Great Trip; Bulls Headed Home

Wrap, Box, Providence Journal

To be honest, I spent all day Saturday getting ready for, and then enjoying, a Derby watch party. Although there was some big stirrings on the web that I’ll get to later.

But we did note that Matt Andriese had his first appearance in a Bulls uniform. Last year he was the Bulls hardest working starting pitcher, starting 25 games and pitching 162 innings with a stellar WHIP of 1.24. The Rays gave him two starts and 3 relief appearances, but just 13 innings so far this year. At least with the Bulls he will get some innings in.

Wrap, Box, Providence Journal
Season: 14-11, Trip: 5-2

Nice end to a very successful road trip, particularly the 2 out of 3 against the PawSox.

Not to take anything away from the Bulls hitters, but the game was charted to be Boston pitching prospect Brian Johnson’s show. Instead, after just 2⅔ innings his season’s ERA blew up from 0.86 to 3.42. That’s a bad day.

Mikie Mahtook’s first home run of the year, a deep fly ball that the wind blew out of the park, put the go-ahead runs across. By that time, however, Johnson’s lack of command was evident. On the short day he had 3 wild pitches and 5 walks to his credit.

The odd, and somewhat sad, stat of the day was Vince Belnome’s first RBI of the year. He drew a bases-loaded walk. Have not yet seen Mr. Belnome look in synch. We can hope.

Outside the game —

The Humberto Quintero (a catcher playing for the PawSox) story blew across the web Saturday morning.

After we wrote it up here, we got a tweet from Snorting Bull that there was video of the incident on the PawSox’s Facebook page. We put up a comment here.

We were not alone.

• Cork Gaines over at RaysIndex expressed his outrage.
• Daniel Russell at DRaysBay had some choice words and then chased down the encounter with Hak-Ju Lee and posted that.
• Mark Tompkin of the Tampa Bay Times talked to Rays manager Kevin Cash.
• Dan Perry at CBS and Mark Townsend at Yahoo commented.

We noticed that Mr. Quintero did not play in either Saturday’s or Sunday’s game. Probably a good idea.

Rosterization —

• Joey Butler, who was having a good year with the Bulls, got put on the Rays 40 man and called up. He went 1-3 today. 
• Interesting comments about soon to arrive Grant Balfour at Rays Colored Glasses.