Attendance: 5,794
Game Time: 3:34
Weather: 70 degrees, sunny
Wind: 10 mph, in from CF
Umpires: Home Plate – Chad Whitson, First Base – Bill Welke, Third Base
– Sean Barber
Seventh-inning stretch song: YMCA – The Village People
Section IBX3, Row 21, Seat 5 – just on the 3rd base side of
home plate, one row from the top (but still plenty close), totally in the
shade, so I was glad I decided to wear a long sleeve shirt
LECOM Park (formerly McKechnie Field) was a lot nicer than I remembered
it from past visits. You can now walk completely around the park, with some
recently-added concessions stands beyond the outfield. (I can now stay I’ve
tried Gator Bites, which are relatively mild and taste at least a little like
chicken.) There’s also plenty of space behind the stands down the first base
line. The downside to Bradenton has always been the traffic. This year I was
pleasantly surprised with my trip down; I think that Google Navigation helped
me get a route through the town to the ballpark with relatively light traffic.
Even when much of the crowd left the game before the end, however, getting out
of the town after the game was still a painfully slow process.
This turned out to be a great game for the Phils, as they jumped out to
an 8-0 lead in the 5th and never looked back. Maikel Franco was the
#1 star, with a 2-run homer in the 4th and a grand slam an inning
later. Jorge Alfaro doubled in the first two runs in the 2nd.
Hernandez, Santana, Hoskins, and Altherr also had two hits each.
Aaron Nola blanked the Bucs over his 4 innings, giving up just 4 hits
and 1 walk while fanning 5. (Batting 8th, he also beat out an
infield grounder in the second inning to get one of the team’s 15 hits for the
day.) After Nola’s departure, the Phils seemingly staged a competition between
Hoby Milner and Zac Curtis for the lefty-specialist role in the bullpen, having
them pitch in the 5th and the 7th innings respectively to
the same Pirates batters. Each fanned lefty-hitting prospect Kevin Kramer and
veteran Cody Dickerson, around hits by the righty-swinging Kevin Newman, who
doubled against Milner and singled off Curtis. Milner finished his outing by retiring
Starling Marte; Curtis gave up a single to Marte before getting a popup from
Gregory Polanco.
New Phillies manager Gabe Kapler has made news this spring by
occasionally flip-flopping his left and right fielders in the middle of an
inning, to protect novice left-fielder Rhys Hoskins when a batter comes up with
a pronounced tendency to hit many more balls to left than right. I did get to
see the switch in action, as Hoskins moved to right and Altherr took over LF
whenever Pittsburgh first-baseman Josh Bell came to the plate. Oddly, Bell was
hitting left-handed, and the infield was in a standard shift for left-handed
hitters, meaning the Phils data showed that Bell would hit grounders to the
right side and fly balls to the left. He singled to right in the 1st,
walked in the 4th, and fanned in the 6th.
The Phillies brought along several young guys from their minor-league
camp as late-inning replacements. (They made 4 defensive substitions during the
seventh-inning stretch, which both MLB At Bat and the stadium scoreboard got in
the wrong positions in the batting order.) If you’ve ever heard of Luke
Williams, Jiandido Tromp, or Jesus Alastre, you either work for the team or
need to find some other activities to occupy your time. The Pirates, on the
other hand, kept their starting nine (except for pitchers) in for the entire
game. This yielded a great if largely unseen bottom of the ninth, when the
Phils brought in 26-year-old, 5-10 lefty Joey DeNato to finish the game.
According to baseball-reference.com, DeNato pitched in AA and AAA for the
Phillies last year and was “drafted by the Phillies in the 19th round of the
2014 MLB June Amateur Draft from Indiana University-Bloomington.” At any rate,
the unsung DeNato worked a 1-2-3 final frame, retiring in order each member of
Pittsburgh’s regular starting outfield (Dickerson, Marte, Polanco).
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