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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August 30 – September 15, 1993 | Games 132–146 of the Sacramento Prayers 1993 Season
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FIVE
The magic number is five. Sacramento needs five wins, or some combination of Sacramento wins and Fort Worth losses totaling five, to clinch the American League West Division title. The Prayers are 92-54. There are sixteen games remaining on the schedule. The lead over Fort Worth is eleven and a half games. The division was decided in practical terms sometime in late August, and it has been decided in mathematical terms for approximately three weeks, but five is the number that makes it official, that puts the bunting on the Cathedral Stadium railings and sends the champagne orders to the clubhouse refrigerators, and five feels very close from where we are standing on the morning of September 16th.
Since the day of last podcast Sacramento Prayers produced a 10-5 record, a ten-game winning streak that ended when Tucson walked into Cathedral Stadium and reminded everyone that baseball declines to cooperate with narrative tidiness, a sweep of Fort Worth that evened the season head-to-head record at nine wins apiece, and a collection of individual performances that belong in the most impressive chapter of this franchise's most decorated decade. It also produced the second, as far as we know, letter from a reliever with a 6.28 ERA to his manager asking him again for a contract extension, which I intend to address with the seriousness it deserves.
But first: five. After everything that has happened in this season — the Cruz injury, the Salazar injuries, the Rubalcava August scare, the Prieto blown saves, the El Paso extra-inning disasters, the Tucson series that cost two home games in three days — the number that matters is five. I have been covering this franchise for a long time, and I know better than most how quickly five can become four, and three, and one, and zero. But I also know this: a team with a 2.60 ERA from its ace, a lead that has grown from two games in July to eleven and a half games today, and a lineup producing at the rate Sacramento has produced since early August is not a team that loses this division. The champagne will be cold. The question now is what October looks like, and that conversation begins at Baltimore on Friday.
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THE RECORD: AUGUST 30 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 15
vs. Tucson: August 30 – September 1 (1-2)
The winning streak reached ten games on August 30th when Espenoza threw 6.2 innings against the Cherubs and the Cathedral crowd watched Sacramento score nine runs in five innings while Tucson's starter walked four batters in five and a third. It was a comfortable win of the kind a team cruising through its schedule produces — efficient, unremarkable, finished. Then Tucson won the next two.
August 31st was Larson allowing five runs in five innings, Salazar pitching two innings before suffering an injury during his delivery, and Gutierrez allowing four runs in a third of an inning in a nine-run Cherubs effort that was more alarming than the final score suggests. The Tucson lineup hit Larson with a Chavez two-run home run in the third that changed the game's character and never looked back. Salazar's status — a shoulder issue that subsequently suffered a setback — is addressed below.
September 1st was the most lopsided home loss Sacramento has absorbed in months. St. Clair lasted 2.1 innings and allowed eight earned runs. Wright allowed two more in one inning. Prieto surrendered four in 1.1 innings, including a Chavez two-run home run. Tucson scored fourteen and held Sacramento to four and three hits, which is a number that looks like a misprint but is confirmed by the box score. Tony Crossley — a pitcher who arrived at Cathedral Stadium with a 11-16 record — threw seven innings and did not allow an earned run. He is the latest in the long list of pitchers with records below .500 who have spent an evening making the Sacramento lineup look lost, and the September 1st game will not be forgotten when the final assessment of this team's weaknesses is written. The series was 1-2 and the winning streak was over.
At Boston: September 3–5 (2-1)
Rubalcava pitched eight innings in Boston on September 3rd, allowed two earned runs, and lost. The line — eight innings, eight hits, two earned runs, five strikeouts, 103 pitches — is the performance of a pitcher who did his job and did not receive the result his job merited. Murguia hit a two-run home run in the fifth. It was not enough. Willie Moran threw 7.1 innings for Boston, and Sacramento managed two runs and lost 3-2. Rubalcava's record moved to 16-8 and his ERA remained at 2.67. He pitched eight innings in a road game and lost. That is baseball.
September 4th was the game that produced the most memorable individual performance of this period and the two most consequential injuries. Andretti started and was hit hard — four and two-thirds innings, six runs, two home runs among the damage — and the Sacramento offense had to dig out of a 6-3 hole it should not have been in. It did: Francisco Hernandez hit two home runs, Alonzo went five for five and tied the Sacramento regular season record for hits in a game, and the offense produced ten runs to win 10-7. That Alonzo went five for five in a game where the starting pitcher allowed six runs is the kind of individual performance that carries a team through a bad afternoon. In the seventh inning of that same game, Cruz was injured running the bases — hamstring tendinitis, the diagnosis later confirmed, expected to sideline him for up to two weeks. Murguia was also injured running the bases in the same game. Two of the most important offensive contributors in the lineup, lost in the same afternoon. The wins-and-losses column said Sacramento won. The injury report said something more complicated.
September 5th was Espenoza winning his thirteenth game with seven innings and seven strikeouts against a Boston lineup that managed four hits. Lopez hit his thirty-fifth home run. Musco had a two-run triple in the first inning. The 12-2 final was the most convincing result of the road trip and the appropriate way to take the series two games to one before flying to Nashville.
At Nashville: September 6–8 (2-1)
Nashville won the first game of the series 8-6, which is exactly what a 70-win team on a five-game winning streak does when it catches a road club playing without its two best position players and sends Larson to the mound with five walks in five innings. Larson walked five batters. Caliari allowed two runs in one-third of an inning. The Angels won and their crowd of eighteen thousand made appropriate noise about it.
The September 7th game required ten innings and produced the Jose Rodriguez performance of the season: two home runs, both in extra innings, three RBI total, the second home run a two-run shot off Scott Ulrich in the tenth that put Sacramento ahead for good. St. Clair was magnificent — seven and two-thirds innings, one earned run, zero walks — and Dodge came on with a two-run lead in the ninth, allowed two home runs, blew the save, and then received the win when Rodriguez's bat made it irrelevant. The 7-3 final in ten innings was the messiest kind of win. It counted the same as the clean ones.
September 8th was Rubalcava. Eight innings, three hits, two earned runs, seven strikeouts, 111 pitches, a 5-2 win. Dodge closed the ninth with eleven pitches. Perez hit a two-run double in the fourth and a solo home run in the ninth. The series was 2-1 and Sacramento left Nashville headed home with a rotation lined up for the Fort Worth series that the entire city had been anticipating since April.
vs. Fort Worth: September 10–12 (3-0)
Before the Fort Worth series, the season head-to-head record stood at six wins and nine losses in Fort Worth's favor — a deficit that had been the primary asterisk on Sacramento's division-leading season since early summer. Three games at Cathedral Stadium produced three wins and moved the head-to-head to nine wins and nine losses. I want to document what happened without overstating it, because nine-nine is not a triumph so much as a correction, but the correction matters for postseason seeding and for the record of what this team did when it needed to win the games that defined its season.
September 10th was Andretti's seventeenth win — seven and a third innings, two earned runs, 95 pitches — while Alonzo went three for four with a home run and three RBI, Rodriguez hit a two-run single, and the eighth inning produced five Sacramento runs off a Fort Worth bullpen that had nothing left. The 10-2 final was thorough.
September 11th was Espenoza's fourteenth win, six and a third innings against the Fort Worth lineup that had been Sacramento's nemesis all season, while Lopez hit his thirty-sixth home run, Alonzo hit his twelfth, and Rodriguez hit a three-run home run in the seventh that ended the evening as a competitive event. The 9-2 win was the second consecutive comfortable result.
September 12th was Larson pitching five and two-thirds innings, one earned run, against John Gillon — who arrived with a 3.42 ERA and the most strikeouts in the American League — and winning with contributions from Perez, Marcos, and a twenty-seventh home run from Musco in the eighth that required Dodge to protect a 4-2 lead with fourteen pitches. Dodge threw fourteen pitches. The season head-to-head is nine wins and nine losses. The last time Sacramento played Fort Worth in this regular season will be the final home series of September. The head-to-head number, and what it means for postseason seeding if both clubs advance, will be relevant again.
vs. Seattle: September 13–15 (2-1)
Rubalcava won his eighteenth game on September 13th — eight innings, three hits, one earned run, seven strikeouts, 93 pitches — and the efficiency of the outing was characteristic of what he has done since the August Columbus disaster: composed, commanding, exactly the pitcher this staff needs him to be in September and beyond. Perez hit a three-run home run in the first inning. Musco hit his twenty-eighth in the third. Dodge saved it with seventeen pitches.
September 14th was St. Clair — seven and two-thirds innings, two hits, zero runs against a Seattle lineup that has hit Sacramento reasonably well this season — and it was another chapter in a September that has confirmed what the Hot Corner began arguing in late July: Danny St. Clair is not a fifth starter filling innings. He is a legitimate rotation piece on a team that intends to go deep into October, and his 10-7 record with a 3.59 ERA in 21 starts is the statistical expression of a pitcher who has earned every opportunity he has received. Marcos hit his ninth home run. Alonzo hit his thirteenth. Salazar came on for the final inning and surrendered two home runs — damage in a non-competitive situation, but a reminder that his shoulder situation is not resolved. Gutierrez threw a clean third of an inning to end it.
September 15th was a loss, Andretti allowing three runs in five and two-thirds innings against a Seattle team that is fifteen games under .500 and has nothing to play for beyond individual performances. Alex Mejia went three for four with a home run, a double, and three RBI. Musco hit his twenty-ninth home run. Sacramento lost 3-2. The Seattle series ended 2-1 and the period concluded with Sacramento at 92-54, a magic number of five, and a trip to Baltimore beginning Friday.
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STAR POWER: WHO CARRIES THE LOAD
Edwin Musco — Twenty-nine home runs. One hundred and seven RBI. A .290 average and a .515 slugging percentage from the shortstop position. In this period alone: eight home runs in nineteen games, a .351 average during that stretch, a season WAR of 6.2 that is closing on Lopez for the team lead. The two-run triple in Boston's first inning on September 5th, the home run that put Sacramento ahead to stay against Fort Worth on September 12th, the two-run shot off Seattle in a game Sacramento needed on September 13th — Musco has been the most reliable run-producing presence in this lineup for the better part of two months, and the quiet with which he has done it, in the shadow of Lopez's MVP-caliber season, is one of the more remarkable individual performances in Sacramento baseball since 1989. That was the year he won the league MVP award. He may not win it this year, because Lopez exists. But the argument that Musco is making every day he takes the field is the argument of a player who has not forgotten what his best looks like.
Rafael Alonzo — Five hits in one game. That is the sentence. On September 4th in Boston, with the rotation getting lit up and the team in need of someone to carry an afternoon that was going wrong, Alonzo went five for five, tied the Sacramento regular season record, and delivered three RBI in a win that required every one of them. His performance over the last nine games entering September 15th — .581 average, three home runs — is the kind of stretch a catcher produces when he is locked in at the plate and calling a game with the confidence of a player who knows exactly what he is doing. His season line of .305/.359/.452 is the product of the most quietly outstanding catcher in this league, and the front office would be well-served to acknowledge what that line represents before his contract situation becomes a negotiation rather than a formality.
David Perez — Four home runs and a .429 average over the last eight games is the hot streak of someone who has been given an opportunity and refused to waste it. With Cruz out and the lineup adjusting around his absence, Perez has started at third base and delivered run after run: the two-run double against Nashville in the fourth inning of the series clincher, the three-run home run in the first inning at Seattle on September 13th, the solo shot in Nashville that closed a game Sacramento needed to win. His season line of .297/.352/.477 is the argument that the organization was right to bring him back from the hamstring injury and trust him in the lineup every day.
Jordan Rubalcava — Eighteen wins and eight losses. A 2.60 ERA. A WHIP of 1.01. A WAR of 6.6 that leads every pitcher in the American League. In this period he went 3-1 with a 1.88 ERA across his last three starts and threw eight innings in each of his two most important September starts — Nashville on September 8th and Seattle on September 13th — at pitch counts of 111 and 93 respectively. He is rested, he is healthy, and he is the best pitcher in professional baseball preparing to start in Baltimore on what will be a meaningful Friday night. Everything else about this team's October prospects depends on variables. Rubalcava is the constant.
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WATCH LIST: POTENTIAL TROUBLE SPOTS
Gil Caliari wrote second letter — I am going to quote from the contents as they were reported: "Dear Mr. Aces, I'm in the last year of my contract and would really like to come back next year. Sacramento is a great place to play ball. I have enjoyed playing for your organization. I hope we can work out a deal. Let me know." The man who wrote this letter has a 6.28 ERA. He has walked twenty-one batters in 28.2 innings. He has allowed opponents to score in eleven of his last fifteen appearances. He has received five losses on a first-place team. He has been the direct cause of two extra-inning losses to clubs with more losses than wins. The letter is written in good faith, and I do not doubt that Caliari genuinely enjoys playing in Sacramento and would genuinely like to return. I also believe that the organization's response to this letter, whatever it is, will tell us something important about how the front office evaluates its own roster. The case for retaining Caliari at any price is not, at present, a case that the statistics will support.
Salazar's shoulder setback is more serious than originally characterized — He was injured August 31st while pitching against Tucson. He subsequently suffered a setback in his recovery from what was described as a sore shoulder. His manager confirmed that Salazar overdid a workout during rehabilitation and re-injured himself, and that the team is taking his recovery one day at a time. He will now miss at least one more week. For a reliever who had been Sacramento's most valuable middle-innings arm — 2.44 ERA, 0.99 WHIP, the arm that held the Seattle game together on August 29th when Andretti was removed after three innings — his absence in September creates a gap in the bullpen structure that Gutierrez, Bautista, and Ryan will be asked to fill. Gutierrez has a 1.95 ERA and can fill it. Bautista has been solid. Ryan's 4.47 ERA is what it is. The question is whether Salazar returns before October, and the medical reports do not currently support optimism on that timeline.
Cruz's hamstring tendinitis and what it means for October — Cruz was placed on the IL on September 4th with the diagnosis, was listed as eligible for return in one day as of September 15th, and should be activated in time for the Baltimore series or shortly after. His season line of .300/.392/.542 is the most complete two-way offensive contribution on the roster — the batting average, the on-base percentage, the twenty-three home runs, the twenty-five stolen bases. His absence for ten games was managed, as these things go, but his presence in October is not optional for a team that needs to win a seven-game series against the best pitching staff in the American League East. The hamstring needs to hold.
MacDonald is batting .097 over his last eight games with zero home runs — The cold streak that appeared in late July has returned. MacDonald has been one of Sacramento's most consistent producers at first base all season — .256 average, sixteen home runs, sixty-four RBI — but the current stretch is the second extended slump of his second half, and a team with legitimate October ambitions needs its first baseman producing when the calendar says September. Perez has absorbed some of the lineup slack while Cruz has been out. MacDonald needs to find his swing before the schedule gets harder.
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WHAT THE REST OF THE LEAGUE IS DOING
Baltimore at 89-57 arrives at home on Friday with a magic number of thirteen and the most significant injury news of the American League's final month: David Hernandez, their ace, is out for the season with a rotator cuff strain. He was 14-8 with a 2.49 ERA and 142 strikeouts in 191.1 innings — the second-best ERA in the American League behind Rubalcava and, by most measures, the second-best pitcher in this league this year. His absence changes the Baltimore October picture in ways that are still being calculated. It does not change the fact that they are 89-57, that they have the best offense in the American League East, that Jorge Jaime is batting .274 with thirty-seven home runs, and that the three games at Camden starting Friday are the most important regular season games Sacramento will play between now and whenever the magic number reaches zero. The Hernandez injury is a factor. It is not a relief.
Fort Worth at 81-66 has won its own five-game winning streak and narrowed the second-place gap slightly, but eleven and a half games with sixteen to play is a mathematical situation that does not resolve itself through winning streaks. The Spirits will play out the string fighting for the wild card — Columbus leads that race at 85-61 — and whether they make October will depend entirely on what they do against teams that are not Sacramento. The head-to-head record is now nine wins each.
Phoenix is on a ten-game losing streak. That sentence should be read twice. The club that entered September as the National League's best team at 78-53 has since lost ten consecutive games and fallen to 81-65, four games behind Las Vegas in the NL West, and the wild card picture in the National League has reshuffled completely. Las Vegas at 85-61 now leads both the division and the NL wild card. Charlotte and Philadelphia are tied at 84-62 in the NL East. Sacramento's most likely World Series opponent is no longer the club it was preparing to face a month ago, and the scouting adjustments that October requires will need to account for that change. Phoenix could still recover. Ten-game losing streaks have ended before. But the team that spent most of 1993 looking like the NL's representative in the Fall Classic has given itself a significant hole to climb out of in the final two weeks.
Nashville's Josh Eichelman will retire at season's end after seventeen professional seasons and a .305 career batting average. He is 38 years old and has said publicly that the physical demands of the game are no longer compatible with what his body can offer. Eichelman collected 2,239 hits over his career. The Nashville organization will miss him, and the Hot Corner extends the professional courtesies his career has earned.
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THE MAILBAG — Because some questions deserve a real answer.
From Brian Collins of East Sacramento, a logistics manager who has attended every home Sacramento game since 1986 and who, by his own account, has never once left Cathedral Stadium early regardless of the score, the weather, or the occasion — a policy he describes as "the only rule I have in life that I've never broken": "The magic number is five. Should I start planning the celebration?"
Brian, the planning can begin. A magic number of five with sixteen games remaining and an eleven-and-a-half-game lead is not a situation that produces surprises. Sacramento needs five wins, or five combined wins-and-Fort-Worth-losses, to clinch a division title that has been effectively decided since August. The champagne in the Cathedral clubhouse has been sitting in a refrigerator for two months waiting for the right evening, and that evening is arriving whether we announce it or not. The more interesting question is not whether Sacramento clinches but when and against whom — the Baltimore series this weekend offers the earliest realistic opportunity if the stars align, and there are worse things than clinching at Camden against the team you will likely face in October. Start planning. Bring your voice.
From Kenji Watanabe of the Pocket District, a high school mathematics teacher who has been calculating Edwin Musco's WAR by hand every week this season as a classroom demonstration of advanced statistics and who reports that his students, initially skeptical of the exercise, now check the numbers independently: "Is Edwin Musco having a Hall of Fame caliber season?"
Kenji, the classroom exercise is exactly the kind of thing that produces baseball fans for the next thirty years, and the number you have been calculating confirms what the eye test has been saying since June. A WAR of 6.2 from a thirty-three-year-old shortstop — not a first baseman or a designated hitter but a shortstop, at a position where the defensive value is incorporated into the metric — is a Hall of Fame caliber season in the straightforward sense that it belongs among the best individual seasons this franchise has produced. Whether it is a Hall of Fame career is a question the totality of Musco's numbers will eventually answer. What is not a question is that he is playing the best baseball of his Sacramento tenure right now, in September, when it matters most, and the students who have been tracking his WAR by hand are watching something worth watching.
From Jack Morrison of Land Park, a retired accountant who reads the Hot Corner column in print rather than listening to the podcast and who opened his letter by noting that he has "no strong feelings about the format, only the content," which is either a compliment or a warning and possibly both: "I read about Caliari's contract extension letter. Is this a joke?"
Jack, it is not a joke. Gil Caliari, the reliever currently carrying a 6.28 ERA and five losses on a first-place team, wrote a personal letter to manager Jimmy Aces requesting a contract extension. The letter was warm, sincere, and demonstrated a level of self-awareness about one's own calendar-year statistics that I will characterize as creative. I want to be fair to Caliari: he has been in professional baseball for a long time, he has produced at a high level in other seasons, and the instinct to advocate for yourself is an entirely human one. But the accountant in you will immediately grasp the relevant numbers — six earned runs per nine innings, twenty-one walks in 28.2 innings, losses in five games — and understand why the response to that letter, if one arrives, will require careful composition. The organization has larger decisions to make this winter. The Caliari extension is not among the most pressing of them.
From Nairi Khachaturian of Rancho Cordova, who immigrated to Sacramento in 1981 and has been a Prayers season ticket holder since 1985, who described attending the Fort Worth series last weekend as "the best three days I have had at a baseball game since Game 7 in 1989": "With Hernandez out, does Baltimore become more manageable in October?"
Nairi, the 1989 memory is one this city shares, and the optimism you are bringing to the Baltimore question is understandable. But manageable is a word I want to use carefully. Baltimore without Hernandez is still Baltimore: 89-57, the best offense in the American League East, Jorge Jaime with thirty-seven home runs and a run differential that leads the league. Losing your ace changes a rotation's ceiling but not its floor — they still have capable pitchers who will compete in a seven-game series. What changes is the top-of-the-rotation matchup: Sacramento's Rubalcava versus Baltimore's second-best starter is a more favorable alignment than Rubalcava versus Hernandez would have been. In a seven-game series, that difference matters. It does not make Baltimore manageable. It makes Sacramento's path to the pennant slightly less steep. The Fort Worth series last weekend was the correct emotional preparation for October. Keep that energy warm.
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Baltimore on Friday. The most important road series of the season, against the team Sacramento will very likely face in the American League Championship Series, with a magic number of five and a lead that has made the division irrelevant for weeks. Rubalcava starts game one. The rotation lines up cleanly. Cruz should be back. Whatever the outcome at Camden, the Prayers return home to Houston and then El Paso before the San Jose series closes the regular season in late September. The champagne is cold. The plan is in place. We are five away from what this franchise has been building toward since April, and I intend to document every step of the final distance.
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.