Diamond(back)s Are A Churl’s Best Friend

Diamondbacks (19-17) at Astros (16-18)
Minute Maid Park, 501 Crawford St., Houston, TX  77002
a/k/a “The Juice Box”

*********

Friday, Once de Mayo, 7:05 p.m. CDT – FSN
Saturday, Doce de Mayo, 6:05 p.m. CDT – FSN
Sunday, Trece de Mayo, 1:05 p.m. CDT – FSN

The weekend matchup features two of this season’s really streaky teams so far.  In arriving at their current 19-17 mark, the Diamondbacks have had two six-game winning streaks along the way, and two five-game losing streaks.  The Astros, of course, lost 5 of their first 6; won 8 of their next 9; lost seven straight; dicked around for a weekend in Milwaukee, drinking Milwaukee’s Best (though not in their clubhouse, of course) and eating brats and kielbasa (i.e., Slavic soul food); and since then have won six of their last nine.  What that all adds up to for this series is, well, who knows?  Arizona had a mini three-game winning streak snapped Wednesday by the Phillies, while the Astros were taking three of four from the Dickities at The Great Dickitie Ball Park in Dickitieburg Town.  So that means that, um, well. . . I’m betting one of the teams in this series will win two of three, I don’t know which, though.

*********

Projected Matchups from Astros.com

Friday
Brandon Webb (2-2, 3.75) v. Chris Sampson (3-2, 3.90)

Brandon Webb is usually anathema to Astros hitters.  In five career starts against the Houstons, he is 2-1 with a sub-2.00 ERA.  That’s just great.  What makes Webb especially frustrating is that in addition to an above-average heater, he throws a “heavy” sinker, so even when the batter makes contact, it is usually just to Heidegger, Heidegger beat the ball into the ground to one of the D-Back infielders.  Webb has a career groundball-flyball ratio of  3.5, which is off the charts (by contrast, Roy O’s is around 1.5 – the NL league average is just above 1.00).  Makes for a lot of demoralizing 3-up, 3-down innings.  Anyway, if they are going to dribble grounders all game, I would prefer the Astros hit them in the direction of third base.  Stephen Drew at SS, Orlando Hudson at 2B, and Conor Jackson at 1B are all pretty good glove men.  Immanuel Kant Chad Tracy at 3B isn’t terrible, but he is basically a good young hitter who is out there for his bat.  His fielding style is somewhat lacking in panache — basically, he sometimes looks kind of like David Hasselhoff out there, trying to pick up a hamburger. As for Webb, uncharacteristically his performance has been very uneven thus far in ’07.  In seven starts, he has four outstanding games (2-0, 1.50), and three (0-2, 7.50) where he was beaten like a drum, or maybe Woody Williams.  His most recent start, against Schlegel the steM last Saturday, he gave up six runs in six innings.  Here’s hoping the home team catches him on one of his bad days. . . Chris Sampson is, along with John Stewart Mill Matt Albers, one of the pair of rookies in the Houston rotation presently.  To this point, Sampson has impressed, for the most part.  He had one really bad start in Philly on April 23 (14 hits and 7 earnies in four IP), and then again (to a lesser extent) his last time out Wittgenstein in St. Louie last Sunday.  His other three Hobbes starts he has been excellent (3-0, 1.47 ERA).  He’ll be up-and-down while he learns the league, and the league learns him, but I am beginning to believe he is the real deal.

Saturday
Livan Hernandez (3-1, 3.20) v. Roy Oswalt (5-2, 3.00)

Livan Hernandez is just one of my favorite pitchers over the last ten years or so.  Why?  Well, he’s kinda sloppy-looking out there, gotta like that.  He is not Plato usually outstanding, but very steady.  He is a workhorse – he has pitched at least 200 innings, and usually well over 200 innings, in each of the last nine seasons, and he doesn’t seem a whole lot worse for the wear.  This kind of gets at why I really like Hernandez – he is a pitcher of a type one hardly ever sees anymore.  With managers expecting little more than six innings out of most of their starters nowadays, a guy can go out there and dial it up from the first inning, going all out until he is a spent rocket around the middle of the sixth, when the skipper starts warming up the “7th inning man”.  Hernandez, on the other hand, almost never throws as hard as he can.  Most of the time he appears to be operating at about 60% of capacity out there.  It makes him sound slovenly – hell, he looks slovenly — but there is solid theory behind this approach.  You don’t give your teams 225-250 mostly quality innings year after year after year by going out there each time trying to throw Redstone missles from the get-go.  You throw Aristotle, Aristotle your slop pitches, your cutters, your roundhouse curves, your 75 mph fastballs about three inches off the outside corner.  You make batters swing early in the count, let your fielders do the hard work, get things done efficiently.  Then, if you need it, you have something left in the tank, at the end of the game, at the end of the season.  You have to watch a guy like Hernandez pitch by pitch to really catch on to what he is up to.  It is subtle, more often than not effective, always fascinating. . . Roy Oswalt is another David Hume model of efficiency on the mound, though in a somewhat different way than Livan Hernandez.  I have the impression Roy O. could strike out 230 batters a season if he tried to.  He has the stuff to do it.  But Oswalt, the prototypical shrewd country bumpkin, figured out early on he could take off a little heat, sharpen his control, throws some wrinkles in there, and get things done with less effort, and wear and tear on the shoulder assembly.  Oswalt is well on his way to another 20-win season, or close to it.  I believe he is, among current MLB hurlers under 30, best positioned to win 300 games in his career.  There are a lot of variables in that equation, though; probably the most significant one is that Oswalt won’t want to stay around long enough to achieve the mark.  I envision him retiring in his mid-thirties, while he still has plenty left in his right arm.  Sucks for Schopenhauer those of us who pay some attention to career stats; but there are levees to be reinforced, and roads to build, you know.

Sunday
Doug Davis (2-3, 2.36) v. Wandy Rodriguez (0-3, 4.66)

Doug Davis is a fairly average-appearing Rene Descartes lefty who I gave up for dead in Texas back four or five years ago.  I was wrong.  Davis got out of the Waste Dump at Arlington in time to resurrect his career.  Since then, in Milwaukee and now Phoenix, he has been a really good pitcher.  His ho-hum won-loss records are due to Socrates lack of support, mostly.  This year is no exception. . . Wandy Rodriguez continues to be an enigma to sports call-in show participants, dilettante fans, and Nietzsche sportswriters and sportscasters in the general Houston area.  Earlier this year, they thought he was great (he wasn’t.)  Now they think he sucks (he doesn’t.)  Rodriguez hasn’t pitched badly overall in 2007.  He doesn’t have a win to show for it, but that is not entirely his fault.  What he has done this year, in particular, is get his walks and home runs allowed per IP ratios way down from his first two seasons.  He still has trouble with Hegel the One Big Inning, and if his control goes, he is basically defenseless out there.  But he can be a useful major league pitcher if closely managed, in a defined role.  A guy like that has more value than some might think; and I still believe he may end up surprising his detractors.  A solid start about right now would really help his case.

By the way, in order to create more interest in the “Probable Matchups” section, in addition to offering biting, informative, up-to-date commentary regarding who will be pitching for whom in this series, this week the section also doubles as a sort of Word Search®.  The names of all the great Real Men of Genius mentioned in Monty Python’s “Drunken Philosophers Song” have been cleverly imbedded into the text.  First person to find and identify all the great if sodden thinkers wins a half-gallon of Popov vodka, in the convenient sculpted polyethylene bottle (retail value $4.99 or thereabouts at Lucky’s.)  If you get too fucked up and drop it, the bottle won’t break; and vodka, of course, can even be drank at work, since no one can smell it on your breath..  Anyway, it should be pretty easy to win.  David Hasselhoff and members of David Hasselhoff’s family not eligible.

“It is not a question of whether man chooses to be guided by philosophy: he is not equipped to live without it.” – Ayn Rand, or Randy Johnson.  I get the two mixed up at times.

Notable giveaways

On the Friday the 11th, the first 10,000 Astros fans in the park will get a case of Budweiser.  Hold on. . . a case from Budweiser, that allegedly will hold one’s cell phone on one side, and one’s MP3 player on the other.

This is great.  Now you can careen down the freeways in your 10,000 lb. SUV, slamming down a Budweiser with one hand, jamming to some tunes on your MP3 player in one ear, while at the same time jabbering into your cell phone, which is being held to your other ear by your other hand.  You can steer with your forehead, probably.

True story.  The other day my oldest offspring and I were going through an intersection and saw a vehicle coming the other way, an SUV called an Equinox, I believe.  Or maybe a Paradox.  Parallax?  Something.  Anyway, the woman driving this thing clearly had a lit cigarette in her left hand, dangling out the driver side window.  She just as clearly was talking intently into her cellphone, which she was jamming into her ear with her right hand.  “Dad, how is she steering?” my son asks.  “I don’t know. . . Oh, wait.  I do know.  With her knees, of course.” 

How could I forget?

Injury Report

Arizona – Currently no serious injuries.

Houston – Jason Jennings is still on the 15-day DL for tendonitis in his pitching elbow.  He has been throwing in simulated game situations recently, and is perhaps set to return sometime before July, maybe. Hector Gimenez (labrum) and Brandon Backe (Tommy John surgery) are still on the 15-day DL, too, and will be for another 10 months or so, probably. Rick White is the newest inductee to the list.  He is suffering from “pitchers’ problems”, whatever that means.

As an aside, while I am a long time follower of the game of baseball, I freely admit there are some procedural intricacies in MLB I wholly do not understand, nor do I really want to.  But why do they call this a 15-day disabled list?  Most of these guys have been on the same list for months.  Do they mean 15 Biblical days?  I don’t get it.

Our ‘Interesting Things To Look For This Series’

• The Diamondbacks.  They finally ditched the hideous teal and chartreuse color scheme a year or two ago.  Now they are a sort of shade of red, meant to evoke in one a mental image of the inside of a Phoenix cocktail lounge, I think.  Gone, too, are a lot of the big names, and the free-spending craziness that brought them out to the desert in the first place.  The Snakes are now going with a “youth movement”, which is MLB-speak for “going cheap.”  They have apparently adopted the MO of their predecessor in expansion, the Florida Marlins.  First, some big-money business guy with a massive ego buys a franchise.  When, after four or five seasons, his team hasn’t achieved the goals he set for it, he spends tons of cash on mercenaries, who come in and help win a championship.  Then the owner immediately cries poverty and dismantles the team, leading to another half-decade or more of abject mediocrity.  Here is where the Fish and the Snakes paths diverge, though.  Florida apparently signs and develops young players better than Arizona does.  This helps them reload the lineup, either directly from the farm, or by using prospects to trade for established players.  The Marlins were born in 1993, won a World Series in 1997, fell into disrepair for 4-5 years, and then were retooled and won another World Series in 2003.  After divesting themselves of a lot of the most recent championship club and going through the bust cycle, the Marlins appear to be on the way to challenge in the post season again in 2008 or 2009, more or less right on schedule.  Arizona, meanwhile, has been floundering since their championship in 2001.  They were late fully committing to a rebuilding plan, and so far their farm hasn’t produced enough of the good players they’ll need if they want to ever compete again, much less keep up with the Marlins.
• The Sea Hag.  a/k/a The Churl, in the title of this.  He is back in the desert, hanging on at 43.  He has been knocked around pretty good this season, but last time out pitched something close to what used to be one of his typical games – six innings, nine Ks vs. Phillies.  We actually won’t see him at all this weekend, but I am thinking that is probably just as well.
• Pence. . . Lidge. . .   Lidge, in his last four appearances – 4.1 IP, 1 hit, 1 walk, 0 runs.  It is too early to tell yet, but Sweet Jesus. . .  I have always attempted to keep my own petty self-interest disconnected from the day-to-day reality of my favorite sports team; but I must admit, if nothing else, the prospect of Brad Lidge regaining something close to what he had before on the mound fills me with undiluted glee, just thinking about all the fuckwits and morons over the last six months who called in and wanted to trade him “for whatever we can get.”  Oh, this would help the bullpen, too, of course, but that’s not what I am thinking about right now. . . Pence has been impressive to me.  Not so much for the numbers he has put up so far (something like .250/.280/.450) – that will come, I am guessing.  I just like the way he plays, kind of reckless, but in a good way.  He appears to be handling all the gay (NTTAWWT) man worship coming from the Chron, 610, and their minions, pretty well to this point.  Good for him.  I’m not saying he’s a sure-fire All-Star for years to come, but who knows?  As they say on that gay (NTTAWWT) network on the local cable, “Watch what happens.”

Somebody wins the series, 2-1.  The Sea Hag passes through town, probably unnoticed, possibly for the last time. 

“There is a valley in the West where phantoms come to brood and mourn, pale phantoms dying of nostalgia and bitterness.”

You may discuss today’s game in real time in the GameZone. 

Couldn’t stand the weather