Sweep, sweep, sweep, we lost all three. Somehow we squeezed out two wins against the Pittsburgh Pirates with our lineup of Mendozas, which surprised me to no end. Against the Cards, a team of a different caliber, we merely teased them each game, but didn't have the guns to win any.
Darvish was good, gave us 7 2/3 innings, but still allowed five runs...not many visiting teams will win in St. Louis like that, which goes double for our offense. That's 22 runs in our last nine games. We are wasting the best starting pitching staff we have ever had. That's the Cards 14, the Padres 7 for the entire series, good enough to lose all three games. Do we have anybody on the farm, perhaps? They couldn't do any worse than our guys. Voit homered, but his hits, I feel, have been less than clutch. No dinger in the ninth does us any good if there is nobody on base and we're trailing by a safe margin. Grish is at .160 and trying to pull everything. We need him on base, not swinging for the fences at every opportunity. It is now June, and our people are still in a slump.
Arenado, true to form, had three hits (including a dinger) and three RBIs, which made the difference. Their top of the order killed us the whole series. Their starting pitcher, Dakota Hudson, gave up one run in seven, only the latest pitcher to look like Sandy Koufax against our guys. It seems the starting pitcher gives up one run in the first just to tease us, like Enjoy, this will be the only run you'll get. We are still ten games above .500, and there is plenty of time to make the necessary adjustments. The Cards needed this series a lot more than we did, although the first sweep of a series by any team is still a little sobering. To make matters worse, we move on to Milwaukee, supposedly an even better team. We have Manaea, Musgrove, and Gore going for us. We'll need runs, though, or we'll lose another series.
50 games in, we stand at 30-20. Would I have taken that at the beginning of the season? You bet. There is still plenty of baseball left to play, and in the playoffs, anything is possible, as the Braves demonstrated last season. The trick is getting there, of course. There are plenty of contenders, including the Cardinals, who made a good case the whole series.
There was some good defensive plays by our guys, for sure. I loved Manny's pick and throw to end the second inning. That runner actually thought he had a chance. More good plays by Cron and Kim, so we have the pitching and defense.
On to Milwaukee. We need to win two there for anything to come out of this road trip.
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