Vazquez (10-13, 4.59)
Park (11-6, 5.91)
- Craig Counsell, 2B
- Chad Tracy, RF
- Luis Gonzalez, LF
- Tony Clark, 1B
- Troy Glaus, 3B
- Shawn Green, CF
- Royce Clayton, SS
- Chris Snyder, C
- Javier Vazquez, P
Well, that was a weird night: one of those where you wake up at 3am, absolutely not sleepy any more in the slightest. Three hours (and a Korean urban martial-arts movie later), I finally drift off again, and sleep through till 11:30 am. With a 12:35 start, that mean this will be almost like one of those Sunday games, the game-thread for today going up before the report for yesterday.
This time it's Vazquez. For sure. How good or effective he's going to be after his "stomach-flu" (and I have a theory on that, which I'll get to later, in the report), we'll see, but in Park, he faces an eminently beatable opponent, whose ERA in five outings with the Padres is still above seven.
Clayton has been dropped to seventh, with Tracy moving into the #2 spot. This is presumably in an attempt to shake up the top of the order, which has been largely unproductive lately - in the past week, Counsell and Clayton are a combined 7-for-52.
Melvin has said that we need to win two out of every three games the rest of the way. That pretty much makes this a must-win game, especially coming against the division leader. Otherwise, with the Dodgers crushing the Cubs so far today (7-0 at time of writing, in the top of the 3rd), we can kiss even second place goodbye.
Not sure how many people will be around for this weekday, noon-ish game. I'll be here, but radio only, because I have way too much to do, and will be pretty much locked to my PC the rest of the day. Which will at least make commenting easy!