Team Takes 3 of 4 In Early-Season Road Trip
After YS9 bats were blanked by Amayas Moelling to start what was looming as a critical ten-game road trip, pitching coach Alberto Sanchez got his staff together for a quick closed-door meeting. Whatever he said seems to have worked. The Nine won the next three games at Chicago’s Pig Slop stadium, with the staff doing a big chunk of the damage.
“It’s hard to lose when you don’t give up a lot of runs,” quipped manager Bill Inkster on get-away day. “Any time you leave a division rival’s home town with three wins in four games is a good time.”
While the bats did manage to eek out 13 runs in those last three games, the credit goes mostly to the arms—both the rotation and the bullpen.
The rotation set the table just fine, even Valle dropping workable numbers in the Moelling fiasco:
| Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | K | HR | PI | PS | PQS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valle (L) | 7 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 91 | 62 | 1 |
| Pineda (W) | 5.1 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 94 | 55 | 1 |
| Ramos (W) | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 90 | 59 | 4 |
| Ramirez | 5.1 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 90 | 55 | 0 |
The bullpen, however, was where the fun was. Six different pitchers saw the mound during the Sox series, distributed as follows:
| Gm | Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | K | HR | PI | PS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | O'Macken | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 15 | 11 |
| 2 | Perez (H) | 1.2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 39 | 23 |
| 2 | Hernandez (H) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 11 | 8 |
| 2 | Phillips (S) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 8 |
| 3 | O'Macken (S) | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 58 | 35 |
| 4 | Duarte | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 14 | 11 |
| 4 | Fernandez (W) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 13 | 6 |
| 4 | Perez (H) | .1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 4 | Phillips (S) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 14 | 8 |
“You’ve got to give some credit to the topside,” Inkster said. “They’ve built this bullpen from within—well, the staff as a whole, really. The parts all work pretty well together.”
Of particular note was Tiernan O’Macken’s 58-pitch, three-inning outing behind Ramos’s start, which Inkster said was critical to keeping the rest of the bullpen fresh. “He can go that kind of distance when we need him to.” Like several Nine relievers, O’Macken started games for several seasons in the minors.
“I like getting multiple innings,” O’Macken said. “You get a feel for the flow of things when you know you’re sticking around. It’s less man a man and more a game of give and take. Maybe you don’t show a pitch until the right time because you want to get the other guys buzzing.”
“That bullpen makes it tough to go against the Nine,” said Grumpy Baseball Addicts Quarterly analyst Gayle Combs. “You want to get past their rotation, but then you don’t want to deal with the next line, either.”
The three victories left the Nine 6-3 heading to the next stop in the trip—a two game stint in Seattle.
