FanPost

thoughts from the emeralds game

thursday i got to take in my first eugene emeralds game of the season with. i live in portland, so until this year i had the luxury of seeing the padres AAA affiliate up close and personal nearly as much as i wanted. sadly, our mayor and this guy named merrit paulson are huge chodes, so the storied portland beavers were relocated to tucson, as you probably know. unfortunately this leaves the nearest live baseabll a 25 or 30 minute drive down I5 to salem, which is the host city of the volcanoes, the short season A ball affiliate of the god damned giants of all teams, which means not only do i have to make a near half hour drive but i have to be reminded every second of how fucking great the giants are in order to see a live professional baseaball game.

the game itself was very good from our perspective. the emeralds won 5 to 2, with five different players driving in runs. cory spangenberg and jace peterson both pass the eye test, and both got on base multiple times. spangenberg had a rbi double that accounted for one of just two extra base hits the emeralds had, the other being a leadoff triple from donavan tate, who looks like hes in cruise control all the time to me. matt andriese threw six dominating innings, allowing only one run. he threw hard, breaking several bats. i dont recall one volcanoes player squaring up a ball when he was still on the mound. peterson made a couple of nice stops of ground balls at short, and the finest play of the game was probably a 643 DP in which peterson made a great stop and spangenberg showed off a really strong armon the relay to first, where daniel garce made a great pick to get the runner by an eyelash. there were no errors in the game for either side, something that we will hopefully be able to say more often the about the pads the rest of the year. finally, im hoping somebody can explain to me how of 14 pitchers only one of the emerealds is left handed? how does that happen? thats pretty much all ive got, next time il try and get some pictures up to make my rambling more tollerable. go padres (and ems!)


This FanPost was written by a member of the Gaslamp Ball community and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Gaslamp Ball staff or SB Nation.