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Daniel Nava was the recipient of a throw behind in the first inning. The tactic seemed to have worked as Nava had an 0-for-5 showing with four left on base. Hiroki Kuroda was smart to have taken Nava out of the game. As the Heat Zone shows, Nava is a good bad pitch hitter. I don’t recall if Dennis Eckersley has a slang term for that type of batter, but Don Orsillo’s partner for the game Dan Petry didn’t. Mariano Rivera marveled at how the short porch helped Will Middlebrooks tie the game in the ninth. The circuit clout helped Middlebrooks earn co-player of the week for the American League. He shared the honor with Mike Napoli. Brandon Workman was pressed into service in the ninth with the score 3-3. It was a great way to pressure test the rookie, and he came up wanting. After striking out Brett Gardner he allowed Ichiro Suzuki to single. Suzuki swiped second and then advanced to third on Vernon Wells’s fly ball out to right. Workman airmailed his first pitch to Alfonso Soriano and the newly-returned Jarrod Saltalamacchia couldn’t stop the ball from reaching the backstop. It goes down in the “W” column...
CC Sabathia just had to regain his form (such that it is) in this series opener. The Yankees had been on a five-game schneid, during which they were swept by the Mets. If bath salt attacks haven’t convinced you of the zombie attacks, the revitalization of Travis Hafner, Lyle Overbay, Ichiro Suzuki, and Vernon Wells should. What is dead may never die, but rises again, irritatinger and annoyinger. It was nice of the Phillies to give Jacoby Ellsbury the actual base that broke the franchise record of stolen bases in a game. They didn’t throw it at him with some batteries. Game 56: May 31, 2013 Boston Red Sox33-23 1 L: Jon Lester (6-2) 2B: Dustin Pedroia – 2 (16), David Ross (2), Mike Napoli (20) New York Yankees31-23 4 W: CC Sabathia (5-4)H: David Robertson (11)S: Mariano Rivera (19) 2B: Vernon Wells (7)...
To welcome Ichiro Suzuki to the Bronx a Yankee fan decked out her SUV with a note of welcome. As a result of his team’s woes Dustin Pedroia is trying too hard to win games by himself. In the bottom of the third with runners on first and second with no outs the Rangers executed a double steal. Elvis Andrus tapped the ball to Pedroia who doggedly dashed after the orb. Pedroia wildly wrenched himself around and lofted the ball to Adrian Gonzalez. Or to be more exact, over Gonzalez. Two runs scored on Pedroia’s throwing error. With the score 4-1 in favor of Texas in the top of the sixth Pedroia led off the frame with a line drive single to left. Gonzalez struck out and Cody Ross flied out to right and any fan could see Pedroia was stewing at first trying to will runs for his team on the board. The second baseman took it upon himself to swipe second despite the facts that his run didn’t mean anything and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who had homered in the second, was at bat. Saltalamacchia led off the seventh with a double that just missed clearing the fences. When one...
Game 36: May 15, 2009 Red Sox4L: Jon Lester (2-4)21-15, 3 game losing streak Mariners5W: Chris Jakubauskas (2-4)H: Sean White (1)H: Mark Lowe (2)S: David Aardsma (4)17-19, 1 game winning streak Highlights: Ichiro Suzuki hit two home runs off Lester. J.D. Drew cottoned to batting third, going 3-for-5 with an RBI single in the first, a leadoff double that sparked the scoring in the third, and a two-out single in the ninth. Jason Bay batted clean-up and was a foot short of giving his team the lead in the top of the ninth. The Joy of Sox pointed out that Boston has scored four runs in the last five consecutive games, tying their team record. From what I have been able to uncover, “Jakubauskas” is a Lithuanian name. Linguists believe that Lithuanian is the oldest surviving Indo-European language. It has remained remarkably constant throughout for at least the past 5,000 years. In fact, it still retains the same vocabulary as Sanskrit.All the words in Dustin Pedroia’s vocabulary are devoted to smack talk, even when speaking to children. The pre-game show featured a segment with the second baseman playing a baseball video game against a kid whose surname was Cashman. Fitting,...
Game 65: June 7, 2008 Mariners 3 L: Miguel Batista (3-7) 22-40, 1 game losing streak Red Sox 11 W: Tim Wakefield (4-4) 39-26, 1 game winning streak Highlights: The baseball deities, unimpressed that an official scorer had attempted to avert the end of Kevin Youkilis’s errorless streak at first, ensured that the first baseman’s run came to end as it should have the game before. For 238 games and 2,002 attempts Youkilis was flawless, but the spell that had lasted since July 4, 2006 came to an abrupt end in the ninth when Alex Cora’s relay toss dropped from Youkilis’s glove to the red earth. At some point in this series there should be a split screen comparison of Jacoby Ellsbury and Ichiro Suzuki. One sequence would juxtapose both speedsters coming out of the box and the other would time them from first to second on a steal. I think these sprinters would be within hundredths of a second of each other even though ten years separate them in age. They say speed is one of the first things to leave a player as they advance in years, but in this string of games Suzuki has shown nothing...
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Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Sports Temples of Boston.