30-28 Game summary

Rumor has it that Brett lives under the right field seats at Safeco. If that’s true I’m pretty jealous. I only get to catch a couple games per year at the ballpark because I live down in Oregon. Today just happened to be one of those games for me, and I just got back to where I’m staying after a very warm day at the ballpark. Usually Griffin posts game summaries, but since I actually got to see the game in person for a change and not on TV or my computer, I thought I’d post a few thoughts:

• Doug Fister had no control early. He was at 40-something pitches through 2 innings and was down 3-0 at that point. It looked like it was going to be a long day. Then he really settled down and the Rays had a tough time. It’s amazing that Fister got through 7 innings considering how the game started. That’s battling. I’m slowly becoming more of a Fister fan.
• The Rays only hit a few ball genuinely hard all game. All of those were caught for outs except the Smoak error at first when he got drilled with a line drive. All the rest of the hits were bloop hits and grounders that made it through hole. Fister got really unlucky.
• Johnny Damon had a bloop double. Gutierrez was playing him really deep and there was just no way he was going to cover that much ground. On another bloop hit, Upton tried to go from first to third and Gutierrez nailed him. It also appeared that Figgin’s then threw out Kotchman at 2nd, but the umpire called him safe. Overall, the defense had a few highlights and looked good.
• Carlos Peguero‘s “hit” in the 2nd was entertaining. Fuld called off both infielders who could have gotten to it, but then lost the ball in the sun and it hit him in the hip.The whole play was about 20 feel from my seats behind third base. I got a good laugh.
• The Ray’s defensive positioning for a couple players was very interesting, especially Chone Figgins. That will have to be the topic of another blog post.
• Maybe it’s just me, but there really wasn’t any point in the game where it felt like the M’s were going to win, even after Miguel Olivo‘s HR. The offense looked really poor all game.
• It was really really warm. Whatever the bright light in the sky was, someone really needed to turn it down. My arms and neck got burned from that thing.