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Major League Hecklers, Minor League Ball

Your Portland Beavers 6, Oklahoma City Redhawks 5

Introduction

The double team, baseball man-sandwich of Thomas King and Daniel Woytek are back again to not only restore sanity to AAA baseball coverage but to also solve multiple immigration issues, clean up oil spills and report on the oldest and second best Portland/Oklahoma City rivalry in all of professional sport — a rivalry that was rekindled Thursday evening.

The Graduate, Wade LeBlanc

In one of our earlier pieces for the Sportsman concerning the Beavers it was mentioned that some of the more intriguing players for the Beavers this year would be the members of the starting pitching rotation. One of the pitchers in that list included Wade LeBlanc, whom I flippantly referred to as “Junkballer Extraordinaire”. This moniker is admittedly is sort of a back-handed compliment and LeBlanc is making me eat my cynical baseball nerd words. After starting two games with the Beavers, Wade LeBlanc was promoted because of an injury to Chris Young and has posted a 3.32 ERA in 7 starts for the San Diego Padres. Nerds like me tend to look at his Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP-which has been created to mirror the ERA number) which, for LeBlanc, isn’t as shimmery (3.47) and began to align with his ERA after getting jacked around by the potent Seattle Mariner offense (yes that is a joke). Regardless, he has probably earned his way into a starting job for the foreseeable future in San Diego.

There and Back Again featuring “The Hobbit”

In anticipation of Thursday nights matchup, I had the opportunity to look over the previous writings done on these eletronic pages about the Portland Beavers. It was mentioned in about Lance Zawadzki that he might have an opportunity to play Major League Baseball because of the Padres lack of depth in the middle infield. Alas that opportunity reared its head recently as starting shortstop Everth Cabrera went to the 15 day disabled list recently and Zawadzki got the MLB phone call. The move by Jed Hoyer and the Padres brass seemed almost definitely a move for depth and not to give a prospect a try. He saw action in 6 games, earning 3 hits and 3 BB’s in 14 plate appearances and was immediately demoted back to Portland with the return of Cabrera. Congrats on the cup of coffee Lance, and for your there and back again status, you have earned the nickname “Hobbit”, with the baseballing men at the Portland Sportsman.

Baseball ain’t all puppies and roses!

If a visually impaired person asked me to describe Thursday’s Portland Beavers tilt with the Oklahoma City Redhawks, the first words would be the game was all “rainbowy and shit!”. As the sunshiny hail of the late afternoon cleared out, the diehards at PGE (all sixteen of them) were treated to an early game double rainbow over left and left centerfield which was expertly paired with Kermit’s classic, “Rainbow Connection” by PGE soundman, Steve (who was immediately congratulated by passersby) during the middle of the 3rd. Thomas and I happened to be sitting next to Steve who was visibly prideful and rightfully so. In the bottom the Beavers scored two runs to extend their lead to 4-0. Coincidence, methinks not.

Game report

Thursday night’s matchup between the Oklahoma City Redhawks and Portland Beavers, first and last place in their divisions, respectively, began in what can only be called miserable conditions: soupy, rain-laden skies, a bone chill to the air, soggy outfield, and a crowd so thin Danny and I could count heads instead of depending on the official attendance report. Our count? Below three hundred. Yes, here was minor league baseball in Portland, Oregon, mid-May of 2010. If you’d have asked me back in my early ’80s childhood what baseball would look like in two-thousand-motherfucking-ten, my mind would have conjured up space bubbles and anti-gravity bullpens, not padded Miller Beer cans gunning for the ribbon to amuse a tiny freezing crowd.

But our spirits — and our national pride — were lifted a few minutes before first pitch by the handsome and buttoned up barbershop group whose name, unfortunately, was garbled by the PA system and which your fearless reporters never bothered to dig up later in the game (it’s incredibly difficult to find such information after the fact, one of those almost delightfully un-Googleable facts that peter into the unarchived past). This group of some twenty men of a certain (advanced) age braved the elements to shoulder up and deliver the “Star Spangled Banner” so quickly and with such a rush through the expected pauses, one wondered if they simply had to keep singing to keep the bow ties from synching up around their necks. The whole song was over in a matter of seconds, and the distinguished singers filed off the field in their matching gray suits and “I’ve-been-surrounded-by-supportive-family-for-fifty-years-so-now-I-get-to-do-the-thing-I-always-wanted-to-do-which-is-sing-barbershop” smiles, presumably toward a warm suite and a bottomless hot cocoas.

Did we witness a game? And how! As Danny alluded to previously, we were treated to a handful of genuine prospects and as least one unexpected bonus preview in the person of Alexi Ogando, the 27-year-old outfielder-turned-pitcher who threw absolute heat during his relief appearance and whose life is the stuff of non-sports publication feature stories. There was Jarrod Saltalamacchia, whose 13-letter surname has earned him the distinction of “Longest Name in Baseball History,” there was the promising pitching matchup of Radhames Liz v. Tommy Hunter, and there was, after all, professional baseball.

The first inning began well enough for the 3-1 Liz, who came out throwing mid-nineties heat and a couple of off-speed pitches that Danny and I figured for a changeup and a kind of cut fastball or slider. The two speeds would end up being sufficient to keep OK City off-balance most of the night, as he struck out five over the first six innings and got even their best hitters to look bad on a few batted balls. But this being Liz’s eight professional season (first with the Beavers) and with his inability to go deep into games, it seems we have a pitcher who’s destined to own a AAA rotation spot for the rest of his career. We just don’t see a scenario in which Liz is called up to the big club for any significant amount of time.

Portland started the scoring in the second inning with a string of hits and an error on Redhawk’s shortstop Esteban German, who’d been written onto the lineup card as the second baseman but had been shuffled to the left side when regular SS Gregorio Petit was replaced by Hernan Iribarren. Whatever the case, Beaver’s SS Lance Zawadzki sparked his big night with an RBI double to score Craig Cooper, then came around himself on eighth-place hitter Anthony Contreras‘s RBI single. The next inning Portland doubled down with another two runs off Hunter, again with a string of little hits.

Liz hummed through the first four innings but ran into trouble in the fifth, despite allowing zero hits in the frame. The ninth- through second-place hitters all reached base when Liz lost command of the strike zone, walking two and plunking leadoff hitter Craig Gentry with an errant off-speed pitch. By this time the rain was really coming down and the players, especially the visitors from Oklahoma (where, incidentally, temps were in the high eighties), looked defeated by the downpour.

As PGE’s fearless sound man Steve predicted after consulting the radar, however, the rains soon abated and the game was never in real danger of being stopped.

While the game and the scoring were far from over, the attentions of your bespectacled, keyboard-tapping duo (make it a trio with visiting photographer Curt Merrill darting around the stadium with his obscenely large zoom lens and his keen eye) soon wandered. This was Thirsty Thursday after all, and the real story was about to shift from the field into the stands, where the four clumps of fans started to come alive with serious heckles and indecipherable yelps toward no one in particular. You should have heard it. Without a real crowd to keep them in check (or at least to absorb some of the vibrations escaping their drunken throats), the hecklers came out in force. It reminded more of the street scene outside a strip of bars at closing time than a baseball game, and you could see the poor parents cringing every time the frat boys in their Georgia caps screamed at the batter to stop sucking so much dick, or something. You were almost proud of the guys for their willingness to abandon self respect and sprint full-speed into that Miller-built abattoir where inhibitions go to die. “Eat a dick, Cooper,” you almost want to shout. “I play a better first base on my softball team!”

The three of us watched the last few innings away from the safety of PGE’s broadcast booth, known lovingly by media as the “A.E. Doyle Memorial Booth” after that architect’s poor planning left no funds to complete the space, which remains to this day an open-air, half-finished shelf that’s exposed not only to the elements but to the luxury boxes immediately behind. You see, we wanted one of them $2.50 beers before the sixth inning ended, and that wasn’t going to happen anywhere but the seats (of which, as we said earlier, there were plenty).

And so the game concluded, with both starting pitchers leaving the game’s fate to the relief corps. The Redhawks came swooping back in the seventh with a merry-go-round of doubles that resulted in three runs, but at that point our fingers were cold, our scorecards got tired (when did that third pitcher enter the game for OK City?), and the only thing that could raise our blood pressure was the cannon arm hanging from the right shoulder of one Mr. Ogando.

Alexi Ogando, a testament to baseball’s awesomeness

Since I’ve seemingly been on a sort of hypothetical kick during the course of this article, will the reader indulge me in another? I assume that silence means that I can proceed. Assume for a moment, one of your lesser enlightened friends exclaims to you that they do not hold baseball deep in their hearts and cherish it with every breath in their body.

Well, after reading this section you should be able to:

• Tell them the story of Alexi Ogando.
• Tell that person, “Stick It, baseball can kick your ass!”

I predict your friend’s heart will either explode with excitement, or won’t hear anything else said because he/she will be devouring anything Ogando related from that point forward.

Alexi Ogando is a former farmhand for the Oakland Athletics. He played two years in the outfield for low level A’s teams and was invited to spring training in 2005. Upon trying to obtain a work visa for the 2005 season he admitted to fraud and was denied admittance to the United States for five years. The Texas Rangers organization picked up Ogando and converted him to pitcher, but he was limited to playing only in the Dominican Republic for the last five years, receiving his United States visa again in February of this year.

He’s now 27 and back in the minor leagues this time as a pitcher. To watch Ogando on the mound can only be compared to watching a cross between a fawn trying to walk for the first time and a teenaged young man seeing a naked lady in person. One kind of expects him to fall over at any moment, but then the ball leaves his hand toward the plate and the feeling is inexplicably visceral (in a good way). Also, the results have been pretty impressive so far. In 21 innings facing AA and AAA batters he has 29 K’s and 5 bases on balls. That’s really good for a guy who is probably still learning how to pitch.

Ogando features a fastball that consistently touched 96 MPH and reached 97 once, his second pitch comes in at about 81 MPH but it lacks the arm action/deception of a changeup or the movement of a breaking pitch. I can only refer to it as a “slowball”. The fastball was devastating on Thursday night getting whiffs, and no real solid contact against. Ogando was pitching in the strike zone the whole time on the mound, which could be a bad thing if he can’t fool people but provides for pretty exciting at bats. Also, this has just been reported, on the “OH BOY!” meter, he rates very high.

Foul Balls!

Gregorio Petit- The starting shortstop for the Oklahoma City Red Hawks left the game rapidly in the 2nd inning Thursday. Judging by his career minor league strikeout to walk ratio (488 K:192 BB), my guess is that he suffered from acute yet chronic diarrhea of the strikezone.

We’d like to leave you with a bizarre image: living inside the open and apparently filthy guts of the Fred Meyer Family Deck is a gang of feral cats. Amazing. Next time you’re at a game look out there and imagine the writhing mass of feline heat and waste and hair and claws; I get all Indiana Jones when I think of that scene. And now this: a few years ago one of those stray kitties found itself on the business end of a rolled up tarp, which tarp was not unrolled again until the following season by a grounds crew that was greeted that fine spring day with a mummified cat pressed thin as a throw rug and smelling, you guess, none too pretty.

Press Box Menu: 2009 Portland Beavers “Cosa Nostra” Edition

• Pizza!
• Raviolis!
• Caeser Salad!
• Fruit Salad! (Italians like fruit too)
• Italian Cookies! (not really, mostly oatmeal raisin)

Soundtrack- Mercurial Weather Edition

• Personal Favorite: “People’s Court Theme Song” during Umpire Crew introductions
• “Jailbreak,” by Thin Lizzy immediately following National Anthem
• “Are You Gonna Go My Way,’ by Lenny Kravitz during coaches conference at home plate
• 1st inning: “Keep ‘em Separated,” by the Offspring
• 2nd inning: “Spirit in the Sky,” by Norman Greenbaum
• 4th inning: “Spiderwebs,” by No Doubt
• 5th inning: “Hash Pipe,” by Weezer
• 6th inning: “Doo Wop (That Thing),” by Lauren Hill
• Every time Eric Munson bats: “White Orchid,” by the White Stripes
• And, of course, the now-famous “Rainbow Connection” by none other than Kermit the Frog during the outbreak of rainbows. Coincidence that the sound man had that track on his iTunes? I think not. Been waiting to pull out that song for years.