Dioner Navarro reminds Don Mattingly about the pictures he has from their lost weekend in Tijuana.
Photo Credit: Jon Soo Hoo
Overview: Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw are good at the baseball. Juan Uribe is not. Welcome to LA, Juan Rivera!
Pros: Kemp and Kershaw come out of the All-Star break swinging, both literally and figuratively. Kemp's 2 run home run was crushed, and he just missed another in his first at bat, sending one all the way to the center field wall. Kershaw's line was somewhat marred by Juan Uribe's 7th inning error (more on that in a minute), but all 4 runs were unearned and he tacked 8 more strikeouts onto his league leading total. Those kids in Africa are going to get the greatest orphanage EVER. Juan Rivera also had a great start to his Dodgers career, golfing a solo home run into the left field bleachers on the first pitch he saw, and later adding an RBI single before being pulled for defensive replacement Tony Gwynn Jr.- a nice move from Mattingly, who has been making more good moves than bad as of late. Even Dioner Navarro counts as a plus this game, contributing 2 hits to raise his average to a robust .195.
Cons: Juan Uribe.
What we learned: Not much, all things considered. The two best players on the team dominated the opposition, and the rest of the team performed well enough to win. We learned that Mattingly, at least in the early going, isn't afraid to pull new acquisition Juan Rivera when the match up isn't in his favor. Unfortunately, we also learned that he thinks batting Juan Uribe second might help "jump start" his bat, which 1) isn't working and 2) hurts the 3-4-5 hitters' chances to produce runs by not having anyone on base to drive in.
Danny was lucky enough to go to the game (the only good thing to come out of living in Phoenix, from my estimation), so he'll post some pictures from last night sometime soon. In the meantime, we'll all prepare to see Hiroki Kuroda continue to audition for opposing team's scouts starting at 5:10 tonight.
Legit!! You guys just need to fix your Title.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kevin! Yeah, we don't love the title layout right now either. We've been trying to tweak it, but I think we're going to have to change the background photo at some point to make the Title pop. As soon as I can find a photo of Juan Castro and Luis Gonzales providing creamy veteran goodness together, I'll switch it out.
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