MLB Daily: Josh Hamilton Walk-Off Makes Rangers Happy; Bartolo Colon Extra Base Hit Update
By Mike Cardillo
Welcome to MLB Daily on (sigh) a Monday. Let’s slide into home plate feet-first anyways …
Strikes and Gutters: Baseball is a grind. The season is a marathon. Maybe it’s because I’m forever a creature of routines and habits, but it is reassuring that most summer nights, when there is nothing else to do, there is a Tigers baseball game available to be streamed within the palm of my hand at 7 p.m. thanks to my iPhone. (You can insert you favorite team and if you live locally you don’t need to resort to MLB.com streaming.)
Anyways, my favorite team was on the West Coast this week and threw my entire routine off, all for worse. Detroit wound up being swept by Anaheim in a four-game series — a series with three 10 p.m. Eastern first pitches and then the god forsaken Sunday Night Baseball slot on ESPN which added a certain insult to injury as Curt Schilling and John Kruk have now decided to talk about anything but the game at hand. Alas.
There is certainly nothing better than setting time aside on a Saturday night only to find starting pitcher Shane Greene allowed as many solo home runs (5) as he does outs. Or losing Sunday night to a two-out single in the eighth by Johnny Giovatella.
The point here is that the Tigers are in serious trouble, saying nothing of Justin Verlander’s uninspiring rehab start in Triple A over the weekend or that the Twins (!) are in first place in the American League Central. Obviously most people reading this don’t care about the Tigers and likely take some sort of pleasure in my personal sports-related misery.
On a larger scale, the 162-game season produces stretches like this, where the last thing on Earth you want to do is watch your team struggle playing baseball. There’s nothing worse — colloquially speaking — than following a baseball team that struggles to produce runs on a consistent basis. The soul-sucking force of the GIDP is strong.
The New York Yankees fall into this categorization with a streaky up-and-down string of results — although most Yankees’ fans I know are treating everything about the year sans A-Rod quite skeptically. The Giants, too, might be an example, but without a vested fan rooting interest it’s hard to say with authority.
If you’re able to pull away and disconnect, as in baseball as in life, you’re never as good as you are at your best or as bad as you are at your worst. The season is long. Strikes and gutters, dude.
Home again: The Red Sox decided to walk Prince Fielder to get to Josh Hamilton in the bottom of the ninth with the winning run on third and two outs. Hamilton delivered with a walk-off, game-winning double. Happy times are here again!
Lo and behold the Rangers finished May a game over .500 to pull within five games of the first-place Astros. Texas remains in Wild Card contention, but then again everyone in the AL but Oakland can make that claim. It wasn’t all perfect for the Rangers on Sunday, as they lost Adrian Beltre for at least a couple weeks with a thumb injury. Texas has plenty of outfielders and DH types, but it looks like Adam Rosales takes over at third for the time being.
As for Hamilton? His arrival coincided with the team’s turnaround. It’s only 22 at bats, but his OPS is north of 1.000. Most encouraging is he’s drawn four walks compared to seven strikeouts. Thanks to the trade/buyout with Los Angeles he’s only on the books for about $2 million and at that salary you’re more than happy to take the gamble on him going forward.
Consider this, a healthy Rangers lineup featuring Shin-Soo Choo, Fielder and Hamilton is going to make it brutal on right-handed pitchers in Arlington during the summer months.
Bartolo Colon hit update: The Mets pitcher hit an RBI double yesterday vs. the Marlins. We must mention this because it seems every single Colon at bat in 2015 has been documented by the World Wide Web.
17 crying face emojis. I’ve never laughed so hard. LOL
That’s a walk-off: Martin Maldonado broke a 6-6 tie in the 17th (!) to give the Brewers a win over the D’backs at Miller Park. Years from now Brewers fans will still be talking about his feet-first slide into home plate. This could be Milwaukee’s season highlight, too.
Self-deprecating humor is tricky, trust me. It would be nice if teams embraced sarcasm or whatever and started making t-shirts to commemorate games like this. For instance, “I saw the Brewers beat the Diamondbacks in 17 innings and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” They could sell it at the Bud Selig museum gift shop. Win-win.
This & That: John Danks threw a complete game shutout vs. Houston yesterday, because apparently it was 2009 again. … Stephen Strasburg went on the DL over the weekend with a neck issue. … The Reds swept the Nationals over the weekend. … Baltimore, Toronto and Boston failed to make any progress in the AL East standings, as New York and Tampa are tied for first at a game over .500. …
[Retired reference]