I guess I could say something about Max Scherzer striking out 15 Pirates after a lackluster start to the season (before the game started today, I told my friend from Detroit that Scherzer would go 7 innings, give up one run on three hits, and strikeout 11: his actual line was 7 IP, 2 R, 4 H, 15 K) or Kevin Correia making a surprisingly solid start this afternoon, but there’s something else that happened in this game that bugged the crap out of me.
If you watched the game live, there’s a good chance you know what I’m about to say before I even have to say it: it’s Prince Fielder’s “double” to open the Tigers’ three-run seventh inning. What really happened is that Fielder hit a very catchable pop-up between Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth. Neither player called for it or went all-out after it and it fell in between the two of them. Barmes then booted it down the right field line. That hit started a chain reaction that ended with the Tigers scoring three times in the seventh, turning a 2-1 Pirate lead into a win for the Tigers.
I don’t know if Gorkys Hernanez would’ve made that play instead of Nate McLouth. I suspect that he may have, but that’s not the sort of thing that anyone can really say for certain. What really irked me about it, though, is that it was a play that involved Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth. We’re sitting here in Year 5 of the Neal Huntington era, suffering through one of the worst offenses that anyone can remember and here with the game on the line in the bottom of the seventh inning the Pirates have Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth out in the field. I can accept a bad team if it’s a bunch of young guys finding their way in the world with a front office evaluating what they have, but no one can say that’s true of Clint Barmes and Nate McLouth.
Maybe that play was the play that turned the game, maybe it would’ve happened anyway. But I’d much rather see a pop-up fall in between Gorkys Hernandez and Yamaico Navarro than between McLouth and Barmes.
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