More on last night's game

Off the top, I worked in Fort McMurray for a very short time, many many years ago. It wasn't a very nice place then. It was a place quickly put together for people to come and, temporarily, stay, while making much more money than they could anywhere else. Since then it has become a much nicer place, a place where you could actually make a life. At least until yesterday. I can only wish the best for people running from the fire.

When teams are going bad offensively, I always hear the same thing: "they look lifeless out there". And they do. It's hard to look anything but lifeless if you aren't hitting/scoring. "Look at his body language, he looks defeated". Well, yeah, he just struck out. "Look at how quiet they are in the dugout". But if they were happy and bouncing around we would be on their case because they clearly aren't getting it. Reyes got all kinds of complaints for smiling, even when it wasn't right after a loss, if he was happy the next day, there was something wrong with him.

They did look lifeless (on offense, they looked pretty amazing on defense) for 8 innings of last night's game. Every time it looked life they were going to, finally, score, they would hit into a double play. Nothing looks as lifeless as hitting into a double play.

Anyone else think that Darwin Barney is, at least, the equal of Ryan Goins defensively? He made, by my count,  4 exception plays in last night's game. Unfortunately MLB doesn't have the clips set up for embedding, but this play was my favorite:

Roughed Odor didn't seem all that pleased with the tag. It's, in part, his fault for acting like he was going to slide and then staying up right. Josh was getting ready to tag him on the ground then had to bring his hands up to tag Odor while he was running past.

And that 15 pitch at bat in the 7th was an amazing thing, even if he did strikeout looking at the end of it.

The way Barney has been hitting I'd be quite willing to give him the full time job at second and have Goins fill in occasionally.

Six innings of 2 hit ball from Marco Estrada goes a long way to settling my worries about his shoulder. I'll admit, that home run, to start off the game, had me wondering. After that, he was pretty amazing.

I have to give Gibby credit for pulling Marco at 88 pitches. After 118 pitches, in his last start, a slightly lighter load seems like a good idea. Way to go Gibby.

The two home runs by Justin Smoak (both to the opposite field) shows why he gets chance after chance, even after less than successful seasons in the majors. When a guy has that much power, teams will give him every chance to figure it out. Players without that one skill that makes them stand out won't get near as long to figure things out.

It does sort of remind me of when Edwin Encarnacion started with the team. People hated him. He was E5. He was "lazy". But, every now and then, you would see home much power he had and you just hoped that he would figure it all out. We were so lucky to get him back from Oakland.

I severely doubt he'll turn out to be anywhere near as good as Edwin, but if he'll continue to take walks and if he can continue to have little hot streaks of bunched home runs, I'm willing to send him out there. I guess it is too much to hope he'll keep the .421 OBP going?