He Likes It! Hey Mikey!
=== Franklin Morales vs Dustin Ackley, 8th Inning, July 22 2011 ===
I don't know what has happened with Franklin Morales, and don't much care. You can go POTD him off the videos and stats if you want.
All I know is that on July 22, he was Arthur Rhodes 2001, and if somebody cares to explain why, that's great. I figured, just another great "get" by Bill James and Co.
Anyway, he threw two LH 94 mph fastballs to Dustin Ackley and my man Mike Blowers was stunned in the booth. "I don't remember him throwing this hard the last time around..."
Morales whizzed another 94 fastball right down the middle, with impunity, and Ackley flied out.
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=== Two On, Two Out ===
The righty Miguel Olivo reached out and poked a 95 mph fastball on a line to right field ... it found a gap and the M's had a guy on second.
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Morales, mixing sliders and hair-balls evenly, then detonated Adam Kennedy on a 4-pitch swinging strikeout. No chance.
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Morales was now up to 97 mph against Smoak, diabolically spooning in lefty sliders unpredictably. But Smoak hitting right handed, incongruously, read the pitches easily and took real close pitches as decisively as if he were Dustin Ackley.
Made me wonder if he's got a speck in his right eye, or something, the night-and-day difference. Anyway, two on, two out.
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=== He Likes It! Hey Mikey! ===
The first pitch was a 96 mph thunderbolt, precisely on the black - Carp swung and missed, or maybe he just ticked the seam a little bit. It was the kind of pitch that made me think, this game is just beyond human reflexes any more. Seriously.
Sometimes I muse about a perfect hitter coming up, a Roy Hobbs, and the pitchers throwing this kind of stuff and the umps jobbing him and the fielders diving to catch his batted balls, and before you know it, a perfect hitter is 0-for-16 ...
This was that kinda pitch. A soul-draining, untouchable fastball.
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Second pitch, Arthur followed up with a crackling sidearm 83 slider, knee-high, breaking across the strike zone to the outside third. Another swing and miss.
Here's where I expected Carp's shoulders to sag and his chest to collapse, the way Smoak's does these days. Cindy watches the ball; I watch body language on 2-0 and 0-2. I perked an eyebrow, very surprised, because Carp looked alert, happy, and ready to attack the next pitch. whaaaaaa ... ?
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Pitch three, a 96 mph ladder fastball ... remember that you add +2 for LHP, right? And remember that you add for being up in the zone.
You can't hit that pitch. Carp pulled a Wade Boggs and fouled it off! Carp still looked cool up there, not "hip" cool but "unstressed" cool.
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Pitch four, on 0-2, a sweeping slider that broke away off the zone. A lot of hitters lunge. Carp took it for ball one.
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Pitch five, with Carp presumably braced against 96 LHP heat with two strikes, Morales went for the throat with a slider. He threw it inside, which is against convention (hard stuff in, soft stuff away) but I don't notice that other Mariner hitters are ripping offspeed stuff on two-strike counts, do you?
Morales pulled the string, and Carp pulled the knob of the bat in. He hit the ball hard and far, over the fence.
Did I mention that my stepdad grew up in Fenway? He talked about how it was built sideways on an extreme rectangle city block, and that if you hadn't been in the park, you couldn't "get" what a homer to right field was like. One of the reasons he talked up Teddy Ballgame, all those mortar shots over a loooooong straightaway RF.
Fenway homers to RF are long, by definition -- the wall was 380 where Carp hit it out, and it carried the wall by a ways. ... Blowers' reaction, Wow, with two strikes? Huh?
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Eric Wedge laments how all his hitters are "in between" -- late on the fastball, in front of the offspeed stuff, "not ready to hit," always too reactive and reacting too sluggishly.
Musta been nice for Wedge to see a hitter time a slider as crisply as that. ... it ain't Carp's hits, kids. It's the way he's getting them. That was a whale of a tough lefty pitcher he crushed.
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BABVA,
Dr D