Padres See Light at End of the Trip, Defeat Reds, 3-2
By the time you read this, the Padres may already have begun the final game of the Longest Trip. They may have already shaken off the sleep and settled in against the 95-m.p.h. fumes from pitcher Jose Rijo in a 12:35 p.m. EDT game against the Cincinnati Reds.
By the time you read this, the Padres already may have snapped bats and nerves and be trailing by touchdowns.
No matter. Manager Jack McKeon woke up this morning knowing two things.
1) After leading his team into 15 games in 14 days, tonight he is coming home.
2) He is coming home happy.
Thanks to a couple of McKeon antics, and players tolerant enough to pull them off, his Padres defeated the Reds, 3-2, Wednesday night to even the trip record at 7-7. If they win today, not only will they come home tied with the Reds for fourth place in the National League West, they will have won eight games on the road for the first time in three years. This same team had won only four road games the entire season before McKeon took over May 28.
“Tell you what,” McKeon said, “Eight wins would make this a great trip. But shoot, seven wins makes this a good trip.”
And a couple of hours in front of 20,331 at Riverfront Stadium Wednesday furthered the notion that McKeon is doing more than just blowing El Producto smoke.
McKeon challenged his starting pitcher, with whom he had a shouting match just five days ago, to go nine innings. Not seven or eight, but the whole game . Eric Show heard this, chuckled and pitched 8 innings, allowing just two runs on five hits.
McKeon challenged his best reliever to take over the game with one out in the ninth inning and nobody on, after Show had recorded his best strikeout of the night. Mark Davis was mildly astonished, then finished off the Reds’ top two left-handed hitters (Kal Daniels and Paul O’Neill) on seven pitches--six strikes and one ball, two strikeouts.
Then there was the time McKeon got real fancy. In the fifth inning of a 1-1 tie, with a runner on first and a slumping Roberto Alomar (3 for 32) at the plate, McKeon wanted a line drive, so he challenged Alomar, using one of the bits of Spanish baseball slang he thought he understood.
“Mucho linea, mucho linea, “ he shouted.
One problem. It doesn’t exactly mean “line drive.” It means “great line drive.”
Alomar promptly hit a two-strike fastball just over the left-field fence for a two-run homer, his sixth.
“I saw the ball go out and thought, ‘Hey, maybe he didn’t hear me,’ ” recalled McKeon. “But then, hey, I really don’t know what that phrase means.”
“I heard him,” Alomar said, smiling. “And that’s what I did. It was a line drive.”
The homer was just enough to complete the tiny comeback of Mr. “Get Rid of Me” Show, who was criticized by McKeon on Friday after he gave up four runs in five innings in a 4-3 loss. Show had fired back, challenging the Padres to trade him and saying he as “ashamed” for McKeon and pitching coach Pat Dobson.
The next afternoon he and McKeon made up--”Even married couples have arguments,” said Show. But Show entered Wednesday’s game still stinging from that incident, and from a career record against the Reds of 6-11 with a 4.11 ERA, the highest of any team against him.
This called for something unexpected. McKeon, you may have guessed, is pretty good at the unexpected. So he showed up next to Show before the game and, according to McKeon, said, “Gimme nine.”
(A note: No manager who expects his pitcher to control his fastball or sanity ever asks for a complete game. A more common request is, “Gimme seven.” Last season with the Padres, it was “Gimme five, oh please, oh please.”)
“Hey,” McKeon said, “why not say it? I wanted him to go all out and let the chips fall where they may.”
“I think,” Show said, “that he just wanted to encourage me. I didn’t take it very seriously.”
Oh no? So he comes in and allows a homer to the game’s second batter (Chris Sabo), a homer to the second batter in the seventh inning (O’Neill) and not much in between. He falls three balls behind on only one hitter. Other than the home runs, only one of the Reds’ three remaining hits made it out of the infield. One single bounced off Show’s leg, and one was a pop fly lost by Alomar in the lights.
“Outstanding,” said Dobson, who pushes Show as hard as he pushes anyone on the staff, and for a reason. “When he has that degree of aggressiveness and intensity, he can be as good as we got. Even better. He can be one of the top in the league.”
Show, who is 6-8 with a 3.83 ERA, was asked about the reason for this good outing as opposed to other lousy outings. He sighed.
“From my second year in the big leagues, I’ve realized that baseball has this fundamental problem--they think there’s a reason for everything,” he said. “There’s not. Sometimes that kind of thinking is wrong.
“Just say I’m learning. I hope as human beings, we are all learning.”
About the only thing one could pin Show down on was that he was not surprised he was lifted for Davis after he struck out Sabo on four pitches in the ninth.
“I wanted to stay in the game, but I didn’t have a good defense against it,” Show said. “Those left-handers coming up had been tough.”
Davis, however, was surprised, even though he had been throwing in the bullpen.
“They asked me if I was warm, and I said ‘Sure,’ then all off a sudden Show is striking this guy out, and they are waving me in,” he said. “I said, ‘Wow. I’m here and there’s nobody on base.’ ”
A few minutes later, there was nobody on the field. Davis struck out Daniels--after falling behind 1 and 0--with two foul balls and a called third strike. He struck out O’Neill on three consecutive strikes, two of them called.
“Did you see that curveball?” Alomar asked. “No way most left-handers can hit that curveball.”
Said Davis, who picked up his 14th save: “I felt as good as I’ve felt in a month. I appreciated Jack’s confidence to bring me in during such a situation.”
Concluded McKeon: “I do what I think I have to do, no matter what. Always will.”
Padre Notes
Chris Brown has formally put to rest Monday’s fight with Marvell Wynne. According to teammates, just before Tuesday’s game, Brown stood up in the clubhouse and apologized to the team for causing any trouble. Said Brown later: “It was something I had to do. And I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t raised that way. As far as I’m concerned, it’s ended.” Said one Padre veteran: “It was sincere, and we all believed it. It really helped a lot.” . . . Not to be outdone at that meeting, no sooner did Brown sit down than Wynne popped up and also apologized. As Manager Jack McKeon has been saying, the case appears to be closed. . . . If Brown sounds like a new man, perhaps it’s because he also looks like one. He had all but a thin top strip of his hair removed Wednesday afternoon by Cincinnati star Eric Davis, a friend of his. “I fell asleep in the chair,” said Brown. “And when I woke up, I looked like this.” . . . John Kruk’s start in left field Wednesday, per McKeon’s lineup switch, was his first start in left since June 3, 1987, in Montreal.
