Dodger Thoughts

Jon Weisman's outlet for dealing psychologically with the Los Angeles Dodgers, baseball and life

Month: September 2012 (Page 3 of 3)

Series of Great Import, Part I Game Chat

Dodgers at Giants, 7:15 pm
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Adam Kennedy, 3B
A.J. Ellis, C
Josh Beckett, P

Tonight’s pinch-hit game chat is in honor of Manny Mota.

The captain has turned on the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign, so please return to your seats. We will be going through some turbulence for the next several hours. We hope to find some smoother air later on.

Other games people might be interested in:

Cubs at Pirates, 4:05 pm, Wood vs Burnett

Brewers at Cardinals, 5:15 pm, Gallardo vs Lohse

  • Adam Kennedy’s lifetime 8 for 21 against Tim Lincecum gets him a start at third base in place of the 2012 model of “Dodgers Folk Hero,” Luis Cruz. The Dodgers also welcome back Alex Castellanos from Albuquerque.
  • According to Dodgers.com, Paco Rodriguez has been assigned #75 and his photo looks like it was taken with a cell phone. Rodriguez will become the first Dodger player to have been born in 1991. Nathan Eovaldi was the first Dodger to born in the 1990 (February 13, 1990.)
  • Did you know that McCovey Cove is not a cove? Coves are usually set off from bays or other bodies of water by a narrow entrance. However, it does sound nice. It is akin to people saying Death Valley instead of Death Graben.
  • Hanley Ramirez is listed among the top 10 most likely candidates to commit MLB’s 500,000th error.
  • The Giants have recalled pitcher Yusmeiro Petit and activated outfielder Jason Christian from the disabled list. The Giants have 18 pitchers on their roster now, as well as 18 position players. And Clay Hensley should come off the disabled list soon.

 

Can history repeat itself? Or does it just have a bad memory?

This pinch-hit post is dedicated to Wally Moon, whom I believe led the Dodgers in pinch hits in the 1960s. (It’s hard to figure accurately. Also, the Dodgers had bad pinch hitters at that time. They also had bad starting hitters for much of the decade too.)

So you’re thinking to yourself, have the Dodgers ever swept TWO series in San Francisco in one season? Isn’t that asking a lot?

Well, Sherman, let’s set the WABAC machine back to 2007. The Dodgers open the season by dropping two of three in Milwaukee. They travel to San Francisco and then Brad Penny, Derek Lowe, and Randy Wolf lead the Dodgers to a sweep from April 6-8.

The Dodgers returned to AT&T Park on July 13. The Dodgers won the first game easily, 9-1. Then the Dodgers survived a joint bullpen meltdown by Chun-hui Tsao (4 runs in 2/3 IP in the 8th) and Takashi Saito (walk to Bonds, who came around to score on a single by Pedro Feliz), to win 8-7 in 12 innings on a Rafael Furcal sacrifice fly. The Dodgers completed the sweep the next day, 5-3. The Dodgers were in first place by one game over the Padres with a 52-40 record.

When the dust cleared at the end of the season, the Dodgers were in fourth place, eight games out of first. The Giants were in last at 71-91. The Padres were in third place after losing a wild card tiebreaker to the Rockies, who finished behind Arizona. Does this seem like it should be familiar?  You mean we don’t all miss the Luis Gonzalez season for the Dodgers?

Prior to 2007, the last time the Dodgers had two series sweeps in San Francisco was 1977. In 1971, the Dodgers swept three two-games series in San Francisco (and still finished in second place behind the Giants.) The last time the Dodgers swept two series from the Giants at the Polo Grounds was back in 1953.

Surprisingly, the Giants have never swept two series from the Dodgers in Los Angeles. The last time the Dodgers were swept in two home series in one season by the Giants was 1938.

Most of this information does not indicate one team’s superiority over the other, but more just how the schedule was laid out in a particular season. When both teams were in New York, the Dodgers and Giants would play series of varying lengths from one to five games, depending on a variety of factors.

When the schedule became a little more regular after the teams moved west, the Dodgers and Giants would battle each other to a draw most seasons. Since 1901, the Giants lead the alltime series against the Dodgers by just 17 games: 1105 Giants wins to 1088 Dodgers wins. The Dodgers lead in California by a margin of 492-465.

And if you’re really curious, the Dodgers best record against any NL team since moving west is a .580 winning percentage against the Montington Expationals. .592 mark against the Brewers. The worst is a .500 mark against the Cardinals.

 

Dodgers throw down and run gauntlet

This pinch-hit Dodger Thoughts post is dedicated to Chuck Essegian.

Friday will be game one of the Dodgers intradivisional duel with the archrival Giants. It is a time when honor can be reclaimed. Or possibly lost. It’s also the beginning of a brutal stretch of games that may leave the team badly bruised and possibly out of playoff contention.

The word “gauntlet” when used in the sense of “throw down the gauntlet” refers to the medieval practice of knights throwing their gauntlet, a protective glove, on the ground to challenge some other knight to a duel of some kind. It comes from a French word gantelet which means “glove” and it’s related to the Spanish word for glove, guante. The Oxford English Dictionary ultimately believes it comes from Germanic languages.

The word “gauntlet” in “to run the gauntlet”, meaning “to run through a narrow passage of people who are ready to beat you up with ropes and clubs” comes from a Scandinavian word gantlope, which sort of means “lane course.” It is believed that the English saw Swedish sailors imposing the punishment of making people “run the gantlope” during the Thirty Years War and then corrupted the pronunciation.

Sometimes, people have tried to differentiate the two words by spelling one as “gantlet” and the other as “gauntlet,” but when you’re talking about words that describe objects or events that rarely happen in real life now, the proper spelling of a word is hard to find or defend.

The Giants begin the series Friday night with, to borrow a “Seinfeld” term, “hand.” The Giants are 4 1/2 games ahead of the Dodgers, they are playing at home, and there isn’t a lot of season left. (24 games for the Dodgers, 25 for the Giants.)

However, for all the stumbling around the Dodgers have done, the Giants have been trying to match them misstep for misstep. The Giants burned through 24 pitchers in their three games at home with Arizona, including a record-tying 11 on Tuesday night. The DBacks scored 22 runs against the Giants. During the Dodgers last trip to the Bay Area, they dominated the Giants sweeping them by a combined score of 19-3. However, in the first series in San Francisco, the Giants swept by a combined score of 13-0.

On Friday, Josh Beckett will face Tim Lincecum in a pitching matchup that only a year or two ago would have been the subject of a 3000 word Bill Simmons ramble, but now it’s just a game between two guys who used to be big. (And the pictures have gotten larger, despite what you’ve been told.) The game will be shown nationally on the MLB Network for those outside of Los Angeles, but it should be with the Prime Ticket feed allowing everyone to enjoy Vin Scully calling a Dodgers-Giants game in a pennant race. This will be a 7:15 pm game.

Saturday’s game will be a daytime affair, starting at 1:05 pm. It will be on Fox, which means that if you are in the fortunate areas that get the game aired to them, you can enjoy the stylings of Matt Vasgersian and Tim McCarver, or you can … not see the game. Chris Capuano will start for the Dodgers, who has been the Dodgers shakiest starter recently.

Since Capuano overwhelmed the Marlins on August 12 (8 IP, 0 R, 10 K), he’s given up 18 runs in 23 1/3 IP in four starts. On the bright side, he’s only walked one batter in that stretch.

Matt Cain will start for the Giants. Cain beat the Dodgers in his last start against them on August 22 at Dodger Stadium. Since then, he’s made two more starts, both on the road, and both were no decisions against Houston and Chicago. In Cain’s only start against the Dodgers at AT&T Park, he had a no decision in a game on July 27 that the Dodgers ultimately won in 10 innings 5-3 on a Hanley Ramirez home run.

Sunday’s game will be a 5:10 pm start and it will be the ESPN Sunday Night game with Dan Shulman, Orel Hershiser, and Terry Francona. Clayton Kershaw will start for the Dodgers against Barry Zito.

The Dodgers will come out of San Francisco trailing the Giants by 1 1/2, 3 1/2, 5 1/2, or 7 1/2 games. If the final two figures are the ones that we see, then it’s time to start paying very close attention to how the St. Louis Cardinals are doing because the Dodgers will likely have no path to the playoffs other than the second wild card spot.

After this coming series, the Dodgers will be off Monday. In fact, the Dodgers are going to be off the next three Mondays. The only Monday game left on the schedule is Game 159 160 against the Giants on October 1 at Dodger Stadium.

On Tuesday, the Dodgers will start a two-game series at Arizona.  The DBacks have beaten the Dodgers 10 of 16 times. (Bonus note: The 1977 Clint Eastwood film, “The Gauntlet,” is set mostly in Phoenix.) Then, they come home for four games against the Cardinals, a series that may make or break the Dodgers season. Or maybe it won’t. Because on Tuesday,  September 18, the Dodgers start a 9-game, 10-day road trip that will see them starting off with three games against the current best team in baseball, Washington, followed by three games agains the second best team in baseball, Cincinnati. Then, a day off, and three games in San Diego, the team that has been playing about as well as anyone else in the NL West since the All-Star Break.

From September 7 through September 27, the Dodgers will be running a gauntlet against a group of opponents all of whom will be ready to thrown down the gauntlet at the same time. Someone is going to get hurt.

 

Resting up for the trip Up North

This pinch-hit Dodger Thoughts post is in honor of Elmer Valo.

While pinch hitting for Jon, I’ll try to keep up with the news as best I can, but I think most of you will probably know it before I do.

Wednesday’s night game against the Padres was quite typical of the Dodgers in the past two weeks. There was disappointment (down 3-0 early), hope (tied 3-3), some more disappointment (down 4-3), hope (Kemp almost hit it out, Victorino got an HBP!), and then disappointment more bitter than yogurt left in the refrigerator two weeks too long. (Gonzalez grounds out to end the game as the Padres bullpen retires 12 of the 14 batters it faces.) On the other hand, I did get to come home with TWO Hello Kitty Dodger tote bags.

There is a small slate of games in baseball on Thursday, just five, and only one of them will have any bearing on the Dodgers. Colorado will be playing at Atlanta at 9:10 am. The Dodgers are presently 4 1/2 games behind the Braves for wild card spot #1, which is the same distance they trail the Giants in the NL West. The Cardinals lead the Dodgers for wild card spot #2, but now the Dodgers are behind Pittsburgh by .0005. (Or you can just look at it as the Pirates having two games in hand.)

Later tonight, I’ll be back, I hope with a preview of the upcoming series the Dodgers will be playing in California’s fourth largest city.

Billingsley’s season is over

Padres at Dodgers, 7:10 p.m.
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Luis Cruz, 3B
A.J. Ellis, C
Aaron Harang, P

The Dodgers placed Chad Billingsley on the 60-day disabled list, ending his 2012 season after one of the hottest stretches of his career. He finishes with a 3.55 ERA (107 ERA+).

Coming to the team is left-handed reliever Steven Rodriguez from Double-A Chattanooga. Drafted just this past June from Florida, Rodriguez had 22 strikeouts against 14 baserunners in 13 2/3 innings.

* * *

First thing Thursday, I’m headed to the Toronto Film Festival, where I will be spending six days seeing movies, conducting interviews and writing for Variety. It’s going to be a murderous schedule, so rather than have this site go completely dormant, I’ve conscripted Bob Timmermann to take the reins. Enjoy, and here’s hoping things are looking bright for the Dodgers when I return.

More bullpen woes: Javy Guerra injures oblique

Padres at Dodgers, 7:10 p.m.
Kershaw CXLV: Kershawncle Bill the Sailor
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Luis Cruz, 3B
A.J. Ellis, C
Clayton Kershaw, P

Javy Guerra, who has allowed 13 baserunners in 12 1/3 innings with a 0.00 ERA since July 28, has been placed on the disabled list with a left oblique strain.

That move, coming even with rosters expanded in September, hints that Guerra is not likely to see much action for the remainder of the regular season, if any.

Guerra pitched one game following his recall from Albuquerque, retiring three of four batters on Sunday. Josh Wall, the closer for playoff-bound Albuquerque, has been brought up to shore up the depleted Dodger bullpen.

* * *

Tonight, Clayton Kershaw faces old friend Eric Stults. The lefty, now 32, has a 2.43 ERA in 63 innings for San Diego, 1.86 since July.

* * *

Update: Steve Dilbeck of the Times tweets the following: “Kenley Jansen to stay on blood thinners 10 more days, hopes to return Sept. 17; plans offseason surgery to fix heart problem.”

 

No bobblehead giveaways on these dates

While waiting for news on whether the Dodgers’ stretch-run bullpen will include Kenley Jansen, Chad Billingsley or neither, we learned from Bill Shaikin of the Times that the Dodgers’ 2013 home schedule is “tentatively set” to include the Red Sox and Yankees – in addition to the Dodgers’ first regular-season road games at any place named Yankee Stadium.

Surly fans score another sigh of relief

Are we owed our ode to joy? Owed or not, our ode arrived in tonight’s 4-3 extra-inning Dodger victory, a result that left me in a pondering place at Los Angeles Magazine’s CityThink blog.

Labor Day game chat

Padres at Dodgers, 5:10 p.m.
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Luis Cruz, 3B
A.J. Ellis, C
Joe Blanton, P

For Labor Day, Robert J. Baumann of Fangraphs looks at which ballplayers are working the hardest this year.

Pretty amazing that Baltimore has pulled within a game of the Yankees in the American League East, isn’t it? This could really be a year for some fresh cities in the postseason.

What would they call a Baltimore-Washington World Series?  The 295 Series? The Inside-Outside-the-Beltway Classic?

Dodgers bring back Abreu

Diamondbacks at Dodgers, 1:10 p.m.
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Luis Cruz, 3B
Matt Treanor, C
Chris Capuano, P

Bobby Abreu has joined the Dodgers’ active roster. To make room for him on the 40-man, the Dodgers technically called up pitcher Chris Withrow, then placed him on the 60-day disabled list … for undisclosed reasons. (Update: It’s listed as a “right lat strain.”)

Withrow last pitched for Double-A Chattanooga on August 17 and has only thrown 19 innings since June 1, all in relief.

Abreu has a .705 OPS against right-handed pitching as a Dodger this year. Shane Victorino as a Dodger against righties is at .629.

September 1 game chat: Ely promoted

Diamondbacks at Dodgers, 6:10 p.m.
Mark Ellis, 2B
Shane Victorino, LF
Adrian Gonzalez, 1B
Matt Kemp, CF
Hanley Ramirez, SS
Andre Ethier, RF
Luis Cruz, 3B
A.J. Ellis, C
Josh Beckett, P

In addition to Tim Federowicz and Javy Guerra, John Ely has joined the big-league roster. Alfredo Silverio was transferred to the 60-day disabled list to make room for Ely.

If the Dodgers lose tonight, they will be 35-32 at home and on the road.

At least there is some good news …

Atlanta, St. Louis and Pittsburgh are sure doing what they can to keep alive the Dodgers’ hopes of playing past Oct. 3, even if only for one day. But it sure has been an ugly week.

On the bright side, Jaime Jarrin has signed a three-year deal with the Dodgers that will keep him in the broadcast booth for his 55th, 56th and 57th seasons.

Elsewhere …

  • I talked Dodgers in this interview with Will Carroll at the Nickel.
  • Javy Guerra and Tim Federowicz are expected to be the Dodgers’ first roster-expansion callups today.
  • John Ely might not get a callup because of 40-man roster issues, but he was named Pacific Coast League pitcher of the year. He led the league in ERA, WHIP and innings, writes Christopher Jackson of Albuquerque Baseball Examiner.
  • Dodger pitching prospect Zach Lee has a 2.27 ERA with eight walks and 29 strikeouts in 39 2/3 innings since July 27 for Double-A Chattanooga.
  • Yasiel Puig, Eric Eadington, Red Patterson, Steven Rodriguez, Gorman Erickson, Rafael Ynoa and Joc Pederson will be on the Dodgers’ Arizona Fall League team.
  • The life and career of John Roseboro is the subject of Bruce Markusen’s piece at the Hardball Times.
  • Former Dodger shortstop Rafael Furcal has a damaged elbow ligament and will miss the rest of 2012. Tommy John surgery is a possibility. Furcal had a .325 on-base percentage and .346 slugging percentage in 531 plate appearances for St. Louis, .276/.278 from May 17 on. He played in 121 of the Cardinals’ first 131 games.
  • No one plays third base like Adrian Beltre, writes Tyler Kepner of the New York Times (via Rob Neyer at Baseball Nation).
  • San Diego, which began its season 28-50, is 34-21 since – best in the National League West. Jeff Sullivan writes about their resurgence at Fangraphs, while The Associated Press writes about their new O’Malley-led ownership.

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