Lookout Landing

I don't feel like writing very much because that game was boring and pointless.

Cheers to Chone Figgins, who hit a couple singles, stole three bases with ease, and made at least one nifty play in the field. Since bottoming out in the middle of May, he's posted a .370 OBP over 148 trips to the plate, strongly suggesting that it's too early to throw the albatross label around. All that's missing right now is the defense, but he'll be right back to his best position before long unless Dustin Ackley struggles or contracts a disease. He could also do both, which we call "pulling a Kotchman".

Cheers to Mike Sweeney, who drilled a couple singles of his own and made a pair of diving stops at first base. I'm dead serious, too. Sweeney made one stop diving to his right, and later he made a better stop diving to his left. I wouldn't say he looked any more graceful than a Jenga tower, but he did fall to the right place, which is something. Sweeney isn't Ken Griffey Jr. He doesn't play like an old man. He plays like a kid. He swings and he fields and he hugs and he talks with a youthful energy and exuberance that you rarely see from any other baseball player, or athlete, or grown man. A shame that said youthful energy may very well have been the biggest contributing factor to the injuries that killed his career.

Cheers to Ryan Rowland-Smith, who - span of three pitches aside - seemed to make some real progress today. Especially in the earlier innings. He got ahead of 13 of the first 15 batters he faced. He generated three swinging strikeouts. He used a low-away breaking ball to great effect against a number of righties, and he appeared to be doing a better job of staying down in the zone. This start would've fit right in with RRS' 2009. You hate to see him keep departing with these walks, of course. And the back-to-back home runs were bad. But in fairness, you don't really expect Jonathan Lucroy or Carlos Gomez to take you deep. RRS doesn't have a good enough fastball to pitch to the middle of the zone.

Cheers to Lucroy on hitting his first big league home run in his 15th big league game. I don't actually give two shits about Lucroy and before today I'd only heard his name one or two times, but I always enjoy watching big league firsts. First hits. First home runs. First errors. First golden sombreros. First demotions back to AAA because man we really gotta get Jose Vidro and Jamie Burke their at bats. While I don't like that Lucroy took RRS deep, it is just plain neat that we got to witness the biggest moment of Lucroy's life, and that said moment made a big difference in the game.

Cheers to David Aardsma for getting his wife pregnant so he can take a little break from this team.

Jeers to Milton Bradley, who is now hitless over his last 26 trips to the plate. Bradley still has a very imposing presence, and he clearly has a disciplined eye, but the more I see him, the more I start to realize that he really doesn't seem to hit the ball off the sweet spot very often. Milton Bradley isn't hitting into tough outs. He's hitting into easy outs, or he's taking trips back to the bench. I know it's only June. I know Bradley's been through a lot, and I know there are probably more important things on his mind right now than baseball. He has a .634 OPS. When people wondered if Bradley was an intelligent acquisition, this isn't even how the skeptics saw things playing out. All in all, his behavior has been okay. It's his bat that's been lousy. That's gotta change, or else we will have turned Carlos Silva into an even more expensive problem.

And jeers to Rickie Weeks for doing whatever it is he's been doing to reach the league lead in hit-by-pitches. Weeks now has a league-leading 13. Prince Fielder is the runner-up, with 11. For his career, Weeks has been beaned once every 32 plate appearances, against a league average of once every 121. That's really annoying. And as a pitcher, you can't even teach him a lesson about it.