Thursday, June 28, 2007 |
Unit Body Framed: Dodgers 9, Diamondbacks 5
"He is Randy Johnson, but at the end of the day, he's still got to throw the ball over the plate and get people out," said Martin, likely to be named an All-Star for the first time on Sunday. "You can't go out there thinking, 'That's Randy Johnson, future Hall of Famer.' You have a game plan like you would for any pitcher.For his part, Johnson, who didn't get into the fourth, attributed his part in the loss to an 18-day layoff. (I'm inclined to say that being 43 has something to do with it, too, but then when you're my — er, our age — the mind has a way of playing funny tricks on you."And I also think, he's still good, but that's not the same stuff he had when I watched him on television and he was absolutely dominating back in the day. The 0-2 pitch I hit, when he was throwing 99 [mph], even if he misses his spot, he had the velocity to compensate and I foul it straight back. Not today."
Martin's two-run jack in the first set the tone for the game, which was, most of the way, a laugher for the Dodgers. The Dodgers' supercatcher went 3-for-6 with a pair of RBIs, and in fact everyone in the one through four part of the lineup got at least two hits. Even Randy Wolf, who had one of his better recent games, got in the act and had a pair of hits.
At the mound, Wolf mostly cruised through six frames, giving up only one run in the fourth on Carlos Quentin's sac fly. He finally got whacked in the seventh, when he gave up a single and two walks to load the bases with nobody out. Grady Little selected Brett Tomko to extract the Dodgers from that jam, which proved about as fatal as expected, with only one of the three failing to score. When Tomko maintained the lead through the eighth (without any Snakes crossing the plate, even!), Little got even more enthusiastic, and allowed him to go in the ninth.
Whereupon he had to eventually be replaced by Takashi Saito after giving up another couple of runs, and a long flyball out to dead center. The griping at DT is that he can't even handle a blowout game without coughing up some lead. That's Bombko; some days, he'll be just good enough to convince you he can be useful. Maybe a two-inning leash?
Labels: diamondbacks, dodgers, recaps
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