The Clippers beat the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees by a score of 5-1 on the strength of another great outing by Carlos Carrasco. Carrasco has heated up during the month of August and will be in position to get a call up in September in order to help out the big league club. The Clippers now stand 2.5 games ahead of Lousiville for the lead in the IL West. Only 20 games remain for the Clippers as they try to hang onto their current, and season-long, postseason bid.
Team Pitching: 1(0) R(ER), 5H, 0BB, 10K, 69% strikes, 45% GB
Carlos Carrasco has been absolutely lights out for the past 2 starts going 13 innings and only giving up 2 runs (1ER), on 8 hits and no BB’s, while striking out 14 batters. This is the kind of minor league dominance (from a 23 year old, no less) that the Indians traded for in the much-maligned Cliff Lee deal. He has shown clear signs of turning things around with a 10 game stretch that has seen him strike out nearly a batter per inning and give up fewer than 3 runs or fewer in 9 of the 10 starts. He seems to have turned the corner and instead of going up and down from start to start, he is stringing together some consistently great outings.
Josh Judy came on and promptly struck out two of the three batters he faced in only 15 pitches while working a perfect 8th. Columbus tacked on an insurance in the bottom of the 8th, but Vinnie Pestano came on in a non-save situation and proceeded to outperform Judy by striking out a pair of batters in a perfect 9th…he only needed 9 pitches to do this however. Judy and Pestano’s combined stat line: 2IP, 4K, 24 pitches, 18 strikes, no questions asked.
Team Hitting: 5R, 12H, 3XBH, 2BB, 3SB
The top of the order did the heavy lifting and made life miserable for Yankee uber-prospect, Jesus Montero, by rampaging on the base paths. Jose Constanza and Ezequiel Carerra each reached base 3 times and each scored a pair of runs. Constanza swiped second base twice and is now in the IL lead for SB’s with 32. Cord Phelps doubled in Carrera in the 1st inning and through 53 games at Columbus is now getting on base better than 40% of the time and is posting an OPS of 932. As a further reason to be optimistic about his performance, his park-adjusted statistics actually are better than his raw numbers thanks to a slightly more difficult than average offensive home field (i.e. Huntington Park isn’t doing him any favors!).
The Clippers face off against Scranton/W-B again tomorrow night. David Huff will put his perfect 7-0 record to the test against Ivan Nova. It’s 50¢ wing night at Huntington Park and the Clippers are back on a tear again, so come on out and watch the next wave of Indians beat up on the Yankees.
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