October Bullpen battle

Phil Gurnee ♦ August 24, 2017 ♦ Leave a comment

Rich Hill pitched a complete game on Wednesday so no one pitched in the bullpen.

On Thursday Ryu pitched six strong innings, making both his case for a spot in the Dodger October rotation or the bullpen. The odds are against him in both cases but if he keeps pitching like that, he might not be denied. Right now I’d rather have Ryu on the roster instead of Tony Watson but that is fluid. Dave Roberts said today that if they are considering any of the rotation pieces for the bullpen in October they would get work in Sept in the bullpen to prepare them. Expect Ryu to get some of those games.

In a very close game, some pitchers came through big time, and one did not. Josh Fields got his first out on a comebacker but then gave up a ringing double. With the score 3 – 1 Tony Watson came in and got the first out before giving up a walk and single putting the score at 3 – 2 and being replaced by Pedro Baez. Pedro just had one of his worst outings of the year on Tuesday Night when he walked three batters.  He was facing one of the hottest hitters in baseball in Andrew McCutchen with the tying run on 3rd base and the go ahead runner on 1st.  Twitter did not take kindly to Baez being in the game but he turned those jeers to cheers when he struck out McCutchen to end the inning.  Baez started the next inning and finished it after giving up a walk and hit batsman giving the Dodgers four key outs.  Brandow Morrow finished the game with a flourish striking out Jose Osuna to end the game.

In other game notes, early in the game Adrian Gonzalez hit another long out and I was wondering if was just missing it, or if that was all he had. Turns out he was just missing it, as he crushed a long home run in the top of the 9th. That was good to see. His home run had followed an even longer home run by Grandal. The 3/4/5 hitters had come into the 9th hitless, but those back to back blasts gave the Dodgers a nice three run cushion for the bottom of the 9th.

Chris Taylor had two bloop hits, one barrel double, and another long out.

Justin Turner is in his first prolonged slump of the season.

Granderson put one into the Allegany river prompting my wife to ask me why they were called the Pirates. I said River Pirates and she scoffed saying there was no such thing. She googled it and found that there certainly were river Pirates, but the Pirates didn’t get their name from river Pirates they got it when they were accused of stealing a baseball player from another team and were called Pirates for the action, and they liked it so much they changed their name from the Pittsburgh Alleghenys to the Pittsburgh Pirates. I still prefer to think they are the Pirates because of the infamous Allegheny River Pirates but evidently, they never existed.

Stay tuned, this is the one battle that will make Sept interesting.