malvasia bianca

We saw a game at Oakland for the first time this season. Liesl’s company has season tickets to the Giants, so we’ve been there, but not Oakland. The game featured Felix Hernandez, whom Baseball Prospectus ranked as their top pitching prospect coming into the season, against Joe Blanton, whose star had dimmed coming into this year but who has managed a 3.51 ERA over 28 starts, an excellent rookie year. (My vote is still for Huston Street, though.)

I hadn’t realized that Hernandez had already been up for almost two months. And he seems to be living up to his billing: seven starts is enough for a 1.59 ERA to mean something, and nothing about his performance yesterday made me think he’d been getting lucky. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell against the A’s: their offense these days seems to either score double digits of runs or none at all.

The Mariners had another recent call-up who put on a bit of a show: the strikingly-named Yuniesky Betancourt did quite nicely both offensively and defensively. Looking at the stats, though, the former at least seems like a bit of a fluke.

Random stat of the day: in three years of high school baseball, Ichiro Suzuki struck out a grand total of 10 times. And every single one of those strikeouts was on a called third strike.