MVN - Most Valuable Network

Nolasco, Marlins hand Webb his first loss

The Marlins have already played the part of the party pooper once this year, denying Greg Maddux his 250th win. They made an encore performance on Wednesday night defeating the Diamondbacks, 3-1, handing Brandon Webb his first loss and keeping his name out of the history books as just the second pitcher to ever win his first 10 games.

Webb started off his usual dominant, using his insane breaking stuff to set down his first 11 in order. He threw first pitch strikes to 10 of them. The early Cy Young favorite took a perfect game into the 4th. That’s where his night would slowly start coming undone. With two outs, Webb gave up his first hit, a Jorge Cantu double. His next four hitters: strikeout, triple, suicide squeeze RBI, solo home run. From then on, the Marlins got solid contact against Webb. Luis Gonzalez added an RBI single in the 7th. Him and Dan Uggla, both Diamondbacks castoffs, accounted for 2 of Florida’s 3 runs. Webb ended his night with a line nearly identical to the one he had his last time out against the Rockies. So why didn’t he get the win? Because for the first time in a long time, he was outpitched.

While Webb was losing confidence as the night grew older, Ricky Nolasco was doing just the opposite. After serving up a 4th inning homer to Stephen Drew, he only allowed two more D-Backs to get on base, one via a hit and one via a walk. He went 7 full, giving up the one run on 3 hits while striking out 7 and walking 2, lowering his ERA to 4.62. Despite only lasting 4.2 innings and not collecting a decision his last time out (thanks in part to his defense), Nolasco has a 2.04 ERA in his last three outings. He’s allowed a total of 12 hits over that span. In the past month and a half, he’s gone from starting the year on the DL to struggling running his ERA up to 6.10 in his first five starts to out-dueling the best pitcher in the league. This guy’s a fighter. He’s tough. He’s got grit. And at 25, he’s still got plenty of baseball left in him. We may be witnessing the birth of a star.

So much for beating up on bad teams. The Marlins will attempt to sweep what was the best team in the league coming into this series tomorrow afternoon. Dan Haren, another core piece of the D-Backs’ rock solid starting rotation, will face off against Andrew Miller. Miller was the victim of some bad defense and took a loss that he didn’t deserve. He’s pitched exceptionally well in his last three starts, giving up a combined 4 runs. The Fish are going to need similar stuff from him if they plan on keeping pace with Haren, who has made it to the 7th inning in three of his last four starts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 2:30 am and is filed under Game Recaps. 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.