Sacramento Prayers - 1988 FLB Season - Page 20

liberty-ca · 06-12-2026, 08:27 AM

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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Winter 2001 | Gunn Signed, Rodriguez Traded | Hall of Fame Voting Produces No Inductees | 2001 Season Starts Monday

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THE DEFENDING CHAMPIONS ARE PREDICTED TO FINISH SECOND IN THEIR OWN DIVISION BY SIXTEEN GAMES

Preseason projections, made by the selective pool of FBL analytic experts, have been released on the eve of new 2001 baseball season: San Jose 109-53, Sacramento 93-69. Sixteen games of separation in the same division. The defending World Series champions predicted to lose nineteen more games than they did in 2000 while their first-round playoff opponents from that very October are projected to be historically dominant. Personally, I find it difficult thing to believe. Nobody who makes these projections has seen Jeon throw a bases-empty shutout in the cold at Nat Bailey Stadium. Nobody who makes these projections has watched Navarro in October. The projections are made from what the numbers say about the players, not from what those players have proven they can do when the games actually matter.

That said: the projections are not wrong to flag concerns. Lopez is still healing. Rubalcava is still seven to eight months away. Lozano has an oblique strain entering the week of Opening Day, and Cruz has a sprained knee. The defending champions are banged up in the first week of April, which is not where you want to be. They have been here before. The 2000 season was built on improvisation, adaptability, and the refusal to accept that injury lists are destiny. There is no reason to stop now.

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THE OFFSEASON TRANSACTIONS

Jose Rodriguez was traded in late January. After spending all of 2000 on the injured list with a broken elbow, Sacramento sent Rodriguez, minor league pitcher Albin Tornatore, a first-round draft pick, and an eighth-round pick to Las Vegas, receiving thirty-eight-year-old reliever Javier Gutierrez and a first-round pick in return. The organization is giving Sacramento a veteran relief arm it can use in the short term and freeing the roster of a shortstop whose health has been a question for two years. The net cost in picks essentially cancels out. What it formalizes is what the 2000 season already made obvious: Alejandro Navarro is the shortstop here for as long as he wants to be.

Chris Blevins was traded to Portland in late February along with minor league outfielder Chase Burrows and three draft picks, receiving twenty-six-year-old reliever Mike Luna, two picks, and $450,000 in cash. Blevins was a fourth outfielder with limited upside. Luna gives the bullpen a younger arm with projection. It is the kind of depth-for-depth exchange that winning organizations make efficiently in the offseason.

John Gunn was signed in late January. Four years, $1.824 million, for a twenty-five-year-old right-hander with a 52-39 career record and a 4.23 ERA. The preseason projections — which are skeptical of Sacramento in general — have him going 15-9 with a 3.06 ERA for 2001. If the model is right, Gunn is the second-best pitcher in the rotation and the most efficient offseason signing Sacramento has made in years.

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TEIICHI KASHIWABARA

Sacramento's left-field prospect is the sixth-best prospect in professional baseball according to the preseason rankings. Sixth overall. Not sixth in the AL, not sixth at his position — sixth among every player in every organization in the FBL. He is nineteen years old. The organization has very quietly built a pipeline that now has two starting pitchers signed as free agents specifically because the current roster needs depth, and a left-field prospect who is one year younger than Victor Alvarez and ranked higher on the league's prospect list than any Sacramento player has been in recent memory.

Kashiwabara doesn't appear in the 2001 opening day roster. He is in the system, developing, which is where a nineteen-year-old should be. But his ranking tells you something about the organization's future that the current roster's age profile also suggests: Sacramento is not in a rebuilding phase, but the next generation is already arriving beneath the surface of a team still competitive enough to defend a championship.

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WHERE SACRAMENTO STANDS — A POSITIONAL SURVEY

The preseason positional rankings tell a layered story about who this team is entering 2001.

At shortstop, Navarro is ranked fourth in the league — which is extraordinary for a twenty-three-year-old in only his second full season as a starter. He is ahead of every shortstop in the AL except Crotwell in Milwaukee, Colson in Detroit, and Rastelli in Vancouver. At right field, Shinohara is second in the league, his Gold Glove year apparently translating into the ranking his talent has deserved for several seasons. At starting pitching, Jang ranks fourth — Sacramento's new signing immediately projects as one of the better starters in the AL. The relief corps with Medina ranks first in the league, which speaks to the depth of the bullpen even after a year when Medina's availability was inconsistent.

Where Sacramento ranks below expectation: first base (18th in Alvarez, who is twenty-one and improving), center field (14th with Choi, whose defensive metrics don't match his offensive production in the rankings), and left field (13th with Mollohan, who is a professional hitter but not a positional star). These rankings represent the team's floor. Alvarez at twenty-one has years of development ahead. Choi's bat doesn't disappear because the rankings question his center-field defense.

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THE INJURY SITUATION

Lopez is listed at two months remaining on his ACL recovery. If the timeline holds, he returns sometime in June. His return won't be quiet — seventy-three stolen bases and twenty home runs from the leadoff spot created an offensive profile that Sacramento has genuinely missed since October, and two months into the season the team will have been playing without him for eight consecutive months. Whether he comes back as the same player immediately or requires a re-acclimation period is impossible to predict. ACL recoveries are individual, and Lopez's athleticism should favor full recovery. The June target is worth watching.

Rubalcava is seven to eight months from returning. That puts him in the range of November 2001 at the earliest — which means his 2001 season, for practical purposes, is over before it begins. Sacramento will not see Rubalcava throw a competitive pitch this year. The rotation will function without him. It has been functioning without him since the wildcard game last October.

Lozano's oblique and Cruz's knee are both short-term. Both are expected back within days. The season doesn't need to wait for either of them.

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THE WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC AND NAVARRO ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

The United States won the World Baseball Classic in March. Seong-soo Kang of South Korea won MVP. The tournament's top vote-getter among position players not named Kang was, essentially, a collection of familiar names from the FBL's upper tier — Crotwell, Washburn, Davis, Robitaille.

Sacramento's own Alejandro Navarro represented Mexico and finished with forty-nine MVP points. He did not win the award. He received no first-place votes, but what is really remarkable, is him playing in his first World Baseball Classic and competing in the same tournament as players who have been international representatives for five or six years at tender age of twenty-three years old. Forty-nine points means voters across twenty participating nations looked at his tournament performance and found it worth acknowledging. The player who hit .476 in the ALDS and won two games of the ALCS with late-inning home runs is now registering on a global stage. This will not be his last World Baseball Classic appearance.

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THE HALL OF FAME BALLOT — NO INDUCTEES

Scott Hunt received 72.2 percent of votes in his seventh year on the ballot and fell short of the 75 percent threshold. Forrest Marrs at 66.3 percent. Eli Murguia and Brian Pullum both first-year candidates with significant vote totals, suggesting the ballot logjam will continue.

No Sacramento connections in the top tier of the ballot other than Eli Murguia, which is a curiosity given how many former Prayers have retired over the last decade. Fernando Salazar is already inducted. Strickler won't be eligible for five years. The institution will have to wait for the next generation to present its arguments.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE — WHAT THE PROJECTIONS SAY

San Jose is predicted at 109-53. Suzuki is projected at 22-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Haddix at 17-7 with a 3.33. If those numbers materialize, Sacramento's division is essentially decided before the calendar turns to August. The Demons return Montemayor, who hit seven home runs against Sacramento's pitching in the ALCS alone, and a lineup that ranked eighth in AL scoring last year with room to improve.

In the NL, Milwaukee is predicted to win the Central at 103-59. Long Beach and Vancouver project as the Pacific leaders. The NL looks like a two-horse race between Milwaukee and whoever emerges from the Pacific, with Vancouver's staff — Corral, Gauthier, Trillo — potentially the best rotation in the NL if health cooperates.

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THE INBOX

From Linnea Bergström of Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, a pediatric nurse, who asks: "The projections show Sacramento finishing sixteen games behind San Jose. Should the front office be more concerned than they appear?"

The projections are based on what the models know: player aging curves, regression to the mean, the departure of Strickler and the injury to Rubalcava, and the assumption that San Jose's young roster matures at the rate its talent suggests. What the models do not know is that Sacramento went 18-23 in one-run games last year and still won 103 games. They do not know what Navarro looks like entering his age-twenty-three season with a full October of winning behind him. They do not know how Jeon performs with a healthy back and ankle and a full complement of October experience. The front office, to my read, is not unconcerned — the Gunn signing and the bullpen depth additions suggest they take the gap seriously — but they are not panicking, which is the correct response to a computer's preseason estimate. Sixteen games is a number in a regular season. Postseason October is a different beast. The 2000 Sacramento Prayers were predicted to win about ninety-five games. They won a hundred and three and a World Series. The models are useful starting points, not verdicts.

From Obinna Uzoma of Sacramento's Rancho Cordova neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "The salary sheet shows the entire roster at $11.7 million in 2001. How does Sacramento compete with teams spending more than that?"

By drafting, developing, and signing players before they reach their market value. The franchise has three players signed through arbitration years at below-market rates in Navarro, Alvarez, and Jeon — three of the most important contributors to last October's championship run. Lozano signed a five-year extension right after the World Series for six hundred thousand dollars per year, which is, to be direct, an extraordinary bargain for a player with five postseason home runs who just won a Gold Glove. Cruz is similarly locked in. Shinohara's five-year deal scales up toward fair market over time but is manageable. Sacramento competes on the margins of the salary structure by finding value before the market finds it, which is what the development pipeline and the scouting staff exist to do. The Kashiwabara ranking at sixth overall in the prospect list is evidence that the pipeline is working. The eleven-point-seven-million-dollar roster that just won the World Series is evidence that it has been working for several years.

From Marta Vidaković of Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood, a high school teacher, who asks: "Opening Day is Monday. Sacramento's rotation has Gunn, Cruz, Espenoza, Andretti, and Jeon. Last year's rotation had the same uncertainty entering the year. Should we expect a similar journey?"

Expect a different journey to a possibly similar destination. Last year's uncertainty was injury-driven — Jeon's back and ankle, Rubalcava's wildcard exit. This year's uncertainty is talent-driven — Gunn is an unknown quantity in Sacramento's system, Andretti is forty-one years old, and the back-end of the rotation is still unsettled. The good news is that Espenoza, who was arguably the best starter on the staff in the second half of 2000 and threw eight and one-third innings in a deciding ALCS game, is a legitimate front-of-rotation arm entering his age-thirty-seven season. The concerning news is that thirty-seven is thirty-seven, and the innings Espenoza threw in October will eventually register somewhere in his arm. The most useful prediction I can offer is the one supported by evidence: this organization, when challenged, finds ways to win. The rotation will have a bad month. The bullpen will cover it. The offense will carry stretches where the pitching cannot. Navarro will do something in September that makes everyone forget the bad April starts. That is what defending champions who are built correctly look like in the regular season. The journey this year will have its own shape. It has earned the right to surprise us again.

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Ninety-three wins predicted. One hundred and three delivered last year. The Seattle Lucifers arrive Monday at Sutter Health Park for Opening Day. Jung-keun Jang takes the ball to pitch for the first time in the Prayers uniform. Alejandro Lopez is two months from coming back. The 2001 Sacramento Prayers begin the defense of their championship with a sprained knee, an oblique strain, and a six-foot-one right-hander from South Korea who the computer thinks will win fifteen games.

See you at the ballpark.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-13-2026, 09:10 AM

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 2 – 12, 2001 | Shinohara Has Five Home Runs in Six Games | Jang Looks Like the Real Thing

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SACRAMENTO IS FIVE AND FIVE, SAN JOSE IS EIGHT AND ONE

There was a hope entering 2001 that the injuries were behind us. That hope lasted eight days. On April 3rd, in his first appearance of the season, Ji-hoon Jeon left the mound having thrown sixty-nine pitches with a finger blister. On April 11th, Ha-joon Choi was hit by a pitch in the forearm or hand — the exact location was not specified, his diagnosis is still pending, which is the kind of medical ambiguity that keeps you awake at two in the morning. He appeared briefly the following day as a pinch runner before being removed, which suggests the injury is not catastrophic. What it is, exactly, remains unknown.

The defending champions are five and five. Two walk-off wins in ten games, one of them in ten innings and one in eleven. Two blown starts from Andretti and Flores respectively. One Gunn debut of considerable promise. One Jang start that suggested everything the projections implied about his value was accurate. And the constant, reliable, infuriating background noise of the injury report telling you that the 2001 Sacramento Prayers intend to continue exactly where the 2000 version left off in terms of medical drama.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

vs. Seattle, April 2-4 (2-1)

Opening Day: Jang pitched seven and one-third innings against Santiago Gomez and lost zero to two. Both numbers are accurate and incompatible-seeming. Jang's game score was sixty-seven on a hundred and three pitches. He allowed four hits, walked nobody, struck out five. Gomez allowed five hits, walked nobody, struck out five. The difference was two runs in the sixth inning off a Jang fastball that Romo put into the outfield and a Najera single that followed. Sacramento put runners on base and left them there in every meaningful inning. A quality start on Opening Day that produced zero runs and a loss is exactly the kind of result that the first game of the year generates more than it should.

Jeon started April 3rd and lasted three and two-thirds innings. He was injured while pitching — the finger blister revealed itself sometime between the forty-fourth and sixty-ninth pitch — and Espenoza came in and threw two and one-third innings in a winning cause. Nakazawa hit a three-run homer in the fifth off Baca to flip a two-nothing deficit into a three-two lead, and the bullpen held. Four to two, Sacramento's first win in 2001.

April 4th was ten innings and Choi's two-run walk-off homer off Glahn. Andretti threw six and one-third innings, allowed three earned runs, and left with the bases loaded for Ke, who let one of those inherited runners to cross the home plate. Multiple blown leads, multiple Seattle comebacks. Chavarria and Choi and Shinohara all contributing. Sacramento won five to three on a ball that Choi put into the seats in the bottom of the tenth, and the crowd finally exhaled.

@ San Jose, April 6-8 (1-2)

Valadez held Sacramento to one run over eight innings on April 6th. Cruz pitched well — six and two-thirds, one earned run — but Luna came in for the eighth, threw twenty-six pitches, two of which were of wild variety, and gave up a Pratly two-run double that decided the game. Three to one, San Jose.

Demon's Suzuki on April 7th: eight innings, no runs, ten strikeouts, one hundred and twenty-two pitches. That is what the number-two starter for the projected hundred-and-nine-win team looks like. Sacramento scored one run in the ninth when Alvarez doubled with two men on and two out. One to two, San Jose's walk-off on Vasquez single, Sacramento at two and three.

April 8th was different. Gunn started his first career game at Sacramento and went six innings of two-hit shutout baseball against a San Jose lineup that had just run Suzuki out there the night before. He threw a hundred and eight pitches with control and movement and made the Demons look ordinary. Lozano — returning from the oblique strain that kept him out of Opening Day — hit a grand slam in the fifth off Haddix to put the game away eight to nothing at that point. Sacramento scored nine runs total. Gunn was game's player of the game in his first career appearance as Sacramento's starter. Nine to five, Sacramento.

@ Portland, April 9-12 (2-2)

Andretti allowed six runs in three and two-thirds innings on April 9th. He is forty-one years old and his ERA entering this week stands at 8.10, which is an early April number that will either come down as he settles into his mechanics or will signal that what he did in the World Series was the final successful thing his body could produce in October before the bills came due in April. That determination cannot be made in two starts. But two starts with an 8.10 ERA are two starts with an 8.10 ERA, and the organization should be mildly concerned at the moment. Shinohara hit two home runs and had three RBI, but that still wasn't enough.

April 10th in eleven innings was exactly the kind of game Sacramento needs to win if it is going to survive the injury attrition of this early schedule. Vic Cruz started and left after four and two-thirds with Portland already scoring at will through the middle innings. Multiple bullpen arms allowed inherited runners to score. Benson blew a save. Sacramento trailed twice and came back twice and then Shinohara hit his fourth homer of the season in the tenth inning to tie it and Nakazawa doubled home the winning run in the eleventh. Ten to eight final, eleven innings, five pitchers for Sacramento, chaos from the third inning through the last.

Jang won April 11th. Six innings, five hits, three runs, nine strikeouts. A hundred and seven pitches. His ERA is 2.14 after two starts and the ground-ball tendency that the organization bought is already manifesting — thirteen ground-outs in eleven innings pitched. Sacramento scored eight runs off three Portland pitchers. Four home runs across the lineup. Everything that was supposed to work, worked this time.

Flores, called up from the minors on an emergency basis to plug the hole in the starting rotation, caused by Ji-hoon Jeon's injury, started April 12th and lasted four and two-thirds innings, allowing six runs on nine hits, including a Garcia three-run homer that turned a manageable game into a rout. Portland won nine to two. The fifth starter question, which was the rotation's biggest uncertainty entering the season, has produced exactly the answer nobody wanted to hear the very first time it had been asked...

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SHINOHARA'S START

Five home runs in six games. A .391 batting average over that stretch. The Gold Glove winner from 2000 has been the most productive offensive player on the roster through the first week and a half of the season, and he has done it while Lopez heals, while Lozano was working his way back from the oblique, while Choi's health status is uncertain. Shinohara is not typically the player who carries a lineup — his value has always resided in his consistency, his ability to hit in the middle innings for doubles and run-scoring singles, his arm that prevents runners from taking extra bases. What he is doing in April 2001 is something different: he is the force around which the offense is currently organized, and he is doing it without apparent mechanical change or visible explanation.

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JANG AND THE ROTATION QUESTION

Two starts. Two quality outings. Thirteen innings, fourteen hits, five earned runs, eighteen strikeouts, an ERA of 2.14. The $1.824 million rotation investment is currently performing like a half-price Cy Young candidate, which is either an early April mirage or a signal that Sacramento found genuine value in a pitcher the market underestimated. The ground-ball rate is real. The control is real. Whether it sustains over thirty-five starts is the only question that matters, and two starts cannot answer it. What two starts can do is make the question worth asking with optimism rather than anxiety.

The fifth starter situation is less encouraging. Flores's 11.57 ERA after one outing tells you he is not ready for this role. Jeon has a finger blister. Andretti is struggling. The depth that held Sacramento together during the 2000 October run is being tested before May, which was not the plan.

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SAN JOSE IS EIGHT AND ONE

The preseason projections said San Jose would win a hundred and nine games. Entering April 13th, they have an eight-and-one record and a run differential that looks exactly like a team capable of winning a hundred and nine games. Suzuki, who the projections put at twenty-two wins with a 2.82 ERA, is already at one win and a game score of eighty-three. Haddix is one and one but allowed eight runs to Sacramento in four and two-thirds innings in a game Sacramento's offense overwhelmed. The Demons are going to lose games. But the early evidence supports the projections in ways that are uncomfortable to acknowledge when you are three and a half games behind them in your own division on April 12th.

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THE INBOX

From Pham Thi Lan of Sacramento's Elk Grove neighborhood, a pharmacist, who asks: "Jeon has a finger blister twelve days into the season. Is there a version of 2001 where his body simply lets him pitch?"

There has to be, because the alternatives are too grim to accept as permanent. A finger blister is among the less severe of the various afflictions Jeon has accumulated over his career — it is not a structural issue, not ligament or bone, not the kind of thing that recurs mechanically the way back injuries or ankle problems do. It is genuinely bad luck of the sort that happens to pitchers who throw hard and grip the ball the way their mechanics require. The concern with Jeon is not the blister in isolation but the cumulative pattern: back, ankle, blister, and underneath all of it a zero-and-four regular season record that distorts what he has actually shown when healthy. His October performances are the argument for patience. His injury timeline is the argument for managing expectations. The most honest thing I can say entering his return from the twelve-day timeline is: Jeon pitching healthy is a legitimate major-league starter, and Jeon pitching is a weekly negotiation between talent and fragility. The franchise knew this when they signed the automatic renewal. They have chosen to bet on the talent. The blister doesn't change the bet.

From Tigran Sargsyan of Sacramento's Arden-Arcade neighborhood, a civil engineer, who asks: "Andretti is 8.10 ERA through two starts. Is he done?"

Two starts in April for a forty-one-year-old pitcher coming off a World Series clinching performance is the smallest sample size you can construct while still calling it data. His Game Six in October was not a fluke — the mechanics, the ground-ball approach, the ability to work deep into games without over-relying on velocity, all of that was real. What happened in the first two starts is likely a combination of spring rustiness, early-season cold weather (games in the forties in Portland do not favor any pitcher over forty years old, frankly), and the natural difficulty of repeating October form across a full spring. The more useful question is not whether Andretti is done but whether he can give Sacramento quality innings in starts three through fifteen. If the answer is yes, the 8.10 ERA is a forgettable artifact. If it is still climbing in June, the organization will face a harder conversation. I am not ready to have that conversation on April 12th.

From Rosario Fuentes of Sacramento's Oak Park neighborhood, a teacher's aide, who asks: "Sacramento is three and a half games behind San Jose eleven days into the season. How does this team catch a hundred-and-nine-win team?"

The honest answer is that it may not need to. The wild card exists, Sacramento is tied for the first wild card spot right now, and winning the World Series last October did not require winning the AL West. What catching San Jose specifically would require is the combination of Sacramento playing at their ceiling — Lopez returning in June and providing the offensive dimension his presence creates, the rotation stabilizing around Jang and Cruz and eventually Jeon, the bullpen returning to its 2000 form — while San Jose plays at something below their own ceiling for a sustained stretch. That combination is possible, not probable. More practically: every team in baseball has a bad month. San Jose will have one too. The question is whether Sacramento is in a position to capitalize when that month arrives. Right now, five and five and competing in a genuinely difficult early schedule, they are capable of being that team. The gap is not insurmountable. It is also not going to close itself.

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Five and five. Boston on the road for three games starting Friday. Then San Jose comes to Sacramento. Lopez is eight weeks away. Choi's diagnosis hopefully arrives sometime before Monday. The season is only eleven days old.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-13-2026, 08:50 PM

THE HOT CORNER
Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL

TIM VAN HAM HITS TWO GRAND SLAMS IN ONE AFTERNOON

The most surprising thing was Bernardo Andretti. Eight innings of two-hit baseball against Seattle on April 20th, with nothing allowed, 584 games into a career that everyone — including, probably, Andretti — briefly worried might be running out of answers after those first two shaky starts of this season. The pitcher who posted an 8.10 ERA through his first two outings of 2001 walked off the mound at T-Mobile Park with a hundred pitches thrown and zero earned runs behind him, and whatever April doubt had accumulated in two weeks of poor results was substantially resolved in one evening.

Sacramento's five and five record had become thirteen and six. Eight wins in nine games. The Boston series went three-for-three. San Jose came to Sacramento and left having lost three straight. The AL West lead is two and a half games and the calendar hasn't turned to May.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

@ Boston, April 13-15 (3-0)

Gunn went six and two-thirds innings on April 13th, allowed one run on three hits and walked nobody. His ERA dropped to 0.71 after two starts as a Prayer. Three home runs in the fifth inning — Shinohara, Cruz, and Chavarria all went deep against Schlageter — gave Sacramento six runs total. Benson closed it. Six to three.

April 14th was Tim Van Ham's afternoon. Five to two over Boston going into the fifth inning, Sacramento already leading after a first-inning rally. Van Ham came to the plate with the bases loaded and hit a grand slam off Onodera. Then in the ninth inning, bases loaded again, he hit another one off Ito. Two grand slams in a single game, eight RBI total, tying the Sacramento regular season record. He finished two for four with both home runs and eight runs batted in while Andretti pitched six innings against a lineup that hit him for three runs — a serviceable start that the offense made irrelevant before the fifth inning was over. Thirteen to three, and the Van Ham name is in the franchise record book.

The April 15th series finale was Cruz's. Seven and two-thirds innings of shutout baseball, six hits, two walks, five strikeouts. Boston had opportunities and squandered every one of them. Van Ham's run-scoring double in the fourth and Mollohan's two-out RBI in the fifth were all Sacramento needed. Two to nothing, and Cruz's ERA fell to 1.42.

vs. San Jose, April 16-18 (3-0)

Jang started April 16th against the Demons and was torched in the fourth inning — Montemayor solo homer, Vasquez two-run shot, five runs allowed in three and two-thirds innings. Sacramento trailed six to three heading into the seventh and somehow won. Gutierrez threw two and one-third scoreless innings to stabilize the bullpen situation. Navarro drove in three runs including a sac fly that tied the game in the fifth. Chavarria doubled twice and scored twice. Schmitt came off the bench in the ninth inning and hit a two-run walk-off homer off Minghetti. Eight to six in ten innings, Sacramento's fourth walk-off of the young season.

April 17th: Espenoza threw six innings and allowed two runs in a grinding performance that kept Sacramento close enough for Florez's eighth-inning two-run homer to decide it. Ke got the win. Four to two, Sacramento.

April 18th: Sacramento scored five runs off Suzuki in the first three innings — Alvarez homered, Van Ham homered, Cruz homered, Chavarria hit a two-run shot — and then surrendered five runs in turn as Ogle hit two home runs and Montemayor added another. Gunn allowed five runs in four and one-third innings, first rough start after his strong Boston outing, and in the end the game became a seven to six Sacramento win on Shinohara's ninth-inning sac fly. Three walks-off in three games against San Jose. The Demons left Sacramento at nine and six.

@ Seattle, April 20-22 (2-1)

Andretti on April 20th: eight innings, two hits, zero runs, five strikeouts, a hundred pitches. The complete reversal of his Portland outings. The Seattle lineup — which is six and twelve and deeply unimpressive — hit him as poorly as a major-league lineup can be expected to hit a pitcher who is locating his ball and working his ground-ball tendencies. Sacramento scored ten runs. Shinohara homered for the eighth time. Mollohan hit his third. The final was ten to one and Andretti's ERA dropped from 6.75 to 4.50 in one start.

Jang threw five innings of no-run ball on April 21st and lost two to one when Luna's one inning of relief allowed two runs on a Welsh double and a Bay sac fly in the seventh. Sacramento had two hits total. The bullpen erased Jang's quality work in one inning, which is becoming a recurring theme for this team.

Cruz won a two-to-one pitcher's duel on April 22nd, going five innings in cold and rainy conditions with four walks but only one run allowed. Gutierrez, Gonzalez, Medina, and Benson all contributed to the hold, and Shinohara's two-out double in the sixth was the winning run. Two to one, series won by Sacramento.

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THE ROTATION IN CONTEXT

Cruz is fourth in the AL in ERA at 1.50 and as of late, he has been the most reliable starter in the rotation. His control, which produced six walks in his Seattle outing but only two in Boston, is the one variable that swings his starts between dominant and merely good. When he throws strikes he generates ground balls and keeps the lineup in order; when he walks batters the game turns chaotic fast. The 1.50 ERA reflects the dominant version appearing regularly enough to outweigh the other.

Jang is 3.03 ERA across six starts and has not yet had a game where he was simply removed for ineffectiveness — his April 16th San Jose start was bad, but even there he recorded seventeen outs before Aces pulled him. The strikeout rate is real. The ground-ball tendencies are real. He is what Sacramento paid for.

Andretti's eight-inning Seattle performance was beautiful. Whether it represents a settled mechanical groove or simply an ideal matchup against a bad lineup remains to be seen over his next three starts. The 4.50 ERA entering May is not a crisis. It is a caution flag that turned amber on April 20th and has not yet gone green.

Gunn's April has been uneven — excellent against Boston in his two outings there, roughed up by San Jose in his most recent start. His ERA after four starts as a Prayer is 3.18, which is still respectable. He is twenty-five years old and has never thrown the kind of April he is experiencing at the major-league level in this environment. Some of the variance is expected.

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SHINOHARA IS CARRYING THIS OFFENSE

Eight home runs in thirteen games. A .373 average over that stretch. Tied for third in the AL in home runs. The Gold Glove right fielder who was supposed to be Sacramento's consistent middle-of-the-order presence has instead become something closer to its offensive engine, filling the role that Lopez would normally occupy at the top and Choi at the heart of the lineup. When both of those players return — Lopez in approximately six to seven weeks, Choi in one week — the offensive picture becomes considerably deeper. What Shinohara has done in April is establish that Sacramento can score runs without its two most important lineup contributors, which is a discovery that should make the rest of April and most of May feel manageable rather than desperate.

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THE PUGA TRADE

On April 23rd, Sacramento traded catcher Jon Horn, second baseman Rey Puga, right-handed pitcher Nick Coulson, a first-round pick, a second-round pick, and a fifth-round pick to the St. Louis Faith. In return: a first-round pick, a third-round pick, and $250,000 in cash.

The picks roughly cancel. The cash is modest. What the transaction actually accomplishes is clearing roster space and salary by moving three players the organization had determined would not be part of the long-term picture. Puga, at thirty years old and batting .043 through his limited appearances in 2001, was not going to contribute at the major-league level this year. Horn was a catching prospect behind Nakazawa on the depth chart with no clear path forward. Coulson was a minor-league arm without an obvious lane to Sacramento's rotation.

Trading present depth for draft capital is the kind of move that produces value in three years rather than this October. Sacramento's position at thirteen and six gives them the luxury of making this trade without it feeling like panic. The organization believes in what it has on the field. This is housekeeping.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

Cleveland leads the NL Central at fourteen and four, which is the best record in the league. Detroit and Sacramento share the best record in the AL at thirteen and six. Charlotte is twelve and six, Houston eleven and seven. The AL is genuinely competitive from top to bottom, which makes Sacramento's current position — leading the West while the projected winner of the division sits two and a half games back — more meaningful than a random mid-April snapshot would normally suggest.

Charlotte reliever, Casey Ford, filed for bankruptcy this morning in a Charlotte court. According to the Chapter 7 filing, Mr. Ford's restaurant chain lost $5.5 million last year. Among his assets, the reliever listed over 2 million in Rolex watches. Casey has been quoted as saying, "What can I tell you? Those timepieces are the epitome of class. I can't say anything about my financial situation. Go through my lawyer."

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THE INBOX

From Margherita Conti of Sacramento's Midtown neighborhood, a restaurant manager, who asks: "Tim Van Ham hit two grand slams in one game, eight RBI, tied the franchise record. Who is Tim Van Ham?"

The honest answer is that Tim Van Ham is the player most franchises have but rarely acknowledge: a perfectly functional major-league outfielder who does not have the ceiling of a star but has enough skill and professionalism to contribute meaningfully when called upon. He entered 2001 as the team's fourth outfielder, filling in for Lopez while the ACL heals and for Choi while the quadriceps recovers. His career numbers have never suggested what he did on April 14th was coming, which is part of what makes the record so striking. There is no analytical framework that predicted Van Ham as the answer to the question of who would tie Sacramento's single-game RBI record. He just came to the plate with the bases loaded twice and hit the ball as hard as he could hit it. That's baseball, and that's Tim Van Ham, and on one afternoon at Fenway Park in April it was exactly sufficient.

From Seun Adesanya of Sacramento's South Sacramento neighborhood, a logistics coordinator, who asks: "Andretti was 8.10 ERA through two starts, then went eight shutout innings against Seattle. Which version is real?"

Both versions exist, and the question is which one appears more often over the remaining twenty-five or so starts. What the April 20th Seattle start showed is that the mechanics and the game plan that produced a World Series-winning performance in October are still available to him — they did not disappear, they were simply inaccessible in two cold April outings against teams that were swinging at his pitches rather than his approach. The Seattle lineup, which is among the weakest in the AL, provided an ideal environment for Andretti to re-establish his rhythm and remind himself of what his arm can still do. The real version of Andretti in 2001 is probably somewhere between the 8.10 ERA and the shutout — a starter who gives Sacramento six innings and two or three earned runs often enough to remain a functional part of the rotation without being the dominant presence he was in his prime years. If those eight innings proved to himself that he still belongs at this level, they have served their most important purpose.

From Hana Procházková of Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, a librarian, who asks: "Sacramento swept San Jose at home in walk-off fashion all three games. Is this what the AL West race looks like all season?"

It might be. The three-game sweep was built on Sacramento's bullpen advantage and its offensive depth more than its rotation superiority — Jang had a poor start in the series opener, Gunn allowed five runs in four and one-third in the finale, and Sacramento still won all three games. That tells you something important about the relative strengths of these two teams: Sacramento's offense and bullpen can absorb a weak starting performance and still find ways to win, while San Jose's rotation advantage — Suzuki and Haddix are clearly the better top-two starters — does not automatically translate into wins when the offense can't protect the lead. San Jose is ten and eight. They will not stay ten and eight. They will almost certainly finish with more wins than Sacramento's preseason number of ninety-three. Whether they close the current gap depends on which version of each team's rotation shows up most consistently from May through September. The AL West race will look like this — close, competitive, determined by individual series rather than sustained runs of dominance — right through the end of summer.

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Thirteen and six. Two and a half games up on San Jose. Phoenix is next for two games on the road, then Long Beach and Philadelphia come to Sacramento. Choi is a week away. Lopez is six to seven weeks away. The rotation has found a shape.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-14-2026, 10:12 AM

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 23 – May 2, 2001 | Twenty-One and Eight | Sacramento Leads the AL West by Four and a Half

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SOSHU SHINOHARA NAMED THE AMERICAN LEAGUE'S BATTER OF THE MONTH FOR APRIL

There is a version of this team that exists only on paper — the one missing Lopez, the one that started the year worried about its fifth starter, the one that lost Navarro for at least a few days to a rib cage injury suffered in a base-running collision on April 28th. And then there is the version that has actually taken the field for the last ten games, which has gone eight and two, scored runs in bunches, found its forty-first home run of the season before the calendar reached May, and built a division lead that nobody projected in March.

Twenty-one and eight — best record in the American League. Four and a half games up on San Jose, who are themselves sixteen and twelve and would be leading most divisions in baseball. Sacramento has built enough cushion that individual injuries — even significant ones — no longer threaten to derail the season. They simply become subplots.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

@ Phoenix, April 23-24 (1-1)

April 23rd was Shinohara's signature month-closer in miniature: four for six, a grand slam in the first inning, a double, two more singles, three runs scored, five RBI. The grand slam off Donegan was his ninth home run of the season and turned a scoreless game into a four-nothing laugher before Phoenix had recorded an out in the bottom of the first. Florez added a two-run homer of his own in the same inning. Gunn improved to three and oh. Thirteen to five — the final score in Prayers favor, and Donegan's start — one and two-thirds innings, ten hits, seven runs — was as bad an outing as any Sacramento opponent has produced all season.

April 24th reversed course completely. Rendon threw eight innings of three-hit shutout baseball for Phoenix, striking out eight, and Espenoza's six and one-third innings of two-run ball were wasted entirely. Sacramento was shut out, five to nothing, in a game where the Crucifixes' Ryan Scott hit two home runs off Espenoza and Musselman. All in all, that was a stark reminder that even the best teams get shut down occasionally by a starter throwing the game of his life.

vs. Long Beach, April 25-26 (1-1)

Long Beach is twenty-two and six, the best record in the National League, and they came to Sutter Health Park and took the first game on the strength of Aaron Boemer going five for five — a double in the first, a single in the fourth, an RBI double in the sixth, and singles in the eighth and ninth, tying the Long Beach regular season game record for hits. Andretti pitched well enough — six and two-thirds innings, two earned runs — but the bullpen surrendered the lead in the eighth and Benson took the loss. Six to five, Long Beach.

April 26th belonged to Victor Alvarez. A grand slam off Kim in the third inning put Sacramento up four to nothing, part of a four for thirteen day at the plate that ended with Alvarez at one for four with the slam, two runs scored, and four RBI. Jang threw six and two-thirds innings of two-run ball for the win, and Musselman picked up his first save of the season in the ninth. Nine to two, the series split against the league's hottest team.

vs. Philadelphia, April 27-29 (3-0)

Philadelphia arrived at seven and seventeen, already drawing public frustration from manager Alex Garcia, who used a press conference on April 24th to criticize media coverage of his team's slow start. The Padres' bats showed up against Sacramento's pitching anyway — Cruz allowed five runs in three innings on April 27th, and the Padres led for much of the game before Sacramento scored seven runs in the third inning alone, behind home runs from Chavarria and Lozano. Florez's two-run double off six-time All-Star Mike Young in the bottom of the ninth was the walk-off that won it for Sacramento, nine to eight.

April 28th: Gunn improved to four and oh, throwing five and two-thirds innings of two-run ball, and Sacramento scored ten runs on nineteen hits, with Shinohara going three for five with a home run and a double. Ten to three.

April 29th was Choi's return from the quadriceps contusion that had sidelined him since mid-April. He went two for three with a home run, two walks, and two runs scored — an immediate, uncomplicated return to form. Sacramento scored thirteen runs, including home runs from Choi, Fernando Garcia, and Chavarria, and Espenoza picked up the win despite allowing four runs in six and two-thirds innings. Thirteen to four. Philadelphia left Sacramento at seven and nineteen, and the sweep was complete.

@ Washington, April 30 - May 2 (3-0)

April 30th: Andretti threw seven and two-thirds innings and allowed only one run — his third straight strong outing, continuing the turnaround that began in Seattle. Chavarria, pinch-hitting in the ninth inning, hit a solo home run off Brooks to break a one-one tie. Benson closed it. Two to one, Prayers.

May 1st: Jang went five and two-thirds innings, allowed three runs on only two hits while issuing four walks, and improved to three and one. Chavarria's go-ahead single in the seventh put Sacramento up for good. Five to three.

May 2nd marked Jeon's return from the stubborn finger blister that had cost him most of April. Six innings, eleven hits, four runs, but only two earned — Jeon committed an error of his own, and Gutierrez and Medina combined for three scoreless innings to seal it. Nakazawa hit two home runs, including a two-run shot in the eighth that provided the final margin. Seven to four. Sacramento finished the road trip three and oh and the homestand-plus-road-trip stretch at eight and two.

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SHINOHARA, AL BATTER OF THE MONTH

The numbers for April: a .351 average, ten home runs, twenty-six RBI, twenty-six runs scored. Tied for first in the AL in home runs with eleven entering May, third in the league in RBI behind only Aguilar of Phoenix and Duran of Nashville — both of whom play for teams currently under .500. Shinohara's recognition as the American League's Batter of the Month is the first major individual honor of the 2001 season for Sacramento, and it arrives for a player who, twelve months ago, was known primarily for his glove.

What makes the month remarkable beyond the raw totals is the context in which it happened. Lopez has not played an inning this year. Choi missed two weeks. The middle of the lineup has been in constant flux due to injuries and roster shuffling. Through all of it, Shinohara has been the one constant — every single game, every series, producing at a level that would be the best month of most players' careers and is, for him, simply April.

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NAVARRO, CHOI, AND THE DEPTH QUESTION

Navarro was injured in a collision at a base during the April 28th game and has been diagnosed with a strained rib cage muscle — day-to-day, with no firm timeline. Cruz has shifted to shortstop in his absence, a position he played at points during this stretch, while Fernando Garcia has taken over at second base and has hit well enough — over .300 in his appearances — that the temporary alignment has not cost Sacramento anything offensively.

Choi's return on April 29th was as clean as a return from injury can be. One home run, two walks, immediate offensive impact in his first game back. Between Choi's return and the inevitable eventual return of Navarro from what appears to be a minor injury, Sacramento's lineup depth — already among the best in the league — becomes deeper still. The lineup that produced forty-four home runs in April, first in the AL, did so without two regular contributors for stretches of the month. What happens when everyone is healthy at once is a question Sacramento has not yet had to answer in 2001, and the answer may be frightening for the rest of the league.

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THE GONZALEZ TRADE AND THE ESPARZA SETBACK

Jeon's return from IL to the starting rotation required the Prayers to make roster decisions. The obvious choice was to send Rafael Gonzalez down to the minors, however the veteran pitcher refused demotion, which forced the management to seek an alternative solution. On April 29th, Sacramento traded right-handed reliever Rafael Gonzalez and minor-league right-hander Ryan McDonald to Columbus for minor-league center fielder Yukinari Sakamoto and $300,000 in cash. A league analyst called it a fairly even transaction, which is as unremarkable an assessment as exists in baseball. Gonzalez, thirty-four, had been a fringe bullpen piece; Sakamoto, twenty-six, adds organizational outfield depth. Nothing about this trade changes Sacramento's 2001 outlook in any direction.

More consequential, unfortunately, is the news that arrived on April 30th regarding Sergio Esparza. The reliever, who has been on the injured list since spring with bone chips in his elbow, suffered a setback in his recovery and will now need at least eight additional weeks before he's ready to return. Combined with Rubalcava's six-to-seven-month timeline and Delgado's seven-month timeline, the bullpen depth chart below the active roster continues to thin. None of this has mattered yet — Benson, Medina, Gutierrez, Ke, and the rest have combined for the second-best bullpen ERA in the league. But injury attrition compounds, and eight more weeks for Esparza is eight more weeks Sacramento needs its current relief corps to hold.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

Long Beach is twenty-two and six, the best record in either league, and their Sacramento series even split was their only blemish in an otherwise dominant stretch. Cleveland is twenty-one and seven in the NL Central. El Paso is twenty and eight in the NL Desert. The early-season parity that defined the first two weeks of April has given way to genuine separation at the top of both leagues — and Sacramento, at twenty-one and eight, belongs in that conversation as much as anyone.

Philadelphia's struggles continue to be a story in themselves. Manager Alex Garcia's media outburst on April 24th — accusing reporters of focusing only on the negative — came during a stretch in which his team would go on to lose six of its next seven, including the three-game sweep at Sacramento's hands. The Padres are seven and twenty-two, the worst record in the American League, and the tension between the front office's public messaging and the team's results on the field appears to be intensifying rather than easing.

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THE INBOX

From Aram Khachaturian of Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood, a high school basketball coach, who asks: "Shinohara won AL Batter of the Month. How does an organization keep a player like that grounded when the attention starts coming?"

The honest answer is that the organization doesn't really need to do much, because the player generally does it himself, and Shinohara's track record suggests he's exactly that kind of person. He's been a consistently excellent, low-drama contributor for four seasons — a Gold Glove winner who was never the headline name even when his performance warranted it. The attention that comes with a league-wide monthly award is, frankly, overdue rather than premature, and players who have spent years being underrated tend not to get carried away when the recognition finally arrives. What the organization can do — and from what I've observed, has done — is continue treating him exactly as they did when he was the quietly excellent right fielder rather than the league's hottest hitter. Consistency from the franchise reinforces consistency from the player. Shinohara doesn't need micromanagement; he needs the room to keep doing what he's doing, and Sacramento has given him exactly that.

From Wioletta Nowakowska of Sacramento's East Sacramento neighborhood, a violinist, who asks: "Navarro is hurt, Lopez hasn't played yet this season, and Sacramento still has the best record in the AL. Is this roster simply deeper than anyone realized?"

Yes, and I think the depth is the actual story of April, more than any individual performance — though Shinohara's award makes for a better headline. Consider what's been absent for stretches of this month: the starting shortstop, the starting center fielder for two weeks, the leadoff hitter and stolen-base threat for the entire month. And consider what's filled in: Fernando Garcia hitting .300 at second base, Cruz capably moving to shortstop, Chavarria providing pinch-hit production and outfield depth, Schmitt delivering a walk-off home run from the bench. This is not a roster built around four or five stars surrounded by replacement-level filler. It's a roster where the eighth and ninth players in the lineup can change a game. That kind of depth doesn't show up in preseason projections — the algorithms that predicted ninety-three wins for Sacramento couldn't have known that Fernando Garcia would hit .300 in extended playing time, because nobody could have known that in March. It's the kind of depth that gets built through years of development and shows its value exactly in months like this one.

From Dimitrios Papageorgiou of Sacramento's Carmichael neighborhood, a barista, who asks: "Sacramento leads the AL West by four and a half games over San Jose, who were projected to win a hundred and nine. What changed?"

Two things, roughly equally important. First, Sacramento has played better than its preseason projection by a significant margin — twenty-one and eight against a projected pace closer to fifteen and fourteen at this point in the season. Second, San Jose has played to roughly their projected level, sixteen and twelve, which is good but not the historic pace the preseason numbers suggested. The gap has opened not because San Jose collapsed but because Sacramento's floor turned out to be much higher than anyone modeled — driven by a healthy April from the rotation's top three, an offense getting career-best months from multiple players simultaneously, and a bullpen that has been the second-best in the league. Four and a half games in early May is not a permanent state. San Jose has a hundred and thirty-some games left to play at their true level, and if that true level is anywhere near a hundred wins, this gap closes. But Sacramento has given itself the cushion to absorb a bad stretch — Navarro's injury, Esparza's setback, the inevitable regression of some hot streaks — without losing the division lead. That cushion is the real accomplishment of April.

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Twenty-one and eight. Nashville on the road for three games, then trip to Portland. Navarro day-to-day, Choi back in the lineup, Lopez five weeks away. The best record in the American League belongs to the defending World Series champions, and it isn't close.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-14-2026, 09:02 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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May 4 – 15, 2001 | Twenty-Seven and Thirteen | Lozano Is Having a Career Year | Cleveland Leads All of Baseball

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SACRAMENTO WINS SIX, THEN DROPS FOUR STRAIGHT

There is a tale of mid-May that looks triumphant — six wins in a row, Jeon's return from injury producing the best start of anyone's season, Lozano quietly compiling a .295 average with seven home runs and twenty-seven RBI in thirty-two games, a four-game lead that briefly felt like breathing room. And there is the version that actually closed out this stretch: four straight losses, two of them to San Jose at home, two of them in Cleveland against a team that is now thirty and nine and looks, frankly, unbeatable.

Twenty-seven and thirteen. Still the best record in the American League at the start of this stretch. Now 1.5 games ahead of San Jose, who went nine and one over the same period. The margin that felt comfortable ten days ago is suddenly very thin, and Sacramento finishes this stretch having just been outplayed, decisively, by the two best teams it has faced all year.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

@ Nashville, May 4-6 (2-1)

Gunn lost his first decision of the season on May 4th, allowing four earned runs in four innings as Nashville's Malik Albury threw eight strong innings. Five to one, Sacramento's only loss of this opening stretch.

Andretti rebounded with six and one-third innings of one-run ball on May 5th, his third strong outing in his last four starts. Navarro drove in three runs including a two-run single in the first inning and a solo homer in the ninth — his first home run of the season. Eight to five, Sacramento.

May 6th belonged to Mollohan, who went three for three with a home run, a double, and a walk, driving in three. Jang threw five innings for the win despite committing a fielding error. Choi and Mollohan both homered in the seventh to put the game away. Six to two. Special note: Navarro was injured while throwing the ball during this game — a separate issue from the rib cage strain, though the severity wasn't immediately clear.

@ Portland, May 8-10 (3-0)

Jeon's return from the finger blister that cost him most of April was worth the wait. Seven and one-third innings, three hits, one run, eight strikeouts — his ERA dropped to 2.12 and his record improved to two and oh. Cruz drove in a run and was injured while throwing the ball in this game, though he stayed in and finished the contest. Sacramento scored seven, Choi homered, and the Apocalypse managed only one run off Jeon and Espenoza combined. Seven to one.

Gunn followed with six and two-thirds innings of shutout ball on May 9th, improving to five and one. Van Ham tripled in the second inning to open the scoring and added two more singles. Alvarez and Lozano both homered. Five to nothing, and Sacramento's lead over San Jose stood at four games.

May 10th was an offensive carnival. Lozano hit two home runs, Alvarez hit two home runs, Choi and Fernando Garcia each added one — five Sacramento home runs total — while Portland's Ryoji Hirayama went five for five, including an RBI triple, tying the Portland regular season hit record. Eleven to eight, Sacramento, in a game that resembled batting practice for both sides. Andretti's three and two-thirds innings of five earned runs were the rough edge in an otherwise dominant week, but the offense buried the problem.

vs. San Jose, May 11-13 (1-2)

May 11th was vintage Shinohara — three hits, a grand slam off Haddix in the seventh inning for his twelfth home run of the season, five RBI total. Jang threw five scoreless innings for the win, improving to five and one. Seven to one, and the win streak reached six.

Then San Jose won the next two. May 12th: Cruz allowed four earned runs in four and one-third innings, and despite a Lozano solo homer, Sacramento lost four to two. May 13th: Jeon, coming off his dominant Portland start, allowed three runs in six innings and took the loss as San Jose's Efrain Flores went seven and one-third scattering only two runs. Three to two, San Jose, and the Demons left Sacramento having won the series and cut the lead to 2.5 games.

@ Cleveland, May 14-15 (0-2)

Cleveland is thirty and nine, and Sacramento got a firsthand look at why. May 14th: Gunn pitched well — six innings, one earned run — but Benson blew a save in the ninth and Cleveland's Jose Salcevo delivered a walk-off single. Six to five, Cleveland.

May 15th was worse. Andretti allowed seven runs in three and two-thirds innings, including a three-run homer to Jason Makin in the first inning. Cleveland led six to nothing before Sacramento recorded an out in the second inning. Ten to three, final, and Sacramento's losing streak reached four — its longest of the season.

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LOZANO'S QUIET SEASON

While Shinohara collects the league-wide attention — thirteen home runs, thirty-eight RBI, a .315 average, tied for second in the AL in total bases — Lozano has assembled a season that would be the headline for almost any other team. Seven home runs, twenty-seven RBI, a .295 average, two home runs in a single game on May 10th. He is doing this while also playing through a hit-by-pitch injury from late April that merited a special note in the box score and apparently required no time off. His defensive numbers — the Gold Glove from 2000 — remain elite. Lozano is twenty-three years old and quietly putting together the best all-around season of his career, in the shadow of a teammate's historic April. That's not a complaint. It's simply what depth looks like.

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THE NAVARRO SITUATION

Navarro's hot home run on May 5th — his first of the season — and three RBI suggested the rib cage strain was behind him. Then came the May 6th note that he was injured while throwing the ball, and his numbers over his last seven games at the time of this report stood at .043 with zero home runs, a precipitous drop for a player hitting .330 a week earlier. He remains day-to-day, not on the injured list, but the throwing-arm issue layered on top of the rib cage strain is the kind of compounding injury situation that deserves monitoring. Cruz has filled in capably at shortstop when needed, and Fernando Garcia continues to provide value at second base. The depth exists. What's needed now is for Navarro's body to cooperate long enough for him to return to the form he showed in April.

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CLEVELAND, AND WHAT A 1.5-GAME LEAD MEANS NOW

Cleveland's thirty and nine record is the best in either league by a wide margin, and the two games Sacramento just played against them were not competitive in either direction — a one-run walk-off loss followed by a blowout. Jason Makin is on pace for over forty home runs. The Cardinals' pitching, anchored by Jordan Sepulveda's seven shutout innings on May 15th, looked every bit as dominant as the record suggests.

Meanwhile, San Jose went nine and one over this same stretch and is now 1.5 games behind Sacramento in the AL West — a margin that, two weeks ago, stood at 4.5 games. The division race that seemed settled in early May is, suddenly, a race again. Sacramento's record remains the best in the American League. But "best in the league" and "comfortable" are not the same thing, and this stretch made that distinction clear.

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THE INBOX

From Adaeze Nwosu of Sacramento's Natomas neighborhood, a nurse, who asks: "Sacramento's lead over San Jose shrank from 4.5 games to 1.5 in less than two weeks. Is this a concerning trend or just baseball being baseball?"

It's mostly the latter, though "mostly" is doing some work in that sentence. Over a hundred-and-sixty-two-game season, every team experiences stretches where they play below their level and stretches where an opponent plays above theirs — San Jose going nine and one is the kind of streak that happens to good teams periodically, and it happened to coincide with Sacramento running into the best team in baseball for two games. The combination compressed what looked like a comfortable cushion into a one-game series swing. What would be genuinely concerning is if this represented a sustained pattern — if Sacramento's pitching depth, particularly Andretti's recent struggles and the bullpen's recent late-inning issues against Cleveland and San Jose, started showing up consistently rather than in isolated bad stretches. One four-game losing streak in mid-May, against a thirty-and-nine team and a divisional rival playing its best baseball of the season, is not a crisis. It's a reminder that the margin in the AL West is real, and Sacramento needs to keep playing at the level that built the cushion in the first place.

From Conor Fitzgerald of Sacramento's Rosemont neighborhood, an auto mechanic, who asks: "Lozano is having a great season but Shinohara gets all the attention. Does that bother the clubhouse at all?"

From everything I've observed about this roster's culture over the past two seasons, no — and I'd point to the way Lozano himself talks about the team as evidence. This is a player who, after a World Series in which he hit five home runs, spent the entire offseason signing a below-market extension because he wanted to stay. Players who operate that way generally aren't keeping score on attention. Shinohara's April was historic — a league-wide monthly award doesn't happen often, and the coverage it generates is proportional and earned. Lozano's season, while less publicized, is being noticed by the people who matter most: his manager, who continues to bat him in a key spot in the lineup, and his teammates, who know exactly what a .295 average with seven home runs from the three-hole means to a lineup's structure. The clubhouse dynamic on a team this deep tends to reward the players who produce quietly and consistently just as much as the ones who produce loudly — sometimes more, because the quiet productivity is what makes the loud productivity sustainable.

From Lilit Hovhannisyan of Sacramento's Fair Oaks neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "After getting swept by Cleveland, how does Sacramento's pitching staff compare to a team that's thirty and nine?"

Not favorably, at least not in these two specific games — but the comparison is worth being precise about. Cleveland's thirty and nine record reflects sustained excellence across their rotation and lineup over six weeks. Sacramento's twenty-seven and thirteen reflects a roster that has dealt with injuries to Lopez, Choi, Navarro, Esparza, and Rubalcava simultaneously and still produced the best record in the American League. The two games against Cleveland exposed real issues — Andretti's three and two-thirds innings of seven runs on May 15th was his worst start since the early-April Portland disasters, and the bullpen's ninth-inning failure on May 14th continues a pattern of late-inning fragility that has cropped up periodically all season. Those are legitimate concerns. But comparing any team's worst two-game stretch to the league's best team's overall record isn't a fair measure of the gap. The more useful comparison is head-to-head over a full season, and Sacramento and Cleveland play in different leagues — they won't meet again unless October arranges it. If it does, these two games will be worth revisiting. For now, they're a data point, not a verdict.

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Twenty-seven and thirteen. A four-game losing streak to snap with Fort Worth coming to Sacramento, then a trip to Detroit. Navarro status unclear. Lopez still three weeks away. San Jose is breathing down Sacramento's neck for the first time all season.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-15-2026, 11:01 AM

THE HOT CORNER
Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL

DEMONS WIN SIX IN A ROW, ALEJANDRO LOPEZ STARTS REHAB NEXT WEEK

Eleven days ago, Sacramento's lead over San Jose stood at 1.5 games and felt fragile. It is no longer fragile, because it no longer exists. San Jose went nine and one over the span this article and the last one cover combined, capped by a six-game win streak that has them at thirty-six and fifteen — five games clear of Sacramento, who went four and seven over the same eleven days and dropped from first place to second for the first time all season.

The low point arrived this past weekend, when Baltimore — twenty-one and thirty-one, the worst record in the American League — won two of three at Sutter Health Park. Sacramento lost series to Detroit, to Brooklyn, and to Baltimore in succession. The injury report has a new entry: Choi fractured a finger and will miss four to five weeks. And yet, buried in the same injury report, is the best news Sacramento has had in months — Lopez is one week from returning.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

vs. Fort Worth, May 16-17 (1-1)

Jang threw five and one-third scoreless innings on May 16th, and Mollohan's two-run single in the eighth provided the margin in a three to one win.

May 17th reversed it completely. Cruz allowed seven runs in six and two-thirds innings as Fort Worth's Terrell Miller, Jaylen Bernal, and Jayson Crumsey all homered. Eight to four, Fort Worth, and the series split.

@ Detroit, May 18-20 (1-2)

Jeon allowed five runs in four and two-thirds innings on May 18th, including a bases-clearing triple by Andy Alfonso that turned a two-one Sacramento lead into a four-two Detroit advantage. Eight to two, final, Detroit's largest margin of victory against Sacramento all season.

May 19th: Gunn allowed five runs in three and two-thirds, Jimmy Rosen's three-run homer in the fourth was the difference, and Sacramento lost five to four. Detroit's third straight win; Sacramento's third straight loss.

May 20th salvaged the series. Andretti threw six and one-third innings of two-run ball — his second strong outing in three starts — and the game went to extra innings tied at two. Fernando Garcia's run-scoring double in the top of the tenth put Sacramento ahead for good, and Musselman picked up his first win of the season in relief. Four to two, Sacramento, in ten innings.

@ Brooklyn, May 21-23 (1-2)

Brooklyn is thirty-five and fifteen, the best record in the American League, and they extended a winning streak to eight games at Sacramento's expense across the first two games of this series. May 21st: Jang threw six innings of two-run ball — a quality start — but Brooklyn's bullpen shut the door and Sacramento lost two to three, with Randy Gill's eighth-inning RBI groundout breaking the tie.

May 22nd: Cruz allowed three runs in six innings, Mollohan hit a home run, but Brooklyn's Luis Vasquez threw seven strong innings and the Priests won five to three, extending their streak to eight.

May 23rd: Chavarria. Two for five with two home runs, including a two-run shot off Tejeda in the top of the tenth inning that broke a four-four tie and ended Brooklyn's eight-game streak. Jeon allowed three runs in five innings, the bullpen held on through extra innings, and Sacramento won six to five. After two frustrating losses against the league's hottest team, Sacramento found a way to take the finale.

vs. Baltimore, May 25-27 (1-2)

Baltimore arrived having lost four in a row and left having won two of three. May 25th: Alvarez hit two home runs and drove in four, Shinohara added a solo shot, and Gunn threw seven innings of three-run ball. Five to three, Sacramento, the high point of the homestand.

May 26th: Jang allowed seven runs — six earned — in four and two-thirds innings, his worst start since the early-season struggles. David Ryals hit a bases-clearing double and a home run, finishing three for five with six RBI. Eleven to four, Baltimore.

May 27th: Cruz allowed five runs in six and one-third innings, his fourth straight start without a win. Tony Villalobos hit a home run and drove in two. Six to two, Baltimore, completing a series loss to the worst team in the league.

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LOPEZ: ONE WEEK

The injury report listed Lopez's ACL recovery at one week remaining as of May 27th — down from three weeks just two weeks ago, down from eight weeks the week before that. The timeline is accelerating, which is the best possible sign for a recovery of this kind. When Lopez returns, Sacramento gets back its leadoff hitter, its center fielder, and the player who stole seventy-three bases and hit twenty home runs in 2000. He has not played a single game in 2001. The lineup that has carried this team through April and most of May — built around Shinohara's historic production, Lozano's quiet excellence, and contributions up and down from Mollohan, Alvarez, Chavarria, and Van Ham — is about to get considerably deeper, at almost the exact moment it needs it most.

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CHOI'S FRACTURE AND THE OUTFIELD SITUATION

Choi fractured a finger and will be out four to five weeks — a frustrating setback for a player who had returned from the quadriceps contusion just a month ago and was hitting well in his time back. The timing is awkward: Choi's absence and Lopez's impending return overlap almost exactly, meaning the outfield picture in early June will be in transition regardless. Van Ham, Durango, and Chavarria have all filled outfield innings capably this season and will continue to do so. The good news is that Sacramento's outfield depth has been tested all year and has not yet failed to produce.

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THE ROTATION'S ROUGH PATCH

Every starter not named Andretti had a rough outing somewhere in this stretch. Jang, who carried a sub-3.00 ERA into mid-May, allowed thirteen runs combined in his last two starts against Baltimore — the same team that was the worst in the American League entering the series. Cruz's struggles have now extended across four winless starts, with his ERA climbing to 4.83. Jeon's two starts produced eight runs in nine and two-thirds innings combined. Gunn was the exception, his Baltimore start a model of efficiency.

None of these are individually alarming — every pitcher has bad stretches — but the cumulative effect, arriving at the same time as a four-and-seven overall record, is what turned a comfortable lead into a five-game deficit. The rotation needs to find its May form again, and soon, because San Jose's six-game win streak suggests they have no intention of slowing down.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

San Jose's surge to thirty-six and fifteen — a six-game win streak that coincided almost exactly with Sacramento's worst stretch of the season — has flipped the AL West standings completely. Sacramento now sits five games back in the division but holds a comfortable 4.5-game lead in the wild card race, which remains a meaningful safety net.

Brooklyn's eight-game win streak, snapped by Sacramento on May 23rd, leaves them at thirty-five and fifteen, tied with San Jose for the best record in the American League. Cleveland remains the NL's best at thirty-four and sixteen. The top of both leagues continues to separate from the pack, and Sacramento — currently 31-20 — needs to decide which group it belongs in.

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THE INBOX

From Priya Chandrasekaran of Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood, a software engineer, who asks: "Sacramento just lost a series to the worst team in the AL. How worried should fans be at this point in the season?"

Worried is probably the wrong word, but attentive is the right one. Losing a series to a twenty-one-and-thirty-one team is never a good look, and the way it happened — Jang and Cruz both getting hit hard in consecutive games — is the part that deserves scrutiny more than the result itself. Baltimore has talented individual hitters even on a bad team, and Ryals's six-RBI day on May 26th was simply a great individual performance rather than evidence of some systemic Baltimore strength. What matters more is whether Jang and Cruz's recent struggles represent fatigue, mechanical issues, or simple variance. Both pitchers carried excellent numbers for the first two months of the season; both had rough two-start stretches in late May. If those rough patches extend into June, that's when concern becomes warranted. Right now, it's the kind of stretch that happens over a hundred-and-sixty-two-game season, magnified by the fact that it coincided with San Jose's best stretch of the year.

From Marcus Delacroix of Sacramento's Tahoe Park neighborhood, a postal worker, who asks: "Lopez comes back in about a week. What does that actually change for this team?"

It changes the top of the lineup and the bottom of the defensive alignment simultaneously, which is rare for a single player's return. Offensively, Lopez gives Sacramento a true leadoff hitter — someone who gets on base and creates pressure with his legs in a way nobody currently in the lineup quite replicates. Seventy-three stolen bases last year is not a typo, and even accounting for some natural decline in his first weeks back from an ACL tear, the speed element alone changes how opposing pitchers approach the top of the order. Defensively, Lopez in center field allows Choi — when he returns from his finger fracture — to shift to a corner, and gives the outfield its best defensive alignment of the season. The timing, with Choi out and Lopez in, means there won't be a moment where Sacramento has both at full strength immediately. But by late June, if both are healthy, this lineup and defense look meaningfully different — and better — than anything Sacramento has fielded in 2001 so far.

From Anezka Novotna of Sacramento's Greenhaven neighborhood, a dental hygienist, who asks: "Chavarria's walk-off-style home run in the tenth inning snapped Brooklyn's eight-game win streak. How significant was that game in the context of this rough stretch?"

More significant than its place in the standings suggests. Sacramento had just lost two straight to the best team in the American League, on the road, with a rotation that was starting to show cracks. A third straight loss in that series — extending Brooklyn's streak to nine — would have compounded a difficult week into something approaching a crisis narrative heading into the Baltimore series. Instead, Chavarria's two-homer game, capped by the go-ahead shot in extra innings, gave Sacramento a tangible response: yes, we can still beat the best team in the league, even on the road, even after losing the first two. That the very next series against Baltimore went poorly anyway tells you the Chavarria game didn't fix everything — but it prevented a bad week from becoming something worse, and it's the kind of performance that, in retrospect, often marks the bottom of a stretch like this one rather than the middle of it. We'll know more in the next ten days.

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Thirty-one and twenty. Five games behind San Jose, 4.5 up in the wild card race. Portland pays visit to Sacramento, homestand then continues with three-game series against Seattle. The defending champions need to find their May form again, fast.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · 06-15-2026, 09:33 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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May 29 – June 7, 2001 | Ten Wins in Ten Games| Cruz Throws Consecutive Shutout-Quality Starts | Jeon One-Hits Seattle

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FROM FIVE GAMES BEHIND TO SHARED LEAD IN ELLEVEN DAYS

The math is simple and the implication enormous. On May 27th, Sacramento trailed San Jose by five games in the AL West. On June 7th, both teams are forty-one and twenty, the identical record, sharing first place in the division. Sacramento won ten consecutive games. San Jose went five and five. The gap that opened during Sacramento's late-May stumble was erased in eleven days by the kind of sustained excellence this organization has produced repeatedly this season when the moment demanded it.

The defense of the championship is no longer a subplot. Friday night in San Jose, with both teams at forty-one and twenty, the game will matter as much as any regular-season game has mattered this year.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

vs. Portland, May 29-31 (3-0)

The first game of the win streak nearly ended before it began. Jeon allowed four home runs in four and one-third innings — Gorum, Garcia, Burrows, and Ruiz all went deep — and Sacramento trailed five to one going into the sixth. The offense clawed back: Mollohan drove in two, Lozano homered in the seventh, Nakazawa doubled in the ninth to tie it, and then Chavarria's double moved runners up before Durango drew a walk-off walk from Gorham. Six to five. A win that required heroics from multiple hitters, was followed the next day by a performance that made things look easy.

May 30th: Gunn threw seven and one-third innings, Van Ham's two-run single in the eighth turned a three-all tie into a six-four lead, and Sacramento won. May 31st: Alvarez hit two home runs off Sandoval, Mollohan added another, and Sacramento swept the Portland series with a seven-five win despite Luna blowing a save and Blevins — the Portland right fielder who was in Sacramento's organization earlier this year — hitting a three-run homer off him in the sixth.

vs. Seattle, June 1-3 (3-0)

June 1st was the clearest signal yet that Vic Cruz had rediscovered himself. Six and one-third innings of one-hit shutout baseball against Seattle, four strikeouts, two walks, ninety pitches. Van Ham hit two home runs. Lozano hit another. Six to one, and Cruz improved to three and four with an ERA that had fallen to 4.29 and would fall further.

June 2nd: Andretti threw five innings and allowed one run. Shinohara hit his sixteenth home run. Mollohan hit his seventh. Sacramento scored five in the first inning and won seven to one.

June 3rd was Jeon. One hit in six innings. Zero walks, ten strikeouts on ninety-three pitches, the economy of an ace who located every pitch and made hitters look helpless. The final was two to one, decided by Mollohan's RBI single in the seventh and preserved by Ke, Medina, and Benson combining for two scoreless innings after Jeon exited. Seattle went ten in a row on the losing side, Sacramento had won six straight.

@ Tucson, June 4-5 (2-0)

June 4th game in the desert required patience. Marco Cervantes threw eight and one-third innings of two-run ball for Tucson, and Sacramento sat at one to one through eight until Navarro doubled home the go-ahead run in the top of the ninth, Benson closed it, and the win streak reached seven.

June 5th was less restrained. Jang threw five scoreless innings. Fernando Garcia hit two home runs, driving in four. Shinohara hit his seventeenth. Van Ham hit his ninth. Sacramento scored eleven and the sweep was complete.

vs. Albuquerque, June 6-7 (2-0)

Cruz's second shutout-quality start in eight days: seven innings against Albuquerque on June 6th, three hits, eight strikeouts, no runs. Sacramento scored in six of eight innings and reached fourteen runs total — the bullpen allowed eight in the ninth to make the final less comfortable than the game itself, but the result was never in doubt. Alvarez homered for the twelfth time. Garcia was hit by a pitch and walked twice on top of the offensive contributions he'd made the night before. The win streak reached nine.

Ten: On June 7th Andretti allowed four runs in five and two-thirds innings but Sacramento doing enough to win anyway. Van Ham hit his tenth homer, Chavarria homered his tenth as well, and Florez delivered the decisive RBI single in the seventh with two out and a runner in scoring position. Benson's sixteenth save. Five to four, and the ten-game streak was complete.

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VIC CRUZ'S TURNAROUND

His ERA was 4.83 at the end of May. It stands at 3.82 entering this weekend. The Seattle game — six and one-third innings of one-hit baseball — and the Albuquerque start — seven innings of three-hit shutout work — represent the best consecutive starts Cruz has had all season. The mechanical questions that surfaced during the Baltimore series, where he allowed five runs in six and one-third innings and absorbed the loss, appear to have resolved themselves. What caused the rough patch is less important than what has followed it: two starts in which the ground-ball tendencies that made him effective in the Boston series returned in full, and the strike zone expanded to include all corners rather than just the ones the hitter expects.

He is now three and four in 2001. The record understates what his best looks like, which is among the better things a manager can say about a starting pitcher heading into a three-game series against the division co-leader.

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JEON'S ONE-HITTER

Six innings, one hit, ten strikeouts, zero walks against Seattle on June 3rd. That is not just a quality start — it is a statement, coming from a pitcher whose ERA entering the game was 4.19 and whose health has been a recurring concern all season. The Seattle lineup, which has been one of the worst in the American League, did not make the performance meaningless; Jeon's stuff was demonstrably better than anything he had produced since his Portland start in May, and the ten-strikeout, zero-walk combination suggests command and velocity working simultaneously rather than the usual situation where one compensates for the other. Whether this was the beginning of a sustained run of good health and good mechanics is the question that frames the rest of his season. The answer requires more starts.

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VICTOR ALVAREZ IS HITTING

Twelve home runs, thirty-nine RBI, a .248 average. Three home runs in four days against Portland and Albuquerque. The twenty-one-year-old first baseman who entered the season at the bottom of the lineup's expected power contributors has become, unambiguously, one of Sacramento's most important offensive players. He is currently fourth in the AL in home runs. His RBI total trails only Shinohara on the roster. The June version of Victor Alvarez looks almost nothing like the April version who was batting .120 through twelve games, which is either evidence that an extended April adjustment period finally resolved itself into production, or evidence that this team has enough depth that even a struggling first baseman could get the at-bats needed to find his swing. Both explanations are probably partially true. The result is that Sacramento now has four players — Shinohara, Alvarez, Van Ham, and Chavarria — with at least nine home runs each, and the team leads the AL in home runs. That kind of offensive depth, distributed across the lineup, makes the team extremely difficult to neutralize with any single pitching strategy.

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LOPEZ AND THE INJURY REPORT

Alejandro Lopez no longer appears on the injury list. He was expected to return around this week or at the beginning of the next after brief rehab stint in Oxnard, where he appeared as a pinch hitter in three games with six at-bat appearances, and his absence from the IL means he has been officially activated. When he does step into the lineup — likely in the coming days, possibly in San Jose — Sacramento will have its leadoff hitter and starting center fielder back for the first time since October. The offensive lineup that produced those ten wins will immediately become deeper.

Choi remains out with the fractured finger — minimum three weeks away from coming back — and Esparza's elbow surgery recovery expectation stands at two weeks. The deep problems, Rubalcava and Delgado with their torn rotator cuffs, are still months away. But the overall injury picture is meaningfully better than it has been at any point in 2001.

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MEDINA'S STREAK

This is something that absolutely deserves its own paragraph: Edwin Medina has not allowed a run in twenty-two consecutive appearances. That is not a typo. Twenty-two games, zero earned runs, against lineups ranging from Portland to Albuquerque to the best teams Sacramento has faced. He is listed at an ERA of 0.46 for the season. The bullpen reliever who was the subject of legitimate concern as recently as April has become arguably the most reliable arm in the Sacramento bullpen, used in the middle innings of close games and emerging without damage every time. Twenty-two appearances. Nothing across.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

Cleveland stands at thirty-nine and twenty-one in the NL Central — still the best record in baseball — and Jorge Jaime of Baltimore has been placed on the injured list with a strained thoracic spine, two weeks out at a time when he was hitting .304 with nineteen home runs and forty RBI. The injury is significant for Baltimore's already-slim playoff chances but changes nothing about anyone else's October calculus.

Long Beach at forty-one and twenty in the NL Pacific is running neck-and-neck with both Sacramento and San Jose for the best record in professional baseball. Three teams at the same winning percentage at the quarter-pole of the season is an unusual alignment, and it speaks to the depth of quality across both leagues this year.

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THE INBOX

From Benedikt Auer of Sacramento's Elmhurst neighborhood, a pastry chef, who asks: "Sacramento went ten and zero and is now tied with San Jose. You wrote last month that this team needed to find its May form again. Has it?"

It has found something even better than its May form. May was when Sacramento first built its lead — the April offensive explosion, the strong rotation work from Jang and Cruz and Gunn, the win streak that pushed the lead to four and a half games. What happened in late May was a regression to something closer to the team's true floor. What has happened in this ten-game stretch is a combination of the May offense — the home runs, the relentless middle-of-the-lineup production — and improved starting pitching, particularly from Cruz. The rotation's ERA over these ten games is significantly better than it was over the four-and-seven stretch that preceded them. What I can say with confidence entering this San Jose series is that Sacramento has found a version of itself that can compete with anyone. Whether it has found a version that can sustain ten wins in ten games over the rest of the season is a different and longer question.

From Chiamaka Okorie of Sacramento's Del Paso Heights neighborhood, a warehouse supervisor, who asks: "Van Ham has ten home runs and thirty-one RBI from the bench and in spot starts. How is that possible from a player nobody expected to contribute at this level?"

Tim Van Ham is the kind of player organizations discover when circumstances force them to find hidden gems in difficult circumstances. Before this season, he had never been asked to carry lineup responsibility. He came into 2001 as the fourth outfielder, filling in for Lopez and Choi as needed and providing the team insurance coverage against injury. What has happened instead is that the injuries created a runway long enough for Van Ham to establish himself as a legitimate lineup contributor, not a placeholder. His swing is compact and his approach to left-handed pitching is particularly effective. He is not the player Shinohara is, not the player Alvarez has become, not the power threat Lozano is. But he is a professional hitter who, given consistent at-bats, has produced at a level that would have ranked among the top five on most teams' expected offensive contributions at the start of the year. When Lopez returns fully and Choi comes back from the fractured finger, Van Ham's role will diminish. What he has done while in that role will not be forgotten.

From Soo-jin Park of Sacramento's Fruitridge neighborhood, a physical therapist, who asks: "Friday's game in San Jose is arguably the biggest regular-season game of the year so far. What are the stakes?"

The standings stakes are obvious: whoever wins the series will certainly move to first place outright. The momentum stakes are equally significant — Sacramento arrives on a ten-game win streak against mostly weaker opposition; San Jose arrives having gone five and five over the same period, including a loss on June 7th. The psychological stakes are perhaps the most interesting. This is the same team Sacramento lost two of three to at home in mid-May, with Suzuki and Haddix and Flores at the top of their rotation. Sacramento's lineup, particularly with Alvarez hitting, Cruz finding his form, and Lopez likely to appear in some capacity, looks different than it did in May. Whether that difference is enough to take two of three at Excite Ballpark — where San Jose is twenty-two and eight this season — is the most important question in the American League this week.

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Forty-one and twenty on the season and tied with San Jose. Lopez activated. Friday night showdown looms big at Excite Ballpark, with first place in the AL West on the line for the first time since the first week of the season.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · Yesterday, 10:34 AM

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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June 8 – 17, 2001 | Forty-Seven and Twenty-Three | Demon's Haddix Out Three Months | Medina's Streak Reaches Twenty-Seven Games

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LOPEZ COMES OFF THE BENCH IN EXTRA INNING TO COMPLETE THE SWEEP

He entered the June 10th game in the tenth inning, replacing Shinohara in center field. He drew a walk in his first plate appearance back. In the twelfth, with Sacramento tied at seven and Lozano on third base with nobody out, Alejandro Lopez hit a sacrifice fly off Danny St. Clair, the Prayers took an eight-to-seven lead, Musselman got the final out, and Sacramento had swept three games at Excite Ballpark from a San Jose team that entered the series four games over .500 and left it having lost four straight.

There are moments in a season that arrive with more meaning than their statistical weight suggests. Lopez has one walk and one sacrifice fly in his 2001 line. What those two plate appearances actually represent is eight months of rehabilitation, a postseason that was ripped away from him in the third game of the ALDS, and a return timed so precisely to a meaningful moment that it would read as convenient fiction if it were invented. It was not invented. He walked to the plate in the twelfth inning of a tied game, seven hours into a baseball trip to San Jose, and produced the run that won the sweep. That is the story.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

@ San Jose, June 8-10 (3-0)

Jeon threw five and one-third innings on June 8th, allowed one run, struck out seven, and left with a lead the bullpen protected comfortably. Shinohara's two-run homer in the first set the tone. Van Ham added a two-run shot in the second. Chavarria hit his eleventh home run in the seventh. Six to one, Sacramento, and first place was theirs outright.

June 9th was Navarro's afternoon. Two for four with a double and a home run, five RBI. Lozano hit his tenth homer. Van Ham his twelfth. Durango, stepping into a lineup that had shuffled considerably, hit his first home run of the season. Gunn went five and one-third innings and the offense scored eleven runs against a San Jose rotation that was showing early signs of the vulnerability that would become apparent by the end of the week. Eleven to two, and Sacramento led the division by two.

June 10th went twelve innings. Jang was excellent through six, allowing one run, then the bullpen unraveled in the late innings: Benson allowed San Jose to tie in the ninth, Ke allowed Montemayor's two-run homer in the tenth to give San Jose the lead, Sacramento answered with Garcia's two-run homer in the eleventh to retake it, then San Jose tied it again on Vasquez's shot off Ke in the same inning. Eight pitchers and a thousand heartbeats later, Lopez walked in his first trip to the plate, advanced to third during the inning's action, and hit a sacrifice fly in the twelfth that stood as the winning run. Luna picked up the win. Musselman closed. Eight to seven, Sacramento, and the sweep was done.

@ Charlotte, June 12-14 (1-2)

The Charlotte series opened in extra innings on June 12th, Cruz allowing four earned runs in four and one-third innings before the bullpen bridged to the tenth. With Charlotte leading five to four and one out, Alvarez singled home the tying run, then Garcia's double pushed the go-ahead run across. Gutierrez got the final out, Benson closed the tenth for the save, and Sacramento won seven to five. In the fifth inning of that game, Lopez pinch hit for Mollohan and singled home a run. He is now hitting .333.

June 13th was the inverse. Jeon allowed six runs in six and one-third innings, though only three were earned — Charlotte's errors and Sacramento's errors combined to make the game messy in both directions. The decisive moment was a Cifuentes three-run homer in the fourth. Sacramento scored five runs in the fifth, including Lopez's three-run double off Guerra with the bases loaded that temporarily tied the game, but Charlotte rallied and won in eleven innings on a Galindo sacrifice fly off Benson. Eight to seven, Charlotte.

June 14th: Steve James threw seven and one-third shutout innings, Rosario hit a two-run homer off Gunn in the fifth, and Sacramento managed four hits total. Three to nothing, Charlotte, the series disappointing loss complete.

vs. Houston, June 15-17 (2-1)

Jang dominated on June 15th — five and one-third innings, zero runs, eight strikeouts, a 2.90 ERA entering the weekend. Cruz hit a two-run homer off Guzman in the second inning, and Sacramento won five to one in a game that was never remotely competitive after the second inning. Cruz's fourth home run of the season from the shortstop position added to a day that felt like the whole roster was performing correctly at once.

June 16th game lasted twelve innings and ended in a loss, which is the kind of result that requires a full accounting. Andretti went six and one-third innings of two-run ball — a quality start. Then Luna blew a save in the seventh, Houston tied it in the seventh, Sacramento led again in the fourth through the ninth, and when Benitez — Houston's closer — allowed a Durango two-run double in the tenth to put Sacramento ahead, the game finally seemed settled. It was not. Medina allowed a McSherry double in the eleventh to tie it again. In the twelfth, with Ke on the mound, Brady hit a sacrifice fly. Houston eight, Sacramento seven, after four hours and twenty-two minutes and enough bullpen arms for two ordinary games.

Cruz redeemed the series on June 17th. Six and two-thirds innings, one run, seven strikeouts — his third quality start in four outings. Navarro hit two home runs, including a three-run shot in the second, and drove in five. Five runs in the first two innings and the game was functionally over. Eight to one.

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ALEJANDRO LOPEZ, SEVEN GAMES IN

Nineteen at-bats, six hits, a .316 average, seven RBI, zero home runs, and the game-winning sacrifice fly at San Jose. Those are the numbers. What they do not capture is the quality of contact — Lopez is hitting the ball to the gaps, not undercutting it or pulling off in the way hitters often do when returning from long injury absences. His first week back suggests a player who spent his rehabilitation time working on his mechanics rather than simply waiting for the healing to finish. Whether the power returns to the level of his 2000 season — twenty home runs and seventy-three stolen bases — is a longer question. What is evident already is that he can play at this level, and that his presence in the lineup changes how opposing pitchers approach the top of the order.

Choi is one week from returning. When both are healthy simultaneously, the outfield and the offensive structure around Shinohara become considerably more dangerous.

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HADDIX AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR SAN JOSE

The news arrived June 19th: George Haddix has ulnar nerve entrapment and expects to miss three months. He was six and eight on the season with a 4.55 ERA — not the dominant pitcher San Jose projected him to be — but he was still a rotation innings-eater and a name opposing lineups had to prepare for. His absence removes the third arm from a rotation that now relies on Suzuki, Flores, and whoever fills in. San Jose was already on a five-game losing streak entering the week. They are now four and a half games back in the division with their third starter gone until September.

This does not mean the division race is over. San Jose is forty-three and twenty-eight and will not stay on a losing streak indefinitely. Suzuki's ERA is 2.55 and he is one of the best pitchers in either league. The Demons are a better team than their recent results suggest. But a three-month absence for Haddix, layered on top of the losses to Sacramento last weekend, makes the path back to the division lead meaningfully harder than it looked on June 7th when both teams were tied.

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THE HOT STREAKS THAT AREN'T GETTING ENOUGH ATTENTION

Jang is seven and two with a 2.90 ERA — the best among Sacramento starters and among the AL's best overall. His last three starts produced a 0.55 ERA. He is doing this while walking fewer than three batters per nine innings and generating ground-ball outs at a rate that keeps his pitch counts manageable. The organization paid $1.27 million per year for this, and by mid-June it looks like a bargain in the same way Lozano's extension looked like a bargain in November.

Cruz is three and zero with a 1.85 ERA over his last four starts — a complete reversal of the rough patch that produced two losses in late May. The June version of Cruz works quickly, changes speeds effectively, and trusts his ground-ball rate to generate early-count outs. When he is pitching like this, Sacramento's rotation depth looks very different than it did during the Charlotte series opener.

Medina has not allowed an earned run in twenty-seven consecutive appearances. He is being asked to bridge between the starters and Benson in the seventh and eighth innings of close games, and he has delivered every time. His ERA is 0.75 for the season. His WHIP is 1.17. He has become the most reliable arm in the bullpen.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

San Jose's five-game losing streak — all losses to Sacramento, Charlotte, and Detroit — dropped them from a half-game back of Sacramento on June 7th to four and a half games back by June 17th. The most dramatic ten-day swing in the AL West standings this season. Whether they recover depends largely on whether the rotation can absorb Haddix's absence. Suzuki and Flores are capable. The back of the rotation is now a question.

Long Beach at forty-six and twenty-five remains the NL's standard. Brooklyn at forty-five and twenty-four is running them close in the East. Cleveland at forty-four and twenty-five continues to make the NL Central look like its personal property. The October landscape is beginning to take shape, and Sacramento's forty-seven and twenty-three record places them firmly among the teams that look like October participants.

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THE INBOX

From Vahan Gevorgyan of Sacramento's Hagginwood neighborhood, a school bus driver, who asks: "Lopez came back and immediately hit a walk-off sacrifice fly in twelve innings at San Jose. Was that the moment of the season so far?"

It competes seriously for that title. The list of comparable moments includes Van Ham's two-grand-slam afternoon at Boston, Navarro's five-RBI game in the June 9th series opener here, the ten-game win streak that erased the five-game deficit in May. But there is something particular about the Lopez sac fly that the others cannot quite replicate: it was the first meaningful at-bat of his return, it came in the highest-leverage situation in the highest-stakes series of the year, and it came against the team Sacramento needs to beat to win the division. Eight months of recovery work, arriving precisely on schedule, in the twelfth inning of a game that produced the sweep. Baseball has a taste for the dramatic. Sometimes it actually delivers.

From Beatriz Almeida of Sacramento's Meadowview neighborhood, a registered nurse, who asks: "Benson has seven blown saves. Is that a problem heading into the second half?"

It is a data point worth watching but not yet a crisis. Benson is seven and three with seventeen saves and a 3.27 ERA. The blown saves have arrived in clusters — June 10th at San Jose, June 13th at Charlotte, June 16th against Houston — but they have also been followed, in most cases, by wins that absorbed the damage. What the blown save total tells you is that Benson's command in very high-leverage situations — tie game or one-run lead in the ninth — has been inconsistent, which is the one thing a closer cannot afford to be consistently. His underlying numbers are good: he's striking out more than a batter per inning, his walk rate is manageable, and the home run rate is low. This does not look like a closer who has lost his ability. It looks like a closer who has had some bad nights in the wrong games. Whether that pattern continues in the second half is the relevant question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. I will say this: if Sacramento reaches October with a division title or a playoff spot, the blown saves will be a footnote. If they cost the team a series, they will be the story. Right now they are neither.

From Kwame Osei of Sacramento's North Sacramento neighborhood, a restaurant owner, who asks: "Sacramento is 47-23 and San Jose just lost Haddix for three months. Is the division race effectively over?"

It is not, and I say that with confidence based on evidence rather than false optimism. Forty-seven and twenty-three is an excellent record. Four and a half games is a meaningful lead. A hundred and one games remain on the schedule. San Jose is still forty-three and twenty-eight, which would be the best record in the AL Central as of today. Suzuki is still one of the best pitchers in professional baseball. The Demons' offense, which produces runs at one of the highest rates in the AL, does not become less dangerous because Haddix is pitching from a couch for three months. What the Haddix injury changes is the probability distribution — it tilts the odds meaningfully in Sacramento's favor, it makes the kind of ten-game losing streak that erased a five-game lead less likely to recur. But it does not end the race. The race ends in September. Sacramento needs to play at its current level for the next three months and maintain the lead. That is the task. A four-and-a-half-game lead with a hundred-and-one games left is a cushion, not a guarantee.

______________________________

Forty-seven and twenty-three. Four and a half up on San Jose, who have lost five straight. Lopez is hitting .316, Choi is a week away. Esparza is four days away, but will require some serious rehab in the minors. Prayers travel to Seattle for three games beginning Tuesday, then return home to host Portland.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

liberty-ca · Yesterday, 11:04 PM

THE HOT CORNER
Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL

THE INFIELD IS FALLING APART — LOZANO, GARCIA, AND DEVORE ALL HURT

Lozano has shoulder tendinitis and went on the injured list after being hurt throwing in the June 27th game. Fernando Garcia has a sore elbow and has been out since June 24th. Cody DeVore developed knee tendinitis and is listed as day-to-day. Three of Sacramento's infielders are unavailable simultaneously, which on most rosters would constitute a genuine crisis. On this roster, it has produced: Vic Cruz going three and zero with a 2.29 ERA over three starts, Jang going three and zero with a 2.45 ERA over five starts, Andretti posting a 2.21 ERA over three starts, and Espenoza allowing zero runs in his last eight appearances. Four Sacramento pitchers on simultaneous hot streaks, during a week when the infield behind them was being rebuilt with utility players and, please forgive me unintentional pun, daily prayers.

Sometimes the only way a pitching staff can protect a shaky defense is to not need it. These four have found a way.

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DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY

@ Seattle, June 19-21 (1-2)

Jeon allowed seven runs in five innings on June 19th. Seattle's Garza tripled and doubled. Welsh tripled. The last-place Lucifers won seven to one in a performance that belongs in the category of things that happen to defending champions who have been playing very good baseball for a long time and are due for a difficult evening. One bad start is one bad start.

June 20th ended Medina's streak. After twenty-seven consecutive scoreless appearances, he entered with Sacramento trailing three to two in the eighth inning and allowed five runs in two-thirds of an inning — a Matthews two-run double, a Matney two-run double — and the game was over. His ERA, which had been sitting at 0.75, jumped to 2.55. Every streak ends. The way Medina's ended, in an inherited-runner situation in Seattle, while his starter had already left him nothing to protect, is the least catastrophic way of how a twenty-seven-game scoreless run concludes, and I am sure he will be fine. Lopez hit his first home run of the season in this game — a leadoff shot in the first inning — which was the one positive note in a seven-to-three loss.

Gunn rebounded on June 21st with five innings of two-hit shutout ball through a rain delay that lasted nearly an hour. When play resumed, Sacramento scored five runs in the seventh on a bases-clearing double from Gil Cruz. Seven to nothing, a clean series split that would have been a cleaner road trip if Jeon had been better in the opener.

vs. Portland, June 22-24 (3-0)

Cruz on June 22nd: six and one-third innings, six hits, one run, nine strikeouts, zero walks. His ERA sits at 3.67 and falling. When Vic Cruz is working with that kind of control — ninety pitches and not a single walk issued — he is as difficult to score against as anyone in the rotation. Navarro had a two-run single in the third to stake him the early lead and the bullpen held it. Four to one.

June 23rd was eleven innings of something approaching controlled chaos. Andretti threw six and one-third fine innings before Musselman allowed an inherited run and Medina surrendered a Deveney two-run homer in the eighth to give Portland a three-to-two lead. In the bottom of the ninth Sacramento tied it, the game extended to the eleventh, and in the end Chavarria was hit by a Sullivan pitch with the bases loaded to force in the winning run. Four to three. The win went to Benson, who threw two scoreless innings — his record now is eight and three in 2001.

Jeon won June 24th start with six and one-third innings of two-run ball. Shinohara's double in the eighth scored the decisive run. Gutierrez and Medina closed it out. Garcia was injured while throwing the ball during this game; the elbow issue that has sidelined him for the foreseeable future.

@ Los Angeles, June 25-26 (1-1)

June 25th was Florez's day. Three for four, four runs scored, two RBI, a home run in the second inning, and energy from the bottom of the lineup that Sacramento needed after Garcia's injury forced another roster shuffle. Jang allowed four earned runs in five innings but Sacramento scored twelve. Navarro homered. Alvarez hit his thirteenth. Mollohan was hurt in a base collision during this game — a day-to-day minor issue that he shook off quickly enough to play two days later.

On June 26th Gunn allowed five runs in five innings — his third start in the last six where he has surrendered four or more earned runs — and the offense couldn't overcome it. A Schoff pinch-hit single in the sixth scored the go-ahead run off Luna and Sacramento lost five to four. Gunn's ERA climbed to 3.77 and the question of whether his occasional roughness represents a pattern worth monitoring has returned.

vs. Salt Lake City, June 27-28 (2-0)

Cruz pitched six and two-thirds innings on June 27th and Sacramento scored eleven times. Lozano was hurt in the fourth inning throwing the ball and left — DeVore came in at third base and contributed a two-RBI double in the sixth. The win was straightforward and the injury was not.

Andretti turned in seven and two-thirds innings on June 28th. Zero walks. Inning after inning of absolute command through a lineup that had no answer for his sequencing and location. His ERA dropped to 4.03. The offense provided eight runs. Eight to two.

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THE INFIELD SITUATION

Lozano, Garcia, and DeVore are all unavailable, all with different timelines. Lozano with a shoulder tendinitis will be sidelined for a minimum of seven weeks — a timeline that doesn't align well with the kind of early-July schedule Sacramento can manage with depth. Garcia's sore elbow, as the early indication from training personnel suggests, will require about a month to heel.

What replaces them in the interim: DeVore's knee has taken him off the field, Gil Cruz has been moving between second base and shortstop amid his own recurring hip strain that keeps surfacing whenever he runs hard, and Schmitt and Navarro are absorbing the bulk of the third-base innings. The good news is that Sacramento built a roster with this kind of redundancy specifically because the 2000 season demonstrated how quickly an injury list can compound. The less-good news is that compounding is exactly what has happened in the past ten days.

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THE ROTATION IN JUNE

Four Sacramento starters have simultaneous hot streak going. Jang is three and zero over his last five starts with a 2.45 ERA. Cruz is three and zero over three starts with a 2.29 ERA. Andretti is one and zero over three starts with a 2.21 ERA. Espenoza has zero runs allowed in his last eight relief appearances. This does not happen often. When it does, it tends to carry a team through periods where the offense and defense are not performing at their ceilings, which is exactly the function it is serving right now.

Cruz and Jang have been the most consistent. Cruz's evolution from late-May struggles — where his ERA briefly climbed toward five — back to the pitcher who threw seven shutout innings at Seattle in early June represents the rotation's most significant individual improvement. Andretti continues to provide the old-professional quality start four out of every five times he takes the ball. Jeon remains the one rotation variable: capable of one-hit performances like the June 3rd Seattle game and seven-run disasters like the June 19th Seattle game, sometimes in consecutive starts against similar competition.

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THE SEVEN-GAME LEAD

Sacramento leads the AL West by seven games with about eighty games remaining. San Jose is forty-seven and thirty-three — a record that would lead the AL Central by three games over Detroit and Charlotte right now. They are a good team losing ground to a better one.

The Haddix injury, the five-game losing streak in late May and early June, and the inability to gain ground during Sacramento's two-game Seattle stumble have combined to put Sacramento in a position where the division race — not yet over — is beginning to look like a formality. Seven games with eighty to play is the kind of lead that requires a specific kind of catastrophic month to overcome, and so far Sacramento has shown no inclination to have that month.

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AROUND THE LEAGUE

Charlotte and Detroit are tied atop the AL Central at forty-six and thirty-four, which makes the Central the most competitive division race in the league. The NL is shaping up around Long Beach, El Paso, and Cleveland — all above fifty wins, all looking like October participants. Marco Corral of Vancouver leads the league in strikeouts at a hundred and thirty-two, which is the kind of number that makes the fact that he was on the mound against Sacramento in the World Series last October feel recent and relevant.

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THE INBOX

From Roksana Wiśniewska of Sacramento's Woodlake neighborhood, a kindergarten teacher, who asks: "Medina's twenty-seven-game scoreless streak finally ended. Was the streak sustainable at all, or was the end inevitable?"

All streaks are eventually inevitable to end — the question is always when and how. What made Medina's run remarkable was the consistency of the circumstances in which he was deployed: inherited runners, high-leverage middle innings, against lineups that were actively trying to score. He was not stringing together scoreless outings against weak opponents in blowout games. He was holding leads when the starters left the game with problems unresolved. The Seattle ending — five runs in two-thirds of an inning with two inherited runners already on base — was rough, but the losses those runs produced were already structural before he threw a pitch. His ERA over the season remains 2.55. He has been one of the two or three most important bullpen arms in the American League in 2001. A bad inning in Seattle does not change what he has built, and the two subsequent appearances in which he allowed nothing suggest the rust shook off quickly.

From Sébastien Mbeki of Sacramento's Colonial Heights neighborhood, a software developer, who asks: "Lozano, Garcia, and DeVore are all hurt. Can this roster actually absorb three infield injuries at once?"

The evidence from this ten-game stretch suggests yes — barely and inelegantly, but yes. Gil Cruz has played through a recurring hip strain. Navarro has absorbed some third-base innings while also managing his own earlier rib-cage soreness. Schmitt, who has been the first utility infielder off the bench all season, has accumulated seven home runs in limited playing time and shown he can handle more than pinch-hit appearances. DeVore, before his knee issue arrived on June 28th, delivered a four-RBI double in what turned out to be his final healthy at-bat of the stretch. The infield depth is thinner than the pitching depth — but when Lozano and Garcia return, the depth picture will look considerably better again. The organization planned for two concurrent injuries. Three at once is the kind of thing that tests planning beyond its design limits. Sacramento is at the edge of that threshold but not past it.

From Kenji Watanabe of Sacramento's Arden Acres neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "With a seven-game lead and the rotation pitching like this, is it time to start preparing for October planning?"

It is not time to prepare for October, because July and August still exist on the calendar and baseball tends to punish teams that declare victory before September. What the seven-game lead does allow is a shift in risk tolerance — Sacramento can absorb a rough week or even a rough series without it constituting a genuine threat to the division. It can afford to manage Andretti's innings more carefully. It can afford to bring Lozano and Garcia back from their respective injuries at a pace that prioritizes their long-term health rather than their short-term availability. Those are real advantages produced by a real lead. They are not, however, a championship. The team that won the 2000 World Series trailed in every playoff series at some point and found ways to win anyway. The 2001 team leading by seven games in late June needs to maintain its focus as much as any version of this franchise ever has, because seven games feels large right now and will feel different if October arrives with a rotation that has been mismanaged or a third baseman who has been pushed back too quickly from a shoulder injury. The October planning begins when the division is clinched. Until then, there are games to play.

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Fifty-four and twenty-six. Seven games up. The Prayers will face Columbus and Washington at home this week. The rotation is the best it has been all season and the infield is being rebuilt underneath it.

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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-12-2026, 08:27 AM	#381
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *Winter 2001 \| Gunn Signed, Rodriguez Traded \| Hall of Fame Voting Produces No Inductees \| 2001 Season Starts Monday* ______________________________ THE DEFENDING CHAMPIONS ARE PREDICTED TO FINISH SECOND IN THEIR OWN DIVISION BY SIXTEEN GAMES Preseason projections, made by the selective pool of FBL analytic experts, have been released on the eve of new 2001 baseball season: San Jose 109-53, Sacramento 93-69. Sixteen games of separation in the same division. The defending World Series champions predicted to lose nineteen more games than they did in 2000 while their first-round playoff opponents from that very October are projected to be historically dominant. Personally, I find it difficult thing to believe. Nobody who makes these projections has seen Jeon throw a bases-empty shutout in the cold at Nat Bailey Stadium. Nobody who makes these projections has watched Navarro in October. The projections are made from what the numbers say about the players, not from what those players have proven they can do when the games actually matter. That said: the projections are not wrong to flag concerns. Lopez is still healing. Rubalcava is still seven to eight months away. Lozano has an oblique strain entering the week of Opening Day, and Cruz has a sprained knee. The defending champions are banged up in the first week of April, which is not where you want to be. They have been here before. The 2000 season was built on improvisation, adaptability, and the refusal to accept that injury lists are destiny. There is no reason to stop now. ______________________________ THE OFFSEASON TRANSACTIONS Jose Rodriguez was traded in late January. After spending all of 2000 on the injured list with a broken elbow, Sacramento sent Rodriguez, minor league pitcher Albin Tornatore, a first-round draft pick, and an eighth-round pick to Las Vegas, receiving thirty-eight-year-old reliever Javier Gutierrez and a first-round pick in return. The organization is giving Sacramento a veteran relief arm it can use in the short term and freeing the roster of a shortstop whose health has been a question for two years. The net cost in picks essentially cancels out. What it formalizes is what the 2000 season already made obvious: Alejandro Navarro is the shortstop here for as long as he wants to be. Chris Blevins was traded to Portland in late February along with minor league outfielder Chase Burrows and three draft picks, receiving twenty-six-year-old reliever Mike Luna, two picks, and $450,000 in cash. Blevins was a fourth outfielder with limited upside. Luna gives the bullpen a younger arm with projection. It is the kind of depth-for-depth exchange that winning organizations make efficiently in the offseason. John Gunn was signed in late January. Four years, $1.824 million, for a twenty-five-year-old right-hander with a 52-39 career record and a 4.23 ERA. The preseason projections — which are skeptical of Sacramento in general — have him going 15-9 with a 3.06 ERA for 2001. If the model is right, Gunn is the second-best pitcher in the rotation and the most efficient offseason signing Sacramento has made in years. ______________________________ TEIICHI KASHIWABARA Sacramento's left-field prospect is the sixth-best prospect in professional baseball according to the preseason rankings. Sixth overall. Not sixth in the AL, not sixth at his position — sixth among every player in every organization in the FBL. He is nineteen years old. The organization has very quietly built a pipeline that now has two starting pitchers signed as free agents specifically because the current roster needs depth, and a left-field prospect who is one year younger than Victor Alvarez and ranked higher on the league's prospect list than any Sacramento player has been in recent memory. Kashiwabara doesn't appear in the 2001 opening day roster. He is in the system, developing, which is where a nineteen-year-old should be. But his ranking tells you something about the organization's future that the current roster's age profile also suggests: Sacramento is not in a rebuilding phase, but the next generation is already arriving beneath the surface of a team still competitive enough to defend a championship. ______________________________ WHERE SACRAMENTO STANDS — A POSITIONAL SURVEY The preseason positional rankings tell a layered story about who this team is entering 2001. At shortstop, Navarro is ranked fourth in the league — which is extraordinary for a twenty-three-year-old in only his second full season as a starter. He is ahead of every shortstop in the AL except Crotwell in Milwaukee, Colson in Detroit, and Rastelli in Vancouver. At right field, Shinohara is second in the league, his Gold Glove year apparently translating into the ranking his talent has deserved for several seasons. At starting pitching, Jang ranks fourth — Sacramento's new signing immediately projects as one of the better starters in the AL. The relief corps with Medina ranks first in the league, which speaks to the depth of the bullpen even after a year when Medina's availability was inconsistent. Where Sacramento ranks below expectation: first base (18th in Alvarez, who is twenty-one and improving), center field (14th with Choi, whose defensive metrics don't match his offensive production in the rankings), and left field (13th with Mollohan, who is a professional hitter but not a positional star). These rankings represent the team's floor. Alvarez at twenty-one has years of development ahead. Choi's bat doesn't disappear because the rankings question his center-field defense. ______________________________ THE INJURY SITUATION Lopez is listed at two months remaining on his ACL recovery. If the timeline holds, he returns sometime in June. His return won't be quiet — seventy-three stolen bases and twenty home runs from the leadoff spot created an offensive profile that Sacramento has genuinely missed since October, and two months into the season the team will have been playing without him for eight consecutive months. Whether he comes back as the same player immediately or requires a re-acclimation period is impossible to predict. ACL recoveries are individual, and Lopez's athleticism should favor full recovery. The June target is worth watching. Rubalcava is seven to eight months from returning. That puts him in the range of November 2001 at the earliest — which means his 2001 season, for practical purposes, is over before it begins. Sacramento will not see Rubalcava throw a competitive pitch this year. The rotation will function without him. It has been functioning without him since the wildcard game last October. Lozano's oblique and Cruz's knee are both short-term. Both are expected back within days. The season doesn't need to wait for either of them. ______________________________ THE WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC AND NAVARRO ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE The United States won the World Baseball Classic in March. Seong-soo Kang of South Korea won MVP. The tournament's top vote-getter among position players not named Kang was, essentially, a collection of familiar names from the FBL's upper tier — Crotwell, Washburn, Davis, Robitaille. Sacramento's own Alejandro Navarro represented Mexico and finished with forty-nine MVP points. He did not win the award. He received no first-place votes, but what is really remarkable, is him playing in his first World Baseball Classic and competing in the same tournament as players who have been international representatives for five or six years at tender age of twenty-three years old. Forty-nine points means voters across twenty participating nations looked at his tournament performance and found it worth acknowledging. The player who hit .476 in the ALDS and won two games of the ALCS with late-inning home runs is now registering on a global stage. This will not be his last World Baseball Classic appearance. ______________________________ THE HALL OF FAME BALLOT — NO INDUCTEES Scott Hunt received 72.2 percent of votes in his seventh year on the ballot and fell short of the 75 percent threshold. Forrest Marrs at 66.3 percent. Eli Murguia and Brian Pullum both first-year candidates with significant vote totals, suggesting the ballot logjam will continue. No Sacramento connections in the top tier of the ballot other than Eli Murguia, which is a curiosity given how many former Prayers have retired over the last decade. Fernando Salazar is already inducted. Strickler won't be eligible for five years. The institution will have to wait for the next generation to present its arguments. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE — WHAT THE PROJECTIONS SAY San Jose is predicted at 109-53. Suzuki is projected at 22-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Haddix at 17-7 with a 3.33. If those numbers materialize, Sacramento's division is essentially decided before the calendar turns to August. The Demons return Montemayor, who hit seven home runs against Sacramento's pitching in the ALCS alone, and a lineup that ranked eighth in AL scoring last year with room to improve. In the NL, Milwaukee is predicted to win the Central at 103-59. Long Beach and Vancouver project as the Pacific leaders. The NL looks like a two-horse race between Milwaukee and whoever emerges from the Pacific, with Vancouver's staff — Corral, Gauthier, Trillo — potentially the best rotation in the NL if health cooperates. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Linnea Bergström of Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, a pediatric nurse, who asks: "The projections show Sacramento finishing sixteen games behind San Jose. Should the front office be more concerned than they appear?" The projections are based on what the models know: player aging curves, regression to the mean, the departure of Strickler and the injury to Rubalcava, and the assumption that San Jose's young roster matures at the rate its talent suggests. What the models do not know is that Sacramento went 18-23 in one-run games last year and still won 103 games. They do not know what Navarro looks like entering his age-twenty-three season with a full October of winning behind him. They do not know how Jeon performs with a healthy back and ankle and a full complement of October experience. The front office, to my read, is not unconcerned — the Gunn signing and the bullpen depth additions suggest they take the gap seriously — but they are not panicking, which is the correct response to a computer's preseason estimate. Sixteen games is a number in a regular season. Postseason October is a different beast. The 2000 Sacramento Prayers were predicted to win about ninety-five games. They won a hundred and three and a World Series. The models are useful starting points, not verdicts. From Obinna Uzoma of Sacramento's Rancho Cordova neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "The salary sheet shows the entire roster at $11.7 million in 2001. How does Sacramento compete with teams spending more than that?" By drafting, developing, and signing players before they reach their market value. The franchise has three players signed through arbitration years at below-market rates in Navarro, Alvarez, and Jeon — three of the most important contributors to last October's championship run. Lozano signed a five-year extension right after the World Series for six hundred thousand dollars per year, which is, to be direct, an extraordinary bargain for a player with five postseason home runs who just won a Gold Glove. Cruz is similarly locked in. Shinohara's five-year deal scales up toward fair market over time but is manageable. Sacramento competes on the margins of the salary structure by finding value before the market finds it, which is what the development pipeline and the scouting staff exist to do. The Kashiwabara ranking at sixth overall in the prospect list is evidence that the pipeline is working. The eleven-point-seven-million-dollar roster that just won the World Series is evidence that it has been working for several years. From Marta Vidaković of Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood, a high school teacher, who asks: "Opening Day is Monday. Sacramento's rotation has Gunn, Cruz, Espenoza, Andretti, and Jeon. Last year's rotation had the same uncertainty entering the year. Should we expect a similar journey?" Expect a different journey to a possibly similar destination. Last year's uncertainty was injury-driven — Jeon's back and ankle, Rubalcava's wildcard exit. This year's uncertainty is talent-driven — Gunn is an unknown quantity in Sacramento's system, Andretti is forty-one years old, and the back-end of the rotation is still unsettled. The good news is that Espenoza, who was arguably the best starter on the staff in the second half of 2000 and threw eight and one-third innings in a deciding ALCS game, is a legitimate front-of-rotation arm entering his age-thirty-seven season. The concerning news is that thirty-seven is thirty-seven, and the innings Espenoza threw in October will eventually register somewhere in his arm. The most useful prediction I can offer is the one supported by evidence: this organization, when challenged, finds ways to win. The rotation will have a bad month. The bullpen will cover it. The offense will carry stretches where the pitching cannot. Navarro will do something in September that makes everyone forget the bad April starts. That is what defending champions who are built correctly look like in the regular season. The journey this year will have its own shape. It has earned the right to surprise us again. ______________________________ Ninety-three wins predicted. One hundred and three delivered last year. The Seattle Lucifers arrive Monday at Sutter Health Park for Opening Day. Jung-keun Jang takes the ball to pitch for the first time in the Prayers uniform. Alejandro Lopez is two months from coming back. The 2001 Sacramento Prayers begin the defense of their championship with a sprained knee, an oblique strain, and a six-foot-one right-hander from South Korea who the computer thinks will win fifteen games. See you at the ballpark. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-13-2026, 09:10 AM	#382
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *April 2 – 12, 2001 \| Shinohara Has Five Home Runs in Six Games \| Jang Looks Like the Real Thing* ______________________________ SACRAMENTO IS FIVE AND FIVE, SAN JOSE IS EIGHT AND ONE There was a hope entering 2001 that the injuries were behind us. That hope lasted eight days. On April 3rd, in his first appearance of the season, Ji-hoon Jeon left the mound having thrown sixty-nine pitches with a finger blister. On April 11th, Ha-joon Choi was hit by a pitch in the forearm or hand — the exact location was not specified, his diagnosis is still pending, which is the kind of medical ambiguity that keeps you awake at two in the morning. He appeared briefly the following day as a pinch runner before being removed, which suggests the injury is not catastrophic. What it is, exactly, remains unknown. The defending champions are five and five. Two walk-off wins in ten games, one of them in ten innings and one in eleven. Two blown starts from Andretti and Flores respectively. One Gunn debut of considerable promise. One Jang start that suggested everything the projections implied about his value was accurate. And the constant, reliable, infuriating background noise of the injury report telling you that the 2001 Sacramento Prayers intend to continue exactly where the 2000 version left off in terms of medical drama. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY vs. Seattle, April 2-4 (2-1) Opening Day: Jang pitched seven and one-third innings against Santiago Gomez and lost zero to two. Both numbers are accurate and incompatible-seeming. Jang's game score was sixty-seven on a hundred and three pitches. He allowed four hits, walked nobody, struck out five. Gomez allowed five hits, walked nobody, struck out five. The difference was two runs in the sixth inning off a Jang fastball that Romo put into the outfield and a Najera single that followed. Sacramento put runners on base and left them there in every meaningful inning. A quality start on Opening Day that produced zero runs and a loss is exactly the kind of result that the first game of the year generates more than it should. Jeon started April 3rd and lasted three and two-thirds innings. He was injured while pitching — the finger blister revealed itself sometime between the forty-fourth and sixty-ninth pitch — and Espenoza came in and threw two and one-third innings in a winning cause. Nakazawa hit a three-run homer in the fifth off Baca to flip a two-nothing deficit into a three-two lead, and the bullpen held. Four to two, Sacramento's first win in 2001. April 4th was ten innings and Choi's two-run walk-off homer off Glahn. Andretti threw six and one-third innings, allowed three earned runs, and left with the bases loaded for Ke, who let one of those inherited runners to cross the home plate. Multiple blown leads, multiple Seattle comebacks. Chavarria and Choi and Shinohara all contributing. Sacramento won five to three on a ball that Choi put into the seats in the bottom of the tenth, and the crowd finally exhaled. @ San Jose, April 6-8 (1-2) Valadez held Sacramento to one run over eight innings on April 6th. Cruz pitched well — six and two-thirds, one earned run — but Luna came in for the eighth, threw twenty-six pitches, two of which were of wild variety, and gave up a Pratly two-run double that decided the game. Three to one, San Jose. Demon's Suzuki on April 7th: eight innings, no runs, ten strikeouts, one hundred and twenty-two pitches. That is what the number-two starter for the projected hundred-and-nine-win team looks like. Sacramento scored one run in the ninth when Alvarez doubled with two men on and two out. One to two, San Jose's walk-off on Vasquez single, Sacramento at two and three. April 8th was different. Gunn started his first career game at Sacramento and went six innings of two-hit shutout baseball against a San Jose lineup that had just run Suzuki out there the night before. He threw a hundred and eight pitches with control and movement and made the Demons look ordinary. Lozano — returning from the oblique strain that kept him out of Opening Day — hit a grand slam in the fifth off Haddix to put the game away eight to nothing at that point. Sacramento scored nine runs total. Gunn was game's player of the game in his first career appearance as Sacramento's starter. Nine to five, Sacramento. @ Portland, April 9-12 (2-2) Andretti allowed six runs in three and two-thirds innings on April 9th. He is forty-one years old and his ERA entering this week stands at 8.10, which is an early April number that will either come down as he settles into his mechanics or will signal that what he did in the World Series was the final successful thing his body could produce in October before the bills came due in April. That determination cannot be made in two starts. But two starts with an 8.10 ERA are two starts with an 8.10 ERA, and the organization should be mildly concerned at the moment. Shinohara hit two home runs and had three RBI, but that still wasn't enough. April 10th in eleven innings was exactly the kind of game Sacramento needs to win if it is going to survive the injury attrition of this early schedule. Vic Cruz started and left after four and two-thirds with Portland already scoring at will through the middle innings. Multiple bullpen arms allowed inherited runners to score. Benson blew a save. Sacramento trailed twice and came back twice and then Shinohara hit his fourth homer of the season in the tenth inning to tie it and Nakazawa doubled home the winning run in the eleventh. Ten to eight final, eleven innings, five pitchers for Sacramento, chaos from the third inning through the last. Jang won April 11th. Six innings, five hits, three runs, nine strikeouts. A hundred and seven pitches. His ERA is 2.14 after two starts and the ground-ball tendency that the organization bought is already manifesting — thirteen ground-outs in eleven innings pitched. Sacramento scored eight runs off three Portland pitchers. Four home runs across the lineup. Everything that was supposed to work, worked this time. Flores, called up from the minors on an emergency basis to plug the hole in the starting rotation, caused by Ji-hoon Jeon's injury, started April 12th and lasted four and two-thirds innings, allowing six runs on nine hits, including a Garcia three-run homer that turned a manageable game into a rout. Portland won nine to two. The fifth starter question, which was the rotation's biggest uncertainty entering the season, has produced exactly the answer nobody wanted to hear the very first time it had been asked... ______________________________ SHINOHARA'S START Five home runs in six games. A .391 batting average over that stretch. The Gold Glove winner from 2000 has been the most productive offensive player on the roster through the first week and a half of the season, and he has done it while Lopez heals, while Lozano was working his way back from the oblique, while Choi's health status is uncertain. Shinohara is not typically the player who carries a lineup — his value has always resided in his consistency, his ability to hit in the middle innings for doubles and run-scoring singles, his arm that prevents runners from taking extra bases. What he is doing in April 2001 is something different: he is the force around which the offense is currently organized, and he is doing it without apparent mechanical change or visible explanation. ______________________________ JANG AND THE ROTATION QUESTION Two starts. Two quality outings. Thirteen innings, fourteen hits, five earned runs, eighteen strikeouts, an ERA of 2.14. The $1.824 million rotation investment is currently performing like a half-price Cy Young candidate, which is either an early April mirage or a signal that Sacramento found genuine value in a pitcher the market underestimated. The ground-ball rate is real. The control is real. Whether it sustains over thirty-five starts is the only question that matters, and two starts cannot answer it. What two starts can do is make the question worth asking with optimism rather than anxiety. The fifth starter situation is less encouraging. Flores's 11.57 ERA after one outing tells you he is not ready for this role. Jeon has a finger blister. Andretti is struggling. The depth that held Sacramento together during the 2000 October run is being tested before May, which was not the plan. ______________________________ SAN JOSE IS EIGHT AND ONE The preseason projections said San Jose would win a hundred and nine games. Entering April 13th, they have an eight-and-one record and a run differential that looks exactly like a team capable of winning a hundred and nine games. Suzuki, who the projections put at twenty-two wins with a 2.82 ERA, is already at one win and a game score of eighty-three. Haddix is one and one but allowed eight runs to Sacramento in four and two-thirds innings in a game Sacramento's offense overwhelmed. The Demons are going to lose games. But the early evidence supports the projections in ways that are uncomfortable to acknowledge when you are three and a half games behind them in your own division on April 12th. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Pham Thi Lan of Sacramento's Elk Grove neighborhood, a pharmacist, who asks: "Jeon has a finger blister twelve days into the season. Is there a version of 2001 where his body simply lets him pitch?" There has to be, because the alternatives are too grim to accept as permanent. A finger blister is among the less severe of the various afflictions Jeon has accumulated over his career — it is not a structural issue, not ligament or bone, not the kind of thing that recurs mechanically the way back injuries or ankle problems do. It is genuinely bad luck of the sort that happens to pitchers who throw hard and grip the ball the way their mechanics require. The concern with Jeon is not the blister in isolation but the cumulative pattern: back, ankle, blister, and underneath all of it a zero-and-four regular season record that distorts what he has actually shown when healthy. His October performances are the argument for patience. His injury timeline is the argument for managing expectations. The most honest thing I can say entering his return from the twelve-day timeline is: Jeon pitching healthy is a legitimate major-league starter, and Jeon pitching is a weekly negotiation between talent and fragility. The franchise knew this when they signed the automatic renewal. They have chosen to bet on the talent. The blister doesn't change the bet. From Tigran Sargsyan of Sacramento's Arden-Arcade neighborhood, a civil engineer, who asks: "Andretti is 8.10 ERA through two starts. Is he done?" Two starts in April for a forty-one-year-old pitcher coming off a World Series clinching performance is the smallest sample size you can construct while still calling it data. His Game Six in October was not a fluke — the mechanics, the ground-ball approach, the ability to work deep into games without over-relying on velocity, all of that was real. What happened in the first two starts is likely a combination of spring rustiness, early-season cold weather (games in the forties in Portland do not favor any pitcher over forty years old, frankly), and the natural difficulty of repeating October form across a full spring. The more useful question is not whether Andretti is done but whether he can give Sacramento quality innings in starts three through fifteen. If the answer is yes, the 8.10 ERA is a forgettable artifact. If it is still climbing in June, the organization will face a harder conversation. I am not ready to have that conversation on April 12th. From Rosario Fuentes of Sacramento's Oak Park neighborhood, a teacher's aide, who asks: "Sacramento is three and a half games behind San Jose eleven days into the season. How does this team catch a hundred-and-nine-win team?" The honest answer is that it may not need to. The wild card exists, Sacramento is tied for the first wild card spot right now, and winning the World Series last October did not require winning the AL West. What catching San Jose specifically would require is the combination of Sacramento playing at their ceiling — Lopez returning in June and providing the offensive dimension his presence creates, the rotation stabilizing around Jang and Cruz and eventually Jeon, the bullpen returning to its 2000 form — while San Jose plays at something below their own ceiling for a sustained stretch. That combination is possible, not probable. More practically: every team in baseball has a bad month. San Jose will have one too. The question is whether Sacramento is in a position to capitalize when that month arrives. Right now, five and five and competing in a genuinely difficult early schedule, they are capable of being that team. The gap is not insurmountable. It is also not going to close itself. ______________________________ Five and five. Boston on the road for three games starting Friday. Then San Jose comes to Sacramento. Lopez is eight weeks away. Choi's diagnosis hopefully arrives sometime before Monday. The season is only eleven days old. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-13-2026, 08:50 PM	#383
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *April 13 – 22, 2001 \| Thirteen and Six \| Andretti Throws Eight Shutout Innings at Seattle \| The Puga Trade* ______________________________ TIM VAN HAM HITS TWO GRAND SLAMS IN ONE AFTERNOON The most surprising thing was Bernardo Andretti. Eight innings of two-hit baseball against Seattle on April 20th, with nothing allowed, 584 games into a career that everyone — including, probably, Andretti — briefly worried might be running out of answers after those first two shaky starts of this season. The pitcher who posted an 8.10 ERA through his first two outings of 2001 walked off the mound at T-Mobile Park with a hundred pitches thrown and zero earned runs behind him, and whatever April doubt had accumulated in two weeks of poor results was substantially resolved in one evening. Sacramento's five and five record had become thirteen and six. Eight wins in nine games. The Boston series went three-for-three. San Jose came to Sacramento and left having lost three straight. The AL West lead is two and a half games and the calendar hasn't turned to May. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY @ Boston, April 13-15 (3-0) Gunn went six and two-thirds innings on April 13th, allowed one run on three hits and walked nobody. His ERA dropped to 0.71 after two starts as a Prayer. Three home runs in the fifth inning — Shinohara, Cruz, and Chavarria all went deep against Schlageter — gave Sacramento six runs total. Benson closed it. Six to three. April 14th was Tim Van Ham's afternoon. Five to two over Boston going into the fifth inning, Sacramento already leading after a first-inning rally. Van Ham came to the plate with the bases loaded and hit a grand slam off Onodera. Then in the ninth inning, bases loaded again, he hit another one off Ito. Two grand slams in a single game, eight RBI total, tying the Sacramento regular season record. He finished two for four with both home runs and eight runs batted in while Andretti pitched six innings against a lineup that hit him for three runs — a serviceable start that the offense made irrelevant before the fifth inning was over. Thirteen to three, and the Van Ham name is in the franchise record book. The April 15th series finale was Cruz's. Seven and two-thirds innings of shutout baseball, six hits, two walks, five strikeouts. Boston had opportunities and squandered every one of them. Van Ham's run-scoring double in the fourth and Mollohan's two-out RBI in the fifth were all Sacramento needed. Two to nothing, and Cruz's ERA fell to 1.42. vs. San Jose, April 16-18 (3-0) Jang started April 16th against the Demons and was torched in the fourth inning — Montemayor solo homer, Vasquez two-run shot, five runs allowed in three and two-thirds innings. Sacramento trailed six to three heading into the seventh and somehow won. Gutierrez threw two and one-third scoreless innings to stabilize the bullpen situation. Navarro drove in three runs including a sac fly that tied the game in the fifth. Chavarria doubled twice and scored twice. Schmitt came off the bench in the ninth inning and hit a two-run walk-off homer off Minghetti. Eight to six in ten innings, Sacramento's fourth walk-off of the young season. April 17th: Espenoza threw six innings and allowed two runs in a grinding performance that kept Sacramento close enough for Florez's eighth-inning two-run homer to decide it. Ke got the win. Four to two, Sacramento. April 18th: Sacramento scored five runs off Suzuki in the first three innings — Alvarez homered, Van Ham homered, Cruz homered, Chavarria hit a two-run shot — and then surrendered five runs in turn as Ogle hit two home runs and Montemayor added another. Gunn allowed five runs in four and one-third innings, first rough start after his strong Boston outing, and in the end the game became a seven to six Sacramento win on Shinohara's ninth-inning sac fly. Three walks-off in three games against San Jose. The Demons left Sacramento at nine and six. @ Seattle, April 20-22 (2-1) Andretti on April 20th: eight innings, two hits, zero runs, five strikeouts, a hundred pitches. The complete reversal of his Portland outings. The Seattle lineup — which is six and twelve and deeply unimpressive — hit him as poorly as a major-league lineup can be expected to hit a pitcher who is locating his ball and working his ground-ball tendencies. Sacramento scored ten runs. Shinohara homered for the eighth time. Mollohan hit his third. The final was ten to one and Andretti's ERA dropped from 6.75 to 4.50 in one start. Jang threw five innings of no-run ball on April 21st and lost two to one when Luna's one inning of relief allowed two runs on a Welsh double and a Bay sac fly in the seventh. Sacramento had two hits total. The bullpen erased Jang's quality work in one inning, which is becoming a recurring theme for this team. Cruz won a two-to-one pitcher's duel on April 22nd, going five innings in cold and rainy conditions with four walks but only one run allowed. Gutierrez, Gonzalez, Medina, and Benson all contributed to the hold, and Shinohara's two-out double in the sixth was the winning run. Two to one, series won by Sacramento. ______________________________ THE ROTATION IN CONTEXT Cruz is fourth in the AL in ERA at 1.50 and as of late, he has been the most reliable starter in the rotation. His control, which produced six walks in his Seattle outing but only two in Boston, is the one variable that swings his starts between dominant and merely good. When he throws strikes he generates ground balls and keeps the lineup in order; when he walks batters the game turns chaotic fast. The 1.50 ERA reflects the dominant version appearing regularly enough to outweigh the other. Jang is 3.03 ERA across six starts and has not yet had a game where he was simply removed for ineffectiveness — his April 16th San Jose start was bad, but even there he recorded seventeen outs before Aces pulled him. The strikeout rate is real. The ground-ball tendencies are real. He is what Sacramento paid for. Andretti's eight-inning Seattle performance was beautiful. Whether it represents a settled mechanical groove or simply an ideal matchup against a bad lineup remains to be seen over his next three starts. The 4.50 ERA entering May is not a crisis. It is a caution flag that turned amber on April 20th and has not yet gone green. Gunn's April has been uneven — excellent against Boston in his two outings there, roughed up by San Jose in his most recent start. His ERA after four starts as a Prayer is 3.18, which is still respectable. He is twenty-five years old and has never thrown the kind of April he is experiencing at the major-league level in this environment. Some of the variance is expected. ______________________________ SHINOHARA IS CARRYING THIS OFFENSE Eight home runs in thirteen games. A .373 average over that stretch. Tied for third in the AL in home runs. The Gold Glove right fielder who was supposed to be Sacramento's consistent middle-of-the-order presence has instead become something closer to its offensive engine, filling the role that Lopez would normally occupy at the top and Choi at the heart of the lineup. When both of those players return — Lopez in approximately six to seven weeks, Choi in one week — the offensive picture becomes considerably deeper. What Shinohara has done in April is establish that Sacramento can score runs without its two most important lineup contributors, which is a discovery that should make the rest of April and most of May feel manageable rather than desperate. ______________________________ THE PUGA TRADE On April 23rd, Sacramento traded catcher Jon Horn, second baseman Rey Puga, right-handed pitcher Nick Coulson, a first-round pick, a second-round pick, and a fifth-round pick to the St. Louis Faith. In return: a first-round pick, a third-round pick, and $250,000 in cash. The picks roughly cancel. The cash is modest. What the transaction actually accomplishes is clearing roster space and salary by moving three players the organization had determined would not be part of the long-term picture. Puga, at thirty years old and batting .043 through his limited appearances in 2001, was not going to contribute at the major-league level this year. Horn was a catching prospect behind Nakazawa on the depth chart with no clear path forward. Coulson was a minor-league arm without an obvious lane to Sacramento's rotation. Trading present depth for draft capital is the kind of move that produces value in three years rather than this October. Sacramento's position at thirteen and six gives them the luxury of making this trade without it feeling like panic. The organization believes in what it has on the field. This is housekeeping. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE Cleveland leads the NL Central at fourteen and four, which is the best record in the league. Detroit and Sacramento share the best record in the AL at thirteen and six. Charlotte is twelve and six, Houston eleven and seven. The AL is genuinely competitive from top to bottom, which makes Sacramento's current position — leading the West while the projected winner of the division sits two and a half games back — more meaningful than a random mid-April snapshot would normally suggest. Charlotte reliever, Casey Ford, filed for bankruptcy this morning in a Charlotte court. According to the Chapter 7 filing, Mr. Ford's restaurant chain lost $5.5 million last year. Among his assets, the reliever listed over 2 million in Rolex watches. Casey has been quoted as saying, "What can I tell you? Those timepieces are the epitome of class. I can't say anything about my financial situation. Go through my lawyer." ______________________________ THE INBOX From Margherita Conti of Sacramento's Midtown neighborhood, a restaurant manager, who asks: "Tim Van Ham hit two grand slams in one game, eight RBI, tied the franchise record. Who is Tim Van Ham?" The honest answer is that Tim Van Ham is the player most franchises have but rarely acknowledge: a perfectly functional major-league outfielder who does not have the ceiling of a star but has enough skill and professionalism to contribute meaningfully when called upon. He entered 2001 as the team's fourth outfielder, filling in for Lopez while the ACL heals and for Choi while the quadriceps recovers. His career numbers have never suggested what he did on April 14th was coming, which is part of what makes the record so striking. There is no analytical framework that predicted Van Ham as the answer to the question of who would tie Sacramento's single-game RBI record. He just came to the plate with the bases loaded twice and hit the ball as hard as he could hit it. That's baseball, and that's Tim Van Ham, and on one afternoon at Fenway Park in April it was exactly sufficient. From Seun Adesanya of Sacramento's South Sacramento neighborhood, a logistics coordinator, who asks: "Andretti was 8.10 ERA through two starts, then went eight shutout innings against Seattle. Which version is real?" Both versions exist, and the question is which one appears more often over the remaining twenty-five or so starts. What the April 20th Seattle start showed is that the mechanics and the game plan that produced a World Series-winning performance in October are still available to him — they did not disappear, they were simply inaccessible in two cold April outings against teams that were swinging at his pitches rather than his approach. The Seattle lineup, which is among the weakest in the AL, provided an ideal environment for Andretti to re-establish his rhythm and remind himself of what his arm can still do. The real version of Andretti in 2001 is probably somewhere between the 8.10 ERA and the shutout — a starter who gives Sacramento six innings and two or three earned runs often enough to remain a functional part of the rotation without being the dominant presence he was in his prime years. If those eight innings proved to himself that he still belongs at this level, they have served their most important purpose. From Hana Procházková of Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, a librarian, who asks: "Sacramento swept San Jose at home in walk-off fashion all three games. Is this what the AL West race looks like all season?" It might be. The three-game sweep was built on Sacramento's bullpen advantage and its offensive depth more than its rotation superiority — Jang had a poor start in the series opener, Gunn allowed five runs in four and one-third in the finale, and Sacramento still won all three games. That tells you something important about the relative strengths of these two teams: Sacramento's offense and bullpen can absorb a weak starting performance and still find ways to win, while San Jose's rotation advantage — Suzuki and Haddix are clearly the better top-two starters — does not automatically translate into wins when the offense can't protect the lead. San Jose is ten and eight. They will not stay ten and eight. They will almost certainly finish with more wins than Sacramento's preseason number of ninety-three. Whether they close the current gap depends on which version of each team's rotation shows up most consistently from May through September. The AL West race will look like this — close, competitive, determined by individual series rather than sustained runs of dominance — right through the end of summer. ______________________________ Thirteen and six. Two and a half games up on San Jose. Phoenix is next for two games on the road, then Long Beach and Philadelphia come to Sacramento. Choi is a week away. Lopez is six to seven weeks away. The rotation has found a shape. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-14-2026, 10:12 AM	#384
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *April 23 – May 2, 2001 \| Twenty-One and Eight \| Sacramento Leads the AL West by Four and a Half* ______________________________ SOSHU SHINOHARA NAMED THE AMERICAN LEAGUE'S BATTER OF THE MONTH FOR APRIL There is a version of this team that exists only on paper — the one missing Lopez, the one that started the year worried about its fifth starter, the one that lost Navarro for at least a few days to a rib cage injury suffered in a base-running collision on April 28th. And then there is the version that has actually taken the field for the last ten games, which has gone eight and two, scored runs in bunches, found its forty-first home run of the season before the calendar reached May, and built a division lead that nobody projected in March. Twenty-one and eight — best record in the American League. Four and a half games up on San Jose, who are themselves sixteen and twelve and would be leading most divisions in baseball. Sacramento has built enough cushion that individual injuries — even significant ones — no longer threaten to derail the season. They simply become subplots. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY @ Phoenix, April 23-24 (1-1) April 23rd was Shinohara's signature month-closer in miniature: four for six, a grand slam in the first inning, a double, two more singles, three runs scored, five RBI. The grand slam off Donegan was his ninth home run of the season and turned a scoreless game into a four-nothing laugher before Phoenix had recorded an out in the bottom of the first. Florez added a two-run homer of his own in the same inning. Gunn improved to three and oh. Thirteen to five — the final score in Prayers favor, and Donegan's start — one and two-thirds innings, ten hits, seven runs — was as bad an outing as any Sacramento opponent has produced all season. April 24th reversed course completely. Rendon threw eight innings of three-hit shutout baseball for Phoenix, striking out eight, and Espenoza's six and one-third innings of two-run ball were wasted entirely. Sacramento was shut out, five to nothing, in a game where the Crucifixes' Ryan Scott hit two home runs off Espenoza and Musselman. All in all, that was a stark reminder that even the best teams get shut down occasionally by a starter throwing the game of his life. vs. Long Beach, April 25-26 (1-1) Long Beach is twenty-two and six, the best record in the National League, and they came to Sutter Health Park and took the first game on the strength of Aaron Boemer going five for five — a double in the first, a single in the fourth, an RBI double in the sixth, and singles in the eighth and ninth, tying the Long Beach regular season game record for hits. Andretti pitched well enough — six and two-thirds innings, two earned runs — but the bullpen surrendered the lead in the eighth and Benson took the loss. Six to five, Long Beach. April 26th belonged to Victor Alvarez. A grand slam off Kim in the third inning put Sacramento up four to nothing, part of a four for thirteen day at the plate that ended with Alvarez at one for four with the slam, two runs scored, and four RBI. Jang threw six and two-thirds innings of two-run ball for the win, and Musselman picked up his first save of the season in the ninth. Nine to two, the series split against the league's hottest team. vs. Philadelphia, April 27-29 (3-0) Philadelphia arrived at seven and seventeen, already drawing public frustration from manager Alex Garcia, who used a press conference on April 24th to criticize media coverage of his team's slow start. The Padres' bats showed up against Sacramento's pitching anyway — Cruz allowed five runs in three innings on April 27th, and the Padres led for much of the game before Sacramento scored seven runs in the third inning alone, behind home runs from Chavarria and Lozano. Florez's two-run double off six-time All-Star Mike Young in the bottom of the ninth was the walk-off that won it for Sacramento, nine to eight. April 28th: Gunn improved to four and oh, throwing five and two-thirds innings of two-run ball, and Sacramento scored ten runs on nineteen hits, with Shinohara going three for five with a home run and a double. Ten to three. April 29th was Choi's return from the quadriceps contusion that had sidelined him since mid-April. He went two for three with a home run, two walks, and two runs scored — an immediate, uncomplicated return to form. Sacramento scored thirteen runs, including home runs from Choi, Fernando Garcia, and Chavarria, and Espenoza picked up the win despite allowing four runs in six and two-thirds innings. Thirteen to four. Philadelphia left Sacramento at seven and nineteen, and the sweep was complete. @ Washington, April 30 - May 2 (3-0) April 30th: Andretti threw seven and two-thirds innings and allowed only one run — his third straight strong outing, continuing the turnaround that began in Seattle. Chavarria, pinch-hitting in the ninth inning, hit a solo home run off Brooks to break a one-one tie. Benson closed it. Two to one, Prayers. May 1st: Jang went five and two-thirds innings, allowed three runs on only two hits while issuing four walks, and improved to three and one. Chavarria's go-ahead single in the seventh put Sacramento up for good. Five to three. May 2nd marked Jeon's return from the stubborn finger blister that had cost him most of April. Six innings, eleven hits, four runs, but only two earned — Jeon committed an error of his own, and Gutierrez and Medina combined for three scoreless innings to seal it. Nakazawa hit two home runs, including a two-run shot in the eighth that provided the final margin. Seven to four. Sacramento finished the road trip three and oh and the homestand-plus-road-trip stretch at eight and two. ______________________________ SHINOHARA, AL BATTER OF THE MONTH The numbers for April: a .351 average, ten home runs, twenty-six RBI, twenty-six runs scored. Tied for first in the AL in home runs with eleven entering May, third in the league in RBI behind only Aguilar of Phoenix and Duran of Nashville — both of whom play for teams currently under .500. Shinohara's recognition as the American League's Batter of the Month is the first major individual honor of the 2001 season for Sacramento, and it arrives for a player who, twelve months ago, was known primarily for his glove. What makes the month remarkable beyond the raw totals is the context in which it happened. Lopez has not played an inning this year. Choi missed two weeks. The middle of the lineup has been in constant flux due to injuries and roster shuffling. Through all of it, Shinohara has been the one constant — every single game, every series, producing at a level that would be the best month of most players' careers and is, for him, simply April. ______________________________ NAVARRO, CHOI, AND THE DEPTH QUESTION Navarro was injured in a collision at a base during the April 28th game and has been diagnosed with a strained rib cage muscle — day-to-day, with no firm timeline. Cruz has shifted to shortstop in his absence, a position he played at points during this stretch, while Fernando Garcia has taken over at second base and has hit well enough — over .300 in his appearances — that the temporary alignment has not cost Sacramento anything offensively. Choi's return on April 29th was as clean as a return from injury can be. One home run, two walks, immediate offensive impact in his first game back. Between Choi's return and the inevitable eventual return of Navarro from what appears to be a minor injury, Sacramento's lineup depth — already among the best in the league — becomes deeper still. The lineup that produced forty-four home runs in April, first in the AL, did so without two regular contributors for stretches of the month. What happens when everyone is healthy at once is a question Sacramento has not yet had to answer in 2001, and the answer may be frightening for the rest of the league. ______________________________ THE GONZALEZ TRADE AND THE ESPARZA SETBACK Jeon's return from IL to the starting rotation required the Prayers to make roster decisions. The obvious choice was to send Rafael Gonzalez down to the minors, however the veteran pitcher refused demotion, which forced the management to seek an alternative solution. On April 29th, Sacramento traded right-handed reliever Rafael Gonzalez and minor-league right-hander Ryan McDonald to Columbus for minor-league center fielder Yukinari Sakamoto and $300,000 in cash. A league analyst called it a fairly even transaction, which is as unremarkable an assessment as exists in baseball. Gonzalez, thirty-four, had been a fringe bullpen piece; Sakamoto, twenty-six, adds organizational outfield depth. Nothing about this trade changes Sacramento's 2001 outlook in any direction. More consequential, unfortunately, is the news that arrived on April 30th regarding Sergio Esparza. The reliever, who has been on the injured list since spring with bone chips in his elbow, suffered a setback in his recovery and will now need at least eight additional weeks before he's ready to return. Combined with Rubalcava's six-to-seven-month timeline and Delgado's seven-month timeline, the bullpen depth chart below the active roster continues to thin. None of this has mattered yet — Benson, Medina, Gutierrez, Ke, and the rest have combined for the second-best bullpen ERA in the league. But injury attrition compounds, and eight more weeks for Esparza is eight more weeks Sacramento needs its current relief corps to hold. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE Long Beach is twenty-two and six, the best record in either league, and their Sacramento series even split was their only blemish in an otherwise dominant stretch. Cleveland is twenty-one and seven in the NL Central. El Paso is twenty and eight in the NL Desert. The early-season parity that defined the first two weeks of April has given way to genuine separation at the top of both leagues — and Sacramento, at twenty-one and eight, belongs in that conversation as much as anyone. Philadelphia's struggles continue to be a story in themselves. Manager Alex Garcia's media outburst on April 24th — accusing reporters of focusing only on the negative — came during a stretch in which his team would go on to lose six of its next seven, including the three-game sweep at Sacramento's hands. The Padres are seven and twenty-two, the worst record in the American League, and the tension between the front office's public messaging and the team's results on the field appears to be intensifying rather than easing. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Aram Khachaturian of Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood, a high school basketball coach, who asks: "Shinohara won AL Batter of the Month. How does an organization keep a player like that grounded when the attention starts coming?" The honest answer is that the organization doesn't really need to do much, because the player generally does it himself, and Shinohara's track record suggests he's exactly that kind of person. He's been a consistently excellent, low-drama contributor for four seasons — a Gold Glove winner who was never the headline name even when his performance warranted it. The attention that comes with a league-wide monthly award is, frankly, overdue rather than premature, and players who have spent years being underrated tend not to get carried away when the recognition finally arrives. What the organization can do — and from what I've observed, has done — is continue treating him exactly as they did when he was the quietly excellent right fielder rather than the league's hottest hitter. Consistency from the franchise reinforces consistency from the player. Shinohara doesn't need micromanagement; he needs the room to keep doing what he's doing, and Sacramento has given him exactly that. From Wioletta Nowakowska of Sacramento's East Sacramento neighborhood, a violinist, who asks: "Navarro is hurt, Lopez hasn't played yet this season, and Sacramento still has the best record in the AL. Is this roster simply deeper than anyone realized?" Yes, and I think the depth is the actual story of April, more than any individual performance — though Shinohara's award makes for a better headline. Consider what's been absent for stretches of this month: the starting shortstop, the starting center fielder for two weeks, the leadoff hitter and stolen-base threat for the entire month. And consider what's filled in: Fernando Garcia hitting .300 at second base, Cruz capably moving to shortstop, Chavarria providing pinch-hit production and outfield depth, Schmitt delivering a walk-off home run from the bench. This is not a roster built around four or five stars surrounded by replacement-level filler. It's a roster where the eighth and ninth players in the lineup can change a game. That kind of depth doesn't show up in preseason projections — the algorithms that predicted ninety-three wins for Sacramento couldn't have known that Fernando Garcia would hit .300 in extended playing time, because nobody could have known that in March. It's the kind of depth that gets built through years of development and shows its value exactly in months like this one. From Dimitrios Papageorgiou of Sacramento's Carmichael neighborhood, a barista, who asks: "Sacramento leads the AL West by four and a half games over San Jose, who were projected to win a hundred and nine. What changed?" Two things, roughly equally important. First, Sacramento has played better than its preseason projection by a significant margin — twenty-one and eight against a projected pace closer to fifteen and fourteen at this point in the season. Second, San Jose has played to roughly their projected level, sixteen and twelve, which is good but not the historic pace the preseason numbers suggested. The gap has opened not because San Jose collapsed but because Sacramento's floor turned out to be much higher than anyone modeled — driven by a healthy April from the rotation's top three, an offense getting career-best months from multiple players simultaneously, and a bullpen that has been the second-best in the league. Four and a half games in early May is not a permanent state. San Jose has a hundred and thirty-some games left to play at their true level, and if that true level is anywhere near a hundred wins, this gap closes. But Sacramento has given itself the cushion to absorb a bad stretch — Navarro's injury, Esparza's setback, the inevitable regression of some hot streaks — without losing the division lead. That cushion is the real accomplishment of April. ______________________________ Twenty-one and eight. Nashville on the road for three games, then trip to Portland. Navarro day-to-day, Choi back in the lineup, Lopez five weeks away. The best record in the American League belongs to the defending World Series champions, and it isn't close. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-14-2026, 09:02 PM	#385
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *May 4 – 15, 2001 \| Twenty-Seven and Thirteen \| Lozano Is Having a Career Year \| Cleveland Leads All of Baseball* ______________________________ SACRAMENTO WINS SIX, THEN DROPS FOUR STRAIGHT There is a tale of mid-May that looks triumphant — six wins in a row, Jeon's return from injury producing the best start of anyone's season, Lozano quietly compiling a .295 average with seven home runs and twenty-seven RBI in thirty-two games, a four-game lead that briefly felt like breathing room. And there is the version that actually closed out this stretch: four straight losses, two of them to San Jose at home, two of them in Cleveland against a team that is now thirty and nine and looks, frankly, unbeatable. Twenty-seven and thirteen. Still the best record in the American League at the start of this stretch. Now 1.5 games ahead of San Jose, who went nine and one over the same period. The margin that felt comfortable ten days ago is suddenly very thin, and Sacramento finishes this stretch having just been outplayed, decisively, by the two best teams it has faced all year. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY @ Nashville, May 4-6 (2-1) Gunn lost his first decision of the season on May 4th, allowing four earned runs in four innings as Nashville's Malik Albury threw eight strong innings. Five to one, Sacramento's only loss of this opening stretch. Andretti rebounded with six and one-third innings of one-run ball on May 5th, his third strong outing in his last four starts. Navarro drove in three runs including a two-run single in the first inning and a solo homer in the ninth — his first home run of the season. Eight to five, Sacramento. May 6th belonged to Mollohan, who went three for three with a home run, a double, and a walk, driving in three. Jang threw five innings for the win despite committing a fielding error. Choi and Mollohan both homered in the seventh to put the game away. Six to two. Special note: Navarro was injured while throwing the ball during this game — a separate issue from the rib cage strain, though the severity wasn't immediately clear. @ Portland, May 8-10 (3-0) Jeon's return from the finger blister that cost him most of April was worth the wait. Seven and one-third innings, three hits, one run, eight strikeouts — his ERA dropped to 2.12 and his record improved to two and oh. Cruz drove in a run and was injured while throwing the ball in this game, though he stayed in and finished the contest. Sacramento scored seven, Choi homered, and the Apocalypse managed only one run off Jeon and Espenoza combined. Seven to one. Gunn followed with six and two-thirds innings of shutout ball on May 9th, improving to five and one. Van Ham tripled in the second inning to open the scoring and added two more singles. Alvarez and Lozano both homered. Five to nothing, and Sacramento's lead over San Jose stood at four games. May 10th was an offensive carnival. Lozano hit two home runs, Alvarez hit two home runs, Choi and Fernando Garcia each added one — five Sacramento home runs total — while Portland's Ryoji Hirayama went five for five, including an RBI triple, tying the Portland regular season hit record. Eleven to eight, Sacramento, in a game that resembled batting practice for both sides. Andretti's three and two-thirds innings of five earned runs were the rough edge in an otherwise dominant week, but the offense buried the problem. vs. San Jose, May 11-13 (1-2) May 11th was vintage Shinohara — three hits, a grand slam off Haddix in the seventh inning for his twelfth home run of the season, five RBI total. Jang threw five scoreless innings for the win, improving to five and one. Seven to one, and the win streak reached six. Then San Jose won the next two. May 12th: Cruz allowed four earned runs in four and one-third innings, and despite a Lozano solo homer, Sacramento lost four to two. May 13th: Jeon, coming off his dominant Portland start, allowed three runs in six innings and took the loss as San Jose's Efrain Flores went seven and one-third scattering only two runs. Three to two, San Jose, and the Demons left Sacramento having won the series and cut the lead to 2.5 games. @ Cleveland, May 14-15 (0-2) Cleveland is thirty and nine, and Sacramento got a firsthand look at why. May 14th: Gunn pitched well — six innings, one earned run — but Benson blew a save in the ninth and Cleveland's Jose Salcevo delivered a walk-off single. Six to five, Cleveland. May 15th was worse. Andretti allowed seven runs in three and two-thirds innings, including a three-run homer to Jason Makin in the first inning. Cleveland led six to nothing before Sacramento recorded an out in the second inning. Ten to three, final, and Sacramento's losing streak reached four — its longest of the season. ______________________________ LOZANO'S QUIET SEASON While Shinohara collects the league-wide attention — thirteen home runs, thirty-eight RBI, a .315 average, tied for second in the AL in total bases — Lozano has assembled a season that would be the headline for almost any other team. Seven home runs, twenty-seven RBI, a .295 average, two home runs in a single game on May 10th. He is doing this while also playing through a hit-by-pitch injury from late April that merited a special note in the box score and apparently required no time off. His defensive numbers — the Gold Glove from 2000 — remain elite. Lozano is twenty-three years old and quietly putting together the best all-around season of his career, in the shadow of a teammate's historic April. That's not a complaint. It's simply what depth looks like. ______________________________ THE NAVARRO SITUATION Navarro's hot home run on May 5th — his first of the season — and three RBI suggested the rib cage strain was behind him. Then came the May 6th note that he was injured while throwing the ball, and his numbers over his last seven games at the time of this report stood at .043 with zero home runs, a precipitous drop for a player hitting .330 a week earlier. He remains day-to-day, not on the injured list, but the throwing-arm issue layered on top of the rib cage strain is the kind of compounding injury situation that deserves monitoring. Cruz has filled in capably at shortstop when needed, and Fernando Garcia continues to provide value at second base. The depth exists. What's needed now is for Navarro's body to cooperate long enough for him to return to the form he showed in April. ______________________________ CLEVELAND, AND WHAT A 1.5-GAME LEAD MEANS NOW Cleveland's thirty and nine record is the best in either league by a wide margin, and the two games Sacramento just played against them were not competitive in either direction — a one-run walk-off loss followed by a blowout. Jason Makin is on pace for over forty home runs. The Cardinals' pitching, anchored by Jordan Sepulveda's seven shutout innings on May 15th, looked every bit as dominant as the record suggests. Meanwhile, San Jose went nine and one over this same stretch and is now 1.5 games behind Sacramento in the AL West — a margin that, two weeks ago, stood at 4.5 games. The division race that seemed settled in early May is, suddenly, a race again. Sacramento's record remains the best in the American League. But "best in the league" and "comfortable" are not the same thing, and this stretch made that distinction clear. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Adaeze Nwosu of Sacramento's Natomas neighborhood, a nurse, who asks: "Sacramento's lead over San Jose shrank from 4.5 games to 1.5 in less than two weeks. Is this a concerning trend or just baseball being baseball?" It's mostly the latter, though "mostly" is doing some work in that sentence. Over a hundred-and-sixty-two-game season, every team experiences stretches where they play below their level and stretches where an opponent plays above theirs — San Jose going nine and one is the kind of streak that happens to good teams periodically, and it happened to coincide with Sacramento running into the best team in baseball for two games. The combination compressed what looked like a comfortable cushion into a one-game series swing. What would be genuinely concerning is if this represented a sustained pattern — if Sacramento's pitching depth, particularly Andretti's recent struggles and the bullpen's recent late-inning issues against Cleveland and San Jose, started showing up consistently rather than in isolated bad stretches. One four-game losing streak in mid-May, against a thirty-and-nine team and a divisional rival playing its best baseball of the season, is not a crisis. It's a reminder that the margin in the AL West is real, and Sacramento needs to keep playing at the level that built the cushion in the first place. From Conor Fitzgerald of Sacramento's Rosemont neighborhood, an auto mechanic, who asks: "Lozano is having a great season but Shinohara gets all the attention. Does that bother the clubhouse at all?" From everything I've observed about this roster's culture over the past two seasons, no — and I'd point to the way Lozano himself talks about the team as evidence. This is a player who, after a World Series in which he hit five home runs, spent the entire offseason signing a below-market extension because he wanted to stay. Players who operate that way generally aren't keeping score on attention. Shinohara's April was historic — a league-wide monthly award doesn't happen often, and the coverage it generates is proportional and earned. Lozano's season, while less publicized, is being noticed by the people who matter most: his manager, who continues to bat him in a key spot in the lineup, and his teammates, who know exactly what a .295 average with seven home runs from the three-hole means to a lineup's structure. The clubhouse dynamic on a team this deep tends to reward the players who produce quietly and consistently just as much as the ones who produce loudly — sometimes more, because the quiet productivity is what makes the loud productivity sustainable. From Lilit Hovhannisyan of Sacramento's Fair Oaks neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "After getting swept by Cleveland, how does Sacramento's pitching staff compare to a team that's thirty and nine?" Not favorably, at least not in these two specific games — but the comparison is worth being precise about. Cleveland's thirty and nine record reflects sustained excellence across their rotation and lineup over six weeks. Sacramento's twenty-seven and thirteen reflects a roster that has dealt with injuries to Lopez, Choi, Navarro, Esparza, and Rubalcava simultaneously and still produced the best record in the American League. The two games against Cleveland exposed real issues — Andretti's three and two-thirds innings of seven runs on May 15th was his worst start since the early-April Portland disasters, and the bullpen's ninth-inning failure on May 14th continues a pattern of late-inning fragility that has cropped up periodically all season. Those are legitimate concerns. But comparing any team's worst two-game stretch to the league's best team's overall record isn't a fair measure of the gap. The more useful comparison is head-to-head over a full season, and Sacramento and Cleveland play in different leagues — they won't meet again unless October arranges it. If it does, these two games will be worth revisiting. For now, they're a data point, not a verdict. ______________________________ Twenty-seven and thirteen. A four-game losing streak to snap with Fort Worth coming to Sacramento, then a trip to Detroit. Navarro status unclear. Lopez still three weeks away. San Jose is breathing down Sacramento's neck for the first time all season. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-15-2026, 11:01 AM	#386
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *May 16 – 27, 2001 \| Thirty-One and Twenty \| San Jose Takes the Lead in AL \| Choi Fractures a Finger* ______________________________ DEMONS WIN SIX IN A ROW, ALEJANDRO LOPEZ STARTS REHAB NEXT WEEK Eleven days ago, Sacramento's lead over San Jose stood at 1.5 games and felt fragile. It is no longer fragile, because it no longer exists. San Jose went nine and one over the span this article and the last one cover combined, capped by a six-game win streak that has them at thirty-six and fifteen — five games clear of Sacramento, who went four and seven over the same eleven days and dropped from first place to second for the first time all season. The low point arrived this past weekend, when Baltimore — twenty-one and thirty-one, the worst record in the American League — won two of three at Sutter Health Park. Sacramento lost series to Detroit, to Brooklyn, and to Baltimore in succession. The injury report has a new entry: Choi fractured a finger and will miss four to five weeks. And yet, buried in the same injury report, is the best news Sacramento has had in months — Lopez is one week from returning. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY vs. Fort Worth, May 16-17 (1-1) Jang threw five and one-third scoreless innings on May 16th, and Mollohan's two-run single in the eighth provided the margin in a three to one win. May 17th reversed it completely. Cruz allowed seven runs in six and two-thirds innings as Fort Worth's Terrell Miller, Jaylen Bernal, and Jayson Crumsey all homered. Eight to four, Fort Worth, and the series split. @ Detroit, May 18-20 (1-2) Jeon allowed five runs in four and two-thirds innings on May 18th, including a bases-clearing triple by Andy Alfonso that turned a two-one Sacramento lead into a four-two Detroit advantage. Eight to two, final, Detroit's largest margin of victory against Sacramento all season. May 19th: Gunn allowed five runs in three and two-thirds, Jimmy Rosen's three-run homer in the fourth was the difference, and Sacramento lost five to four. Detroit's third straight win; Sacramento's third straight loss. May 20th salvaged the series. Andretti threw six and one-third innings of two-run ball — his second strong outing in three starts — and the game went to extra innings tied at two. Fernando Garcia's run-scoring double in the top of the tenth put Sacramento ahead for good, and Musselman picked up his first win of the season in relief. Four to two, Sacramento, in ten innings. @ Brooklyn, May 21-23 (1-2) Brooklyn is thirty-five and fifteen, the best record in the American League, and they extended a winning streak to eight games at Sacramento's expense across the first two games of this series. May 21st: Jang threw six innings of two-run ball — a quality start — but Brooklyn's bullpen shut the door and Sacramento lost two to three, with Randy Gill's eighth-inning RBI groundout breaking the tie. May 22nd: Cruz allowed three runs in six innings, Mollohan hit a home run, but Brooklyn's Luis Vasquez threw seven strong innings and the Priests won five to three, extending their streak to eight. May 23rd: Chavarria. Two for five with two home runs, including a two-run shot off Tejeda in the top of the tenth inning that broke a four-four tie and ended Brooklyn's eight-game streak. Jeon allowed three runs in five innings, the bullpen held on through extra innings, and Sacramento won six to five. After two frustrating losses against the league's hottest team, Sacramento found a way to take the finale. vs. Baltimore, May 25-27 (1-2) Baltimore arrived having lost four in a row and left having won two of three. May 25th: Alvarez hit two home runs and drove in four, Shinohara added a solo shot, and Gunn threw seven innings of three-run ball. Five to three, Sacramento, the high point of the homestand. May 26th: Jang allowed seven runs — six earned — in four and two-thirds innings, his worst start since the early-season struggles. David Ryals hit a bases-clearing double and a home run, finishing three for five with six RBI. Eleven to four, Baltimore. May 27th: Cruz allowed five runs in six and one-third innings, his fourth straight start without a win. Tony Villalobos hit a home run and drove in two. Six to two, Baltimore, completing a series loss to the worst team in the league. ______________________________ LOPEZ: ONE WEEK The injury report listed Lopez's ACL recovery at one week remaining as of May 27th — down from three weeks just two weeks ago, down from eight weeks the week before that. The timeline is accelerating, which is the best possible sign for a recovery of this kind. When Lopez returns, Sacramento gets back its leadoff hitter, its center fielder, and the player who stole seventy-three bases and hit twenty home runs in 2000. He has not played a single game in 2001. The lineup that has carried this team through April and most of May — built around Shinohara's historic production, Lozano's quiet excellence, and contributions up and down from Mollohan, Alvarez, Chavarria, and Van Ham — is about to get considerably deeper, at almost the exact moment it needs it most. ______________________________ CHOI'S FRACTURE AND THE OUTFIELD SITUATION Choi fractured a finger and will be out four to five weeks — a frustrating setback for a player who had returned from the quadriceps contusion just a month ago and was hitting well in his time back. The timing is awkward: Choi's absence and Lopez's impending return overlap almost exactly, meaning the outfield picture in early June will be in transition regardless. Van Ham, Durango, and Chavarria have all filled outfield innings capably this season and will continue to do so. The good news is that Sacramento's outfield depth has been tested all year and has not yet failed to produce. ______________________________ THE ROTATION'S ROUGH PATCH Every starter not named Andretti had a rough outing somewhere in this stretch. Jang, who carried a sub-3.00 ERA into mid-May, allowed thirteen runs combined in his last two starts against Baltimore — the same team that was the worst in the American League entering the series. Cruz's struggles have now extended across four winless starts, with his ERA climbing to 4.83. Jeon's two starts produced eight runs in nine and two-thirds innings combined. Gunn was the exception, his Baltimore start a model of efficiency. None of these are individually alarming — every pitcher has bad stretches — but the cumulative effect, arriving at the same time as a four-and-seven overall record, is what turned a comfortable lead into a five-game deficit. The rotation needs to find its May form again, and soon, because San Jose's six-game win streak suggests they have no intention of slowing down. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE San Jose's surge to thirty-six and fifteen — a six-game win streak that coincided almost exactly with Sacramento's worst stretch of the season — has flipped the AL West standings completely. Sacramento now sits five games back in the division but holds a comfortable 4.5-game lead in the wild card race, which remains a meaningful safety net. Brooklyn's eight-game win streak, snapped by Sacramento on May 23rd, leaves them at thirty-five and fifteen, tied with San Jose for the best record in the American League. Cleveland remains the NL's best at thirty-four and sixteen. The top of both leagues continues to separate from the pack, and Sacramento — currently 31-20 — needs to decide which group it belongs in. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Priya Chandrasekaran of Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood, a software engineer, who asks: "Sacramento just lost a series to the worst team in the AL. How worried should fans be at this point in the season?" Worried is probably the wrong word, but attentive is the right one. Losing a series to a twenty-one-and-thirty-one team is never a good look, and the way it happened — Jang and Cruz both getting hit hard in consecutive games — is the part that deserves scrutiny more than the result itself. Baltimore has talented individual hitters even on a bad team, and Ryals's six-RBI day on May 26th was simply a great individual performance rather than evidence of some systemic Baltimore strength. What matters more is whether Jang and Cruz's recent struggles represent fatigue, mechanical issues, or simple variance. Both pitchers carried excellent numbers for the first two months of the season; both had rough two-start stretches in late May. If those rough patches extend into June, that's when concern becomes warranted. Right now, it's the kind of stretch that happens over a hundred-and-sixty-two-game season, magnified by the fact that it coincided with San Jose's best stretch of the year. From Marcus Delacroix of Sacramento's Tahoe Park neighborhood, a postal worker, who asks: "Lopez comes back in about a week. What does that actually change for this team?" It changes the top of the lineup and the bottom of the defensive alignment simultaneously, which is rare for a single player's return. Offensively, Lopez gives Sacramento a true leadoff hitter — someone who gets on base and creates pressure with his legs in a way nobody currently in the lineup quite replicates. Seventy-three stolen bases last year is not a typo, and even accounting for some natural decline in his first weeks back from an ACL tear, the speed element alone changes how opposing pitchers approach the top of the order. Defensively, Lopez in center field allows Choi — when he returns from his finger fracture — to shift to a corner, and gives the outfield its best defensive alignment of the season. The timing, with Choi out and Lopez in, means there won't be a moment where Sacramento has both at full strength immediately. But by late June, if both are healthy, this lineup and defense look meaningfully different — and better — than anything Sacramento has fielded in 2001 so far. From Anezka Novotna of Sacramento's Greenhaven neighborhood, a dental hygienist, who asks: "Chavarria's walk-off-style home run in the tenth inning snapped Brooklyn's eight-game win streak. How significant was that game in the context of this rough stretch?" More significant than its place in the standings suggests. Sacramento had just lost two straight to the best team in the American League, on the road, with a rotation that was starting to show cracks. A third straight loss in that series — extending Brooklyn's streak to nine — would have compounded a difficult week into something approaching a crisis narrative heading into the Baltimore series. Instead, Chavarria's two-homer game, capped by the go-ahead shot in extra innings, gave Sacramento a tangible response: yes, we can still beat the best team in the league, even on the road, even after losing the first two. That the very next series against Baltimore went poorly anyway tells you the Chavarria game didn't fix everything — but it prevented a bad week from becoming something worse, and it's the kind of performance that, in retrospect, often marks the bottom of a stretch like this one rather than the middle of it. We'll know more in the next ten days. ______________________________ Thirty-one and twenty. Five games behind San Jose, 4.5 up in the wild card race. Portland pays visit to Sacramento, homestand then continues with three-game series against Seattle. The defending champions need to find their May form again, fast. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

06-15-2026, 09:33 PM	#387
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *May 29 – June 7, 2001 \| Ten Wins in Ten Games\| Cruz Throws Consecutive Shutout-Quality Starts \| Jeon One-Hits Seattle* ______________________________ FROM FIVE GAMES BEHIND TO SHARED LEAD IN ELLEVEN DAYS The math is simple and the implication enormous. On May 27th, Sacramento trailed San Jose by five games in the AL West. On June 7th, both teams are forty-one and twenty, the identical record, sharing first place in the division. Sacramento won ten consecutive games. San Jose went five and five. The gap that opened during Sacramento's late-May stumble was erased in eleven days by the kind of sustained excellence this organization has produced repeatedly this season when the moment demanded it. The defense of the championship is no longer a subplot. Friday night in San Jose, with both teams at forty-one and twenty, the game will matter as much as any regular-season game has mattered this year. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY vs. Portland, May 29-31 (3-0) The first game of the win streak nearly ended before it began. Jeon allowed four home runs in four and one-third innings — Gorum, Garcia, Burrows, and Ruiz all went deep — and Sacramento trailed five to one going into the sixth. The offense clawed back: Mollohan drove in two, Lozano homered in the seventh, Nakazawa doubled in the ninth to tie it, and then Chavarria's double moved runners up before Durango drew a walk-off walk from Gorham. Six to five. A win that required heroics from multiple hitters, was followed the next day by a performance that made things look easy. May 30th: Gunn threw seven and one-third innings, Van Ham's two-run single in the eighth turned a three-all tie into a six-four lead, and Sacramento won. May 31st: Alvarez hit two home runs off Sandoval, Mollohan added another, and Sacramento swept the Portland series with a seven-five win despite Luna blowing a save and Blevins — the Portland right fielder who was in Sacramento's organization earlier this year — hitting a three-run homer off him in the sixth. vs. Seattle, June 1-3 (3-0) June 1st was the clearest signal yet that Vic Cruz had rediscovered himself. Six and one-third innings of one-hit shutout baseball against Seattle, four strikeouts, two walks, ninety pitches. Van Ham hit two home runs. Lozano hit another. Six to one, and Cruz improved to three and four with an ERA that had fallen to 4.29 and would fall further. June 2nd: Andretti threw five innings and allowed one run. Shinohara hit his sixteenth home run. Mollohan hit his seventh. Sacramento scored five in the first inning and won seven to one. June 3rd was Jeon. One hit in six innings. Zero walks, ten strikeouts on ninety-three pitches, the economy of an ace who located every pitch and made hitters look helpless. The final was two to one, decided by Mollohan's RBI single in the seventh and preserved by Ke, Medina, and Benson combining for two scoreless innings after Jeon exited. Seattle went ten in a row on the losing side, Sacramento had won six straight. @ Tucson, June 4-5 (2-0) June 4th game in the desert required patience. Marco Cervantes threw eight and one-third innings of two-run ball for Tucson, and Sacramento sat at one to one through eight until Navarro doubled home the go-ahead run in the top of the ninth, Benson closed it, and the win streak reached seven. June 5th was less restrained. Jang threw five scoreless innings. Fernando Garcia hit two home runs, driving in four. Shinohara hit his seventeenth. Van Ham hit his ninth. Sacramento scored eleven and the sweep was complete. vs. Albuquerque, June 6-7 (2-0) Cruz's second shutout-quality start in eight days: seven innings against Albuquerque on June 6th, three hits, eight strikeouts, no runs. Sacramento scored in six of eight innings and reached fourteen runs total — the bullpen allowed eight in the ninth to make the final less comfortable than the game itself, but the result was never in doubt. Alvarez homered for the twelfth time. Garcia was hit by a pitch and walked twice on top of the offensive contributions he'd made the night before. The win streak reached nine. Ten: On June 7th Andretti allowed four runs in five and two-thirds innings but Sacramento doing enough to win anyway. Van Ham hit his tenth homer, Chavarria homered his tenth as well, and Florez delivered the decisive RBI single in the seventh with two out and a runner in scoring position. Benson's sixteenth save. Five to four, and the ten-game streak was complete. ______________________________ VIC CRUZ'S TURNAROUND His ERA was 4.83 at the end of May. It stands at 3.82 entering this weekend. The Seattle game — six and one-third innings of one-hit baseball — and the Albuquerque start — seven innings of three-hit shutout work — represent the best consecutive starts Cruz has had all season. The mechanical questions that surfaced during the Baltimore series, where he allowed five runs in six and one-third innings and absorbed the loss, appear to have resolved themselves. What caused the rough patch is less important than what has followed it: two starts in which the ground-ball tendencies that made him effective in the Boston series returned in full, and the strike zone expanded to include all corners rather than just the ones the hitter expects. He is now three and four in 2001. The record understates what his best looks like, which is among the better things a manager can say about a starting pitcher heading into a three-game series against the division co-leader. ______________________________ JEON'S ONE-HITTER Six innings, one hit, ten strikeouts, zero walks against Seattle on June 3rd. That is not just a quality start — it is a statement, coming from a pitcher whose ERA entering the game was 4.19 and whose health has been a recurring concern all season. The Seattle lineup, which has been one of the worst in the American League, did not make the performance meaningless; Jeon's stuff was demonstrably better than anything he had produced since his Portland start in May, and the ten-strikeout, zero-walk combination suggests command and velocity working simultaneously rather than the usual situation where one compensates for the other. Whether this was the beginning of a sustained run of good health and good mechanics is the question that frames the rest of his season. The answer requires more starts. ______________________________ VICTOR ALVAREZ IS HITTING Twelve home runs, thirty-nine RBI, a .248 average. Three home runs in four days against Portland and Albuquerque. The twenty-one-year-old first baseman who entered the season at the bottom of the lineup's expected power contributors has become, unambiguously, one of Sacramento's most important offensive players. He is currently fourth in the AL in home runs. His RBI total trails only Shinohara on the roster. The June version of Victor Alvarez looks almost nothing like the April version who was batting .120 through twelve games, which is either evidence that an extended April adjustment period finally resolved itself into production, or evidence that this team has enough depth that even a struggling first baseman could get the at-bats needed to find his swing. Both explanations are probably partially true. The result is that Sacramento now has four players — Shinohara, Alvarez, Van Ham, and Chavarria — with at least nine home runs each, and the team leads the AL in home runs. That kind of offensive depth, distributed across the lineup, makes the team extremely difficult to neutralize with any single pitching strategy. ______________________________ LOPEZ AND THE INJURY REPORT Alejandro Lopez no longer appears on the injury list. He was expected to return around this week or at the beginning of the next after brief rehab stint in Oxnard, where he appeared as a pinch hitter in three games with six at-bat appearances, and his absence from the IL means he has been officially activated. When he does step into the lineup — likely in the coming days, possibly in San Jose — Sacramento will have its leadoff hitter and starting center fielder back for the first time since October. The offensive lineup that produced those ten wins will immediately become deeper. Choi remains out with the fractured finger — minimum three weeks away from coming back — and Esparza's elbow surgery recovery expectation stands at two weeks. The deep problems, Rubalcava and Delgado with their torn rotator cuffs, are still months away. But the overall injury picture is meaningfully better than it has been at any point in 2001. ______________________________ MEDINA'S STREAK This is something that absolutely deserves its own paragraph: Edwin Medina has not allowed a run in twenty-two consecutive appearances. That is not a typo. Twenty-two games, zero earned runs, against lineups ranging from Portland to Albuquerque to the best teams Sacramento has faced. He is listed at an ERA of 0.46 for the season. The bullpen reliever who was the subject of legitimate concern as recently as April has become arguably the most reliable arm in the Sacramento bullpen, used in the middle innings of close games and emerging without damage every time. Twenty-two appearances. Nothing across. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE Cleveland stands at thirty-nine and twenty-one in the NL Central — still the best record in baseball — and Jorge Jaime of Baltimore has been placed on the injured list with a strained thoracic spine, two weeks out at a time when he was hitting .304 with nineteen home runs and forty RBI. The injury is significant for Baltimore's already-slim playoff chances but changes nothing about anyone else's October calculus. Long Beach at forty-one and twenty in the NL Pacific is running neck-and-neck with both Sacramento and San Jose for the best record in professional baseball. Three teams at the same winning percentage at the quarter-pole of the season is an unusual alignment, and it speaks to the depth of quality across both leagues this year. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Benedikt Auer of Sacramento's Elmhurst neighborhood, a pastry chef, who asks: "Sacramento went ten and zero and is now tied with San Jose. You wrote last month that this team needed to find its May form again. Has it?" It has found something even better than its May form. May was when Sacramento first built its lead — the April offensive explosion, the strong rotation work from Jang and Cruz and Gunn, the win streak that pushed the lead to four and a half games. What happened in late May was a regression to something closer to the team's true floor. What has happened in this ten-game stretch is a combination of the May offense — the home runs, the relentless middle-of-the-lineup production — and improved starting pitching, particularly from Cruz. The rotation's ERA over these ten games is significantly better than it was over the four-and-seven stretch that preceded them. What I can say with confidence entering this San Jose series is that Sacramento has found a version of itself that can compete with anyone. Whether it has found a version that can sustain ten wins in ten games over the rest of the season is a different and longer question. From Chiamaka Okorie of Sacramento's Del Paso Heights neighborhood, a warehouse supervisor, who asks: "Van Ham has ten home runs and thirty-one RBI from the bench and in spot starts. How is that possible from a player nobody expected to contribute at this level?" Tim Van Ham is the kind of player organizations discover when circumstances force them to find hidden gems in difficult circumstances. Before this season, he had never been asked to carry lineup responsibility. He came into 2001 as the fourth outfielder, filling in for Lopez and Choi as needed and providing the team insurance coverage against injury. What has happened instead is that the injuries created a runway long enough for Van Ham to establish himself as a legitimate lineup contributor, not a placeholder. His swing is compact and his approach to left-handed pitching is particularly effective. He is not the player Shinohara is, not the player Alvarez has become, not the power threat Lozano is. But he is a professional hitter who, given consistent at-bats, has produced at a level that would have ranked among the top five on most teams' expected offensive contributions at the start of the year. When Lopez returns fully and Choi comes back from the fractured finger, Van Ham's role will diminish. What he has done while in that role will not be forgotten. From Soo-jin Park of Sacramento's Fruitridge neighborhood, a physical therapist, who asks: "Friday's game in San Jose is arguably the biggest regular-season game of the year so far. What are the stakes?" The standings stakes are obvious: whoever wins the series will certainly move to first place outright. The momentum stakes are equally significant — Sacramento arrives on a ten-game win streak against mostly weaker opposition; San Jose arrives having gone five and five over the same period, including a loss on June 7th. The psychological stakes are perhaps the most interesting. This is the same team Sacramento lost two of three to at home in mid-May, with Suzuki and Haddix and Flores at the top of their rotation. Sacramento's lineup, particularly with Alvarez hitting, Cruz finding his form, and Lopez likely to appear in some capacity, looks different than it did in May. Whether that difference is enough to take two of three at Excite Ballpark — where San Jose is twenty-two and eight this season — is the most important question in the American League this week. ______________________________ Forty-one and twenty on the season and tied with San Jose. Lopez activated. Friday night showdown looms big at Excite Ballpark, with first place in the AL West on the line for the first time since the first week of the season. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

Yesterday, 10:34 AM	#388
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *June 8 – 17, 2001 \| Forty-Seven and Twenty-Three \| Demon's Haddix Out Three Months \| Medina's Streak Reaches Twenty-Seven Games* ______________________________ LOPEZ COMES OFF THE BENCH IN EXTRA INNING TO COMPLETE THE SWEEP He entered the June 10th game in the tenth inning, replacing Shinohara in center field. He drew a walk in his first plate appearance back. In the twelfth, with Sacramento tied at seven and Lozano on third base with nobody out, Alejandro Lopez hit a sacrifice fly off Danny St. Clair, the Prayers took an eight-to-seven lead, Musselman got the final out, and Sacramento had swept three games at Excite Ballpark from a San Jose team that entered the series four games over .500 and left it having lost four straight. There are moments in a season that arrive with more meaning than their statistical weight suggests. Lopez has one walk and one sacrifice fly in his 2001 line. What those two plate appearances actually represent is eight months of rehabilitation, a postseason that was ripped away from him in the third game of the ALDS, and a return timed so precisely to a meaningful moment that it would read as convenient fiction if it were invented. It was not invented. He walked to the plate in the twelfth inning of a tied game, seven hours into a baseball trip to San Jose, and produced the run that won the sweep. That is the story. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY @ San Jose, June 8-10 (3-0) Jeon threw five and one-third innings on June 8th, allowed one run, struck out seven, and left with a lead the bullpen protected comfortably. Shinohara's two-run homer in the first set the tone. Van Ham added a two-run shot in the second. Chavarria hit his eleventh home run in the seventh. Six to one, Sacramento, and first place was theirs outright. June 9th was Navarro's afternoon. Two for four with a double and a home run, five RBI. Lozano hit his tenth homer. Van Ham his twelfth. Durango, stepping into a lineup that had shuffled considerably, hit his first home run of the season. Gunn went five and one-third innings and the offense scored eleven runs against a San Jose rotation that was showing early signs of the vulnerability that would become apparent by the end of the week. Eleven to two, and Sacramento led the division by two. June 10th went twelve innings. Jang was excellent through six, allowing one run, then the bullpen unraveled in the late innings: Benson allowed San Jose to tie in the ninth, Ke allowed Montemayor's two-run homer in the tenth to give San Jose the lead, Sacramento answered with Garcia's two-run homer in the eleventh to retake it, then San Jose tied it again on Vasquez's shot off Ke in the same inning. Eight pitchers and a thousand heartbeats later, Lopez walked in his first trip to the plate, advanced to third during the inning's action, and hit a sacrifice fly in the twelfth that stood as the winning run. Luna picked up the win. Musselman closed. Eight to seven, Sacramento, and the sweep was done. @ Charlotte, June 12-14 (1-2) The Charlotte series opened in extra innings on June 12th, Cruz allowing four earned runs in four and one-third innings before the bullpen bridged to the tenth. With Charlotte leading five to four and one out, Alvarez singled home the tying run, then Garcia's double pushed the go-ahead run across. Gutierrez got the final out, Benson closed the tenth for the save, and Sacramento won seven to five. In the fifth inning of that game, Lopez pinch hit for Mollohan and singled home a run. He is now hitting .333. June 13th was the inverse. Jeon allowed six runs in six and one-third innings, though only three were earned — Charlotte's errors and Sacramento's errors combined to make the game messy in both directions. The decisive moment was a Cifuentes three-run homer in the fourth. Sacramento scored five runs in the fifth, including Lopez's three-run double off Guerra with the bases loaded that temporarily tied the game, but Charlotte rallied and won in eleven innings on a Galindo sacrifice fly off Benson. Eight to seven, Charlotte. June 14th: Steve James threw seven and one-third shutout innings, Rosario hit a two-run homer off Gunn in the fifth, and Sacramento managed four hits total. Three to nothing, Charlotte, the series disappointing loss complete. vs. Houston, June 15-17 (2-1) Jang dominated on June 15th — five and one-third innings, zero runs, eight strikeouts, a 2.90 ERA entering the weekend. Cruz hit a two-run homer off Guzman in the second inning, and Sacramento won five to one in a game that was never remotely competitive after the second inning. Cruz's fourth home run of the season from the shortstop position added to a day that felt like the whole roster was performing correctly at once. June 16th game lasted twelve innings and ended in a loss, which is the kind of result that requires a full accounting. Andretti went six and one-third innings of two-run ball — a quality start. Then Luna blew a save in the seventh, Houston tied it in the seventh, Sacramento led again in the fourth through the ninth, and when Benitez — Houston's closer — allowed a Durango two-run double in the tenth to put Sacramento ahead, the game finally seemed settled. It was not. Medina allowed a McSherry double in the eleventh to tie it again. In the twelfth, with Ke on the mound, Brady hit a sacrifice fly. Houston eight, Sacramento seven, after four hours and twenty-two minutes and enough bullpen arms for two ordinary games. Cruz redeemed the series on June 17th. Six and two-thirds innings, one run, seven strikeouts — his third quality start in four outings. Navarro hit two home runs, including a three-run shot in the second, and drove in five. Five runs in the first two innings and the game was functionally over. Eight to one. ______________________________ ALEJANDRO LOPEZ, SEVEN GAMES IN Nineteen at-bats, six hits, a .316 average, seven RBI, zero home runs, and the game-winning sacrifice fly at San Jose. Those are the numbers. What they do not capture is the quality of contact — Lopez is hitting the ball to the gaps, not undercutting it or pulling off in the way hitters often do when returning from long injury absences. His first week back suggests a player who spent his rehabilitation time working on his mechanics rather than simply waiting for the healing to finish. Whether the power returns to the level of his 2000 season — twenty home runs and seventy-three stolen bases — is a longer question. What is evident already is that he can play at this level, and that his presence in the lineup changes how opposing pitchers approach the top of the order. Choi is one week from returning. When both are healthy simultaneously, the outfield and the offensive structure around Shinohara become considerably more dangerous. ______________________________ HADDIX AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR SAN JOSE The news arrived June 19th: George Haddix has ulnar nerve entrapment and expects to miss three months. He was six and eight on the season with a 4.55 ERA — not the dominant pitcher San Jose projected him to be — but he was still a rotation innings-eater and a name opposing lineups had to prepare for. His absence removes the third arm from a rotation that now relies on Suzuki, Flores, and whoever fills in. San Jose was already on a five-game losing streak entering the week. They are now four and a half games back in the division with their third starter gone until September. This does not mean the division race is over. San Jose is forty-three and twenty-eight and will not stay on a losing streak indefinitely. Suzuki's ERA is 2.55 and he is one of the best pitchers in either league. The Demons are a better team than their recent results suggest. But a three-month absence for Haddix, layered on top of the losses to Sacramento last weekend, makes the path back to the division lead meaningfully harder than it looked on June 7th when both teams were tied. ______________________________ THE HOT STREAKS THAT AREN'T GETTING ENOUGH ATTENTION Jang is seven and two with a 2.90 ERA — the best among Sacramento starters and among the AL's best overall. His last three starts produced a 0.55 ERA. He is doing this while walking fewer than three batters per nine innings and generating ground-ball outs at a rate that keeps his pitch counts manageable. The organization paid $1.27 million per year for this, and by mid-June it looks like a bargain in the same way Lozano's extension looked like a bargain in November. Cruz is three and zero with a 1.85 ERA over his last four starts — a complete reversal of the rough patch that produced two losses in late May. The June version of Cruz works quickly, changes speeds effectively, and trusts his ground-ball rate to generate early-count outs. When he is pitching like this, Sacramento's rotation depth looks very different than it did during the Charlotte series opener. Medina has not allowed an earned run in twenty-seven consecutive appearances. He is being asked to bridge between the starters and Benson in the seventh and eighth innings of close games, and he has delivered every time. His ERA is 0.75 for the season. His WHIP is 1.17. He has become the most reliable arm in the bullpen. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE San Jose's five-game losing streak — all losses to Sacramento, Charlotte, and Detroit — dropped them from a half-game back of Sacramento on June 7th to four and a half games back by June 17th. The most dramatic ten-day swing in the AL West standings this season. Whether they recover depends largely on whether the rotation can absorb Haddix's absence. Suzuki and Flores are capable. The back of the rotation is now a question. Long Beach at forty-six and twenty-five remains the NL's standard. Brooklyn at forty-five and twenty-four is running them close in the East. Cleveland at forty-four and twenty-five continues to make the NL Central look like its personal property. The October landscape is beginning to take shape, and Sacramento's forty-seven and twenty-three record places them firmly among the teams that look like October participants. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Vahan Gevorgyan of Sacramento's Hagginwood neighborhood, a school bus driver, who asks: "Lopez came back and immediately hit a walk-off sacrifice fly in twelve innings at San Jose. Was that the moment of the season so far?" It competes seriously for that title. The list of comparable moments includes Van Ham's two-grand-slam afternoon at Boston, Navarro's five-RBI game in the June 9th series opener here, the ten-game win streak that erased the five-game deficit in May. But there is something particular about the Lopez sac fly that the others cannot quite replicate: it was the first meaningful at-bat of his return, it came in the highest-leverage situation in the highest-stakes series of the year, and it came against the team Sacramento needs to beat to win the division. Eight months of recovery work, arriving precisely on schedule, in the twelfth inning of a game that produced the sweep. Baseball has a taste for the dramatic. Sometimes it actually delivers. From Beatriz Almeida of Sacramento's Meadowview neighborhood, a registered nurse, who asks: "Benson has seven blown saves. Is that a problem heading into the second half?" It is a data point worth watching but not yet a crisis. Benson is seven and three with seventeen saves and a 3.27 ERA. The blown saves have arrived in clusters — June 10th at San Jose, June 13th at Charlotte, June 16th against Houston — but they have also been followed, in most cases, by wins that absorbed the damage. What the blown save total tells you is that Benson's command in very high-leverage situations — tie game or one-run lead in the ninth — has been inconsistent, which is the one thing a closer cannot afford to be consistently. His underlying numbers are good: he's striking out more than a batter per inning, his walk rate is manageable, and the home run rate is low. This does not look like a closer who has lost his ability. It looks like a closer who has had some bad nights in the wrong games. Whether that pattern continues in the second half is the relevant question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. I will say this: if Sacramento reaches October with a division title or a playoff spot, the blown saves will be a footnote. If they cost the team a series, they will be the story. Right now they are neither. From Kwame Osei of Sacramento's North Sacramento neighborhood, a restaurant owner, who asks: "Sacramento is 47-23 and San Jose just lost Haddix for three months. Is the division race effectively over?" It is not, and I say that with confidence based on evidence rather than false optimism. Forty-seven and twenty-three is an excellent record. Four and a half games is a meaningful lead. A hundred and one games remain on the schedule. San Jose is still forty-three and twenty-eight, which would be the best record in the AL Central as of today. Suzuki is still one of the best pitchers in professional baseball. The Demons' offense, which produces runs at one of the highest rates in the AL, does not become less dangerous because Haddix is pitching from a couch for three months. What the Haddix injury changes is the probability distribution — it tilts the odds meaningfully in Sacramento's favor, it makes the kind of ten-game losing streak that erased a five-game lead less likely to recur. But it does not end the race. The race ends in September. Sacramento needs to play at its current level for the next three months and maintain the lead. That is the task. A four-and-a-half-game lead with a hundred-and-one games left is a cushion, not a guarantee. ______________________________ Forty-seven and twenty-three. Four and a half up on San Jose, who have lost five straight. Lopez is hitting .316, Choi is a week away. Esparza is four days away, but will require some serious rehab in the minors. Prayers travel to Seattle for three games beginning Tuesday, then return home to host Portland. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.

Yesterday, 11:04 PM	#389
liberty-ca All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: New Westminster, BC Posts: 529	THE HOT CORNER *Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL* By Claude Playball \| Baseball Insider & Analyst \| Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast ______________________________ *June 19 – 28, 2001 \| Fifty-Four and Twenty-Six \| Medina's Streak Ends in Seattle \| The Lead Is Seven Games* ______________________________ THE INFIELD IS FALLING APART — LOZANO, GARCIA, AND DEVORE ALL HURT Lozano has shoulder tendinitis and went on the injured list after being hurt throwing in the June 27th game. Fernando Garcia has a sore elbow and has been out since June 24th. Cody DeVore developed knee tendinitis and is listed as day-to-day. Three of Sacramento's infielders are unavailable simultaneously, which on most rosters would constitute a genuine crisis. On this roster, it has produced: Vic Cruz going three and zero with a 2.29 ERA over three starts, Jang going three and zero with a 2.45 ERA over five starts, Andretti posting a 2.21 ERA over three starts, and Espenoza allowing zero runs in his last eight appearances. Four Sacramento pitchers on simultaneous hot streaks, during a week when the infield behind them was being rebuilt with utility players and, please forgive me unintentional pun, daily prayers. Sometimes the only way a pitching staff can protect a shaky defense is to not need it. These four have found a way. ______________________________ DID YOU CATCH THOSE GAMES? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY @ Seattle, June 19-21 (1-2) Jeon allowed seven runs in five innings on June 19th. Seattle's Garza tripled and doubled. Welsh tripled. The last-place Lucifers won seven to one in a performance that belongs in the category of things that happen to defending champions who have been playing very good baseball for a long time and are due for a difficult evening. One bad start is one bad start. June 20th ended Medina's streak. After twenty-seven consecutive scoreless appearances, he entered with Sacramento trailing three to two in the eighth inning and allowed five runs in two-thirds of an inning — a Matthews two-run double, a Matney two-run double — and the game was over. His ERA, which had been sitting at 0.75, jumped to 2.55. Every streak ends. The way Medina's ended, in an inherited-runner situation in Seattle, while his starter had already left him nothing to protect, is the least catastrophic way of how a twenty-seven-game scoreless run concludes, and I am sure he will be fine. Lopez hit his first home run of the season in this game — a leadoff shot in the first inning — which was the one positive note in a seven-to-three loss. Gunn rebounded on June 21st with five innings of two-hit shutout ball through a rain delay that lasted nearly an hour. When play resumed, Sacramento scored five runs in the seventh on a bases-clearing double from Gil Cruz. Seven to nothing, a clean series split that would have been a cleaner road trip if Jeon had been better in the opener. vs. Portland, June 22-24 (3-0) Cruz on June 22nd: six and one-third innings, six hits, one run, nine strikeouts, zero walks. His ERA sits at 3.67 and falling. When Vic Cruz is working with that kind of control — ninety pitches and not a single walk issued — he is as difficult to score against as anyone in the rotation. Navarro had a two-run single in the third to stake him the early lead and the bullpen held it. Four to one. June 23rd was eleven innings of something approaching controlled chaos. Andretti threw six and one-third fine innings before Musselman allowed an inherited run and Medina surrendered a Deveney two-run homer in the eighth to give Portland a three-to-two lead. In the bottom of the ninth Sacramento tied it, the game extended to the eleventh, and in the end Chavarria was hit by a Sullivan pitch with the bases loaded to force in the winning run. Four to three. The win went to Benson, who threw two scoreless innings — his record now is eight and three in 2001. Jeon won June 24th start with six and one-third innings of two-run ball. Shinohara's double in the eighth scored the decisive run. Gutierrez and Medina closed it out. Garcia was injured while throwing the ball during this game; the elbow issue that has sidelined him for the foreseeable future. @ Los Angeles, June 25-26 (1-1) June 25th was Florez's day. Three for four, four runs scored, two RBI, a home run in the second inning, and energy from the bottom of the lineup that Sacramento needed after Garcia's injury forced another roster shuffle. Jang allowed four earned runs in five innings but Sacramento scored twelve. Navarro homered. Alvarez hit his thirteenth. Mollohan was hurt in a base collision during this game — a day-to-day minor issue that he shook off quickly enough to play two days later. On June 26th Gunn allowed five runs in five innings — his third start in the last six where he has surrendered four or more earned runs — and the offense couldn't overcome it. A Schoff pinch-hit single in the sixth scored the go-ahead run off Luna and Sacramento lost five to four. Gunn's ERA climbed to 3.77 and the question of whether his occasional roughness represents a pattern worth monitoring has returned. vs. Salt Lake City, June 27-28 (2-0) Cruz pitched six and two-thirds innings on June 27th and Sacramento scored eleven times. Lozano was hurt in the fourth inning throwing the ball and left — DeVore came in at third base and contributed a two-RBI double in the sixth. The win was straightforward and the injury was not. Andretti turned in seven and two-thirds innings on June 28th. Zero walks. Inning after inning of absolute command through a lineup that had no answer for his sequencing and location. His ERA dropped to 4.03. The offense provided eight runs. Eight to two. ______________________________ THE INFIELD SITUATION Lozano, Garcia, and DeVore are all unavailable, all with different timelines. Lozano with a shoulder tendinitis will be sidelined for a minimum of seven weeks — a timeline that doesn't align well with the kind of early-July schedule Sacramento can manage with depth. Garcia's sore elbow, as the early indication from training personnel suggests, will require about a month to heel. What replaces them in the interim: DeVore's knee has taken him off the field, Gil Cruz has been moving between second base and shortstop amid his own recurring hip strain that keeps surfacing whenever he runs hard, and Schmitt and Navarro are absorbing the bulk of the third-base innings. The good news is that Sacramento built a roster with this kind of redundancy specifically because the 2000 season demonstrated how quickly an injury list can compound. The less-good news is that compounding is exactly what has happened in the past ten days. ______________________________ THE ROTATION IN JUNE Four Sacramento starters have simultaneous hot streak going. Jang is three and zero over his last five starts with a 2.45 ERA. Cruz is three and zero over three starts with a 2.29 ERA. Andretti is one and zero over three starts with a 2.21 ERA. Espenoza has zero runs allowed in his last eight relief appearances. This does not happen often. When it does, it tends to carry a team through periods where the offense and defense are not performing at their ceilings, which is exactly the function it is serving right now. Cruz and Jang have been the most consistent. Cruz's evolution from late-May struggles — where his ERA briefly climbed toward five — back to the pitcher who threw seven shutout innings at Seattle in early June represents the rotation's most significant individual improvement. Andretti continues to provide the old-professional quality start four out of every five times he takes the ball. Jeon remains the one rotation variable: capable of one-hit performances like the June 3rd Seattle game and seven-run disasters like the June 19th Seattle game, sometimes in consecutive starts against similar competition. ______________________________ THE SEVEN-GAME LEAD Sacramento leads the AL West by seven games with about eighty games remaining. San Jose is forty-seven and thirty-three — a record that would lead the AL Central by three games over Detroit and Charlotte right now. They are a good team losing ground to a better one. The Haddix injury, the five-game losing streak in late May and early June, and the inability to gain ground during Sacramento's two-game Seattle stumble have combined to put Sacramento in a position where the division race — not yet over — is beginning to look like a formality. Seven games with eighty to play is the kind of lead that requires a specific kind of catastrophic month to overcome, and so far Sacramento has shown no inclination to have that month. ______________________________ AROUND THE LEAGUE Charlotte and Detroit are tied atop the AL Central at forty-six and thirty-four, which makes the Central the most competitive division race in the league. The NL is shaping up around Long Beach, El Paso, and Cleveland — all above fifty wins, all looking like October participants. Marco Corral of Vancouver leads the league in strikeouts at a hundred and thirty-two, which is the kind of number that makes the fact that he was on the mound against Sacramento in the World Series last October feel recent and relevant. ______________________________ THE INBOX From Roksana Wiśniewska of Sacramento's Woodlake neighborhood, a kindergarten teacher, who asks: "Medina's twenty-seven-game scoreless streak finally ended. Was the streak sustainable at all, or was the end inevitable?" All streaks are eventually inevitable to end — the question is always when and how. What made Medina's run remarkable was the consistency of the circumstances in which he was deployed: inherited runners, high-leverage middle innings, against lineups that were actively trying to score. He was not stringing together scoreless outings against weak opponents in blowout games. He was holding leads when the starters left the game with problems unresolved. The Seattle ending — five runs in two-thirds of an inning with two inherited runners already on base — was rough, but the losses those runs produced were already structural before he threw a pitch. His ERA over the season remains 2.55. He has been one of the two or three most important bullpen arms in the American League in 2001. A bad inning in Seattle does not change what he has built, and the two subsequent appearances in which he allowed nothing suggest the rust shook off quickly. From Sébastien Mbeki of Sacramento's Colonial Heights neighborhood, a software developer, who asks: "Lozano, Garcia, and DeVore are all hurt. Can this roster actually absorb three infield injuries at once?" The evidence from this ten-game stretch suggests yes — barely and inelegantly, but yes. Gil Cruz has played through a recurring hip strain. Navarro has absorbed some third-base innings while also managing his own earlier rib-cage soreness. Schmitt, who has been the first utility infielder off the bench all season, has accumulated seven home runs in limited playing time and shown he can handle more than pinch-hit appearances. DeVore, before his knee issue arrived on June 28th, delivered a four-RBI double in what turned out to be his final healthy at-bat of the stretch. The infield depth is thinner than the pitching depth — but when Lozano and Garcia return, the depth picture will look considerably better again. The organization planned for two concurrent injuries. Three at once is the kind of thing that tests planning beyond its design limits. Sacramento is at the edge of that threshold but not past it. From Kenji Watanabe of Sacramento's Arden Acres neighborhood, an accountant, who asks: "With a seven-game lead and the rotation pitching like this, is it time to start preparing for October planning?" It is not time to prepare for October, because July and August still exist on the calendar and baseball tends to punish teams that declare victory before September. What the seven-game lead does allow is a shift in risk tolerance — Sacramento can absorb a rough week or even a rough series without it constituting a genuine threat to the division. It can afford to manage Andretti's innings more carefully. It can afford to bring Lozano and Garcia back from their respective injuries at a pace that prioritizes their long-term health rather than their short-term availability. Those are real advantages produced by a real lead. They are not, however, a championship. The team that won the 2000 World Series trailed in every playoff series at some point and found ways to win anyway. The 2001 team leading by seven games in late June needs to maintain its focus as much as any version of this franchise ever has, because seven games feels large right now and will feel different if October arrives with a rotation that has been mismanaged or a third baseman who has been pushed back too quickly from a shoulder injury. The October planning begins when the division is clinched. Until then, there are games to play. ______________________________ Fifty-four and twenty-six. Seven games up. The Prayers will face Columbus and Washington at home this week. The rotation is the best it has been all season and the infield is being rebuilt underneath it. ______________________________ Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.