Homers in the Gloaming

AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Box score.  Cubs early runs come off Soto and Johnson solo shots in the 2nd and 5th.  Cubs almost tacked on another in the 5th, but Soriano was thrown out at home, trying to score from second on a Lee single.  Ultimately it wasn’t enough, as the Cubs bat in the 9th down by one, but cannot score.  The Cubs move to 60-43.

Jeff Samardzija made his MLB debut in relief in the top of the 7th, just called up from the Iowa Cubs.  His fastball was consistently in the 95-97 MPH range in the 7th, with some wicked late movement.  He was more under control, and a bit slower, 92 or so, in the 8th.  He worked 2 innings, gave up one run, struck out two, gave up a weak single up the middle to Hanley, a double to Cantu, and threw a wild pitch on a pitchout.  He threw 31 pitches in all.

Howry gave up the Marlins’ go-ahead third run in the top of the 9th, on a solo homer to Hermida, which made it onto Sheffield.  Howry took the loss.

AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Fukudome is trying hard to mix things up and get it going back at home.  Notice the “Geovany Soto” stamp on his bat in the photo.  Kosuke was excellent in right field in the game, with a few good catches, and one fantastic catch, jumping up against the ivy.

Milwaukee is temporarily a 1/2 game back, and they will host the Astros at 7:05 tonight.  St. Louis is temporarily 3 1/2 back, and play the Mets in NY at 6:10.  Here’s a look at the current wild card standings in the NL:

Milwaukee     59-43   --
St. Louis     57-47  3.0
Philadelphia  54-48  5.0
Florida       54-49  5.5
Cincinnati    50-53  9.5
Los Angeles   49-52  9.5

“Without sinking into a morass of Philosophy 101 disputation about whether statistics reside in the things we observe or whether we impose them, let’s look at the ‘reality’ of the thing itself, which for our purposes is the game of baseball.  The form in which it comes to most of us is a telecast, which flattens the game into two dimensions, transforming baseball into ambulatory chess or Pac-Man; to restore contours to the game we have to imagine it even as we watch it.  The televeised game offers signposts of what baseball is like for those on the field or at the park; to recreate that feeling, the viewer relies upon his experience of playing the game or of seeing it in the open.  This act of imagination, this reconstructing of the video image, profresses from what is seen to what is unseen.  Disorientingly, in this instance the game that is seen is the abstraction while the unseen game is concrete, or ‘real.’

“This movement from the seen to the unseen describes the impulse and the activity of the game’s statisticians, too.  For them, plumbing the meaning of numbers is not mere accounting; to bring the hidden game of baseball into the open is an act of imagination, an apprehension and approximation of truth, and perhaps even a pursuit of beauty and justice.”

–John Thorn and Pete Palmer, The Hidden Game of Baseball