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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May 17 – May 30, 1993 | Games 42–54 of the Sacramento Prayers 1993 Season
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35-19. FOUR GAMES UP IN THE AL WEST. AND AT 1:30 IN THE MORNING ON MAY 20TH, CATHEDRAL STADIUM FINALLY WENT DARK.
Five hours and twenty minutes. Seventeen innings. Two records set in the same game — Alejandro Lopez walking four times to establish a Sacramento franchise mark in extra-inning contests, Fort Worth's Steve Schultz striking out five times to tie the AL record for the same — and at the end of it all, Luis Prieto on the mound in the seventeenth inning throwing two pitches that produced two home runs that produced the ending nobody in that building wanted. The May 19th game against Fort Worth was the kind of evening that takes something out of a franchise — not permanently, not catastrophically, but in the way that a seventeen-inning loss at home against your main division rival takes something out, after six pitchers and 315 combined pitches and a crowd that stayed long past any reasonable hour to be genuinely hurt by what happened at the end. I will cover it properly in the game section. What I want to say here, before any of the summaries arrive, is that Sacramento went 8-5 over these thirteen games, extended the AL West lead to four games over Fort Worth, and is playing well enough to win this division by a comfortable margin — and also that the patterns around the closer's recent work are real stories that deserve honest examination alongside the good ones. Both are true. The 35-19 record is the headline. What sits underneath it requires some talking about.
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THE SCORECARD: GAME BY GAME, TRUTH BY TRUTH
vs. Fort Worth: May 17–20
The measuring-stick series I circled on the calendar two weeks ago arrived and delivered exactly the kind of ambiguous verdict that measuring-stick series tend to produce when two evenly matched clubs play each other hard across four games — a 2-2 split, a story for each side, and no definitive answer about who the better team is. What we got was two extra-inning games, a dominant starting performance that got no reward, a comeback win of genuine quality, and a marathon that ended in the worst possible way. Fort Worth confirmed everything I suspected about them. They are a real threat in this division and Sacramento cannot afford to take them lightly for the remainder of this season.
The May 17th opener was Rubalcava making his case one more time, the case he has been making since opening day, the case that his ERA has been making on his behalf. He went 7.1 innings, allowed one run on four hits, threw 107 pitches, and left with Sacramento leading 2-1. Dodge entered and gave up a Benoldi two-run homer in the eighth. Prieto entered and gave up a Guerrero walk-off double in the ninth. The 3-2 final moves Rubalcava to 4-4 with an ERA of 2.58. I have written a version of this paragraph several times this season and I intend to keep writing it until the record corrects itself or the season ends, whichever comes first.
The May 18th game went twelve innings and required the Prayers to absorb Izzy Rodriguez hitting two home runs and driving in four runs — the second of those home runs a three-run shot off Ryan in the ninth inning that turned a 3-3 tie into a 6-3 Fort Worth lead and seemed for a moment to settle the matter conclusively. Instead Sacramento tied it again, played three more innings, and Baldelomar lined a walk-off double off Ingram in the twelfth to score Torres, who had led off with a double of his own. Bautista earned the win with two scoreless innings. The game lasted four hours and five minutes and required fifteen Sacramento hits, twenty-eight runners left on base between the two clubs, and the kind of stubborn refusal to accept a tidy ending that characterizes this franchise at its best. Marcos was hit by a pitch and departed with an injury that will matter to the roster conversation.
The May 19th game went seventeen innings, and the full accounting of how Sacramento fought to be in a position to lose it deserves more than a summary paragraph. Andretti threw 6.2 innings of two-run baseball. Gutierrez, Dodge, Ryan, Bautista, and Wright all contributed innings in the long middle section of the game, the bullpen collectively holding Fort Worth scoreless from the tenth through the sixteenth and giving the Sacramento offense multiple opportunities that it failed to convert — thirteen runners left on base in those extra innings, which is a failure of execution that contributed to the final result as much as anything the pitching staff did. And then Prieto entered the seventeenth inning, and Benoldi hit one out, and Hicks hit one out, back to back, and the game was over. Fort Worth 7, Sacramento 5. I genuinely do not know whether to be angrier at the two home runs or at the thirteen stranded baserunners that made the two home runs decisive.
The May 20th game was Sacramento writing the final chapter of the series the right way. Lopez hit his fourteenth homer in the first inning. Hernandez doubled and scored in the second. The Prayers built a lead and when Miera — who continues to reward every opportunity he receives — stroked a go-ahead two-run double in the sixth to push it to 5-4, the Cathedral crowd finally had something unambiguous to celebrate. St. Clair went seven solid innings. Dodge held the eighth. Caliari came in for the ninth and retired Fort Worth in order, three up three down, for the first save of his season. The series split 2-2.
At Brooklyn: May 21–23
We went to Priests Grounds knowing Brooklyn was on a seven-game winning streak with the best record in the American League. We left having taken one of three, which given the circumstances — a Brooklyn club playing its best baseball of the season, Sacramento's rotation shuffled, the lineup carrying injury absences — is a result I'll accept without too much complaint, though the manner of the first two losses deserves some honest accounting.
The May 21st game should have been winnable. Espenoza gave Sacramento 5.2 innings, allowed one earned run, and left his team with a 5-5 tie in the sixth. Then Caliari entered for the eighth with Sacramento trailing 5-6 — Largent had led off the inning with a solo shot — and could not hold it. Caliari has given up that kind of run with uncomfortable regularity this season and whatever goodwill he generated with the May 20th save was partially spent here. Brooklyn completed the win behind Torres, who had two doubles and four RBI on the night. Brooklyn's winning streak reached eight games.
The May 22nd game was quieter and not much more pleasant. Rubalcava took his second consecutive loss in circumstances that bear stating plainly: he went six innings, allowed one earned run, and lost 5-2. Guerra was better on the night — eight innings of two-run baseball, an excellent performance that deserved to win — and did. Rubalcava is 4-4. His ERA is 2.26. I understand completely that a pitcher can be 4-4 with a 2.26 ERA without anything fraudulent having occurred, but I also understand that it is unusual, and the unusual tends to correct itself, and I am waiting for the correction with considerable anticipation.
The May 23rd game gave Cathedral North something to talk about and gave this column an anecdote I intend to use for a long time. Larson went nine innings. Nine. He threw two hits, allowed one earned run, struck out seven, and finished with a game score of 85. It was the best start of his season and one of the best individual pitching performances Sacramento has produced in 1993, and when MacDonald hit a solo home run off the scoreboard in the eleventh inning to give the Prayers a 2-1 lead, and Dodge came in to close the door for his third save, the series finale felt like a proper ending to a difficult road trip — not the series result anyone wanted, but a game that reminded you what this rotation is capable of when the full version shows up.
vs. Las Vegas: May 25–27
Three games against the Blessed at Cathedral Stadium, three wins. The stretch reads as cleanly as the scoreboard suggests and I am happy to let it.
The May 25th opener — which I covered briefly at the close of the previous article — set the tone. Andretti went eight innings, Baldelomar hit his seventh home run in the seventh inning, and Prieto closed it out for save number fourteen.
The May 26th game produced the single most explosive inning of Sacramento's season to date. Mayberry came to the mound in the fourth with the game scoreless and left in the middle of the inning having allowed seven runs on seven hits, including three home runs. Cruz hit one. MacDonald hit one. Francisco Hernandez hit one with two men on to cap the seven-run frame. Espenoza handled the rest with the kind of ease you can afford when your offense deposits seven runs on the table in the fourth inning — 8.2 innings, two earned runs, another quality start logged. The 7-2 final improved his season ERA to 2.94.
The May 27th game belongs to two men and the appropriate way to handle them is separately. Rubalcava went eight innings, allowed nothing, struck out nine, threw 109 pitches, and finished with a game score of 83. The Las Vegas offense, which entered averaging nearly four runs per game, could not do anything with him. The final line — 8.0 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 9 K — is simply a dominant professional performance, the kind Rubalcava has been delivering all season while the won-loss column refused to cooperate. He is 5-4 now. The ERA is 2.26. Both numbers tell true stories. The second number tells a truer one.
The second man is Prieto, who came into the ninth inning with a 2-0 lead and saved his 300th career game. He allowed a Florez home run, which is the kind of note this podcast feels obligated to include alongside any celebration, because complete accounting matters more than a clean narrative. But he closed it out. Three hundred saves. He spoke to reporters afterward with genuine feeling, and the milestone deserves recognition as the accomplishment it is.
vs. Seattle: May 28–30
The Lucifers came to Cathedral Stadium and went 1-3, which is the right result against a team sitting ten and a half games back in the division. The detailing matters though.
The May 28th loss was the kind of game that accumulates from small failures rather than any single catastrophic moment. Larson went six innings and allowed four earned runs — not a disaster, but not the result Sacramento needed. Gutierrez, who had been pitching at a level that earned him a spot in the Concern Corner I am choosing not to put that category name on this time, inherited runners in the seventh and allowed both to score, giving the Lucifers a 6-5 lead that Arispe's two-run single had created. Thirteen men left on base for Sacramento, three errors contributed to the defensive ledger, and the Prayers lost 6-5 to a team playing below .500. It was not a good night.
The May 29th game was considerably better. Alonzo hit a two-run homer in the fifth to put Sacramento on top 3-3 after Seattle had built a 3-0 lead. Baldelomar singled home the winning run with two outs in the eighth, and Dodge and Prieto held it from there — Dodge winning his third game of the season without a loss, Prieto recording his sixteenth save. St. Clair threw seven-plus innings and continues to do everything this organization asked of him when it handed him a rotation spot in April.
The May 30th finale was an Andretti afternoon, the kind of game that makes the contract look like money well spent. He went 5.1 innings and got the win, his seventh of the season against two losses, while Cruz went 3-for-4 with a home run and three RBI — Cruz's tenth home run of the year — and MacDonald added a two-run shot in the fifth. Bautista gave up a Hicks two-run homer in the ninth that made the final score 8-6 look closer than the game felt for most of its duration, and Prieto got his seventeenth save to close the series.
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NAMES WORTH KNOWING RIGHT NOW
Alejandro Lopez — Fourteen home runs. Nineteen stolen bases. A .388 on-base percentage built through genuine plate patience — forty-two walks in fifty-two games — that makes him the most complete offensive player on this roster by a meaningful margin. The WAR column says 2.5, which leads the team. I wrote early in the season that the twenty-four-year-old center fielder was due for a year that made people pay attention beyond Sacramento, and that is precisely what is happening. When they hand out the AL West Player of the Month award for May, his name should be on the envelope.
Jordan Rubalcava — A 2.26 ERA. Eighty-two strikeouts in 83.2 innings. A WHIP of 1.03. And a 5-4 record that I refuse to accept as a meaningful descriptor of how well this man has pitched in 1993. The May 27th start against Las Vegas — eight innings, three hits, zero runs — was the most recent entry in a catalog of performances that deserve better outcomes than the bullpen and the offense have provided. He is the best pitcher in the American League right now by nearly any reasonable measure and I will argue this with anyone who wants to have the argument.
Bernardo Andretti — The transformation from the inconsistent figure of recent seasons into the reliable innings-eater and team win-accumulator he has become in 1993 remains the rotation story I find most personally satisfying. Seven wins against two losses. A 2.91 ERA. Seventy-seven innings and fifty-four strikeouts. The May 30th win over Seattle was his seventh, and the manner of it — controlled, professional, getting the team to the middle innings with a lead and handing it cleanly to the bullpen — is exactly what a number-two or number-three starter is supposed to do. Andretti is doing it consistently now.
Steve Dodge — Three wins. Three saves. A 2.05 ERA across twenty-eight appearances. The right-handed setup man has become the most reliable arm in the bullpen over the past month and the May 23rd save at Brooklyn — coming into a tie game in the eleventh after Larson's nine-inning gem and holding it for one out — was a performance that required real nerve. When this podcast discusses the bullpen's concerns, Dodge is the reason that section does not read as purely alarming.
Carlos Miera — Five games, ten at-bats, a .400 average, a home run, and the go-ahead two-run double against Fort Worth on May 20th that represents exactly the kind of contribution a roster-depth player is supposed to make when the regular lineup has gaps to fill. He is hitting .400/.500/.800 in limited time. That will not last, but the bat is real and the confidence is visible every time he steps in.
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THE HONEST QUESTIONS
Luis Prieto — The 300th save is a genuine milestone and we celebrated it appropriately in the game section. I want to be equally clear about something else: the closer's ERA stands at 4.85 after the May 30th series finale. He has four blown saves. He has allowed six home runs in twenty-six innings. The May 17th blown save cost Rubalcava another win. The May 19th inherited situation in the seventeenth ended with two back-to-back home runs. He allowed the Florez homer immediately after clinching career save number 300. There is a pattern in this data that the milestone does not cancel out. The 300th save happened. The ERA is still 4.85. Both are true simultaneously, and the latter is the one that matters going forward.
The bullpen depth beyond Dodge and Gutierrez — Ryan at 4.76, Wright at 4.91, Caliari at 7.11. Three of the five middle-relief arms are allowing runs at rates that would concern any front office, and the May 19th Fort Worth marathon exposed precisely what happens when this bullpen is asked to carry a seventeen-inning game. Gutierrez has been outstanding — a 1.25 ERA and two saves in fifteen appearances — but he cannot be the only reliable option in the seventh and eighth. The May 31st demotion of Bautista, who posted a 3.14 ERA in fifteen appearances, and his replacement with Salazar, who threw 3.1 rehabilitation innings before being recalled, represents either a legitimate upgrade or a gamble, depending on what Salazar looks like over the next two weeks.
Jose Rodriguez — Three separate injury events in roughly ten days: the elbow while throwing, the groin while running bases, and the May 16th IL stint that began a clock that ran until his activation May 27th. He appeared in the May 27th game briefly enough that his full return to the regular lineup is still genuinely uncertain. Rodriguez is twenty-three years old with a Gold Glove and a .360 ceiling in the development model, and every game he misses is a game the Prayers are running David Perez or Gil Cruz at third base instead. Neither Perez nor Cruz is a liability there — Perez has actually been hitting well (.316/.367/.452) — but Rodriguez is the long-term solution and his health situation requires monitoring that goes beyond the optimistic language of "day-to-day."
The Charlotte trade — Three minor league pitchers — including Art Rutgers, Danny Lopez, and Francisco Gutierrez — plus two draft picks, one of which was a third-round selection, sent to Charlotte in exchange for a minor league catcher, a first-round pick, and $106,000 in cash. The organization clearly sees the first-round pick as the centerpiece of the deal, and that logic has merit if the pick lands in the top third of the round. But three pitching prospects plus two picks is a meaningful inventory investment for a team built on rotation depth, and the full accounting of this trade probably won't be readable for three or four years. I flag it now because deals like this tend to be forgotten quickly in the middle of a winning season.
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LEAGUE NOTES: WHAT'S HAPPENING ELSEWHERE
Brooklyn is 34-19 and leads the AL East, and anyone building a realistic World Series bracket in their head right now has to consider a Sacramento-Brooklyn matchup in the Championship Series as the most likely AL pairing. The Priests have the best record in the league and Sacramento has the second best. They met at Priests Grounds for three games this past week, Sacramento left with one win, and the gap between these two clubs is smaller than the standings gap suggests. Their pitching, defensively grounded approach, and unwillingness to beat themselves late in games makes them the team I most respect in this league right now.
Fort Worth at 31-23 remains the primary division challenger, four games back in the West and holding the AL Wild Card lead at plus one-and-a-half games over Milwaukee. They split the four-game series with Sacramento in May and they are exactly the kind of team that splits series with Sacramento — too disciplined to get swept, not quite good enough to win the series outright. If the Prayers ever go through a significant losing stretch, Fort Worth will be there.
In the NL, Phoenix is 34-19 and leads the West while Philadelphia at 33-19 leads the East, and the early-season picture of those two franchises as the most complete teams in the National League has not meaningfully changed. If Sacramento does reach the World Series, it will almost certainly come from one of those two directions.
The El Paso managerial situation resolved with the firing of Eric Alexander. His dismissal following a 18-35 start was not a surprise to anyone who has watched them play this season. They are sixteen and a half games back in the division and trending in the wrong direction. Whatever competitive identity El Paso was trying to build under Alexander, it did not take.
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LISTENER MAIL — The questions you asked and the answers you deserve.
Brendan Doyle from Midtown writes: "Claude — the May 19th game. I stayed until the seventeenth inning. I have never in thirty years of watching this franchise felt that particular combination of pride and devastation at the same time. What is your honest read on what that game means for the rest of the season?"
What it means is that Sacramento has the kind of roster that keeps a seventeen-inning game close enough to lose in the seventeenth inning, and that is actually a statement of quality rather than indictment. A lesser team gets blown out by the fifth and goes home. The Prayers fought Fort Worth to a standstill for sixteen innings before the bullpen exhaustion finally showed. What it also means is that Prieto giving up back-to-back home runs in the seventeenth inning of a tied game is not a random event — it is consistent with a pattern of vulnerability that the organization needs to address before October. Both readings are honest. Thank you for staying until the end. The franchise noticed.
Rosario Galvan-Nakamura from East Sacramento writes: "I want to make the case for Andretti as the team MVP through May. Seven and two, a 2.91 ERA, seventy-seven innings, and nobody is talking about it because Rubalcava gets all the attention and Lopez gets all the highlight reels. Am I wrong?"
You are not wrong, and the case you are making is a real one. Andretti's transformation this season is the story that gets underreported precisely because Rubalcava's statistical dominance and Lopez's power-and-speed combination are more naturally dramatic. Andretti goes out every five days, throws seven innings, gets the win, and gets minimal column inches for it. If I am being precise about team value, Lopez leads the club in WAR at 2.5, Rubalcava leads the pitchers at 3.1, and Andretti's 2.0 WAR represents genuine above-average production. He is not the MVP of this team but he is unambiguously one of its three most valuable players and you are correct that he deserves more recognition than he receives.
Sarkis Baghdassarian from Arden Park writes: "Claude, I've been watching Miera closely these last few games. He looks too good to be a reserve. What's the plan with him long-term if Rodriguez stays healthy?"
The honest answer is that the plan is probably exactly what it sounds like — Rodriguez is the starter, Miera is the depth. The .400 average in limited time is encouraging but also limited, and the full-time sample will tell the real story. What I find genuinely interesting about Miera is that his plate approach in his few appearances suggests a hitter with some real understanding of the strike zone, which tends to age better than pure contact rate. Whether that translates to a starting role at some point depends entirely on what Rodriguez does with his own health, which as discussed above is not a settled question. Watch the at-bat quality more than the batting average line.
Linh Phan from Natomas writes: "The Charlotte trade bothers me more than I can fully explain. What are we actually getting?"
A first-round draft pick, a minor league catcher who appears to be organizational depth rather than a top-100 prospect, and $106,000 in cash. The first-round pick is the real answer to your question, and whether that answer satisfies depends entirely on where in the first round it lands. If it's a top-fifteen pick from a team that struggles, the deal looks smart in three years. If Charlotte turns things around and it's picking twenty-eighth, the Prayers gave away three live arms and two additional selections for a supplemental asset. The organization's front office has earned considerable trust given the six consecutive championships, and I do not assume incompetence when I cannot see the full picture. But I share your unease and I do not think that unease is irrational.
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Claude Playball has covered Sacramento Prayers baseball for eleven years. The Hot Corner publishes throughout the season. Questions and correspondence are welcome.