{"id":517,"date":"2013-07-17T22:04:25","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T05:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=517"},"modified":"2013-07-18T18:54:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T01:54:23","slug":"national-pitchers-shine-in-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=517","title":{"rendered":"National Pitchers Shine in Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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All-Star Game MVP Edwin Encarnacion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A couple months ago, I wrote an article with the headline “A Strikeout Epidemic”.\u00a0 I could have used it again to headline this recap of the 20th DTBL All-Star Game.\u00a0 On Wednesday night at Moonshiner Ballpark, home of Mike’s Moonshiners, 29 at bats resulted in a strikeout.\u00a0 Amongst all of the whiffs, the National Division was able to string together enough hits to pull out a 5-1 victory over the American Division.\u00a0 The National pitchers were dominant from start to finish, striking out 15 hitters, walking none, and surrendering just four hits.<\/p>\n

The National All-Stars set the tone early against American starting pitcher Cliff Lee.\u00a0 Mike Trout started the game by walking on four pitches and scored two batters later on a double by Evan Longoria.\u00a0 A Chris Davis single moved Longoria to third with one out.\u00a0 But the National All-Stars failed to break the game open, and started the K parade when the next two batters were retired on strikes.\u00a0 Again in the second, the National Division looked poised to run away with things.\u00a0 Buster Posey started the inning with a single, advanced to third on a double by Adam Jones and scored on an infield single by Ian Desmond.\u00a0 But once again, the threat didn’t amount to much as two of the next three hitters struck out.\u00a0 The 2-0 lead would prove to be all they would need though.<\/p>\n

Max Scherzer started the big night for National pitchers with two scoreless innings, striking out three.\u00a0 Matt Harvey followed with a pair of strikeouts in his inning.\u00a0 Then Adam Wainwright turned it up a notch, striking out all three batters he faced in the fourth.\u00a0 The biggest hit of the night came in the top of the fifth.\u00a0 Facing Chris Sale with one man on and two outs, Edwin Encarnacion worked Sale through a nine pitch battle, ending with a two run home run to deep left.\u00a0 This gave the National squad a commanding 4-0 lead at the mid-point of the game.<\/p>\n

The American Division finally got on the board in the bottom of the 8th.\u00a0 Andrew McCutchen hit a solo home run on a 0-2, 2 out pitch from Yu Darvish.\u00a0 It was McCutchen’s second hit of the night, giving him half of the American’s total hits.\u00a0 Mariano Rivera made his final DTBL All-Star Game appearance in the top of the 9th, but it was not nearly the fairy tale ending that the real Rivera provided the night before.\u00a0 He surrendered the final run of the game, a sacrifice fly by David Ortiz scoring Longoria.\u00a0 Sergio Romo took the mound with a four run lead in the bottom of the 9th and, fittingly, struck out the side to end the game.<\/p>\n

Scherzer was the winning pitcher and Lee took the loss.\u00a0 There was a tough call for the MVP award.\u00a0 Longoria reached base four times on two hits with a RBI.\u00a0 Davis had three hits.\u00a0 Sherzer had the two impressive innings on the mound.\u00a0 But in the end, we decided to go with OOTP’s choice of Mavericks first baseman Edwin Encarnacion.\u00a0 His two run homer was definitely the biggest hit of the game.<\/p>\n

You never know how these games will play out.\u00a0 Although the 29 strike outs were pretty mind-boggling, the domination of the National pitching staff was not.\u00a0 They had as strong of a collection of starting pitcher as you will ever see.\u00a0 In fact, the National Division could have fielded a very strong 5-man rotation of guys who didn’t even make this team.\u00a0 Both teams had impressive lineups, but good pitching beat good hitting on this night.<\/p>\n

We had some technical difficulties, so the game wasn’t played quite the way I had planned.\u00a0 Nick had connectivity issues, making the webcast a no-go.\u00a0 So we went “old school” and started a Facebook chat with me typing in the play-by-play, which is pretty much how we did things until the LiveStream idea popped up a couple years ago.\u00a0 So I apologize to anyone who tried to tune into the webcast last night.\u00a0 We’ll try something similar next year, although I’m thinking about switching to a Google+ Hangout.\u00a0 But we’ll worry about that a year from now.<\/p>\n

I hope you had a restful All-Star break.\u00a0 The baseball action resumes tomorrow!<\/p>\n

Here is the box score<\/a> from last night’s game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple months ago, I wrote an article with the headline “A Strikeout Epidemic”.\u00a0 I could have used it again to headline this recap of the 20th DTBL All-Star Game.\u00a0 On Wednesday night at Moonshiner Ballpark, home of Mike’s Moonshiners, 29 at bats resulted in a strikeout.\u00a0 Amongst all of the whiffs, the National Division […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-star-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":521,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}