Trachsel Pinches Out 10th Victory of Season

You might call this a workman-like performance. In other words, not a millionaire, not a welfare recipient but just good enough to get by.


Why does is seem like Trachsel is putting a 16 pound shot rather than a 5 ounce avoirdupois baseball



Steve Trachsel allowed 3 earned runs and 7 hits in less than six innings work, just enough to squeak by with his 10th victory against 5 losses in a 6-5 Mets victory over the Marlins, just enough to maintain his telling 5.12 ERA, down from 5.14 which by last count ranked him 81st in the Major Leagues. It's also expected when you've walked more batters (54) than struck out (53) for the season. I think I've just reduced this from workman-like to a pedestrian performance.

Interestingly enough, Willie slipped Aaron Heilman in the set-up to Wagner for the second consecutive night although Roberto Hernandez did get his 2006 Met debut.

After Trachsel allowed two homers in the 6th off three batters, then walked another, Hernandez came in to induce an inning-ending fly ball from 5'9 Cody Ross to Cliff Floyd. Hernandez then came out for the 7th inning to allow Willie to see a little more and what he saw was a wild pitch strikeout followed by a single to centerfield by the deadly Alfredo Almezaga before inducing the next two batters into line outs to center and pop ups to first respectively before yielding the mound to the honourable Mr Pedro Feliciano.

It did get quite alot more exciting than that thereafter. There was the clever little chess match of relievers and pinch hitters between Willie and Marlins rookie manager which resulted in Miguel Cabrera's two-run single off of Chad Bradford making the score a suddenly nail-biting 6-5.

Aaron Heilman pitched a perfect 8th with two swinging strikeouts to his credit and was followed by another yipping performance by Billy Wagner, who allowed a single and hit a batter before regaining his bearings and striking out the side for the save.


It's amazing how wide a man's mouth can open when he's angry

An in an ironic twist in the 9th inning, Lastings Milledge replaced Floyd after Floyd was ejected from the game for arguing strikes rather than the other way around. Of course, Floyd didn't bump the ump like Milledge appeared to have done last Sunday down in AAA but this is the Major Leagues after all. There's nowhere to run and hide from here.

Curios

Paul LoDuca had three hits last night which raised his post-All Star game average to .377 - you might enjoy being reminded that he is more of a day hitter than a night hitter (perhaps he could use a pair of those night vision gogles the GIs use.) Day games he is hitting .397 whilst only hitting .289 at night.

For the second straight night a Met was walked thrice in a game by the Marlins pitching staff. Last night it was Carlos Delgado getting the plethera of free pases. It's not as if the Marlins needed to be particularly frightened of their former teammate. In 8 games against the Marlins he's hitting .307 with no homers and 4 RBIs.

In going 0 for 5 last night, David Wright left 10 runners on base. In fact, between him, Cliff Floyd and Jose Valentin the trio left a total of 21 runners on base. That's almost more than the 22 the entire Marlin team left on base last night.

*****


Jesus didn't wear a cowboy hat as far as I can tell.

Don't worry, the Army isn't getting all trendy and suddenly spreading poker news around as if it were a sport like many media outlets do these days but I couldn't help but do a double take seeing this Chris "Jesus" Ferguson photograph and wonder how come the religious right aren't freaking out over a poker player being nicknamed after their saviour.

Guess they're waiting for something really blasphemous, like the re-release of Life of Brian or something.