A not-so-welcome for the return of Joe Wieland and an insanely long back-and-forth featuring plenty of home runs, RISP LOB, and an entire cast of relief pitchers and pinch hitters results in a fun game, but a cruddy loss.
It has been about two and a half years since we've seen the handsome face of Joe Wieland on a big league mound in a Padres uniform. Since his first start back in April of 2012 he's had four solid appearances, until that was cut short due to the seemingly accursed Tommy John trend with young star Padres pitchers.
Although it was nice to see WieWie back on the mound, the Colorado Rockies didn't make his return a pleasant one. Wieland only lasted 2.1 innings before getting cut short after giving up two early second and third inning home runs by Michael McKenry and Justin Morneau, bringing home 3 runs and making things 3-0. McKenry struck again with an RBI single and WieWie's return would be cut short before any more crud could be knocked from him.
Taken to the 4th and 5th, Jedd Gyorko started the San Diego scoring off with an RBI single, followed by a sexy solo HR from Tommy Medica (his 8th of the season). But by the time things reached the 5th inning an error by Rymer Liriano would have things at an ugly 2-6.
Medica looks almost impatient as he blasts one into left center.
To get back into the action in the 6th for the Padres, Gyorko would pop off another RBI; this time in the form of a double, plating Liriano and putting the Friars within a reasonable 3-6 defecit. Once things moved to the 7th inning and Alexi Amarista up to bad, a fat 95MPH fastball found its way into the Ninja's thigh. With a runner on first now, Corey Spangenberg pinch-hit in the exact way you would want him to: his second MLB HR, a hard-hit smack into the left field front row bleachers.
Spangy comes off the bench to hit what might be the best weakest HR ever.
With the 4-HR game now at a tight 5-6 score and runners on first and third with one out, Seth Smith came up wagging his bat in the 8th inning to single in the tying run. At 6-6 the Rockies ended the inning, and an intense back-and forth would begin.
Smeth ties things up and prevents everybody from going home for 4 more innings.
By the time it was the 11th inning, neither side was budging all that much. Once the Padres started to pull the game in their direction with two on and two out and no choice but to stick Cashner up to bat the extremely fortunate opportunity for Andrew Cashner to take an at-bat with RISP - resulted in a very hard effort and a line-out into right center.
Quackenbush was clean shaven when this game started.
— Gaslamp Ball (@gaslampball) September 7, 201447 at bats. 13 hits. 3 walks. 11 strikeouts. 18 left on base. Here is your full cast for tonight's game:
Abraham Almonte (Jake Goebbert), Rymer Liriano (Dale Thayer, Nick Vincent, Rene Rivera, Kevin Quackenbush, Andrew Cashner, Jesse Hahn), Yangervis Solarte, Jedd Gyorko, Yasmani Grandal, Tommy Medica (Seth Smith), Cameron Maybin (Will Venable), Alexi Amarista, Joe Wieland (Tim Stauffer, Adam Moore, Leonel Campos, Alex Torres, Cory Spangenberg)
The game started at 6:10 PM, and unfortunately it took until 12 innings and almost 5 hours for the "human element" to get tired of standing behind home plate and start calling inane balls and strikes to end the game as soon as possible. Pushing the Padres out of offensive opportunities on some questionable strike calls, and forcing Jesse "burning the late-night oil" Hahn to narrow down his location gave the Rockies all they needed to walk it off.
FINAL GAME TIME
4 HOURS 52 MINUTES
From the get-go the Rocks had the game in their favor. Early on the board and packing on insurance runs; it wasn't until Seth Smith's home run that our win probability actually dipped into a Padres positive. Things zig-zagged until ultimately shooting in the wrong direction.
Source: FanGraphs
Plenty of the Gee El Bee showed up for tonight's marathon.
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| Total comments | 306 |
| Total commenters | 13 |
| Commenter list | CurbEnthusiasm, Darklighter, EnglishChris, EvilSammy, Friar Fever, Hormel, Lancers46, SDCole24, TheThinGwynn, abara, daveysapien, hashtagtroll, jodes0405 |
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Although FriarFever bombarded the thread with almost 100 comments, it was jodes and yours truly that fought the rec battle. TheThinGwynn took home the Mario Party star for the comment with the most recs, but with jodes at 8 recs and daveysapien at 7 recs, I would argue that daveysapien won the rec war (at least 3 of jodes recs were from me). That's my impartial sabermetric analysis of the thread.
The rec battle wasn't all to be had. A Bud Black.gif-off started early in the thread. Frankly, jodes should have been disqualified for posting a non-gif of Bud Black, but I'll leave it up to you all to decide who the winner is.