BY DAN GLICKMAN
ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The bullpen day. Few phrases make baseball fans more uneasy. No starter, no bulk guy, just a parade of relievers, none going more than two innings. If even one of them has a poor showing, the entire team may suffer.
On Saturday, the Rochester Red Wings faced such a day. Zach Penrod took the ball first, just a day after some struggles as a reliever. After him came Andre Granillo, then Carson Palmquist, and then three more relievers in turn.
The result? A 3-2 extra-innings win made possible by that very bullpen, a rare bunt for infielder Trey Lipscomb, and a costly mistake by Worcester Red Sox fielders. The reward? A return to first place in the International League first half, with seven games left to play.
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That final play came in the first at-bat of the bottom of the tenth, after a top half that saw Rochester reliever Zak Kent keep Worcester off the board. With the speedy Robert Hassell III as the “ghost runner” at second, Lipscomb came to the plate to lead off.
Lipscomb is not normally someone expected to do a sacrifice bunt. He’d only had two sacrifice bunts in his career heading into the night. But the Red Wings and their parent club, the Washington Nationals, have been making it a point of emphasis.
“These guys have bought into sac bunting,” says Red Wings manager Matt LeCroy. “I’ve talked to (Nationals manager) Blake [Butera], and to MJ (Michael Johns), who’s the bench coach. They’re going to bunt, they’re going to safety squeeze, which most if not all our guys have put down a bunt, a sac bunt, or had a safety squeeze.”
Lipscomb’s first attempt went foul. His second attempt brought chaos. The ball fell on the first base side, and Worcester first baseman Matt Lloyd came, only to have the ball go under his glove. The pitcher, Wyatt Olds, backed him up and picked up the ball – only to throw the ball past second baseman Tsung-Che Cheng to allow Hassell to come home to score the walk-off run on the error as a crowd of 10,280 went wild.
“The job was just to get it down and let the rest happen,” said Lipscomb post-game. “And, you know, it happened.”
The game-winning score was the first for either team since the fifth inning in a game where runs didn’t come easy.
Facing Brayan Bello – a recent notable demotion from Boston – the Red Wings initially had trouble. The first five batters went down against the righty, until Hassell III got on base with an infield single with two outs in the second. Hassell stole second soon after. Then, Lipscomb continued his hot-hitting by catching a 2-1 sinker in the zone and grounding it into right, allowing Hassell to come around and score to give the Wings an early 1-0 lead.
The Red Sox struck back quickly in the third, as Matt Lloyd – who had a key home run against the Red Wings earlier in the series – found a pitch he liked from Andre Granillo and golfed it over the right-field fence for a game-tying home run.
The 1-1 tie didn’t hold for long, however. Phillip Glasser, playing designated hitter, doubled to start the bottom of the third. After Christian Franklin struck out, Glasser moved to third on a wild pitch by Bello before Seaver King singled on a grounder to right to give the Wings the 2-1 lead.
When the Red Sox tied the game at two in the fifth, it was on an unearned run: facing Palmquist, Lloyd doubled. He then moved up to third on a passed ball by Riley Adams, allowing for the game-tying run to come in on a sacrifice fly by Max Ferguson.
That 2-2 score would hold until the 10th and Lipscomb’s bunt but there were moments of danger for both squads. In the eighth, for example, both the Red Sox and Red Wings got runners to second, only to fail to bring them in. Then in the top of the 10th, the Red Sox got the ghost runner to third only to fail to bring him in.
The credit, said the Red Wings’ skipper, ultimately lie with the bullpen.
It’s not hard to see why: on the game, the seven Red Wings pitchers (Penrod, Granillo, Palmquist, Jack Sinclair, Seth Shuman, Eddy Yean, and Kent) allowed six hits and two runs (one earned) while striking out 10 and walking one. Every pitcher had at least one strikeout.
“Our bullpen was tremendous, we did a nice job,” said LeCroy. “We did some really neat things. They kept us in it, and then we were able in extras to do what needed to be done on the sac bunt”
Elsewhere in the International League, Memphis lost to Norfolk, 2-1, allowing the Red Wings to leapfrog them in the standings. At 42-25, the Wings hold a half-game lead over the St. Louis affiliate. Another competitor for the playoff spot, the Nashville Sound, fell 6-4 to Durham, pushing them to a full game back of Rochester.
Off-the-field, the Red Wings saw some unexpected changes. Chief among them is a change on the coaching staff: Travis Fitta, the squad’s assistant hitting coach, will be leaving the Nationals organization to become the hitting coach for Grand Canyon University. Fitta, who joined the organization ahead of the season after previously working in several organizations including Driveline Baseball, will remain with Rochester until the end of the current home-stand.
Other notable moves include the callup of pitcher PJ Poulin, and the demotion from Washington of Riley Cornelio, who has primarily been a starter for the Red Wings but usually used in relief during his appearances in the big leagues. Erick Mejia, the former infielder who has been converted to pitching, has been called up from AA Harrisburg.
The Red Wings and Red Sox conclude their series on Sunday at 1:05 p.m., when Rochester expects to send out right-hander Chandler Champlain (5-1, 3.47) against Worcester’s righty-hander, Jack Anderson (1-3, 4.39).
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