Saw quite a game last night. The 'Cats allowed a run to score in the 1st when, with 2 outs, SS Joe Sclafani dropped a high pop-up in the outfield, allowing a BB'ed runner to score from 1st. That run stood until the 8th, when TC rallied to score 2, and held on in the 9th with a closer combo of RHP Jamaine Cotton and LHP KennyLong, who throws a sloooow breaking ball sidearm that struck out the one lefty he faced for the last out.
Juri Perez was wild. Looking at the box score now I'm surprised he only walked 3 in his 6 IP. He had a lot of trouble getting his fastball in the zone, but evidently the combination of that and his hard curve (slider?) were enough to keep the hitters off-balance, because they only managed 2 hits off him, and didn't square up much. He threw 88 mph mostly, with maybe 91 his high.
Andrew Aplin made a fine running catch in the RC gap that I thought would surely be a double off the bat, and he cut off a ball in the LC gap to hold the batter to a single later, so he matched his rep in this game at least. He was 1-for-2 with a walk and drove in the go-ahead run on a deep sac fly to RC (even the runner at 1st advanced) in the 8th. He stole 2 bases in the 7th but was very lucky- the throw to 2nd was terrible but still bang-bang, and the throw to 3rd wasn't handled cleanly by the 3B, but would've easily beaten him. It was incredibly stupid of him to try, considering there were two outs at the time, he represented the tying run, and there was a LH batter (Davidson) at the plate. Unless for some reason the manager ordered it, very bad decision to go for 3rd there in my opinion. Oddly, the
boxscore and play-by-play make no mention of him stealing 3rd, but trust me, it happened.
Jobduan (pronounced "JOB-wan" by the announcer) Morales caught, but wasn't really tested defensively. He looks natural enough back there. He didn't do anything at the plate, a deep opposite-field fly ball to the warning track notwithstanding.
Deven Marrero DH'ed for the Spinners. He is a small kid. Not squat, but not tall, and very slender. I guess he's a SS, so that's fine, I was just surprised to see this kid once thought to be a top-10 overall talent be so physically unimpressive. Maybe he's Ozzie Jr. in the field, I dunno.
Austin Elkins had a nice game, 2 hits including the game-tyer, and he looked very good at 2B. Jeremiah Meiners had two nice innings including a pickoff where he absolutely froze the runner at 1st. Huge crowd as usual, including a fair number of Red Sox jerseys to watch the Spinners get swept.
