Snake Bytes: 08/30 - McCarthy, Hitting Ranger

Diamondbacks News

[AZ SnakePit] Breakfast Baseball: Phillies 7, Dbacks 4

Give it up for....Justin27!!! Justin once again put some ink in his pen and gave us another outstanding recap, this time about yesterday’s sorrowful loss. “At least this was an entertaining game”, wrote Justin after finishing his bag of peanuts and self-made nachos while sipping from his beer.

Suarez, Philly Ranger...or is it Philly, Suarez Ranger...well, whoever started for the Phillies was outdone with that name by reliever JD Hammer. That is one hell of a name for a player. “Can’t touch this”, he said, and the D-Backs went down, but not before they tagged good old Archie Bradley with a couple of runs.

[AZ Central] Bumgarner struggles, Diamondbacks come up short in road trip-ending loss to Phillies

Good article from José Romero, who apparently allowed Nick Piecoro to have a day off, and the writer provides lots of quotes.

Like the comments Jake McCarthy had after getting his first major league hit. McCarthy played in front of his whole family, including his grandmother: “The entire experience to be out there playing in front of my family and a lot of my high school friends, it was all just super special to take in,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy is from Scranton, PA, and his family lives nearby the Dunder Mifflin office: “Michael is a good friend of our family, and he prides himself on being the one that discovered me. We get free paper supplies. We invited him to the game today, but apparently he thought he got an invitation to the presidential seats so unfortunately he was a bit delayed and didn’t get to see my first hit.”

Meanwhile, poor Lovullo was shifting players around again. He saw Rojas making an error at third and Marte struggling again in center: “He’ll get there,” said Lovullo. Or maybe he won’t, Torey.

[dbacks.com] Bumgarner ‘had no feel’ in off start vs. Phils

“It should have been a lot worse. That’s as bad as I think I’ve ever been,” Bumgarner said. “I had no feel, no idea where the ball was going. It was really bad. That’s as bad a game as I’ve thrown in a long time, and I’m surprised it wasn’t a lot worse.” Bumgarner said, as quoted by Paul Casella.

Bumgarner felt right from the beginning it was going to be a tough afternoon: “Pretty much right away,” said Bumgarner when asked about when he first noticed something was off. “Even the warmup pitches on the game mound — for whatever reason — I was throwing fastballs in the dirt warming up, which I don’t do.”

[Arizona Sports] D-backs release Bryan Holaday, recall Andrew Young from Triple-A

Hooray! Hooray! It’s a Hola-Holaday!

[NBC Sports Philadelphia] An OK homestand is better than a terrible homestand as Phillies continue to hang around

“It ended a lot better than the way it started out,” Girardi said of the homestand. “We’ve started to play better and hopefully it can continue as we move into this road trip.”

Not the first time a team thinks it is turning things around after beating the Diamondbacks.

Around The MLB

[CBS Sports] How MLB pushed back the Atlantic League mound and pushed fed-up players to the brink of a work stoppage

It is not that radical as I am going to describe it here, but when I read this article about the Atlantic League, the word “lab rat” crossed my mind (maybe I got some help from a paragraph title). MLB and the Atlantic League reached a three-year agreement in 2019 so that the independent ball players were going to serve as a testing ground: the automated ball-strike system, the three-batter minimum, stricter defensive positioning rules, wider bases, the “double-hook” designated hitter (a team loses its DH whenever it removes its starting pitcher) and moving back the pitcher mound.

The intention of pushing back the mound is to give hitters a tiny bit more fraction of time to be able to hit the ball, so there are less strikeouts. Pitchers have had to adjust their release point. It looks like MLB is happy with the experiment, so don’t be surprised if at ony time it’ll push back the mound, but the article is far from conclusive in my opinion, so read it yourself and share your own findings and thoughts.

[ESPN] Javier Baez, Francisco Lindor and Kevin Pillar take a jab at Mets’ fans and the club is not pleased at all

Oh, the Mets. Different owner, different front office, same old problems. The Mets are still one of the juiciest teams in the MLB. A couple of weeks ago it was Mets’ owner Steve Cohen who called out on Twitter the Mets’ struggling offence.

The Mets have gone better than AWOL since the All Star break but have lost momentum and are sitting behind the Braves and Phillies with odds of slightly above 1% to reach the play-offs.

New York is not amused and this Sunday’s game saw (I didn’t see it, but I guess it really happened) Mets’ fans booing their own players. Baez, Lindor and Pillar had a couple of “in your face” moments after getting hits and gave the public a thumbs down gesture.

GM Sandy Alderson was “not pleased” and the Mets released an official press release you can read here. Javier Baez probably knows already that a Cubs’ World Series ring doesn’t mean anything at all at Flushing. And maybe he can even forget a possible contract extension there.

[CBS Sports] Yadier Molina’s Hall of Fame case is perplexing, but here’s why the catcher is deserving

First of all, the man has to retire. And he doesn’t look like a man who wants to retire.
But if we are talking about a HOF case: I see your WAR and raise it with JAWS. But you are playing Jack Sommers who lays down his trump card: “And here is my shoewizard”. What is your take, Jack?

[MLB Trade Rumors] Mets Release Josh Reddick

A .182/.289/.303 line in 38 at bats in Triple A was enough to get the hook.

Across The Pacific

[Japan] Chiben Wakayama wins Japan’s high school baseball Koshien title

Japan’s most important national tourney for high school baseball was held these past weeks for the first time since 2019, after being cancelled in 2020 due to COVID. This year it was still a different sight of the venue, as the stadium were the tournament is traditionally held was completely empty because of the COVID regulations. Chiben Wakayama won the tournament for the third time, its first in 21 years.

The tournament was not without any incidents, as two teams had to withdraw because of COVID infections while heavy rain prevented baseball from being played for 6 consecutive days, something that had never happened before.

The Koshien tournament is organised since 1914 and represents a knock-out tournament for the high school champions of each Japanese prefecture, who play qualifiers in their own prefecture. Last one standing is Japan’s best.

[South Korea] KBO confirms Lotte Giants pitcher Song Seung-jun’s 72-game ban for possession of illegal substance

Performance enhancing drugs is not just a problem in MLB, but also in the KBO. Although in this case the pitcher was already proven guilty before actually using the substance. Song Seung-jun, a former Boston Red Sox MLB top 100 prospect, was found guilty of posessing an illicit growth hormone four years ago. KBO rules state that a player can be punished for their purchase and possession of banned substances: it is not necessary to prove he actually uses it. Apparently several appeals prevented the ban from being imposed earlier.

A similar case happened just a couple of weeks ago, when American pitcher Aaron Brooks was caught by Korea customs of purchasing a pipe with marihuana traces on it. The KIA Tigers immediately released the right-hander.

Across The Wall

[Dominican Republic] The Curacao and Aruban path to the Major Leagues passes through DR to complete training

Dutch Caribbean native Henry Martínez discovered that kids of 12 to 16 years are physically behind Dominican children of the same age in their baseball development. That led the son of a Dominican mother to open an academy in Santo Domingo. Young kids and away from their family...but the food seems to be better and 7 hours of daily training will probably keep them from longing back to their country. The school has some success too as proven by 6 international signings thus far from the academy.