As they say in Street Fighter… Round 1… FIGHT! That photo above made me realise just how big Blaine Neal is. Yeah, at 6-5, 250lbs, he’s double my weight, but it was still weird to see Trot look so small.
Just yesterday, I was on the subway reading through last year’s stats (thereby confirming my baseball geekery), and I noticed that Arroyo had hit the most batsmen among AL pitchers last year with 20. Well, what do you know? He’s racing up the charts again.
You can’t tell intentionality from the list of top pitchers in terms of hitting batsmen each season (some, like Victor Zambrano, are just products of bad command), but the same names tend to crop up… personally, I think Arroyo does have both intentional and unintentional HBPs - it’s part of his game. The Huff one looked like one of Arroyo’s intentional-unintentional HBPs to me. Singleton, um, less so. Not really a good move, in that Singleton came round to score to make it a 2-run game. But throwing at the head, as Carter did, is really unacceptable.
Incidentally, judging by the leaders, it does seem like the 2000s have seen hit batsmen at a level not seen since the turn of the previous century. I’m guessing the brushback’s back in style. Netshrine’s study on the brushback pitch, done back in 2001, notes that the great ages of brushbacks are 1900-29 (Walter Johnson), 1950-69 (Drysdale, Bunning), and 1990 onwards (Pedro, Randy). Looks like we’re still in that 3rd era.
Suspensions all round, which can’t be good. Maybe it’s just playing at Tropicana Field. Juicing is supposed to give you rage…
As for the rest of the game itself… what to say? Jay Payton thus far seems a better hitter than Gabe Kapler as a backup outfielder, and if his previous appearance in costume as Papa Jack is anything to go by, he seems like a goofball type, which I always like. Payton was never as good as his Rockies stats made him out to be, but never as bad as his Padres stats. Manny and Ortiz homering is ho-hum these days, which is great.