow motion replays of some of those knucklers makes me long to have seen hi-res views of Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm. How slow were their spin rates?
Back-to-back doubles in the bottom of the fourth led the scoring off Schwellenbach. but The Mime hit a sweeper out to tie it in the top of the fifth, eliminating my fear that we’d get a repeat of last night. There followed some old-fashioned baseball: Duvall doubled on a knuckleball, Rosario bunted him to third, and d’Arnaud knocked him with a single to right. I have no idea whether or not Joe Simpson was awake for that sequence, but if he was, he probably needed to change his underwear.
Then something really weird happened: Orlando Arcia bombed a two-run shot to left that will have convinced him tha he’s just been unlucky since the start of the season, and his swing is totally sound.
The upshot was a four run inning, the sort of inning that in recent days means: here’s your runs Spencer — make it stand up.
The first five innings of this game were played in just over an hour. This is what happens when both guys pitch to contact, a lost Madduxian baseball art. There were only nine strikeouts in this game, and only two walks. That’s how you finish a West Coast game by midnight.
Schwellenbach went 7, giving up one run on three hits with 3 Ks and 1 BB. Well done, young fella. Joe Jimenez pitched the 8th, stranding a man on 2nd with no outs. A Riley Sac Fly plated a run in the 8th, and the 9th saw The Mime’s second homer, making it 6-1 and making me wonder who Snit would send out for the 9th. The answer was Dylan Lee.
Announcer line of the day
“If it wasn’t for the Phillies, the Braves would be leading the division.”
Tony Gwynn, Jr.
Rodgers and Hart
No, not Kenny Rogers and Jim Ray Hart. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the 1927 musical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It featured a song which became a jazz standard, Thou Swell. There are a lot of great versions available on YouTube, but I’m going with Blossom Dearie. Thou Schwell, Spencer and Marcell, you ain’t too shabby.
A great, complete game on both sides of the ball. I don’t think I’d gotten to watch Schwell before this and I generally liked what I saw – I like the deep repertoire behind the big fastball. His command wasn’t perfect, as he frequently missed his spots by a good bit, and he wasn’t getting nearly as much swing and miss as I’d like, but the Padres weren’t doing much with his pitches. I’d love to see him sharpen his command, but generally I saw a lot to like.
Rodgers and Hart weren’t bad at songwriting. But when I see Schwellenbach, I think of the Turtles: Spencer, Gee I think you’re Schwell. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JeAtre3Bxg8
I, too, am a big fan of San Diego’s ballpark & its surrounding Gaslamp Quarter, which has a zillion food, bev, & music options. Had several business-related trips there & never had a bad time.
The Gaslamp also has a variety of public transportation options. You can even hop on a light rail that’ll take you all the way to the US/Mex border, if you like. Came in handy when my sister’s family was living in Tijuana.
Have seen several games there over the years & caught one this past June — a midweek day game vs. Miami. Spectacular weather, get a seat in the shade & enjoy a Pacifica draft. Walk back to the hotel — and there’s a buncha nice ones.
What’s kinda weird to me about the Padres franchise is that when you go into the team store, there are so many different Padres’ logos & colors & jerseys, it just seems like the team can never make up its mind what it wants to look like. They’re mustard, now they’re brown, now they’re blue, now they have brown pinstripes, etc. And, yes, those City Connect efforts maintain the club’s grim fashion tradition.
And those ’70s unis where they looked like McDonald’s employees (‘cuz they kinda were) are among the all-time worst — ranked down with the ChiSox softball-shorts unis & the Indians’ two-tone efforts from the same decade, IMO. And now, unfortunately, they kinda look like UPS workers.
Also, they have the smallest “team hall of fame” I’ve ever seen. I mean, they include Steve Garvey & Rich Gossage, etc., in their HoF. I understand why (Garvey hit a big NLCS HR in ’84), but of all players… Garvey, really?
Anyway, let’s sweep ’em & see if we can pick up another game on the Phils & the WC pack.
They have the problem that some of their better players were better known elsewhere. They did an interview with McGriff last night talking about what might have been if he hadn’t been traded to Atlanta. And of course there’s Winfield.