Games 7 and 8

With Infante's head injury this week, I didn't expect a lot from our second base corps. Johnny Giavotella came up, but only played on Wednesday. It looks like Infante will be back in the 2nd base position as early as tonight (game 9), but that is still up in the air.

As far as game seven went, here's what I have to say. Loading the bases three times: good. Scoring zero runs when the bases are loaded: bad. That about sums it up. Getting on base is the most important thing that you can somewhat control. The Royals just didn't get any hits when they would have been opportune which could be a lineup problem or it could just be bad luck. This early in the season, I'm going with the former. This was also Yordano Ventura's first start and he performed admirably. He got his pitch count a touch too high, but he went 6IP with 6Ks and no ERs. That's pretty darned good for your first start of the year.

Game eight was Guthrie's second shot at starting and he did remarkably well. For whatever reason, it seems like we score tons of runs for him. No idea what that's about. It would be moderately interesting to see if there is some sort of correlation between pitching statistics and runs scored by the offense in starts by that pitcher. It could be luck, opposing pitcher or something else. It would be interesting to see, regardless. We scored a bunch of runs and won. This was Gio's first game starting at second and he played pretty well.

We have now won our last two series after dropping our first two game set against Detroit. I would hazard a guess that if we win 2/3 series for the rest of the year, we will make the postseason handily. Not that I'm making any impressive prediction or anything. Pitching is good and the offense can only improve on what they have shown so far. The first home run of the year by Gordon was nice, but there should be a lot more power in our lineup than we have seen thus far. Could simply be a case of it not being quite warm enough for the bats to succeed yet, but I'm hoping that everybody breaks out soon and we can roll over the Twins and Astros who we play exclusively over the next nine games. It would be wise of us to get as many games as we can into the win column over this stretch of fairly easy opponents.