Diamondbacks Beat Brewers 8-1 In Game 3, Stay Alive

Soapbox time. I hate when managers walk the bases loaded. Hate it, hate it, hate it. With the bases loaded, a 1-0 count becomes a get-it-in count ... except you can’t just throw a meatball to get it in. So then it becomes a 2-0 counts and, oh boy, you can’t throw a ball here, but you also just can’t toss something right down the middle.

Here are the splits for the National League with runners on second and third, and the bases loaded.

This was a surprise.

This was not a surprise.

Shaun Marcum is a master of deception, befuddling hitters with his perfectly placed change-up, and sneaking his fastball by them when they least expect it. At least, that’s the idea. In the first three innings of Game Three, though, he’s been hittable (four hits) and not as fine with his control (two walks) as he normally is.

In the third, Marcum walked Aaron Hill with one out, and he followed that up with a walk to Justin Upton. Miguel Montero followed that with an RBI single up the middle to make the Arizona lead 3-1.

Odd note from tonight: The two starting pitchers in the game have the third-lowest and seventh-lowest fastball velocities in the National League. Only R.A. Dickey and Livan Hernandez had slower fastballs in 2011 than Shaun Marcum, and Josh Collmenter’s fastball averaged just .5 more miles per hour than Marcum’s. There’s a good chance that we won’t see a fastball over 90 until the mid or late innings.

In the other playoff game going on right now, the Yankees have the pitcher with the 16th-fastest average fastball in the American League. Some guy named Burnett. I don’t want to draw conclusions here, but I’m starting to think that velocity isn’t the only thing that matters for a starting pitcher.

When you throw him a batting-practice fastball, splitting the plate and roughly crotch-high, Hart is perfectly capable of doing terrible things to the baseball.

He just missed with a pitch. It happens to everybody.

If you’re flipping back and forth between tonight’s games, you might have been struck by an oddity: in both Comerica Park and Chase Field, there’s a dirt strip between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. As you probably know, this is a nod to old-time baseball. But why the strip in the old times?

From Peter Morris’s essential book, A Game of Inches: The Game Behind the Scenes:

The twist to the inning, though, is that Rickey Bloomquist was actually out on the stolen base. Or, at least, he should have been. It was a close play, so this isn’t a slam on second-base umpire Jeff Kellogg, but the inning certainly would have gone quite differently if the correct call had been made.

The solution to umpires blowing calls, of course, is to not allow hits to Willie Bloomquist.

One of the more surprising stories in baseball this year was the rise of Arizona’s Josh Collmenter, who will start Game 3 of the NLDS and attempt to keep the Diamondbacks alive. Collmenter wasn’t a heralded prospect before the season started -- he couldn’t even crack Baseball America’s list of the 30 best Diamondbacks prospects -- but he came up and threw strike after strike. His career BB/9 in the minors is 3.1. In the majors he lopped off more than a walk per nine innings.

That control put him in some rare company. There aren’t a lot of rookies in baseball history who came up and threw more than 150 innings without walking more than two batters per nine innings. But though it’s rare company ... it’s also oddly nondescript company:

Kirk Gibson is sending out the same eight position players in Game 3 as he did in Game 2. Ron Roenicke thought that was a neat idea so he’s doing the same thing.

Boy, that sure makes these things an awful lot of fun to try and analyze. Many of these guys can hit. Some of them cannot hit as well as some of the others. You probably already have a good idea of who’s really productive and who’s less productive.

And for another thing, have you seen Gibson’s bench? Here is Gibson’s bench:

There’s not a lot there to choose from. All of those players have their uses, but none of them are more useful than any of the guys who’re starting. One might argue that drafting a starting lineup, then, is the easiest part of Gibson’s job.