Diamondbacks 4, Padres 2 - Walks, Balks, and Homers, Oh My!

If I told you that the winning team would score two of its runs on a balk and a bases-loaded walk, would you believe that it was the Diamondbacks who won? Scoring runs is always at a premium at PetCo Park, and when the Arizona nearly wasted a bases loaded and no out situation, it looked like another one of those "bang your head against a hard surface" kind of games. But Daniel Hudson threw eight solid innings of work and the Diamondbacks managed to scratch across enough runs in unusual fashion to get Hudson his second win of the season.

More details of the limited-broadcast game after the jump.

The first three innings were full of missed scoring opportunities for the Diamondbacks. Willie Bloomquist doubled in the 1st, ensuring that the San Diego Padres would remain the only team without a no-hitter for at least one more day, but he was stranded at second base. Miguel Montero and Chris Young led off with walks in the 2nd inning, but neither moved an inch from there. Edinson Volquez gave up a two-out walk to Jason Kubel in the 3rd inning. At this point, as he was throughout the game, Volquez was only throwing about 50% of his pitches for strikes, yet the Diamondbacks were mostly unable to capitalize.

Even when they did push their first run across in the 4th inning, it was rather disappointing. Montero and Young both walked again to lead it off, and Josh Bell was called safe on his sacrifice bunt to load the bases with nobody out. After Aaron Hill popped out too shallow to advance anybody, it felt like the whole inning might be wasted. Luckily, Silver Slugger Daniel Hudson stepped to the plate and hit a sacrifice fly to give Arizona a 1-0 lead. Gerardo Parra struck out to end the threat.

San Diego got the runs right back in the bottom half of the 4th by playing some small ball. Will Venable reached on a bunt hit and stole second, then scored on a close play at the plate. Parra's direct throw to home on the single allowed Cameron Maybin to advance to second base, and he scored on Yonder Alonso's single up the middle to give the Padres a fleeting lead.

Bloomquist led off the 5th inning with a single, but was TOOTBLAN'd right in front of Paul Goldschmidt, who hit a deep, no-doubt home run to left to tie up the game. In the 7th inning, Parra reached on an infield single and Bloomquist moved him to third with another single (Willie was 3-for-4 tonight). Parra's mere presence on third base caused reliever Joe Thatcher to lose his concentration and balk, and Parra scored the go-ahead run.

Meanwhile, Daniel Hudson was dealing. In 89 pitches, he had allowed only the two runs, no walks, and struck out four. So when it came to Hudson's spot in the lineup in the 8th inning, with Montero and Bell on base and two outs, Gibson let Hudson hit for himself. Hudson took a walk to load the bases for Parra, who then also walked to bring in Montero and give the Diamondbacks a 4-2 lead. (Parra nearly walked on four straight pitches from new pitcher Luke Gregerson, but a generous strike call allowed Gregerson to throw a fifth pitch before walking Parra and promptly being pulled.)

Hudson struggled a bit in the 8th inning, his strength, energy, or both clearly starting to lag. He gave up his first walk to Everth Cabrera and threw a lot of pitches to get the next three outs, but he did it, ending the night at 112 pitches with a strikeout to Venable.

J.J. Putz came in for the save and just had to make things "interesting." After two relatively quick outs, Carlos Quentin was hit by a pitch (of course) and Chase Headley singled to put runners on the corners, but J.J. got Jesus Guzman to line out to Goldschmidt to end the game and lock down the win for the Diamondbacks.

Source: FanGraphs

Frodo and Sam: G Parra, +18.0% / W Bloomquist, +13.6%
Aragorn: D Hudson, +13.1%
The Eye: Kirk Gibson Aaron Hill, -17.6%

Despite the overall positive (in our case, downward) fangraph, the Diamondbacks continue to miss a whole lot of scoring opportunities. The Diamondbacks worked eight walks and seven hits, and they only got four runs. They twice had the bases loaded, once with nobody out, and only came away with one run each time. They were only 1-for-12 w/ RISP, the one hit didn't even score a run (Bell's infield single), and there were a cumulative 23 men left on base. Hudson's sacrifice fly was nice, sure, as was Goldy's home run, but the go-ahead run came on a balk call and another run on a bases-loaded walk, and those two lucky events probably aren't going to happen very often.

Nonetheless, a win is a win, and it makes everybody's day a little brighter.

It was a fairly quiet Gameday Thread with fewer than 500 comments, probably due to the fact that none of us out-of-towners could actually see the game, since it was a FOX broadcast. Bryan nearly had over 90 comments, and hotclaws and Jim were the other top posters. The 16 of us present were hotclaws, Clefo, Bryan J. Boltik, onedotfive, Jim McLennan, kishi, shoewizard, snakecharmer, Fangdango, AzDbackfanInDc, txzona, SongBird, Marc Fournier, Zavada's Moustache, Bryn21, and Muu. Wow, that is a short list... nearly pre-SBN 2.0 days.

A quiet GDT means no green comments. Bryan had the most recs (all two of them) with this quip after the game was over:

I'm still not confident

i think we need 2 more outs just to be safe

2012: The year of Wagner Mateo

by Bryan J. Boltik on Jun 2, 2012 7:26 PM PDT up reply actions 2 recs

Tomorrow's game has a late start time (3:35pm AZ time) due to a marathon in San Diego, which pushes it into ESPN's exclusive TV broadcast window. While there will be no TV broadcast of the game in either city, local blackout restrictions have been withdrawn and the game will be available for free on MLB.tv, with the audio commentary being provided by way of the radio broadcast. See you tomorrow as we try to take the series against the Padres!