Game 49 Recap: They Didn’t Tell Me It Would Be Like This
Second Half Opens with Game of Two Halves in Long Beach As Ballers Fall 12-4
By Joe Horton
LONG BEACH—For five-and-a-half innings, turning the page to the second half of the season had indeed flipped the script: the Ballers led 4-1 in front of a raucous $2 Tuesday crowd, grinding out hits and outs against a Coast team that showed no signs of slowing down in their “meaningless” second half after securing a playoff spot.
(And about that. I made the mistake of looking up the Ballers’ first-half record from last season: 37-11. Long Beach’s first half record this season? 37-11. If this Coast team wants to make a run at the modern-era record of 73-23, this Ballers squad should have something to say about it.)
In the bottom of the sixth, starter Charlie Hurley—who had given up only a single run to that point—walked the first two batters of Patrick Roche and Cooper Vest before getting a groundout that might have been a double play but wasn’t called. He induced another grounder that scored Roche before a single from Jacob Jablonski scored Vest. With two outs and a strike on Emilio Corona, it looked like Hurley had further gotten ahead when Corona went around, but it was called a check swing, much to the dismay of Manager Aaron Miles. One pitch later, Corona homered.
Said Hurley after the game about his last inning, “Yeah, I mean, just frustrating. You want to go out there and you want to be able to finish that last inning for your team and be able to get them off the field with the lead, and not being able to do that, it's definitely leaving a sour taste in the mouth. But we just get back to work and work on stuff that we need to change, especially that last inning; you can't walk the first two leadoff guys. That's never a good recipe for a zero.”
And about that check-swing call, or his manager’s reaction? “I mean, I definitely saw the check swing. Being me, being biased, I thought he went. And no, I didn't see Skip, but that doesn't surprise me. He's a very passionate coach. He's going to ride for his guys.”
One call (or two) rarely changes the entire game, and this (these) one(s) didn’t, but it served as the clear demarcation between a fine first half of the game and a sour second. Long Beach scored five in the seventh and never looked back. SS Tremayne Cobb was a bright spot offensively, going 3-for-4 for the Ballers with two RBI.
New Baller Demias Jimerson, acquired from the Billings Mustangs after spending seasons with the Tri-City Valley Cats of the Frontier League, made his debut in the ninth inning, lacing a single to left field. Ballers VP of Communications and Fan Entertainment Casey Pratt saw Jimerson take batting practice and said he looked great. “Just want to be a big contributor to this team,” Jimerson wrote to Dispatches after the game. “Want to bring in a spark for us.”
The biggest pregame news was the return of B’s pitcher and fan favorite Reed Butz, who was on bat-boy duty in the first couple of innings for the team. “They didn’t tell me it would be like this,” Butz joked.
Odds & Ends
There were plenty of Ballers with Southern California friends and family who stuck around to greet their local well-wishers. There were B’s shirts and chants in the stands throughout the game.
Yes, B’s fans, you can be jealous: Blair Field is mostly in the shade for evening games, and the curved coverings for the stands funnel the sound out onto the field: it gets loud very easily.
A group of Long Beach fans abandoned one of their worse-for-wear friends to his own quest into the LBC night. “Is he going to be ok?” one asked. “Yeah,” said another. “Believe it or not, this is his cool-down.”
The word is out in Long Beach about the Coast. This was on the table in our hotel room when we checked in.
Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.
