reyes clemens
1-3, 3.30 1-2, 2.76
damn, but it's good to have edmonds back.
it's as if he did more or less the same thing as clemens -- took the first three months of the season off to conserve finite physical resources. july 1 arrives, he comes out of retirement and goes hard till the end of hte season. a more sensible sequence than what we saw last year, when his ailing shoulder rendered him a shell-of-self after the all-star break and a slap hitter in the postseason. ( seems to have rubbed off on rodriguez, too.) it's not just that his stats are better -- he looks like a great player again. all three of his homers this month came off that trademark edmonds uppercut, where he reaches out and paddles the ball high and deep to right field -- like a tennis player yanking a cross-court backhand. he's taking his full rip again. i figured that we'd never see that swing again -- that, between the shoulder and the abdominal stuff, he could no longer generate it. for the same reasons, i figured we wouldn't be seeing many of those out-of-body-type defensive miracles like the one he performed on the hill last night. that's as valuable a play as a two-run homer.
it's as if we've been working with the demo-only version of edmonds, with all the more robust features disabled. then suddenly the disk arrives in the mail and you load it in, and you find out the program can do all this stuff you never realized it was capable of. it looks to me as if the edmonds disk has arrived. . . . .
ah, the resourcefulness of the press. danup, beset with a server crisis not of his own making, has nonetheless published this morning; his temporary quarters are over at blogspot. go there for a scouting report on raj clemens' liver spots and jason marquis' screwball. . ..
trade deadline is 23 days away; ken rosenthal surveys the nl. he makes no mention of sid ponson, but i would expect sid to find a taker -- prob'y after the 10-day DFA period has passed, so the acquiring team doesn't have to assume his contract (and the attached incentives). he may wash ashore at shea, in arizona, possibly in arlington texas; he's no good, but there's a lot worse out there.
speaking of replacement-level starting pitchers: dennis tankersley pitched 7 shutout innings and won 1-0 last night vs albuquerque; era over the last two months is now 2.35.