Innovation Field, Rochester (AAA #17 -- A big crowd, but was it for Bruce the Bat Dog?)

 

Last night’s game had one of the biggest crowds we’ve seen at a minor league game, 10,167. Ironically, a day after thinking about why Lehigh Valley keeps leading the minor leagues in attendance, the crowd was larger than the capacity of Lehigh Valley’s stadium (10,100). Rochester draws well, but there were a couple of notable things that drew the fans to that game in particular. One was that there was a fireworks show afterwards. The other was someone who consistently got the biggest cheers at the start of the game, but had to leave after four innings to get to Washington, D.C. in time to make his debut in the majors.

First, a little about Rochester. The Rochester Red Wings have been playing in the minors continuously, under the same team name, since 1899. I’m pretty sure that’s the longest such streak in the minors. There are only five major league teams that have been playing in the same city that long (the American League didn’t even start until 1902), and most or all of them have changed team names along the way.

Minor league baseball teams have a habit of coming and going, but the Red Wings have stayed. In part, that’s because, since the mid-1950s, they’ve had an advantage over everyone else in the stability realm. The Red Wings are one of two publicly-owned professional sports teams in the U.S., the Green Bay Packers being the other. So the town is literally invested in the team.

Rochester is a city that isn’t as prominent as it was around the turn of the 20^th Century, when the Erie Canal was the primary way to get goods from the East Coast to the Great Lakes. But it has some sports history. Last night, they honored the Negro Leagues by having three former Negro League players (all quite elderly, since the last such league folded in the early 1950s) and by having the Red Wings wear uniforms that were replicas of those worn by the Rochester team in the original Negro National League, the first true major league Negro League.

Bruce the Bat Dog

The star of the game was clearly Bruce the Bat Dog. For the first four innings, after every Rochester batter (or at least, after every batter who didn’t strike out and carry his bat back to the dugout), Bruce’s handler would let him go, and he would run out, find the bat (he got confused once when a batter had flipped it down the third base line), carefully pick it up by the barrel (not  the handle), and carry it proudly back to the dugout. Bruce is a golden retriever, so as he carried each bat back and the crowd cheered, he would prance along, tail wagging, in the way that a self-satisfied retriever will do, back to the dugout. It was a great show.

At the end of the fourth, Bruce and his handler had to leave, because Bruce was going to make his major league debut today at the Washington Nationals’ game (the Red Wings are affiliated with the Nationals), as the first-ever major league bat dog. The event was a huge success. Earlier in the week, the Red Wings issued a video of the manager telling Bruce he’d been called up, which went viral. Topps issued a special trading card for Bruce. Bruce’s Instagram following grew to more than 5000. Yes, Bruce has an Instagram account.

As long as Bruce doesn’t have to have Tommy John surgery, and doesn’t get caught taking performance-enhancing drugs, I think he may have a long career ahead of him.

The game: Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp 5, Rochester Red Wings 3

After talking about Bruce the Bat Dog, the rest of the game seems like an anticlimax. The Red Wings lost, but it wasn’t a surprise, since Jacksonville, the Marlins' AAA team, has one of the best records in AAA, and Rochester one of the worst.

One thing worth noting is that it was a game that displayed why the official wins and losses for a relief pitcher may not be a good measure of his effectiveness. In the early days of baseball, it was obvious who the winning and losing pitchers were – they were the pitchers who (usually) pitched the whole game. But as more and more relief pitchers started being used, there had to be some way to codify that well-known statistic.

For a starting pitcher, it makes some sense. If a starting pitcher leaves the game with his team behind, and his team never catches up, he’s the losing pitcher. For a starter to be the winning pitcher is similar, except that he also has to have pitched at least five innings to get the win. But what if the lead changes hands? Then, the winning pitcher is the pitcher who got the last out before his team took the lead for good, and the losing pitcher is the pitcher who put the runner on base who scored the run that put the winning team ahead for good.  

Tonight, the winning pitcher was his team’s least effective pitcher, and the losing pitcher was one of his team’s most effective pitchers. Jacksonville was ahead, 2-0, entering the bottom of the sixth inning. But Rochester put two runners on base with two outs against starter Robinson Piña, so the manager replaced him with Colin Roa. At this point, if the Red Wings never caught up, Piña, who had pitched very well, would have been a very deserving winning pitcher. But Roa gave up a hit, then another hit, and the score was tied. Roa then walked the next batter, so the bases were loaded, but he got out of the inning thanks to a diving catch by his second baseman, Harrison Spohn, on a hard hit ball. So it was 2-2 after 6.

Now the Jumbo Shrimp came to bat. Marquis Grissom Jr. had pitched the previous inning and retired the three batters he faced, but gave up a single to start the top of the seventh. He got the next batter out, but then the Red Wings changed pitchers, and the new pitcher, Konor Pilkington, gave up a home run to the first hitter he faced, which put the Jumbo Shrimp ahead for good. It was Pilkington who gave up the decisive home run, but it was Grissom who had put the runner on base who scored the go-ahead run, so Grissom was the official losing pitcher, despite getting four of the five hitters he faced out. And who was the winning pitcher? It was Roa, who got the last out of the previous inning, the only out among the four batters he faced, and only because of a great defensive play. In this case, life wasn’t fair at all to either Roa or Grissom.