Straight Baseballed: Pompey, Dead Arm and a Walk Off

That was a pretty rough weekend of baseball, yesterday feeling particularly ugly. Things aren't quite gelling at the moment and guys are pressing a little. It just felt like baseball coming to bite them.

"First and foremost, I just want to apologize to my teammates and my fans, coaching staff. We lose that game because I don’t make that play and I take full responsibility for that,” said centrefielder Dalton Pompey.

“I’ve found, ever since the season started, I’ve been playing somewhat scared just because I don’t want to make a mistake,” said Pompey. “It took a situation like that where I couldn’t bail out my pitcher, Daniel Norris, I’ve made plays for him many times in the past and this time, I didn’t step up to the plate. It’s a learning experience for me and it just shows me I need to be more aggressive and, if I make mistakes being aggressive, then it won’t be as bad.”

“When I used to watch them on TV, I used to think they were pretty much perfect people and they made all the plays and they never made mistakes, really,” said Pompey. “Last thing I wanted to do in a situation is make sure I catch the ball, make the routine plays and sometimes I’ve felt like I’ve played back on the ball when it’s a groundball, so I make sure I field it instead of being aggressive.”

“Every game matters; we’re trying to win here and the mistakes I made today potentially cost us,” said Pompey. “It’s a long season, but you look back in September and this game might have mattered.”

Pompey made a couple of bad plays. He could definitively have made that play in the first, but it wasn't routine. So while it's nice he apologized and took responsibility, but who loaded the bases in that inning? Who barely hit the rest of the game? Who didn't score enough runs when relief pitching kept them in it. It's a team game and a team loss. I really hope one of the grown ups heard this and talked to Pompey about it.

Also, Pompey really needs to let go of the "I used to come here as a kid" thing for the Rogers Centre. Yeah, it's embarrassing, but jeez. Take off the hair shirt, put down the switch and forgive yourself, kid. Baseball is going to kill you if you let it.

They aren't operating on all cylinders. Donaldson's bat has woken up, but Bautista and Encarnacion aren't quite there yet and are just missing pitches they normally crush. Bautista's reaction to his homer on Saturday (screaming into the ground) and Encarnacion trying to hit a baseball twice out of frustration yesterday was pretty telling. Both were hilarious, though.

Dead arm? What the heck? That sounds scary! 

You know some mornings (maybe even this morning) you wake up and feel like you haven't really slept. Or maybe you haven't slept well the last couple of nights and it's finally catching up to you.

You can function at your job, but you can't really get it going. You have no pep or spark. No follow through. No matter how much coffee (even French Press coffee) you drink.

Well, that's what dead arm is. It doesn't hurt, really. You just don't have the extra little bit of zing that makes you an effective pitcher.

“I’m going through a little bit of a dead-arm phase, so it’s really tough for me to just feel the late life on everything that I was used to in spring training,” said Norris, in the same TSN.ca article linked above. He was definitely missing up with pitches, which often happens when a pitcher starts getting tired.

In an interview done six years ago, C.C. Sabbathia talked about dead arm. "I think you get it as a pitcher growing up as a kid," Sabathia said. "You go through that period when you first start throwing where you have nothing. The first couple times, you get a little nervous. But as you get older, you figure it out. It's just dead arm, and you have to deal with it."


Jeff Francis, nice Canadian boy, did his team a solid in long relief yesterday and kept the Jays in it.

In other Canadian content news, Canadian Press writer (and general awesome person) Melissa Couto  wrote about Braves' beast Freddie Freeman his late mother who was Canadian. He wants to one day represent Team Canada in the WBC, which would be awesome, as he is a beast.

"I know she's watching every single game up in heaven," Freeman said. "I have a necklace that unscrews and there's a piece of her hair inside of it, so she's always with me everywhere I go."

I guess I'll stop making fun of his alliterative name now.

Undeniably awesome?

Best.