Things We Learned from Today's Game (7/31/11)

We decided to feature a picture of Blake Hawksworth today because, well, when is he ever going to be featured again?




Overview:  Rubby's De La Roasted.  Diamondbacks 6 Dodgers 3

Pros:  Andre Ethier, before flying out to end the game, collected four hits in his first four hit game of the season.  Matt Kemp had a couple hits, though left 3 on base as well.  Juan Rivera, who started for the second time in a row at first base (is management finally realizing that James Loney is just not very good?), contributed two hits including an RBI single.  Dioner Navarro had something of a tale of two games in that he homered and threw out two runners attempting to steal second, but he also grounded into a double play, struck out to end a rally and lost a wild pitch in an embarrassing fashion, allowing Gerardo Parra to go from first all the way to third.  Kudos also go to Blake Hawksworth, who tossed two scoreless innings when De La Rosa failed to make it into the fifth.

Cons:  Speaking of De La rosa, he labored through four innings, needing 103 pitches to do it, while walking four and giving up 3 runs.  We've seen flashes of his potential, but clearly there's still some work to be done in his development.  Hong-Chih Kuo  didn't fare any better.  In his one inning he walked one, gave up 3 hits, one of them a two run homerun to Parra, his second of the game.  Kuo had a rough July, in which he only pitched 4 and 2/3 innings.  In that span he has walked 8 and given up 7 runs, good for a 13.50 ERA.  Clearly he's having some issues, but our question is this:  If you don't trust a guy enough to pitch more than a few innings a month, why even have him on the roster?  He's not going to pitch himself out of his slump while sitting in the bullpen.
 As for the other cons of today's game.  Well, Eugenio Velez is still inexplicably on the roster, Aaron Miles put up an 0fer and the Diamondbacks announcers (I live in Phoenix) are painful to listen to.  They chastised Rafael Furcal for about ten minutes because he never gave up his number 15 jersey, never mind that he'd been wearing the number in a Dodgers uniform for over 5 years, to Davey Lopes.  Then they urged the Diamondbacks to not look ahead to their big series starting tomorrow against San Francisco  until today's game was over, and then proceeded to talk about the big series against San Francisco for the entire game.  I miss Vin Scully everyday.

What we Learned:  That we're not any less upset about Ned Colletti's asinine trade now then we were five hours ago.  A team, who clearly desperately needs offense, can't just trade away one of their top offensive prospects because they're thin at catcher.