Eight
Mark Buehrle battled last night, and didn't have it, but perhaps a further indication that everything is coming up Blue Jays, Mark Buehrle prevailed. And pitbulls across the land rejoiced.
"Today there were a lot of pitches I got away with. Earlier in the season that wasn't happening. Those pitches were getting hit for home runs and getting us down in a hole early."
Gibbons called the performance "gutsy", and I have to agree. People who understand pitching talk about how the true test is how a pitcher makes it work when he doesn't have his best stuff. This was a textbook case of that.
Brett Cecil has become a story. He's been lights out all season, and last night he broke a record set by David Cone in 1995. Brett Cecil has not allowed a hit in 38 consecutive batters. Since May 28, he has pitched 17 2/3 runless innings. Hand in hand with swagger on the mound, Cecil has started giving Halladay-esque quotes to the press: "It is what it is, I'm not here to break records. I want to win a World Series."
I'm happy for Cecil. I always like seeing people come into their own.
Adam Lind, whose average is up to .340, hit a 3-run homer in the first inning that felt bound to happen and impossible to avoid.
So how long is this ride going to last, Mark Buehrle?
"We're going go through stretches where we're good, and we're going to go through stretches when we're bad. I wouldn't expect to keep this rate up for too much longer. I mean, I'm sure someone is going to hit a bump in the road here soon, we just have to ride it out while we can."
Shi Davidi has a piece about Colby Rasmus, who is pretty quietly putting together a good season. Rasmus talks about managing expectations, and it becomes apparent that this a very sensitive and conscientious person who has a tendency to be very hard on himself. It's also apparent that Tony LaRussa has become symbolic for Rasmus of a certain attitude towards baseball he doesn't respond to.
"I've always had a problem with that, everybody always saying that I should do this and do that,” says Rasmus. “I would always try to tell them I am who I am, and I just try to play hard and have fun. But they didn't like that answer. La Russa didn't like that answer. He’s like, ‘This ain't fun, we're trying to win.’ And to me, it never made sense."
He also talks about being in the spotlight in St. Louis. "When I'd get home, in the morning I'd wake up and the mailman would come at me and say, ‘You need to be hitting the ball the other way.' That's a pretty bossy mailman.
A piece from the Miami New Times about how Porter Fischer exposed the Biogenesis scandal. It features this choice comment:
"The people running Major League Baseball are the biggest scumbags on Earth as far as I'm concerned," Fischer says. "At this point, every bad guy out there knows exactly who I am. Why shouldn't everyone else know the story too?"
Gwen Knapp, over on Sports on Earth, talks about the Cuban phenom called Puig. It outlines the Dodgers' efforts to obtain Puig and culturally assimilate him to life in the US with the help of Tim Bravo, the Dodgers' director of cultural assimilation. Puig, despite the language barriers, never gets lost travelling around LA.
"All you have to do is tell him something one time and he knows exactly what he's going," Bravo said. "He's my GPS. I don't have to put it up. He says: 'Teacher -- that's what he calls me -- teacher, where are we going? I tell him, and that's it."
John Lott writes about Brett Cecil's emergence. Cecil has come to love working out of the bullpen and declares, “I'm having a lot of fun.”
That does seem to be the key.