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liberty-ca · 03-20-2026, 07:41 PM

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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April 15 – April 27, 1994 | Games 13–24 of the Sacramento Prayers 1994 Season

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SEVENTEEN AND SEVEN, AND THE NUMBER THAT KEEPS ME AWAKE

Seventeen wins and seven losses. A team ERA of 3.04, best in the American League West. Four complete games in twenty-four starts, which is a number that belongs to a different era of baseball and yet here it is, printed in the box scores of 1994 Sacramento games. A rotation so deep and so consistent that the fifth starter — the man who was a question mark entering spring training after biceps tendinitis ended his 1993 season prematurely — is three and zero with a 2.25 ERA in three starts and may be the most pleasant surprise the franchise has produced since Espenoza emerged from the middle of the rotation to go sixteen and four last year.

All of that is real and documented and worth celebrating.

And then there is Steve Dodge's ERA, which stands at 11.12 through seven appearances, and which is the number I keep returning to regardless of how often I remind myself that seven appearances is a small sample, that closers have bad stretches, that the 1.83 ERA he posted across the full 1993 season represents the larger truth about what he is. I keep returning to it because it is not seven appearances of random variance. It is seven appearances in which he has allowed a grand slam, two home runs off the same batter in the same game, and a solo shot in a separate save situation, and the ERA of 11.12 is the accumulated weight of those specific, consequential pitches thrown at the exact moments when they could do the most damage.

I have been arguing since June of 1993 that Dodge is the correct closer for this team. I am not retracting that argument. What I am doing is acknowledging, clearly and without hedging, that the argument needs to survive contact with an ERA of 11.12 rather than be protected from it. The next four games at Cathedral Stadium are against Fort Worth, the team that beat Sacramento in October, the team that is currently nine and sixteen but whose roster, when fully healthy, is the most dangerous obstacle between Sacramento and the AL West title. I will be watching the ninth inning with a particular quality of attention that I have not given to ninth innings since last October.

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THE RECORD: GAMES 13 THROUGH 24

@ El Paso, April 15-17 (2-1)

The first road trip of the season opened at Abbots Park with a statement from a player who had been hearing about his slow start since the middle of the first homestand. MacDonald went three for five with a home run and a double and four RBI on April 15th, and Larson won his third game in six innings of three-run ball while Scott threw three clean innings of mop-up relief to complete the 11-3 final. Lopez hit his fourth home run. Musco drove in runs. The lineup looked like what the lineup was supposed to look like at the beginning of April when it was instead going zero for two against a pitcher with a 5.40 ERA.

April 16th was the most frustrating loss of the young season, and I mean frustrating in the specific sense that it was nobody's fault and everybody's problem. Rubalcava threw eight innings and allowed one earned run on six hits with six strikeouts and ninety-seven pitches, and the Sacramento offense managed two hits against Dong-kyun Jung and left Abbots Park having lost a baseball game by a score of 1-0. Rubalcava's ERA went to 0.85 after that game. His record went to 2-2. Those two numbers describe the same pitcher and they describe opposite things, which is a tension I intend to address in the storylines section below.

April 17th was Andretti at five and two-thirds innings in a comfortable 8-4 win, which would have been an entirely clean story except for Salazar entering in relief and giving up two earned runs including a Mike Gillock home run in a situation that did not require Salazar to be exposed to high-leverage at-bats. The forty-three-year-old legend's ERA is 7.71 and his role for the remainder of this season needs to be clearly defined before another manager's decision places him in a position where the outcome matters.

@ San Jose, April 18-20 (2-1)

The April 18th game at San Jose Grounds was the most entertaining Sacramento game I have covered in two seasons of this program, and I mean that without irony. Twenty runs. Twenty-five hits. Cruz hit two home runs and collected ten total bases. Alonzo went five for six, tying the Sacramento franchise single-game hits record. Musco drove in runs. Perez drove in runs. MacDonald drove in runs. Every name in the lineup produced something in a game that lasted three hours and forty-one minutes and felt every minute of it in the best possible way. Espenoza was roughed up for six runs in four innings before Bautista entered and threw five clean innings of four-strikeout relief — which may have been the most important individual bullpen performance of the season to this point, a reliever doing starter work in the most complete way available.

Hidden in the box score: Perez was injured while running the bases. The nature and severity were not immediately disclosed, which produced a night of concern before the April 19th box score revealed him starting at first base and hitting a home run and two singles for three RBI in the 14-4 win. St. Clair started that game, went seven and two-thirds innings, allowed two earned runs, and struck out three while Cruz hit another home run and Musco hit a grand slam and the Sacramento offense produced the kind of numbers that make visiting San Jose a pleasure. St. Clair is now two and zero with a 2.08 ERA and I will address him more fully in the section below.

April 20th was Larson's second start of the road trip and it lasted one and two-thirds innings, six earned runs, three walks, and a game score of fifteen. Vasquez hit a bases-clearing double in the second inning that effectively ended Sacramento's competitive interest in the game before the first hour had elapsed. Bautista, Scott, Caliari, and Prieto all threw clean relief innings in a mop-up exercise that the Sacramento front office should perhaps study for what it says about where the available pitching depth actually lives right now. Karos closed it for San Jose. The final was 6-4, the loss was Larson's second of the season, and the "Who's Cold" label — backed up by zero wins and two loses, with 9.64 ERA in the last two outings — is the most accurate two-word summary of what I watched.

@ Milwaukee, April 22-24 (2-1)

April 22nd in Milwaukee was the game that required me to sit with something uncomfortable for twenty-four hours before I could write about it analytically. Rubalcava lasted four and two-thirds innings and allowed eight runs, six earned, with a game score of 24. The Milwaukee lineup scored five times in the third inning against the best pitcher in the American League, a man whose ERA entering the start was 0.85 and whose career ERA with this franchise is 2.67. Salazar entered in relief and threw three and a third clean mop-up innings, which is exactly the deployment context in which Salazar belongs and which produced exactly the result Salazar is still capable of producing at forty-three when the leverage is appropriate. The 8-3 loss went into the books. After sitting with it for twenty-four hours, here is what I believe: what happened on April 22nd in Milwaukee was an outlier, not a pattern. Every pitcher in the history of professional baseball has a start that looks like this. The question is what comes next.

What came next was a Rubalcava complete game shutout in San Antonio on April 27th — nine innings, seven hits, zero runs, four strikeouts, 110 pitches, game over. The answer to the Milwaukee start was delivered five days later in the most emphatic terms available. Rubalcava's ERA is 1.79. His record is three and two. If you are tracking only the wins and losses, you are tracking the wrong number.

April 23rd at Milwaukee was Andretti going eight innings and allowing four earned runs including two Josh Hill home runs, and Dodge closing the ninth in a save situation, and Hill hitting another home run in the ninth, and Sacramento winning 7-5 because the offense had built a cushion sufficient to survive it. Dodge's ERA after the Hill home run: 9.64. April 24th was Espenoza at seven and two-thirds innings with Cruz hitting a three-run home run and Musco adding another and Prieto throwing a clean third of an inning and Dodge closing the final inning — allowing a two-run Briones home run and a solo Briones home run in consecutive at-bats. Sacramento won 6-5. Dodge's ERA after the Briones home runs: 11.12. Five saves through seven appearances. An ERA of 11.12. Both of those numbers describe the same pitcher in the same twenty-four games, which is the statistical expression of a situation that has moved beyond small sample variance into something that requires a direct organizational response.

@ San Antonio, April 25-27 (2-1)

The series opened on April 25th with Larson's fourth start and another quality-adjacent performance that produced another loss — seven and two-thirds innings, four earned runs, three walks against a San Antonio club that was fifteen and seven and playing the best baseball in the NL East outside of Philadelphia. Musco went four for four with a home run and was the only Sacramento bat that gave the lineup any personality. Ryan entered and failed to retire anyone, and the inherited run scored, and Prieto finished cleanly, and the 2-4 final went into the books as Sacramento's seventh loss of the season.

April 26th was St. Clair again, and I want to stop the game-by-game account for a moment to acknowledge what this man is doing. Three starts, three wins, twenty innings, seven strikeouts per nine innings, a 2.25 ERA against three different opponents in three different ballparks. He pitched seven innings in San Antonio against a fifteen-and-seven club that was leading the National League East and allowed two earned runs and struck out seven on ninety-eight pitches. MacDonald went four for five with a home run, a double, two singles, and three RBI — one hit shy of the cycle — and Cruz added another home run and the 13-3 final was one of those games where every element of a baseball team functions simultaneously, which is a rarer phenomenon than the standings suggest and worth noting when it occurs.

And then April 27th, which I have already addressed, and which deserves one more sentence: Rubalcava stood on the mound in San Antonio and threw a complete game shutout five days after the Milwaukee start, and the San Antonio manager called him "pure nasty," and I agree with the San Antonio manager completely.

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WHAT I'M WATCHING

Danny St. Clair is the most important story nobody is telling — Three starts. Three wins. A 2.25 ERA. Seven strikeouts per nine innings. A WHIP of 1.30 that reflects occasional traffic but never the kind of traffic that produces crooked numbers. He is thirty years old and recovering from biceps tendinitis and he is pitching like the fourth starter on a championship-caliber rotation — which, when you consider that Rubalcava, Andretti, Espenoza, and Larson all occupy spots one through four, is exactly what he is. The question I have been asking since April 1st about whether Larson's inconsistency would expose the rotation's depth has been answered by a pitcher the pre-season coverage barely mentioned. Sacramento entered 1994 with what appeared to be a four-man rotation and a question mark in the fifth slot. What it actually has, based on twenty-four games of evidence, is a five-man rotation with one variable and four near-certainties, which is a depth profile that most playoff contenders would trade for.

David Perez is having the season nobody predicted — Through twenty-four games: a .416 batting average, twenty-six RBI, and a 1.028 OPS that leads every position player in the American League. He is twenty-eight years old, he holds a player opt-out after this season, and the front office that is already managing Rubalcava's contract situation and Andretti's contract year is about to discover that there is a third contract conversation waiting in the first base lineup card. Perez drove in twelve runs in his first twelve games, hit an opposite-field home run in San Jose, had a two-run double in Milwaukee that won the series opener, and has not had a two-game hitless stretch in three weeks. The opt-out he holds becomes more valuable with every game he plays at this level, and the organization needs to be thinking about it now rather than in October when his leverage is maximized and Sacramento's is not.

Gil Cruz is in the middle of something — .368 batting average, five home runs in the last ten games. Cruz through twenty-four games: .302 average, six homers, twenty RBI, a .989 OPS. He is twenty-six years old and ranked first overall at second base in the league and he is playing like it. The three stolen bases against seven caught stealings is the one number in his line that I would prefer to look different, but the power and the walks and the contact rate and the defensive contributions at second base have combined to produce a player who looks ready to step out of the supporting cast conversation and into the starring role one.

Lopez at .213 requires a precise diagnosis — Seventeen walks in eighty-nine at-bats. Four home runs. Eight stolen bases. An OBP of .324 that is thirty points higher than his batting average, which tells you that the walks are keeping him valuable even when the hits are not falling. I do not believe the .213 average reflects a changed player; I believe it reflects a month in which the line drives have found gloves more often than gaps, which is a phenomenon that baseball statistics call BABIP and which corrects itself over a full season for hitters with Lopez's contact quality. What concerns me is not the average but the seventeen caught stealing situations accumulating alongside the eight stolen bases — a success rate below fifty percent for the player whose sixty stolen bases in 1993 were one of the signature achievements of the season. The aggressive baserunning that produced those sixty steals is the same aggressive baserunning that is producing caught stealings in April 1994, and the adjustment that converts aggressiveness into efficiency is one of the conversations worth having in the Cathedral Stadium dugout this week.

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THE FINE PRINT: RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES

The Dodge situation is no longer theoretical — I am going to be precise about this. An ERA of 11.12 through seven appearances represents a data set that has moved beyond the range of reasonable sample-size dismissal. The Takahashi grand slam was one event. The Hill home runs were two events. The Briones home runs were two more events. Five home runs allowed in seven appearances, three of which directly changed the outcome of games Sacramento was leading, is not variance. It is a pattern of pitches that are catching too much of the plate in the moments of maximum consequence, and the pattern needs a response.

The response is not to remove Dodge from the closing role. I want to be clear about that as well, because the instinct when a closer struggles is to find an alternative, and the alternatives currently available — Prieto at 4.50, Salazar at 5.23, Caliari at 3.68 in middle relief — do not represent upgrades in ninth-inning, one-run-lead situations. The response is to understand why the pitches are catching too much of the plate, to have the pitching staff conversation that adjusts the approach, and to hold the deployment decision while that adjustment is made. The response is not to hand the ninth inning back to Prieto, whose own performance history in that role was documented across an entire season of this program in 1993. Dodge closes. That answer has not changed. The question is what he needs to close effectively, and that conversation needs to happen in the Cathedral Stadium pitching lab rather than in a front office meeting.

Larson's variance is real and requires an honest accounting — Three wins and two losses, 4.25 ERA, but the ERA does not fully describe the situation because the ERA is the average of starts that range from a game score of 73 to a game score of 15. The score of 15 start — one and two-thirds innings in San Jose, six earned runs — is the same pitcher who threw seven scoreless innings against Boston. The same pitcher who won his first three starts convincingly. He is not inconsistent in the way that a pitcher with a uniformly mediocre ERA is inconsistent; he is inconsistent in the way that a pitcher with competing versions of himself is inconsistent, and which version arrives on a given Tuesday is not something the rotation planning can control. What the organization can control is the bullpen depth available to manage the starts where the bad version shows up early, and the April evidence suggests that Bautista and Scott are the arms most capable of absorbing those innings productively.

Salazar's deployment context must be enforced, not suggested — The forty-three-year-old was excellent in Milwaukee on April 22nd, throwing three and a third mop-up innings cleanly in a game already decided. He was not excellent in El Paso on April 17th, entering with Sacramento leading 8-2 and allowing two earned runs including a home run in a situation that did not require his presence. The difference between those two appearances is not Salazar's quality; it is the leverage of the situation in which he was placed. A legend who is forty-three and pitching with a 5.23 ERA deserves a deployment context that allows him to contribute without being exposed. That context is mop-up innings, blowout situations, the fourth and fifth innings of games already decided. The manager who places him in the seventh inning of a close game is not doing Salazar a service. He is creating an outcome that the ERA has been predicting since April.

Fort Worth is coming to Sacramento, and the series matters — They are nine and sixteen, which is eight and a half games behind Sacramento in the standings, and their injury list reads like a medical journal: Alzate out two months with forearm inflammation, Bocanegra gone with a torn abdominal, Yost and Ramos and Music all on the injured list, Valencia's broken hand. The Fort Worth that comes to Cathedral Stadium this week is not the Fort Worth that eliminated Sacramento in October. It is a diminished version of that team playing without its center fielder, two of its starters, and a closing situation that was already uncertain after McLamb's departure last August. Sacramento should beat this Fort Worth club in this series. That sentence contains its own warning, because Sacramento should have beaten this Fort Worth club in October and did not. The nine-nine head-to-head record that defined the 1993 regular season does not expire simply because Fort Worth's roster has been depleted by injury. The pitching matchups favor Sacramento — Andretti, Espenoza, and Larson are all projected to start — and the lineup is operating at a level well above what it managed in the October series. I expect Sacramento to win three of four. I will be watching what those games reveal about whether the October adjustments — the offensive approach against Fort Worth's pitching, the ninth-inning deployment decisions, the situational hitting that went absent in October — have been made.

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INTEL FROM AROUND THE LEAGUE

Brooklyn is eighteen and seven and leading the AL East, which is a development that deserves more attention than this program has given it. They lost both their primary shortstops before the season began — Pedro Ortiz to a broken elbow, John Miller to a torn labrum — and they are playing the best baseball in the American League anyway, which suggests either that their lineup is carrying a defensive deficiency or that their pitching is good enough to absorb one. Their team ERA of 3.31 and their .293 team batting average are both among the best in the league, and the thirteen-game lead they have built over the competition in a division that includes Boston at fifteen and ten suggests they are the most complete team in the East right now. They are not a team I expected to be writing about in the second article of the season as the primary rival to Sacramento's best-team-in-the-league claim. Here we are.

Baltimore is eleven and fourteen with Jaime on the injured list for two more weeks, and the Satans are already three games under five hundred without the man who won the AL MVP in 1993 and was projected to hit .358 with forty home runs and 123 RBI this season. When Jaime returns, Baltimore will be a different team than the one currently posting a 5.37 team ERA and losing series to opponents it should handle comfortably. The question of what Baltimore looks like healthy and what October matchup Sacramento is building toward remains the most important competitive intelligence question of the first month.

Fort Worth's injury situation is worth examining beyond the surface-level observation that they are nine and sixteen. They have six pitchers on the injured list, their center fielder is out eight weeks, and they have lost eleven of their last fourteen games. A team that was nine and nine against Sacramento in the regular season last year and eliminated them in October is currently the worst team in the AL West below only Seattle, which is a reminder that the October version of a club and the April version can look nothing alike. My concern about Fort Worth is not who they are right now. It is who they will be in September when the injured players return and the roster looks the way it looked when it beat Sacramento in Game 1 at Cathedral Stadium.

Philadelphia is eighteen and seven in the National League East, riding a seven-game winning streak, with Mike Young at four and zero and a 0.68 ERA through five starts. Young just signed a five-year extension at $810,000 per season, which is the kind of organizational commitment to a quality starting pitcher that Sacramento would do well to study. Philadelphia appears to be the class of the NL and the most likely World Series opponent if Sacramento wins the AL pennant, and I have been saying since the spring training article that Carro versus whoever Sacramento sends to the mound in a seven-game series is the October matchup that requires the most preparation.

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YOU ASKED, I'M ANSWERING

From Jennifer Walsh of Midtown Sacramento, a pediatric therapist who describes herself as someone who "processes emotions for a living and finds it both ironic and appropriate that Sacramento baseball requires the same skill set": "Is Rubalcava's 3-2 record going to cost him the Cy Young Award again?"

Jennifer, the therapeutic framing is exactly right and I will match it with the statistical one. Rubalcava's 1.79 ERA through six starts, his 0.90 WHIP, his thirty-seven strikeouts in forty-five and a third innings — these are Cy Young numbers regardless of what the win-loss line says. His two losses came on a day when Dong-kyun Jung threw eight innings of two-hit ball and the Sacramento offense was kept to zero runs, and on a day in Milwaukee when the lineup was absent and the opponent had a historically anomalous inning against him. Neither loss reflects a deficiency in Rubalcava's performance; both reflect the reality that a pitcher can be the best on the field and still lose when his team does not score. The voters who gave him sixteen of twenty-four first-place votes last year were not rewarding his win total; they were rewarding his ERA, his WHIP, and his innings pitched. If those numbers hold through October — and through six starts they are holding — the Cy Young Award will find him again regardless of how the offense performs on his start days.

From Marcus Chen of East Sacramento, a financial analyst who has been listening to this program since 1990 and who describes his approach to Sacramento baseball as "the same framework I apply to equity valuation — what are the fundamentals, and is the market pricing them correctly": "Is Perez's .416 average sustainable, and what does it mean for his contract situation?"

Marcus, the equity valuation framework is exactly right for this question. The .416 average is not sustainable in the sense that no batting average above .400 has been maintained across a full season in the history of professional baseball. The underlying fundamentals that are producing it — a .443 on-base percentage suggesting genuine plate discipline, a .584 slugging percentage driven by extra-base hits rather than cheap singles, twenty-six RBI in twenty-four games suggesting consistent production with runners on base — are sustainable at a level that will produce a full-season line somewhere between .350 and .380, which would place him in the conversation for the AL batting title and comfortably among the top five position players in the league by season's end. The contract implication is straightforward: a player producing at this level with an opt-out after the season holds maximum leverage in any extension conversation, and Sacramento's front office needs to begin that conversation now rather than in October when the leverage differential is most unfavorable. The market is currently pricing Perez as a first baseman ranked thirteenth in the league. His 1994 performance is arguing for a significant revaluation of that estimate.

From Roberto Alcántara of Land Park, a retired postal worker who has attended Sacramento home games since the franchise's first season in 1969 and who was in Cathedral Stadium the night Corey Gonzales hit three home runs against Baltimore in 1972: "After twenty-four games, where does this team rank among the Sacramento clubs you've watched?"

Roberto, being at that 1972 game is the kind of baseball credential that commands genuine respect, and the question you are asking requires the honest answer rather than the flattering one. Through twenty-four games, this team's pitching staff is the best I have covered in my years following the franchise. Four complete games, four shutouts, a 3.04 team ERA with Rubalcava and St. Clair and Andretti all posting ERAs under 2.75 simultaneously — that is exceptional by any measure. The offense is producing at a pace driven heavily by Perez's extraordinary start and Cruz's current hot streak, which are real contributions that will likely normalize somewhat as the season progresses, but the team OPS of .798 is strong and the thirty-six stolen bases reflect an aggressive baserunning approach that creates runs the box score sometimes does not fully capture. What separates 1994 from 1993 through twenty-four games is the depth — St. Clair in the fifth slot is better than anything the 1993 rotation offered below the top four. What keeps this program from declaring 1994 superior to the 1989 and 1990 seasons is Dodge's 11.12 ERA, which is the single number that connects April to October in a way that cannot be ignored. The foundation is exceptional. The ninth inning is the question.

From Anisha Patel of Natomas, a software developer who has been following Sacramento baseball for three seasons and who describes her analytical approach to the game as "I believe in the data but I also believe what my eyes see, and right now my eyes and the data are not agreeing about Steve Dodge": "How do I reconcile what I'm seeing from Dodge with what the career numbers say he is?"

Anisha, the tension you have identified is exactly the right one and I will not pretend it resolves easily. The career numbers say Dodge is a closer who posted a 1.83 ERA last season, a 2.05 ERA across four years with Sacramento, and a profile of performance that represents the best available option for the ninth inning on this roster. The eye test through seven appearances in 1994 says he is throwing fastballs that are finding the middle of the strike zone in the highest-leverage moments of close games, and that hitters are identifying those fastballs quickly enough to do damage with them. Both of those things can be simultaneously true, and when they are simultaneously true the correct response is to trust the larger sample — four years, two hundred innings, a career ERA of 2.05 — while acknowledging that the smaller sample is telling you something that needs to be addressed in the pitching lab rather than ignored. What I would resist is the conclusion your eyes are perhaps drawing, which is that Dodge is no longer capable of closing games. He is. The evidence of four years of professional baseball says he is. What April has shown is that the specific approach he is using in ninth-inning situations — the pitch selection, the location, the sequence — needs refinement. That refinement happens in the bullpen sessions between starts, not in the box score. Keep watching. Keep trusting the larger sample. And if we are still having this conversation in July, the conversation will be different.

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Fort Worth tonight at Cathedral Stadium. Andretti on the mound for Sacramento against a club that is nine and sixteen but whose history against this franchise demands respect regardless of what the standings say. I will be there for all four games of the series, filing after each one, watching the ninth inning with the particular attention that seventeen games of an 11.12 ERA has made necessary. Sacramento is the best team in the American League West. Fort Worth is the team that proved last October that being the best team in the division does not guarantee anything in October. The conversation between those two facts is the thing I am most interested in covering this week.

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.

03-20-2026, 07:41 PM	#262
liberty-ca Major Leagues Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 447	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *April 15 – April 27, 1994 \| Games 13–24 of the Sacramento Prayers 1994 Season* ______________________________ SEVENTEEN AND SEVEN, AND THE NUMBER THAT KEEPS ME AWAKE Seventeen wins and seven losses. A team ERA of 3.04, best in the American League West. Four complete games in twenty-four starts, which is a number that belongs to a different era of baseball and yet here it is, printed in the box scores of 1994 Sacramento games. A rotation so deep and so consistent that the fifth starter — the man who was a question mark entering spring training after biceps tendinitis ended his 1993 season prematurely — is three and zero with a 2.25 ERA in three starts and may be the most pleasant surprise the franchise has produced since Espenoza emerged from the middle of the rotation to go sixteen and four last year. All of that is real and documented and worth celebrating. And then there is Steve Dodge's ERA, which stands at 11.12 through seven appearances, and which is the number I keep returning to regardless of how often I remind myself that seven appearances is a small sample, that closers have bad stretches, that the 1.83 ERA he posted across the full 1993 season represents the larger truth about what he is. I keep returning to it because it is not seven appearances of random variance. It is seven appearances in which he has allowed a grand slam, two home runs off the same batter in the same game, and a solo shot in a separate save situation, and the ERA of 11.12 is the accumulated weight of those specific, consequential pitches thrown at the exact moments when they could do the most damage. I have been arguing since June of 1993 that Dodge is the correct closer for this team. I am not retracting that argument. What I am doing is acknowledging, clearly and without hedging, that the argument needs to survive contact with an ERA of 11.12 rather than be protected from it. The next four games at Cathedral Stadium are against Fort Worth, the team that beat Sacramento in October, the team that is currently nine and sixteen but whose roster, when fully healthy, is the most dangerous obstacle between Sacramento and the AL West title. I will be watching the ninth inning with a particular quality of attention that I have not given to ninth innings since last October. ______________________________ THE RECORD: GAMES 13 THROUGH 24 @ El Paso, April 15-17 (2-1) The first road trip of the season opened at Abbots Park with a statement from a player who had been hearing about his slow start since the middle of the first homestand. MacDonald went three for five with a home run and a double and four RBI on April 15th, and Larson won his third game in six innings of three-run ball while Scott threw three clean innings of mop-up relief to complete the 11-3 final. Lopez hit his fourth home run. Musco drove in runs. The lineup looked like what the lineup was supposed to look like at the beginning of April when it was instead going zero for two against a pitcher with a 5.40 ERA. April 16th was the most frustrating loss of the young season, and I mean frustrating in the specific sense that it was nobody's fault and everybody's problem. Rubalcava threw eight innings and allowed one earned run on six hits with six strikeouts and ninety-seven pitches, and the Sacramento offense managed two hits against Dong-kyun Jung and left Abbots Park having lost a baseball game by a score of 1-0. Rubalcava's ERA went to 0.85 after that game. His record went to 2-2. Those two numbers describe the same pitcher and they describe opposite things, which is a tension I intend to address in the storylines section below. April 17th was Andretti at five and two-thirds innings in a comfortable 8-4 win, which would have been an entirely clean story except for Salazar entering in relief and giving up two earned runs including a Mike Gillock home run in a situation that did not require Salazar to be exposed to high-leverage at-bats. The forty-three-year-old legend's ERA is 7.71 and his role for the remainder of this season needs to be clearly defined before another manager's decision places him in a position where the outcome matters. @ San Jose, April 18-20 (2-1) The April 18th game at San Jose Grounds was the most entertaining Sacramento game I have covered in two seasons of this program, and I mean that without irony. Twenty runs. Twenty-five hits. Cruz hit two home runs and collected ten total bases. Alonzo went five for six, tying the Sacramento franchise single-game hits record. Musco drove in runs. Perez drove in runs. MacDonald drove in runs. Every name in the lineup produced something in a game that lasted three hours and forty-one minutes and felt every minute of it in the best possible way. Espenoza was roughed up for six runs in four innings before Bautista entered and threw five clean innings of four-strikeout relief — which may have been the most important individual bullpen performance of the season to this point, a reliever doing starter work in the most complete way available. Hidden in the box score: Perez was injured while running the bases. The nature and severity were not immediately disclosed, which produced a night of concern before the April 19th box score revealed him starting at first base and hitting a home run and two singles for three RBI in the 14-4 win. St. Clair started that game, went seven and two-thirds innings, allowed two earned runs, and struck out three while Cruz hit another home run and Musco hit a grand slam and the Sacramento offense produced the kind of numbers that make visiting San Jose a pleasure. St. Clair is now two and zero with a 2.08 ERA and I will address him more fully in the section below. April 20th was Larson's second start of the road trip and it lasted one and two-thirds innings, six earned runs, three walks, and a game score of fifteen. Vasquez hit a bases-clearing double in the second inning that effectively ended Sacramento's competitive interest in the game before the first hour had elapsed. Bautista, Scott, Caliari, and Prieto all threw clean relief innings in a mop-up exercise that the Sacramento front office should perhaps study for what it says about where the available pitching depth actually lives right now. Karos closed it for San Jose. The final was 6-4, the loss was Larson's second of the season, and the "Who's Cold" label — backed up by zero wins and two loses, with 9.64 ERA in the last two outings — is the most accurate two-word summary of what I watched. @ Milwaukee, April 22-24 (2-1) April 22nd in Milwaukee was the game that required me to sit with something uncomfortable for twenty-four hours before I could write about it analytically. Rubalcava lasted four and two-thirds innings and allowed eight runs, six earned, with a game score of 24. The Milwaukee lineup scored five times in the third inning against the best pitcher in the American League, a man whose ERA entering the start was 0.85 and whose career ERA with this franchise is 2.67. Salazar entered in relief and threw three and a third clean mop-up innings, which is exactly the deployment context in which Salazar belongs and which produced exactly the result Salazar is still capable of producing at forty-three when the leverage is appropriate. The 8-3 loss went into the books. After sitting with it for twenty-four hours, here is what I believe: what happened on April 22nd in Milwaukee was an outlier, not a pattern. Every pitcher in the history of professional baseball has a start that looks like this. The question is what comes next. What came next was a Rubalcava complete game shutout in San Antonio on April 27th — nine innings, seven hits, zero runs, four strikeouts, 110 pitches, game over. The answer to the Milwaukee start was delivered five days later in the most emphatic terms available. Rubalcava's ERA is 1.79. His record is three and two. If you are tracking only the wins and losses, you are tracking the wrong number. April 23rd at Milwaukee was Andretti going eight innings and allowing four earned runs including two Josh Hill home runs, and Dodge closing the ninth in a save situation, and Hill hitting another home run in the ninth, and Sacramento winning 7-5 because the offense had built a cushion sufficient to survive it. Dodge's ERA after the Hill home run: 9.64. April 24th was Espenoza at seven and two-thirds innings with Cruz hitting a three-run home run and Musco adding another and Prieto throwing a clean third of an inning and Dodge closing the final inning — allowing a two-run Briones home run and a solo Briones home run in consecutive at-bats. Sacramento won 6-5. Dodge's ERA after the Briones home runs: 11.12. Five saves through seven appearances. An ERA of 11.12. Both of those numbers describe the same pitcher in the same twenty-four games, which is the statistical expression of a situation that has moved beyond small sample variance into something that requires a direct organizational response. @ San Antonio, April 25-27 (2-1) The series opened on April 25th with Larson's fourth start and another quality-adjacent performance that produced another loss — seven and two-thirds innings, four earned runs, three walks against a San Antonio club that was fifteen and seven and playing the best baseball in the NL East outside of Philadelphia. Musco went four for four with a home run and was the only Sacramento bat that gave the lineup any personality. Ryan entered and failed to retire anyone, and the inherited run scored, and Prieto finished cleanly, and the 2-4 final went into the books as Sacramento's seventh loss of the season. April 26th was St. Clair again, and I want to stop the game-by-game account for a moment to acknowledge what this man is doing. Three starts, three wins, twenty innings, seven strikeouts per nine innings, a 2.25 ERA against three different opponents in three different ballparks. He pitched seven innings in San Antonio against a fifteen-and-seven club that was leading the National League East and allowed two earned runs and struck out seven on ninety-eight pitches. MacDonald went four for five with a home run, a double, two singles, and three RBI — one hit shy of the cycle — and Cruz added another home run and the 13-3 final was one of those games where every element of a baseball team functions simultaneously, which is a rarer phenomenon than the standings suggest and worth noting when it occurs. And then April 27th, which I have already addressed, and which deserves one more sentence: Rubalcava stood on the mound in San Antonio and threw a complete game shutout five days after the Milwaukee start, and the San Antonio manager called him "pure nasty," and I agree with the San Antonio manager completely. ______________________________ WHAT I'M WATCHING Danny St. Clair is the most important story nobody is telling — Three starts. Three wins. A 2.25 ERA. Seven strikeouts per nine innings. A WHIP of 1.30 that reflects occasional traffic but never the kind of traffic that produces crooked numbers. He is thirty years old and recovering from biceps tendinitis and he is pitching like the fourth starter on a championship-caliber rotation — which, when you consider that Rubalcava, Andretti, Espenoza, and Larson all occupy spots one through four, is exactly what he is. The question I have been asking since April 1st about whether Larson's inconsistency would expose the rotation's depth has been answered by a pitcher the pre-season coverage barely mentioned. Sacramento entered 1994 with what appeared to be a four-man rotation and a question mark in the fifth slot. What it actually has, based on twenty-four games of evidence, is a five-man rotation with one variable and four near-certainties, which is a depth profile that most playoff contenders would trade for. David Perez is having the season nobody predicted — Through twenty-four games: a .416 batting average, twenty-six RBI, and a 1.028 OPS that leads every position player in the American League. He is twenty-eight years old, he holds a player opt-out after this season, and the front office that is already managing Rubalcava's contract situation and Andretti's contract year is about to discover that there is a third contract conversation waiting in the first base lineup card. Perez drove in twelve runs in his first twelve games, hit an opposite-field home run in San Jose, had a two-run double in Milwaukee that won the series opener, and has not had a two-game hitless stretch in three weeks. The opt-out he holds becomes more valuable with every game he plays at this level, and the organization needs to be thinking about it now rather than in October when his leverage is maximized and Sacramento's is not. Gil Cruz is in the middle of something — .368 batting average, five home runs in the last ten games. Cruz through twenty-four games: .302 average, six homers, twenty RBI, a .989 OPS. He is twenty-six years old and ranked first overall at second base in the league and he is playing like it. The three stolen bases against seven caught stealings is the one number in his line that I would prefer to look different, but the power and the walks and the contact rate and the defensive contributions at second base have combined to produce a player who looks ready to step out of the supporting cast conversation and into the starring role one. Lopez at .213 requires a precise diagnosis — Seventeen walks in eighty-nine at-bats. Four home runs. Eight stolen bases. An OBP of .324 that is thirty points higher than his batting average, which tells you that the walks are keeping him valuable even when the hits are not falling. I do not believe the .213 average reflects a changed player; I believe it reflects a month in which the line drives have found gloves more often than gaps, which is a phenomenon that baseball statistics call BABIP and which corrects itself over a full season for hitters with Lopez's contact quality. What concerns me is not the average but the seventeen caught stealing situations accumulating alongside the eight stolen bases — a success rate below fifty percent for the player whose sixty stolen bases in 1993 were one of the signature achievements of the season. The aggressive baserunning that produced those sixty steals is the same aggressive baserunning that is producing caught stealings in April 1994, and the adjustment that converts aggressiveness into efficiency is one of the conversations worth having in the Cathedral Stadium dugout this week. ______________________________ THE FINE PRINT: RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES The Dodge situation is no longer theoretical — I am going to be precise about this. An ERA of 11.12 through seven appearances represents a data set that has moved beyond the range of reasonable sample-size dismissal. The Takahashi grand slam was one event. The Hill home runs were two events. The Briones home runs were two more events. Five home runs allowed in seven appearances, three of which directly changed the outcome of games Sacramento was leading, is not variance. It is a pattern of pitches that are catching too much of the plate in the moments of maximum consequence, and the pattern needs a response. The response is not to remove Dodge from the closing role. I want to be clear about that as well, because the instinct when a closer struggles is to find an alternative, and the alternatives currently available — Prieto at 4.50, Salazar at 5.23, Caliari at 3.68 in middle relief — do not represent upgrades in ninth-inning, one-run-lead situations. The response is to understand why the pitches are catching too much of the plate, to have the pitching staff conversation that adjusts the approach, and to hold the deployment decision while that adjustment is made. The response is not to hand the ninth inning back to Prieto, whose own performance history in that role was documented across an entire season of this program in 1993. Dodge closes. That answer has not changed. The question is what he needs to close effectively, and that conversation needs to happen in the Cathedral Stadium pitching lab rather than in a front office meeting. Larson's variance is real and requires an honest accounting — Three wins and two losses, 4.25 ERA, but the ERA does not fully describe the situation because the ERA is the average of starts that range from a game score of 73 to a game score of 15. The score of 15 start — one and two-thirds innings in San Jose, six earned runs — is the same pitcher who threw seven scoreless innings against Boston. The same pitcher who won his first three starts convincingly. He is not inconsistent in the way that a pitcher with a uniformly mediocre ERA is inconsistent; he is inconsistent in the way that a pitcher with competing versions of himself is inconsistent, and which version arrives on a given Tuesday is not something the rotation planning can control. What the organization can control is the bullpen depth available to manage the starts where the bad version shows up early, and the April evidence suggests that Bautista and Scott are the arms most capable of absorbing those innings productively. Salazar's deployment context must be enforced, not suggested — The forty-three-year-old was excellent in Milwaukee on April 22nd, throwing three and a third mop-up innings cleanly in a game already decided. He was not excellent in El Paso on April 17th, entering with Sacramento leading 8-2 and allowing two earned runs including a home run in a situation that did not require his presence. The difference between those two appearances is not Salazar's quality; it is the leverage of the situation in which he was placed. A legend who is forty-three and pitching with a 5.23 ERA deserves a deployment context that allows him to contribute without being exposed. That context is mop-up innings, blowout situations, the fourth and fifth innings of games already decided. The manager who places him in the seventh inning of a close game is not doing Salazar a service. He is creating an outcome that the ERA has been predicting since April. Fort Worth is coming to Sacramento, and the series matters — They are nine and sixteen, which is eight and a half games behind Sacramento in the standings, and their injury list reads like a medical journal: Alzate out two months with forearm inflammation, Bocanegra gone with a torn abdominal, Yost and Ramos and Music all on the injured list, Valencia's broken hand. The Fort Worth that comes to Cathedral Stadium this week is not the Fort Worth that eliminated Sacramento in October. It is a diminished version of that team playing without its center fielder, two of its starters, and a closing situation that was already uncertain after McLamb's departure last August. Sacramento should beat this Fort Worth club in this series. That sentence contains its own warning, because Sacramento should have beaten this Fort Worth club in October and did not. The nine-nine head-to-head record that defined the 1993 regular season does not expire simply because Fort Worth's roster has been depleted by injury. The pitching matchups favor Sacramento — Andretti, Espenoza, and Larson are all projected to start — and the lineup is operating at a level well above what it managed in the October series. I expect Sacramento to win three of four. I will be watching what those games reveal about whether the October adjustments — the offensive approach against Fort Worth's pitching, the ninth-inning deployment decisions, the situational hitting that went absent in October — have been made. ______________________________ INTEL FROM AROUND THE LEAGUE Brooklyn is eighteen and seven and leading the AL East, which is a development that deserves more attention than this program has given it. They lost both their primary shortstops before the season began — Pedro Ortiz to a broken elbow, John Miller to a torn labrum — and they are playing the best baseball in the American League anyway, which suggests either that their lineup is carrying a defensive deficiency or that their pitching is good enough to absorb one. Their team ERA of 3.31 and their .293 team batting average are both among the best in the league, and the thirteen-game lead they have built over the competition in a division that includes Boston at fifteen and ten suggests they are the most complete team in the East right now. They are not a team I expected to be writing about in the second article of the season as the primary rival to Sacramento's best-team-in-the-league claim. Here we are. Baltimore is eleven and fourteen with Jaime on the injured list for two more weeks, and the Satans are already three games under five hundred without the man who won the AL MVP in 1993 and was projected to hit .358 with forty home runs and 123 RBI this season. When Jaime returns, Baltimore will be a different team than the one currently posting a 5.37 team ERA and losing series to opponents it should handle comfortably. The question of what Baltimore looks like healthy and what October matchup Sacramento is building toward remains the most important competitive intelligence question of the first month. Fort Worth's injury situation is worth examining beyond the surface-level observation that they are nine and sixteen. They have six pitchers on the injured list, their center fielder is out eight weeks, and they have lost eleven of their last fourteen games. A team that was nine and nine against Sacramento in the regular season last year and eliminated them in October is currently the worst team in the AL West below only Seattle, which is a reminder that the October version of a club and the April version can look nothing alike. My concern about Fort Worth is not who they are right now. It is who they will be in September when the injured players return and the roster looks the way it looked when it beat Sacramento in Game 1 at Cathedral Stadium. Philadelphia is eighteen and seven in the National League East, riding a seven-game winning streak, with Mike Young at four and zero and a 0.68 ERA through five starts. Young just signed a five-year extension at $810,000 per season, which is the kind of organizational commitment to a quality starting pitcher that Sacramento would do well to study. Philadelphia appears to be the class of the NL and the most likely World Series opponent if Sacramento wins the AL pennant, and I have been saying since the spring training article that Carro versus whoever Sacramento sends to the mound in a seven-game series is the October matchup that requires the most preparation. ______________________________ YOU ASKED, I'M ANSWERING From Jennifer Walsh of Midtown Sacramento, a pediatric therapist who describes herself as someone who "processes emotions for a living and finds it both ironic and appropriate that Sacramento baseball requires the same skill set": "Is Rubalcava's 3-2 record going to cost him the Cy Young Award again?" Jennifer, the therapeutic framing is exactly right and I will match it with the statistical one. Rubalcava's 1.79 ERA through six starts, his 0.90 WHIP, his thirty-seven strikeouts in forty-five and a third innings — these are Cy Young numbers regardless of what the win-loss line says. His two losses came on a day when Dong-kyun Jung threw eight innings of two-hit ball and the Sacramento offense was kept to zero runs, and on a day in Milwaukee when the lineup was absent and the opponent had a historically anomalous inning against him. Neither loss reflects a deficiency in Rubalcava's performance; both reflect the reality that a pitcher can be the best on the field and still lose when his team does not score. The voters who gave him sixteen of twenty-four first-place votes last year were not rewarding his win total; they were rewarding his ERA, his WHIP, and his innings pitched. If those numbers hold through October — and through six starts they are holding — the Cy Young Award will find him again regardless of how the offense performs on his start days. From Marcus Chen of East Sacramento, a financial analyst who has been listening to this program since 1990 and who describes his approach to Sacramento baseball as "the same framework I apply to equity valuation — what are the fundamentals, and is the market pricing them correctly": "Is Perez's .416 average sustainable, and what does it mean for his contract situation?" Marcus, the equity valuation framework is exactly right for this question. The .416 average is not sustainable in the sense that no batting average above .400 has been maintained across a full season in the history of professional baseball. The underlying fundamentals that are producing it — a .443 on-base percentage suggesting genuine plate discipline, a .584 slugging percentage driven by extra-base hits rather than cheap singles, twenty-six RBI in twenty-four games suggesting consistent production with runners on base — are sustainable at a level that will produce a full-season line somewhere between .350 and .380, which would place him in the conversation for the AL batting title and comfortably among the top five position players in the league by season's end. The contract implication is straightforward: a player producing at this level with an opt-out after the season holds maximum leverage in any extension conversation, and Sacramento's front office needs to begin that conversation now rather than in October when the leverage differential is most unfavorable. The market is currently pricing Perez as a first baseman ranked thirteenth in the league. His 1994 performance is arguing for a significant revaluation of that estimate. From Roberto Alcántara of Land Park, a retired postal worker who has attended Sacramento home games since the franchise's first season in 1969 and who was in Cathedral Stadium the night Corey Gonzales hit three home runs against Baltimore in 1972: "After twenty-four games, where does this team rank among the Sacramento clubs you've watched?" Roberto, being at that 1972 game is the kind of baseball credential that commands genuine respect, and the question you are asking requires the honest answer rather than the flattering one. Through twenty-four games, this team's pitching staff is the best I have covered in my years following the franchise. Four complete games, four shutouts, a 3.04 team ERA with Rubalcava and St. Clair and Andretti all posting ERAs under 2.75 simultaneously — that is exceptional by any measure. The offense is producing at a pace driven heavily by Perez's extraordinary start and Cruz's current hot streak, which are real contributions that will likely normalize somewhat as the season progresses, but the team OPS of .798 is strong and the thirty-six stolen bases reflect an aggressive baserunning approach that creates runs the box score sometimes does not fully capture. What separates 1994 from 1993 through twenty-four games is the depth — St. Clair in the fifth slot is better than anything the 1993 rotation offered below the top four. What keeps this program from declaring 1994 superior to the 1989 and 1990 seasons is Dodge's 11.12 ERA, which is the single number that connects April to October in a way that cannot be ignored. The foundation is exceptional. The ninth inning is the question. From Anisha Patel of Natomas, a software developer who has been following Sacramento baseball for three seasons and who describes her analytical approach to the game as "I believe in the data but I also believe what my eyes see, and right now my eyes and the data are not agreeing about Steve Dodge": "How do I reconcile what I'm seeing from Dodge with what the career numbers say he is?" Anisha, the tension you have identified is exactly the right one and I will not pretend it resolves easily. The career numbers say Dodge is a closer who posted a 1.83 ERA last season, a 2.05 ERA across four years with Sacramento, and a profile of performance that represents the best available option for the ninth inning on this roster. The eye test through seven appearances in 1994 says he is throwing fastballs that are finding the middle of the strike zone in the highest-leverage moments of close games, and that hitters are identifying those fastballs quickly enough to do damage with them. Both of those things can be simultaneously true, and when they are simultaneously true the correct response is to trust the larger sample — four years, two hundred innings, a career ERA of 2.05 — while acknowledging that the smaller sample is telling you something that needs to be addressed in the pitching lab rather than ignored. What I would resist is the conclusion your eyes are perhaps drawing, which is that Dodge is no longer capable of closing games. He is. The evidence of four years of professional baseball says he is. What April has shown is that the specific approach he is using in ninth-inning situations — the pitch selection, the location, the sequence — needs refinement. That refinement happens in the bullpen sessions between starts, not in the box score. Keep watching. Keep trusting the larger sample. And if we are still having this conversation in July, the conversation will be different. ______________________________ Fort Worth tonight at Cathedral Stadium. Andretti on the mound for Sacramento against a club that is nine and sixteen but whose history against this franchise demands respect regardless of what the standings say. I will be there for all four games of the series, filing after each one, watching the ninth inning with the particular attention that seventeen games of an 11.12 ERA has made necessary. Sacramento is the best team in the American League West. Fort Worth is the team that proved last October that being the best team in the division does not guarantee anything in October. The conversation between those two facts is the thing I am most interested in covering this week. Got a question for the mailbag? Find the Hot Corner wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California. Last edited by liberty-ca; 03-20-2026 at 09:10 PM.