Milestones for a rookie playing in his first major league game and a veteran who's been through quite a few more highlighted the Los Angeles Dodgers' 8-5 win over the Boston Red Sox yesterday.
Rob Segedin was originally a third round pick for the NY Yankees and had bounced around the minor leagues for years, at one point ready to give up on baseball, but he got the call-up to the Dodgers yesterday at age 27 and promptly entered the team's record books by driving in four runs, the most ever by a Dodger rookie in his major league debut.
Segedin doubled off David Price with the bases loaded in the fourth, and drove in two more runs with a bases-juiced single in the fifth. And Adrian Gonzalez, who played with the Red Sox in the infamous 2011 beer and chicken scandal season, hit home run number 300 for his career. The only positive for the Red Sox was their own rookie Andrew Benintendi continuing to impress since his call up a week ago, collecting three hits and two RBIs. But the Red Sox were a dispiriting 5-6 on the first of two long west coast road swings still left this season. Price is now 2-7 in his last fourteen starts and hasn't won since early July, although to be fair he should have won his last two starts prior to yesterday's but was let down by defensive errors in one game and a lack of offense in the other.
The Red Sox fly back to the east coast today to open a three game series against the NY Yankees at Fenway Park. With Baltimore winning yesterday the Sox drop three games out of first and trail second place Toronto by two games.
When the Red Sox do face the Yankees they'll be saying goodbye, or perhaps fans at Fenway will have variations on that particular word, to Alex Rodriguez, who's announced he's retiring from the game mid-season. His final game will be on Friday, and after that he'll stay on with the Yankees as a special instructor. A-Rod has spent most of this season on the bench, his .205 batting average in stark contrast to some of the best numbers ever put up in the game by a player who for most of his 22 seasons was one of the greatest ever to take the field. But the legacy of the player who has a handful of games left to reach 700 home runs for his career, sitting at 696 right now, will forever be tarnished by his use of performance enhancing drugs, and his despicable poor sportsmanship in game six of the 2004 American League Championship series against the Red Sox when he slapped the ball out of the glove of Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo to avoid a tag, and then feigned indignation with with all the believability of a five year old who insists he didn't raid the cookie jar despite having his chocolaty fingerprints all over it when he was called out for doing so.
If A-Rod does see some playing time against the Red Sox, and he probably will, he's not going to get a respectful send-off from the Fenway Faithful, and while A-Rod's talents and numbers before he used PEDs do make him a legitimate Hall of Famer, I'd rather not hear any finger wagging from Yankees fans, writers, or sportscasters who would admonish fans for venting their true feelings about a player who never needed to enhance his talents, but chose to do so. A-Rod dug this hole himself, and you can't blame Red Sox fans for not wanting to help him out of it now.
If you want an anti-A-Rod to cheer for, give it up for Ichiro Suzuki, who entered the 3,000 career hit club with a triple in the Miami Marlins' 10-7 win over the Rockies yesterday. Ichiro becomes just the 30th player in Major League history to reach that milestone, and he did so decidedly PED-less.
The Yankees were in action, beating the Cleveland Indians yesterday 3-2. Didi Gregorius homered and Masahiro Tanaka went six innings giving up just six hits and one run for his eighth win of the year.
The NY Mets got a big two-run homer in the top of the ninth from Neil Walker to beat the Detroit Tigers 3-1, avoiding a three game sweep at the hands of the red hot Tigers, who lost for just the second time in their last twelve games. The win helps the Red Sox, who are chasing the A.L. wild card with Detroit.
In the NY Penn League, make it seven losses in a row for the Vermont Lake Monsters, who fell to the State College Spikes 11-2 at Centennial Field yesterday. Fans at the game did get to see an inside the park home run by the Spikes' Jeremy Martinez.
The Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl football game has a 63-year history, but never has there been a blow-out like the one at Castleton University yesterday, and forgive Vermont for piling it on New Hampshire in that record setting 50-2 victory. Vermont took a fifteen-game losing skid against their neighbors into yesterday's game so Ryan Alexander's five touchdown passes were a kind of long awaited payback. The Fairhaven native also ran for 63 yards in leading Vermont to the romp.
