Recaps

[Arizona Sports] Orioles get to Zac Gallen early - Gallen has allowed 11 earned runs in his last two starts, his most in a two-game stretch since 2020. Six of the first seven balls in play against him were hits to pair with four strikeouts. He said his feel wasn’t at its peak going in, so he had to lock in and fight to make pitches. “I thought he actually had good stuff,” Lovullo said. “I feel like they got to that point in the count, the Orioles did a good job of that throughout the series, they kind of made you work through that critical at-bat. I think they just waited Zac out and got the right pitch and got some extension on him... I think some balls got hit in the right place at the right time.”

[dbacks.com] D-backs drop series finale to surging Orioles - Right now, the D-backs can’t worry about the records of the teams they’re playing or how the other Wild Card contenders are playing either. As first baseman Christian Walker pointed out, they have to focus the same way, every day regardless. “You can feel the trends,” said Walker, who hit his 30th homer of the season in the ninth inning Sunday. “Like, you know if we're not stringing together wins, chances are we're slipping behind and you're aware of what's going on around the league. But I feel like I want all my focus going into what's happening here. We're definitely aware of it and you pay attention to the standings, but it's not another team's job to get us in [the playoffs]. It’s going to come down to us winning games.”

[AZ Central] Orioles wear down Zac Gallen, outpace Diamondbacks - The ball was hit sharp and just to the right of a drawn-in Ketel Marte at second base. Reaching to his right, the ball glanced off his glove and trickled into center field. Thinking back on the play, Torey Lovullo stopped short of calling it one Marte should have made. What was clear, at least, was that he could have made it, and his inability to do so changed the course of not just the sixth inning on Sunday but what would become an 8-5 loss. “The bottom line is we didn’t do it. We didn’t execute well enough to keep runs off the board, to put runs on the board. There’s just a lot of identifiable things that I feel like we came close to but didn’t get the job done.”

[SI] Big Inning Bites the D-backs Again in Series Loss to Orioles - Zac Gallen, who entered the game with a 1.84 ERA in 13 starts following a loss, was ambushed for four runs in the first two innings. Baltimore got hits on six of the first seven balls they put into play, with many of them either finding holes or dropping in front of outfielders. “It’s a good lineup, it’s a good young lineup, I think they’re going to be good for a while” said Gallen. “I’m sure they came in with a pretty solid plan, that’s a common theme for teams that are really good. Good offenses, they have a good plan and they stick to it. I’m not executing, works in their favor. It’s a good team, and they had some good at-bats.”

Team News

[Arizona Sports] D-backs' Tommy Pham scratched after slamming bat into rack - “He has a bruised righty pinky that was causing him a little bit of discomfort through the course of his swing,” manager Torey Lovullo said Sunday. “He was trying to fight his way into the lineup … but when he went and took some swings pregame, there was just too much pain.” Pham delved into the situation more after the loss. “[The pinky’s] just swollen,” Pham said. “Got an X-ray, there’s no break so that’s good news. … I should be good to go tomorrow.” Pham fessed up on how the injury occurred. “[Saturday] when I struck out in the last at-bat, I slammed the bat in the bat rack and my pinky caught the bat rack.”

[SI] Should Zac Gallen Abandon the Cutter Against Lefties? - A lot of the damage has been on cutters thrown to left hand batters. He's thrown 129 cutters to left hand batters and when they put the cutter in play, they are 16 for 32, .500 B.A. and slugging .906. Contrast that with his changeup against left hand batters. He's thrown 250 of those, and left hand hitters are just 11 for 64, .172, and slugging .281. The issue with the cutter against lefties is he's simply not getting it in enough.

And, elsewhere...

[Washington Post] How MLB prospects survived record heat in Arizona’s ‘fire league’ - July was Phoenix’s hottest month on record, with an average temperature of 102.7 degrees and an average daytime high of 114.7. In a record-breaking streak, the high topped 110 for 31 straight days. It was even hotter in direct sunlight... a run of extreme heat that affected even the most veteran of baseball hands. “It was a different heat,” said Josh Barfield, the farm director of the hometown Diamondbacks. “As soon as you open the door, it’s hitting you in the face, and there’s really no escaping it.”

Looop Lapeta (2022)

Rating: B

Dir: Aakash Bhatia
Star: Taapsee Pannu, Tahir Raj Bhasin, KC Shankar, Shreya Dhanwanthary

The news that Bollywood had obtained the rights to an official remake of Run Lola Run came as a total surprise to me. The fact that it was available on Netflix, even more so. Give their algorithm a massive fail. I mean, Lola is only one of my all-time favourites. Why would they possibly think I would not be interested in another version? To be fair, I had qualms. The original is such a perfect film, any remake is going to be very hard-pushed to match it, rendering it almost a lost cause. We therefore settled in at Film Blitz Towers for a potential hate watch, feeling someone had tried to clone one of our kids, and was trying to pass it off as the real thing.

As the grade above suggests, however, it was by no means disastrous. It’s different, to be sure, and that’s probably for the best. The makers wisely seem to have realized there was no point in trying to copy Lola shot-for-shot, and have largely gone their own direction. The central framework is there, no question, and also contains some nicely-done nods to the original. But it’s different in many ways – not least in length, where it’s close to an hour more than Lola. That allows for a lot more development of some elements, although not all of these are necessarily particularly welcome.

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