Cray! Zee! Ass! Game!!!!!!!
Man, this game was all sorts of wild! I thought Pax showed up well and for some inexplicable reason or another, the M's defense decided to crap the bed in the top 3rd. FOUR friggen errors!!! At one point, they had Pax's final line as 6 runs-allowed but only 1 run earned. They later took the error on Mitch away and that resulted in Pax giving up 5 earned runs. Yikes. I genuinely felt bad for Pax and based on his facial expression as he walked off the field, he was pretty pissed off.
I'm kinda glad that it turned out this way for a few reasons:
1) The M's have been getting national attention for the last week now, and the spotlight is squarely upon them this weekend. Say what you will, but the hype does make the players play more tightly and since this is our first game against a "big, bad team", biggest fan turnout of the year, with the whole baseball world paying attention, I think it got to some of our players. You can see them somewhat folded for a couple of innings after the top 3rd. Which leads to...
2) After that shell shocked of a 3rd inning, the players kinda settled down and got out of their mental blocks of the big stage and simply started playing their style of ball again. That diving stop by Dee to get out of the top 7th was pure Superman-esque. They started becoming the scrappy, never-say-die M's that we're so used to. They get on base, scratch out hits, then come through at the end with a clutch double by Span!
3) Diaz got a taste of high pressure, high leverage situation against a top team, on a big stage, vs the heart of the order...and he got out of it. He was wild coming into the game, but settled down....basically a microcosm of what the entire team did in this game and this series.
I think this game could've been the catalyst for either one of two scenarios: the team getting bitch-slapped back to reality by the Sox and people start calling us pretenders or not good enough, thus spiraling down into a .500 season the rest of the way. Or (the way it turned out) the team realizing that they ARE good enough to hang with and beat the best teams in baseball with the spotlight shining squarely on them.
I have a feeling the team wih build on this game and it will catapult us into the rest of the season playing like we belong and hopefully make some history.
P.S. Seager is atrocious at the plate. He looks clueless at times, swings at bad pitches, or just takes stuff right down the middle for strikes. I've been waiting for him to snap out of his usual early-season slump, but I think this year is the year where we see "bad" Seager full time. And his error at 3rd today led to 3 more runs. Terrible.
