Record: 25-15. Pace: 101-61. Change on last season: +4

The good news is, yes, The Sets now has wi-fi. The bad news is, my PC never went past "Acquiring network address", so full connectivity proved elusive this evening. Still, I was able to watch some of the game, albeit on a TV with a dodgy cable connection. This was a different one from last week's frozen mosaic device: this one was old-school lines and static. Still, he are are my notes, pretty much written as the game unfolded. I arrived just in time to see Eric Byrnes' first at-bat of the evening, which can only be described as possessing all the hideous fascination of a car-accident. Even when he was 3-0 ahead, you knew it was going to end in another Flying Nun, and after swinging at ball four, that's exactly what happened as he struck out swinging. There were some poignant and painfully appropriate signs in the crowd: the one that sticks in my mind said "Eric: don't hit it here. Just hit it."

De La Rosa had a very nice curveball; makes you wonder if he'll eventually be another one of those pitchers we look back on and regret trading away [a.k.a. the Brad Penny Hall of Fame]. Turns out he passed through our organization not once, but twice: we signed him back in March 1998, then sold him to Monterrey in 2000, before his brief transit as part of both the Schilling and Sexson trades. He struck out Owings and Young with it in the third, despite the sign in the crowd saying "Our lineup has nine hitters. Does yours?" - the more cynical among you are probably muttering that this is being somewhat kind to certain members of said lineup. Interesting to see Snyder trying to drop down a bunt with Reynolds on first. Not many times you'll see the #8 hitter in an NL lineup doing that, with the pitcher on deck. Just another way that the presence of Pwnings changes the dynamics of the game.

Owings was pitching with admirable efficiency - well, from what I can tell anyway. The entire top of the fourth, bar the final fly-ball, happened in the time it took me to write the above paragraph [my laptop is out of sight of the television, so I keep having to scurry across the bar, watch some baseball, and then run back to our table.] We finally broke through in the bottom of the fourth; a Drew double, an infield single by Hudson, and a Jackson single, spectacularly misplayed into a double by Hawpe, which brought the first run home. The Rockies walked Upton to get to Byrnes, who promptly obliged by grounding into a double-play, albeit one that did score another run. He was just trying SO hard, it was...sad and painful and about a dozen other emotions, all in one. The volume was down on the TV - how was the crowd reaction?

Perhaps the biggest hit was Orlando Hudson's two-RBI knock in the bottom of the fifth, that doubled our lead and made the score 4-0. We had men on second and third with one outs, but Drew struck out and it looked as if De La Rosa was going to escape the inning unscathed. However, O-Dawg muscled a bloop into the outfield, and both base-runners advanced. A walk to Jackson ended the Colorado starter's evening with two outs in the fourth, but another free pass, to Upton, meant that Byrnes came up with the bases-loaded again. One headfirst slide later, the inning was over - ironically, just in time for the start of the comedy show, which basically suspended my ability to pay much attention to the game, except sneaking surreptitious glances out of the corner of my eye.

What I did see, in a squinty way, was Colorado gradually pulling closer after Owings left. In contrast to yesterday, while much the same bullpen was in operation, they didn't exactly look lights out - tonight, it was seven hits and three runs in three innings. Each of Qualls, Slaten and Peña were tagged for a run by the Rockies, which meant Lyon was faced with a one-run lead in the ninth. If one pitch can be said to have decided the outcome, it was a 3-1 pitch to Matt Holliday that he thought was ball four: the home-plate umpire disagreed and Holliday grounded out. That proved crucial as Lyon subsequently allowed a pair of two-out singles that put the tying run at third-base. However, he then got Hawpe to pop out to Reynolds, for his fifteenth straight shutout inning, eleventh save and Arizona's 25th victory.

Excellent outing by Owings, who gave us six scoreless innings, on five hits and two walks, with five K's. He got into and out of trouble in the first, loading the bases with one out, but got a crucial strikeout of Atkins and escaped without damage. The Rockies didn't get another runner past second base until the last batter Owings faced, to end the sixth inning. However, Owings did go ohfer, dropping his average down to "only" .370 - he might have been robbed by a call at first, however. Arizona was actually outhit quite significantly by the Rockies, 12-7, but they left the bases littered with wasted opportunities, stranding a dozen men. Drew and Hudson had two hits, the latter also surviving a nasty moment when he stumbled coming out of the batter's box, which led to the grounds crew drying up the area around home-plate.

[Click to enlarge in new window]
Master of his domain: Micah Owings, +31.5%
Honorary mention: Orlando Hudson, +16.0%
God-emperor of suck: Eric Byrnes, -8.8%

Solid turnout in the Gameday Thread - we might even have needed an overflow thread, if I'd been able to get connected. However, thanks to those who did not experience technical difficulties; soco, mrssoco, DbacksSkins, Wimb, unnamedDBacksfan, 4 Corners Fan, kishi (happy birthday!), foulpole, snakecharmer, hotclaws, TwinnerA, isoldout, dstorm, frienetic, dahlian, UptonMVP, batster, srdmad, seton hall snake pit, Zephon and singaporedbacksfan. With tomorrow night's marquee pitching match-up, however, I will be clearing the decks and should be in full effect.

Finally, here's one of those player comparison things:
Left-fielder A: .214/.275/.357     
Left-fielder B: .276/.343/.429
I think we all know who Player A is, so let's move on, shall we? Player B, however, might surprise you: Luis Gonzalez, in a less-than-full time role for the surprising (and NL East leading) Florida Marlins. Over on Major-League Jerk, Hef speculates on how Gonzo's career might have played out, had he decided to stay here. It's an interesting domino-esque effect, had Gonzo stayed as the fourth outfielder in 2006, backing up Quentin, Young and Byrnes. Who can say?

Facing Clemens
by Jonathan Mayo
The Lyons Press, $16.95

"I may have been fortunate to pitch for twenty-four years, but it has been no accident."
    -- Roger Clemens

In the light of recent events, the above quote from Clemens - virtually the first thing he says in his introduction to Mayo's book, now takes on a somewhat different reading, given recent claims by Brian McNamee, not to mention the 82 mentions of Clemens by name within the Mitchell Report. Now is certainly a good time for a book which examines the Rocket's career. Unfortunately, Mayo's book is as much as victim of circumstance as a beneficiary, since it was finished before Mitchell's revelations broke. The result is somewhat like a biography of John F. Kennedy which ends, "The president got off the plane in Dallas and lived happily ever after." The light of subsequent events render everything which went before in spectacularly different light.

Steroids are basically the elephant in the corner of the room here, though this is through no fault of Mayo. Almost every chapter refers to Clemens' remarkable late-career resurgence, which is basically utterly unprecedented, as since 1923 only three ERA-qualified pitchers older than 31 have had an ERA+ better then 200. Roger Clemens is two of them - doing it first in 1997 at age 34, and then again, eight years later. His ERA+ of 226 is more than a hundred points better than any other 42-year old in baseball history. Clean living and hard work or...? The unspoken questions inevitably color all reading of the book. When Cal Ripken says of Roger, "I did notice in Boston toward the end, his fastball did come back a little bit to a normal range," is he hinting at something? If you take the first letter of the paragraphs in Clemens' introduction, do they spell out, "Yeah, I did it. So sue me"?

Putting that aside, the book is sometimes interesting, yet is limited because it is maddeningly single-faceted. There is certainly scope for a book on what makes a great pitcher tick, but Mayo basically talks only to the batters who had to face Clemens. They, obviously, offer first-hand experience, but can only give one part of the picture. What about the catchers who worked with Clemens, such as Jorge Posada, behind the plate for 155 games and 4,105 plate-appearances? Wouldn't he be able to provide more insight into Clemens' dominance than Dave Magadan, who may have faced Clemens in the College World Series, but only had 12 major-league at-bats versus the Rocket. Or what about Clemens' team-mates, with the best seat in the house to observe him? Heck, talk to the umpires too.

That said, there are nuggets to be gleaned, and some of it is just plain fun to read. Luis Gonzalez is interviewed, as a chapter is devoted to him because of he and Clemens' roles in the 2001 World Series, one late-bloomer facing another. I still get goose-bumps simply reading about Game Seven, and Gonzalez also has some interesting thing to say about how to handle Clemens. "You try to get him early, because he came up with the splitter and things like that and it made it that much tougher. Not only that, when you have a pitcher like that, you don't want to get deep into the count because he is a strikeout-type pitcher, so you try to get that guy early, get something up in the zone and try to get a good pass at it."

Credit also to Torii Hunter, who - unlike Mike Piazza! - agreed to be interviewed despite a lifetime 0-for-28 [including the playoffs] against the Rocket. Though Hunter, somewhat grumpily, reckons he was robbed of a double when the scorer gave an error to Scott Brosius. More recent hitters such as Hunter make better interview targets, since the at-bats are fresh in their mind [Magadan's last one, for example, was in 1998], and they have more of substance to say. In some cases, Mayo seems forced to pad chapters with paragraphs which do little more than recite the box score: "In two games, both Rangers wins, the second baseman went 4 for 7 with 4 RBIs. He carried that over into the next year with a 2 for 4 showing in their first meeting in 1990. Then came 1991. The Rangers beat Clemens twice, with Franco going 3-for-6 in the process."

Only time will tell how history views the legacy of Roger Clemens. What seemed like a sure-fire lock for the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, is now apparently another tarnish mark on the history of baseball at the turn of the millennium, with the greatest hitter and greatest pitcher of the era apparently both turning to illegal methods to prolong and improve their careers. The definitive book on Clemens has still not been written, and perhaps never will be: one can only wonder what kind of book Mayo would write now, if he had the information available now.

For more information visit the author's site at jonathanmayo.net.

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