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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August 2 – August 15, 1996 | Games 110–122 | Seventy-Eight and Forty-Four
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THREE THINGS HAPPENED IN AUGUST AND ALL OF THEM MATTER
First: the rotation put together the best twelve-game stretch in the history of this franchise. The starters went nine and one with a combined ERA so low, it is impractical to measure — Rubalcava at 0.00 over two games, Andretti at 0.69 over two, Espenoza at 0.00 over three, Strickler at 1.80 over two. The bullpen ERA across those games was not much higher. The Sacramento pitching staff leads the entire American League in ERA, starters ERA, runs allowed, hits allowed, opponents average, BABIP, walks allowed, and strikeouts. Every pitching category available. All of them.
Second: Musco hit four home runs over seven games including two-home-run performances in back-to-back outings against Portland, which is the kind of thing a thirty-six-year-old shortstop with a long history of serious injuries is not supposed to do in August of a long season when he has been managing soft-tissue ailments for five months.
Third: Manuel Hernandez of Charlotte hit his fifty-second home run of the season on August 15th, setting the all-time single-season record in the Fictional Baseball League. He now has fifty-four. He has one hundred and forty-one RBI. He is batting .371. The Hot Corner has been documenting this since April and is now simply bearing witness.
Sacramento is seventy-eight and forty-four on the season. Nine consecutive wins entering the off day. The best pitching staff in the American League by every available measure.
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DID YOU CATCH THAT GAME? — WHAT THE SCORECARDS SAY
@ Seattle, August 2-4 (3-0)
Rubalcava on August 2nd: six and two-thirds innings, one run, six strikeouts. Perez doubled in two in the first. Choi hit a two-run home run. Eight to two. Easy.
Andretti on August 3rd went five and a third innings and allowed four runs — not his cleanest outing, a game score of forty-five — but Cruz hit a three-run home run in the third and Lozano homered in the second and the offense scored nine. The who's cold list for Seattle's August starters has ERA values in the fives and sixes, and the Sacramento lineup is receiving exactly what those numbers promise. Nine to five.
Espenoza on August 4th threw seven and two-thirds innings of zero-run ball. Lopez went four for five with a home run, two doubles, and three runs scored. Perez doubled twice. Eight to one. The three-game Seattle sweep complete.
vs. San Jose, August 6-8 (2-1)
Strickler on August 6th threw seven innings of one-run baseball against a fifty-one-and-sixty-two team and lost three to two because Medina walked two batters in the ninth and the inherited runner scored on Reza's sacrifice fly. Strickler had a game score of sixty-nine. He deserved a better outcome. Three to two, San Jose.
Rubalcava on August 7th responded with six and a third innings of two unearned runs — he allowed seven hits and walked one and was effective enough that the line does not fully represent the quality of the performance. Five to two, Sacramento. Lawson held the final two and two-thirds.
Andretti on August 8th won his sixteenth game on five and two-thirds innings, which is shorter than his recent quality starts but sufficient with the bullpen behind him. Cruz homered in the first, Lozano homered in the fifth. Medina saved his thirty-second. Four to one.
vs. Portland, August 9-11 (3-0)
Espenoza on August 9th threw eight innings of three-hit shutout baseball. Eight strikeouts. A game score of eighty-four. Portland is thirty-four and eighty-six. The differential between those two facts — a game score of eighty-four against a thirty-four-win team — is slightly misleading: Espenoza's command was genuinely excellent and would have produced a similar line against better competition. His ERA through this start: 3.26, down from 3.45 two weeks ago. His WHIP leads the American League. Five to nothing.
St. Clair on August 10th threw eight and two-thirds innings and absorbed both Portland home runs — Skees in the eighth — while the lineup scored seven runs and Musco hit two home runs. I will address Musco's August separately. Seven to three.
Strickler on August 11th threw eight innings of two-run baseball and the lineup scored ten runs, nine of them in the eighth inning when the Portland bullpen lost control of an inherited-runner situation involving five batters and two home runs and eventually a mop-up pitcher named Billy Arana who produced a game score of negative nine. Musco homered twice more. Eleven to two. Five consecutive wins.
@ Los Angeles, August 12-13 (2-0)
Rubalcava on August 12th at Los Angeles: eight innings, five hits, zero runs, five strikeouts, game score of seventy-six. The lineup scored one run — Rodriguez's solo home run in the eighth. One to nothing. The winning run scored on zero baserunners except Rodriguez, who hit a pitch over the fence by himself. That is not how you want to win a game, but it is how you accept one. Six wins in a row.
Andretti on August 13th held seven and a third innings of zero-run ball. His ERA through this start: 2.98. Below three, for the first time since May. MacDonald hit a two-run homer in the fifth, Lopez homered in the eighth. Four to nothing, Sacramento. Seven consecutive wins.
vs. Salt Lake City, August 14-15 (2-0)
Espenoza on August 14th threw seven innings of shutout ball. Berrios hit a two-run homer in the seventh. Lawson held the final two. Five to nothing. Eight consecutive wins at the time of writing.
St. Clair on August 15th won his ninth game with six and a third innings of one-run pitching. Mollohan homered. Perez hit a three-run shot in the seventh. Eight to one. Rodriguez left the game in the sixth inning with a hip impingement and was placed on the ten-day IL the same night. Rodriguez, who has eighteen home runs and forty-nine RBI, is expected to miss approximately three weeks. Prayers win for the ninth time straight.
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THE STORIES THAT DEFINE THIS STRETCH
The rotation is the best pitching staff in this league and I am going to declare it an established fact — First in AL ERA, first in starters ERA, first in runs allowed, first in hits allowed, first in opponents average, first in BABIP, first in walks allowed, first in strikeouts. Not top three. First. All eight pitching categories tracked by the league standings table. The specific question that interested me in March was whether the 1996 rotation would be better than the 1994 championship rotation. The answer is yes. Andretti's ERA is 2.98. Rubalcava's is 3.30. Espenoza, who I spent most of April worrying about, is 3.11. Strickler is 3.52. The fifth starter St. Clair is 3.90. This is a rotation without a weak spot in September.
Andretti is seventeen and three with a 2.98 ERA and leads baseball in wins — The Cy Young conversation is essentially closed. Thompson is eleven and six at 3.67. Andretti leads Thompson in wins by six, ERA by sixty-nine points, and has been the most consistent starting pitcher in the American League over the last sixty games. The Hot Corner is not making a formal Cy Young prediction because there are forty-four games remaining. What I am saying is that the argument for any other pitcher in the American League would require acknowledging a gap that is now substantial.
Musco hit four home runs in three games and is hitting .348 over his last seven starts — Two home runs against Portland on August 10th, two more on August 11th — a four-home-run weekend against a team at thirty-four wins that is meaningless to the standings but meaningful to the question of whether Musco at thirty-six, with the three separate injury interruptions just this year alone, is still the player I have been covering since 1993. He really is. When he plays, he is producing at a level that would earn him AL MVP consideration if he had enough plate appearances to qualify.
Lopez reached fifty stolen bases on August 4th — The Hot Corner predicted in March that the 1995 mechanical regression was resolved. Through August 15th Lopez has nineteen home runs and fifty-two stolen bases. His career high in steals was sixty-nine in 1995. He is on pace to exceed that on his current trajectory. The power-speed combination he has produced this year — nineteen home runs and fifty-two steals — is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in Sacramento franchise history.
Rodriguez to the ten-day IL with a hip impingement is the most significant injury since Andretti's back spasm scare — Eighteen home runs, forty-nine RBI, and the breakout season the Hot Corner predicted in March is now interrupted for three weeks. Alex "Energizer Bunny" Bonilla has been called back up for the first time since 1993 season, and the lineup will shuffle accordingly. I expect the offense to absorb this without catastrophic impact because the depth is genuine — Cruz, Musco, Perez, and Lozano are all producing at levels that compensate for one absent hitter. The concern is October: Rodriguez returning from a hip impingement in late August and being ready for a playoff run in October requires specific monitoring.
The left-handed pitching problem appears resolved — The record against left-handed starters was two and six through forty games. Through one hundred and twenty-two games the record is twelve and eleven. The team found the adjustment somewhere in June and July and has been beating left-handed pitching at the same rate as right-handed since. I do not have a mechanical explanation for what changed. I am just documenting the outcome.
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AROUND THE LEAGUE
Columbus is eighty-one and forty-one. They have been slightly less dominant in August — five and five over their last ten — but the lead over Detroit is eleven and a half and the division title is not in question. The October bracket from Sacramento's perspective requires winning the AL West — which is done in everything but formal arithmetic — and then most likely facing the second-place AL Central team in the ALDS, which would be Detroit at sixty-nine and fifty-two, before an ALCS against Columbus.
Manuel Hernandez broke the all-time FBL home run record with his fifty-second on August 15th. He now has fifty-four. The Hot Corner has been tracking this since April and has run out of adequate language. He is one hundred and fourteen games into a season where he is batting .371 with fifty-four home runs and one hundred and forty-one RBI. The record book has been rewritten. I predict Manuel Hernandez to be a first ballot Hall-of-Famer when he becomes eligible.
Charlotte is fifteen and a half behind Columbus after losing Sato and their closer Rodriguez to season-ending injuries. They have won three consecutive games but the rotation depth problem is real.
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THE INBOX — Questions worth answering
From Cristina Nakamura of Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood, a woman who builds scale model ships for a hobby and has constructed fourteen of them over the past twelve years in a spare bedroom her husband calls "the harbor," who asks: "Is this the best Sacramento team ever?"
Cristina, yes. The 1994 team won the World Series with Rubalcava at his peak and Cruz and Musco at twenty-six. This team has deeper pitching — a five-man rotation that is first in eight pitching categories — and a more balanced offense. The 1995 back-to-back team was better than 1994. This team is better than 1995. The specific reason is Andretti, whose emergence as an ace has given the rotation a first starter capable of winning a deciding game in October, which Rubalcava provided in 1994 and 1995 but may not be positioned to do at thirty-three in the same capacity.
From Gregory Osei-Bonsu of Elk Grove, a high school band director who has spent twenty years teaching teenagers to play instruments and has developed a specific tolerance for controlled chaos that he suspects prepared him perfectly for following this bullpen, who asks: "What happened to Medina?"
Gregory, the blown save and the loss in July were the anomalies. He has thirty-three saves now with a 2.45 ERA. The bullpen behind him — Lawson five and zero, Gonzalez holding the who's hot section, Benson with sixteen holds — has been the most reliable late-inning unit this organization has assembled. What happened to Medina is that he had two bad outings in July and then went back to being the pitcher who has been closing games since April.
From Patience Abara of Sacramento's Natomas neighborhood, a pediatric occupational therapist who evaluates children's motor development for a living and who recently informed me through the mailbag that she has been naming her assessment categories after Sacramento Prayers players since 2014, who asks: "With Rodriguez hurt, who bats cleanup?"
Patience, the honest answer is that Jimmy Aces has been rotating the four spot among Cruz, Musco, and Perez depending on the opposing starter since July, and Rodriguez's absence formalizes what was already an informal rotation. My projection: Perez bats fourth against right-handed starters, Musco against lefties. Perez has fifteen home runs and eighty RBI and hit a three-run home run in the seventh inning of the August 15th win. The cleanup spot is not unoccupied — it has several qualified candidates.
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Nashville visits next, which is a three-game series against a team that has won nine of its last ten but remains twenty-six and a half games behind Sacramento in the standings. Then Washington at home. The rotation cycles back to Rubalcava, Andretti, and Espenoza over the next six days.
Seventy-eight wins. Forty-four games remaining. The magic number is nineteen.
Got a question for the mailbag? Find the Hot Corner wherever you get your podcasts.
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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.