MVN - Most Valuable Network

Too Bad Punches Don’t Count As Runs

No, the season’s not over, but watching your squad continue to score zero runs in a baseball game can really start to wear on you.

There have been 17 different games this season when the Dodgers have scored 1 or 0 runs in an entire ballgame. We’re 28-30, so that’s 58 games. In 17 of our 58 games we’ve scored one run or less. I wish I could find a stat for this somewhere, but aside from the Padres, there’s no way that there’s another team in baseball that has played that many games scoring that little runs.

In our last 12 games we’ve scored 32 runs. Take away Game One with the Rockies when we scored 8, and Game Two with the Mets when we scored 9, and that’s 15 runs in the other 10 games. I don’t have to tell you that 15 Runs in 10 games is 1.5 Runs per game, and that’s not very good at the Major League level.

It’s never been so apparent how much we miss Rafael Furcal, and Jones is out (who cares?), but now Kemp’s going to get suspended too.

That was crazy last night though huh?

I was watching the game in Colorado, and by the way that the Colorado-homer-announcers were talking, you’d have thought Torrealba was a peace-loving nun, or an innocent and wide-eyed infant who’d never seen the world. Then they make Matt Kemp out to be some villain looking for nothing but blood and trouble.

I know Kemp shoved him first. When the tape gets back to league offices, they’re going to see that Kemp shoved Torrealba first, and that’s what’s going to get him suspended.

That being said, take a look back and check out how it went down.

Kemp was furious he had struck out, as he should be; he was 0-for-4, and started to jog towards first because the ball had hit the dirt.

As he began to run, the bat he was still carrying in his hand nudged the ball out of the way, and the home plate umpire called him out, so he stopped running, probably happy not to have to exert the effort running to first after a horrible looking strike out.

Torrealba went up to tag him, which is fine, but Kemp just got a little upset over the unnecessary contact, and gave Yorvit a little shove. That’s when things got a little sloppy.

In retaliation, Yorvit took a pretty solid two-handed swing at Kemp, and landed one of his hands on Kemp’s neck, and the other one nailed Matt in the chin. It was a hard shove.

I’m not really sure anybody wanted to fight that bad in a 2-0 game in the bottom of the ninth, but these are two very frustrated teams, and the second there was contact with his face, Kemp went after Torrealba.

What ensued was a whole lot of nothing. Kemp and Torrealba got separated, and nobody else really seemed to care about the fight. Delwyn Young had to get held back, but it didn’t seem like he wanted to punch anyone, he just wanted to be a part of all in his first-ever big league scuffle.

Long story short, we need Matt Kemp right now. If he’s suspended for something like a week, and we have to start either Delwyn Young or Terry Tiffee in the outfield, and move Juan Pierre back to Center, we’re in even more trouble.

Good news is I’m leaving for the weekend. I’m going to my second music festival in the past three weeks, and this seems like a pretty good time to just get Dodger updates on my phone rather than absorbing the stinky Television rays of our sputtering offense.

Nate also packed it in for a little backpack trip around Europe, so that’s where he is.

I’ll be gone all weekend, so it’d be pretty cool if you were messing around on MVN and decided to leave a comment or two underneath the article and talk about what’s about to go down this weekend.

I’m not gonna be here, so you should do some writing; let me know what I missed.

Peace, love and music. Let’s score some runs please. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 8:34 am and is filed under Delwyn Young, aaron sapiro, Terry Tiffee, Matt Kemp, Dodger Loses, Rafael Furcal, Andruw Jones, $35 All You Can Eat, Juan Pierre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.