THE HOT CORNER
Baseball coverage from the inside Sacramento Prayers and the FBL
By Claude Playball | Baseball Insider & Analyst | Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast
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July 17 July 29, 1992 | Games 92103 of the Sacramento Prayers 1992 Season
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70-33. TEN IN A ROW. AND ANDRETTI JUST HELD NASHVILLE TO ONE HIT.
Let me tell you about Wednesday, July 29th at Angel Stadium of Anaheim.
Sacramento is riding nine straight wins and Bernardo Andretti takes the ball against a Nashville lineup that has been outscored 26-1 in the previous two games. He throws 6.1 innings. He allows one hit. Zero runs. Four strikeouts. One hundred pitches of precise, professional, dominant baseball. After the game, Jimmy Aces says simply: "Bernardo is a gamer." He said the same thing eleven days earlier after a different dominant outing that also ended in a win. At some point this season, the wins started coming for Andretti and the universe began slowly, grudgingly to balance its books. His record is 8-6. His ERA is 2.63. If you have been paying attention to this column since April, you know which number to trust.
Seventy wins. Thirty-three losses. Ten consecutive victories. A division lead of thirteen games with two months of baseball remaining. The Sacramento Prayers are not a good team that has gotten hot. They are a historic team that occasionally stumbles before remembering what they are.
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THE EIGHTH TWO WEEKS: A GAME-BY-GAME TOUR
Seattle at Home: July 17-19
Three games against the Lucifers to open the post-All-Star stretch, and Sacramento went 2-1 in a series that featured two extra-inning games and a fourteen-inning marathon that tested every arm in the bullpen.
Friday, July 17th: Rubalcava threw eight innings but gave up four runs, including a two-run Mayeski homer in the eighth that tied the game. Sacramento scratched back to tie it and then because this team finds ways to win games that extend past the ninth Rafael Baldelomar came off the bench in the tenth inning and hit a two-run walk-off homer off Seattle's Reeves. Sacramento wins 6-4. Seattle's All-Star closer Jose Reyes blew his sixth save in the process. Prieto threw two clean innings and got the win. "That was your kind of game, if you like high drama," said Aces. The man has a gift.
Saturday, July 18th was four hours and forty-five minutes of baseball that ended the wrong way. Alejandro Lopez went 3-for-6 with a homer, a triple, and three RBI and was named Player of the Game despite being on the losing side which tells you everything you need to know about how the night went. Alonzo hit his sixth homer. Cruz went 4-for-7. Salazar threw 7.2 innings and gave up five. Prieto blew his seventh save in the eighth. Ryan took the loss in the fourteenth on a Melendrez single. Sacramento had the lead multiple times and couldn't hold it. The game ended 7-6 Seattle. Fourteen innings, 4:45 of game time, and a result that belonged in the loss column despite Lopez's heroics. Also worth noting All-Star left fielder Gus Arispe was injured running the bases during this game. Bad news for Seattle and for the AL.
Sunday, July 19th: Andretti threw seven innings of one-run ball zero earned runs, six strikeouts, 92 pitches and Cruz hit a solo homer in the eighth off Seattle's Cantu for the decisive run. Dodge closed with two clean innings. Sacramento wins 2-1. "Bernardo is a gamer," said Aces, the first time. The universe made a small payment.
El Paso at Home: July 20-22
Three games against the last-place Abbots, and Sacramento swept all three with the kind of efficiency that separates the very good teams from the great ones.
Monday, July 20th: Espenoza threw eight innings of one-run ball on 85 pitches zero walks, three hits, the picture of controlled excellence. Cruz delivered a two-out RBI single in the seventh for the winning run. Prieto closed with a seven-pitch, perfect ninth inning. Sacramento wins 2-1. Espenoza attributed the performance to the team's "steely resolve." The phrase is earned.
Tuesday, July 21st: Larson threw 7.2 innings of one-run ball six strikeouts, zero walks, 93 pitches and named Player of the Game. Musco hit his twenty-second homer, a three-run shot in the fifth that broke the game open. Cruz hit his fifteenth. Francisco Hernandez went 3-for-4. Sacramento wins 7-1 and Larson's "Who's Hot" designation is confirmed with a second consecutive quality performance.
Wednesday, July 22nd: A 13-4 demolition. Three home runs Perez, MacDonald, and Lopez all going deep. Murguia delivered a key sac fly to break a 3-3 tie in the fifth and drove in three total. "You need to show up when your number's called," said Murguia afterward. From the 1986 League MVP and 1987 AL RBI leader, that is not a motivational poster. That is a standard. Jose Rodriguez went 3-for-4 with two doubles. Rubalcava gets the win in 6.1 innings despite not being particularly sharp the offense covered his modest off-night with thirteen runs. Francisco Hernandez stole four bases. More on that in a moment.
At Washington: July 24-26
Three games at Devils Pit against the most troubled franchise in the American League. Sacramento swept all three and the margin of the wins was larger than the scores suggest.
Friday, July 24th: Andretti threw 6.1 innings, gave up four runs, and Sacramento trailed at various points before Musco delivered a two-out RBI single in the seventh to take the lead for good. Ryan threw 1.2 clean innings. Prieto closed with a perfect ninth for his twentieth save. "We're all about heart and hustle on this team. That's what wins ballgames," Musco told the Sacramento Citizen. The Prayers win 5-4. Washington's starter Quirarte is now 1-14. There is no favorable interpretation of that number for the Washington organization.
Saturday, July 25th: Espenoza threw 7.1 innings in a 4-3 win, named Player of the Game. Hernandez hit his eighth homer in the first inning and stole another base his forty-third of the season. More on that number shortly. Prieto threw 1.2 clean innings for his twenty-first save. "They busted their humps out there," said Aces. Jimmy Aces contains multitudes.
Sunday, July 26th: The offense produced eleven runs behind fourteen home runs MacDonald hit his fourteenth, Rodriguez hit his seventh, and Lopez clubbed a three-run shot in the seventh for the decisive blow. Scott threw 2.2 immaculate innings in relief. Sacramento wins 11-5. "We hit the ball hard," said Aces. "Line drive after line drive." The attendances at Devils Pit 8,427 and 8,828 and 9,639 tell the story of a franchise whose fanbase has stopped showing up. Washington is 36-63 and the nine-game losing streak noted in the standings is only getting longer.
At Nashville: July 27-29
Three games at Angel Stadium of Anaheim against the Nashville Angels, and Sacramento outscored them 34-1. Thirty-four to one. The winning streak reached ten games and several individual performances in this series deserve their own paragraphs.
Monday, July 27th: Rubalcava threw eight shutout innings against Nashville. Three hits. Four strikeouts. 114 pitches. The offense produced fifteen runs behind Musco's twenty-third home run a grand slam in the fourth and contributions from virtually every player in the lineup. Vieyra hit his third. MacDonald his fifteenth. Rodriguez drove in four runs. "We have a lot of confidence in Jordan," said Aces afterward, which may be the most restrained possible description of how an organization feels about a pitcher with an 18-2 record. Sacramento wins 15-0.
Tuesday, July 28th: Larson threw six shutout innings, zero walks, eight strikeouts. Cruz hit two home runs his sixteenth and seventeenth on the season. Rodriguez went 4-for-4 with a triple, a double, two singles, and three RBI the best individual game of his young career, named Player of the Game. St. Clair threw three clean innings for the save. Sacramento wins 11-0. And then the note that matters most in the entire game log: Edwin Musco was injured stealing a base. His status entering August is the most significant health concern on this roster and I will address it directly in the Concern Corner.
Wednesday, July 29th: Andretti's masterpiece. One hit. Zero runs. Six-point-one innings of the kind of pitching that should produce a 15-6 record and instead produces an 8-6 record because baseball does not always reward excellence with wins. The offense backed him with eight runs including home runs from Marcos, Cruz, and Lopez. And buried in a dominant performance Bill Marcos, the player who has occupied the "Who's Not" column in this section for most of 1992, hit a two-run homer in the sixth inning and went 3-for-5. Marcos said "we're playing hard and we're playing to win." A small redemption in a large victory.
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THE EMERGING STORYLINES
Francisco Hernandez: The Stolen Base Story Nobody Is Talking About
Francisco Hernandez has 44 stolen bases. He plays right field. He bats at the bottom of the order more often than the top. His batting average is .226 and his OPS is .679, which means he is not an offensive contributor in the traditional sense. But forty-four stolen bases from a right fielder, contributing to a team that leads all of baseball in steals, is a number that deserves to be said out loud and examined from multiple angles. The Prayers' 165 stolen bases as a team lead all of baseball. Hernandez is a significant reason why. Speed creates runs, disrupts pitchers, and forces defensive mistakes, and Hernandez has been doing all three quietly while the Muscos and Rubalcavas of this roster collect the headlines.
Bernardo Andretti: The Universe Is Paying Its Debt
I have written about Andretti's unjust record in every article since May. His ERA has been elite all season. His record has not reflected it. Something has shifted in July. He is 8-6 now, having gone 2-0 in his last two starts a 2-1 win over Seattle in which he allowed zero earned runs in seven innings, and a 8-1 win over Nashville in which he allowed one hit in 6.1 innings. His ERA is 2.63. His WHIP is 1.13. He has thrown 147.1 innings. If Rubalcava wins the Cy Young and he should Andretti deserves to finish second in the voting. He has been that good. "Bernardo is a gamer," Aces has now said twice in this stretch. I am inclined to agree, and to add that he is a great deal more than that.
The Ten-Game Winning Streak
July 17th through July 29th. Ten games, ten wins. Seattle, El Paso, Washington, Nashville. Not the most intimidating schedule in the history of the sport, but this team does not allow itself to overlook opponents and the results speak for themselves. The Prayers have outscored their opponents by a substantial margin across this stretch and the pitching staff has been the primary engine Rubalcava, Larson, Espenoza, and Andretti all contributing quality starts, the bullpen holding leads with increasing reliability. Sacramento is 70-33. The Pythagorean record from the standings sheet suggests they should be 74-29, meaning they are four wins below their run differential expectation. The underlying talent is even better than the record indicates.
Gil Cruz: The Quiet Emergence
Entering the season, Cruz was a solid contributor. Midway through July, he is something more. Eighteen home runs. Sixty-five RBI. A .908 OPS. Four-point-zero WAR. Named to the All-Star team. He had two home runs in the Nashville series and has been one of the most consistent offensive contributors on the roster for six weeks. The "Who's Hot" designation showing .350 with three homers in his last five games entering this period was confirmed emphatically by what followed. The Prayers have a legitimate MVP candidate at shortstop and a legitimate all-star second baseman. That is an embarrassment of riches up the middle.
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CONCERN CORNER
Edwin Musco: The Injury That Must Be Monitored
Musco was injured stealing a base on Tuesday, July 28th in Nashville. The standings sheet lists him as day-to-day with back spasms, three days. The mechanism of injury sliding into a base combined with the pre-existing back concerns that have been noted in these pages since spring raises a question that deserves a direct answer from the medical staff: is this an acute injury from a specific slide, or is it a recurring issue that has been managed and suppressed throughout the season? Musco has played through discomfort all year. He has twenty-three home runs. He is hitting .309 with an .928 OPS. He has 4.4 WAR and is the frontrunner for the AL MVP. The Prayers have a thirteen-game division lead and can afford to be cautious. They should be. Whatever it takes to ensure Edwin Musco is healthy and available in October is worth doing in August, including giving him rest he might not request for himself.
Prieto: Real Progress, Honest Accounting
Luis Prieto has converted his last several save opportunities cleanly. His ERA has dropped from a peak of 6.75 to 5.37. He has twenty-one saves on the season. In the Washington series he was genuinely reliable perfect ninth innings, clean appearances, the kind of performance that makes you cautiously optimistic rather than anxiously waiting for the implosion. I am going to say something I have not said in this column since April: Prieto looks like he might be finding himself. I will not declare the problem solved because his ERA is still 5.37 and the blown save count remains at seven. But the trend is real, it has sustained across multiple series, and it deserves acknowledgment. The October test remains. The improvement is real.
The Long Beach Problem Has Not Gone Away
Sacramento did not play Long Beach in this article period, which means the 0-6 record against the Diablos remains untouched. The August schedule shows no Long Beach games that I can identify, which means the next opportunity to address this matchup problem may come in September. Sacramento can afford to carry a bad record against one opponent when the division lead is thirteen games. They cannot afford to carry it into a potential playoff scenario. Consider this a standing reminder.
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AROUND THE LEAGUE
The AL East has tightened into one of the genuinely compelling races of the 1992 season. Boston leads at 60-43, Columbus is one game back at 59-44, and Baltimore is a game and a half behind at 58-44. Three teams within two games with two months to play. The wildcard race is similarly compressed, with Columbus leading Baltimore by half a game. Any of these three teams could win the East or take the wildcard and each would be a formidable opponent in October.
Fort Worth has slipped to 56-45 and thirteen games back in the West. The Spirits entered the season as Sacramento's primary division rival and spent June making a genuine race of it. July has been unkind to them and the division race is effectively over. They remain the most likely wildcard team from the AL West if Columbus or Baltimore falters, and Giacomo Benoldi is still hitting the ball hard. Fort Worth is a dangerous team that happens to be playing in the wrong division at the wrong time.
Several transactions worth noting from around the league. Baltimore acquired right-hander Vincent Benitez from Brooklyn a 3.07 ERA reliever who could help a contender's bullpen. Detroit sent Eric Godwin to Boston in exchange for a minor league outfielder. Las Vegas sent second baseman Mike Reavis to the Saints for Manuel Murrone, a move that helps Los Angeles offensively and costs them a reliever they can apparently afford to spare. Salt Lake and Boston swapped players in a minor move involving reliever Joel Hudson.
The human cost of the season continues to accumulate. San Antonio reliever Sergio Hilario is done for the year with a stretched elbow ligament. Los Angeles starter Sal Nava 9-6, 3.48 ERA, 147 innings of solid work suffered the same injury on July 26th and is also done. In a season when Sacramento has stayed relatively healthy, it is worth acknowledging how quickly a rotation can be dismantled by the kinds of injuries that have no warning signs.
Houston manager Gabe Heaney delivered a remarkable radio interview this week, asking "whatever happened to journalistic integrity?" in response to stories suggesting the Crusaders' struggles stem from off-field distractions involving a player named DeVille. Whether the stories are true is not mine to say. Whether Heaney's defense of his players is sincere is not hard to read. The Crusaders are 38-65, which is its own kind of story, and the manager appears to be fighting on multiple fronts.
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MAILBAG The Hot Corner audience has questions, Claude Playball has answers.
From Sacramento season-ticket holder Maria V. Castellanos, who writes that she has been listening to this podcast "since before it was called a podcast": "Is Rubalcava the best pitcher in FBL history? I feel like people aren't saying it enough."
Maria, people are absolutely not saying it enough, and I will say it here. What Rubalcava is doing in 1992 is historically extraordinary by any reasonable measure. Eighteen wins before August. A 2.35 ERA over 183 innings. A 0.99 WHIP. Five-point-six WAR at a position where three-plus is considered excellent. He has won more games than any pitcher in baseball. He has allowed the fewest baserunners per inning of any starter in the AL. Whether this is the greatest single-season pitching performance in FBL history requires a deeper look at the record books than I can provide in this column, but I will say this without reservation: I have been covering this league for a long time, and I have not seen a starting pitcher this dominant, this consistent, and this unhurried in any season I can recall. "Jordan has got a slow heartbeat," said Aces. The man does not panic. And that, perhaps more than any statistic, is what makes him singular.
From longtime listener "Two-Out Tommy" Reyes of Elk Grove, who claims he has never once left a Prayers game before the final out: "Ten-game winning streak. Division up thirteen. Are we already talking about a parade route?"
Tommy, I respect your commitment to the final out, and I am going to answer your question the same way a good manager answers questions about clinching one game at a time, and not because that's a clichι but because it's true. Yes, the division lead is thirteen games. Yes, the magic number is forty-eight. Yes, this team is historically good. But the 1992 season still has sixty-plus games remaining, Edwin Musco is day-to-day with a back injury, the Long Beach problem is unsolved, and October baseball is a different sport from July baseball. The parade route conversation is premature. The conversation about whether this team is capable of making a deep October run that one is entirely appropriate. And the answer to that question begins and ends with whether the man on the mound every fifth day remains healthy, focused, and slow-heartbeated.
From Dugout Dave, writing from Section 301 as always, who informs me he has "converted three rows of skeptics" since his relocation: "Bill Marcos hit a home run. Do I owe him an apology?"
Dave, you do not owe Bill Marcos an apology for reading the statistics, which have been what they have been all season. You may owe him an acknowledgment that Wednesday, July 29th was a good day for him and that human beings sometimes exceed their established trends in meaningful moments. Marcos went 3-for-5 with a two-run homer and said something honest and simple after the game. That is worth a nod, not a retraction of the numbers. The .193 batting average is still the .193 batting average. One good game does not change the roster question. It does, however, remind us that the men playing this game are more than their statistics, and that every now and then, even the player everyone has written off gets to be the hero for an evening. Keep converting the skeptics, Dave. Section 301 sounds like a good time.
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Sacramento opens August with a road trip to Tucson before heading to San Jose, then returning home to face Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Musco's status will be the storyline entering Tuesday. The ten-game winning streak is a foundation. What gets built on top of it is the real question.
Got a question for the mailbag? Find the Hot Corner wherever you get your podcasts.
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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.