Miller Park in Milwaukee is beautiful. It’s huge but intimate, expansive but cozy, a stadium with a retractable roof that feels completely open. They did a really nice job with the place and I found it a much prettier ballpark than Target Field, by which I had been expecting to be blown away.
There are a couple of really cool things about the park, the coolest of which is the roof. I’m really hoping I get to see it in closing mode sometime in the next couple of days, I just have a feeling it would be pretty awesome to see. When Rogers Centre is open for a game, the roof closes when the game is over because of the turf and the fact that there’s no drainage if it rains. Miller Park is a natural grass field and the default setting is open, so unless it’s raining while there are baseball-related activities going on, the roof is open.
The other super-neat thing about Miller Park is Bernie the Brewer’s slide. It used to be just a little thing at old County Stadium, and the Brewers’ mascot would slide into or out of a big mug of beer every time a Brewer hit a home run, but in the new place (actually 12 years old now), it’s morphed into something much bigger. It’s like an enormous water slide that starts out at the top of the fourth seating deck in left field and winds its way down to the top of the second deck above the seats. There’s a whole lot of nothing between the slide and the crowd, so Bernie will go a long way if there should ever happen to be a sliding mishap, and the slide isn’t enclosed at all.
The slide is pushed well back of the field, too, and looked to be unreachable by big-league batsmen, but Edwin Encarnacion nailed it with a 463-foot shot off Randy Wolf in the sixth inning. It’s only the second time Bernie’s slide has been hit by a home run ball – Brandon Phillips of the Reds was the first to do it.
Jose Bautista got in on the fun in the seventh, though he didn’t hit the slide. He did, however, pummel a mammoth two-out, three-run homer off of Kameron Loe, his 20th of the season. It tied the game at six, a game the Blue Jays had trailed 6-1 after just two innings.
Loe wound up getting a win to go with his blown save when Aramis Ramirez ripped a line-drive home run off the left-field padding that acts as the foul pole as it climbs up the wall before the actual pole begins, to again illustrate how useless it is to look at a pitchers’ win total in order to make any sort of assessment about how he’s pitching. Ask Cliff Lee.
Anyway, the Blue Jays were down 6-1 after just two innings because Henderson Alvarez spent those first two innings getting pummeled. He did give up a few ground ball hits, it’s true, and that’s just the BABIP Monster stepping in and biting him (Alvarez had just a .259 batting average against on balls in play coming into the start, which is generally unsustainably low), but he also gave up a few rockets, including Ramirez’ two-out, two-run double in the second and Edwin Maysonet’s rocket off the base of the wall in left-centre earlier that inning.
I remember talking about Alvarez quite a bit in the spring, curious as to why so many people seemed to have an unshakeable belief that he would be able to hit the ground running as a 22 year-old and have the same kind of success that he’d had in his 10-start stint with the Blue Jays at the end of last season. Young pitchers so very, very rarely improve in a linear fashion as they develop into big-time big-leaguers, but there was almost complete unanimity in the idea that Alvarez was not only going to be fine, but that he was going to be great.
He hasn’t been. And in fact, had the Blue Jays not lost 60 per cent of their starting rotation to injury over the past week, Alvarez might even be a candidate for demotion.
In allowing six runs on 11 hits over just four innings of work, Alvarez’ ERA was pushed up 43 points to 4.30, and his WHIP rose to 1.367. Since his last win, on May 10th in Minnesota, Alvarez has allowed 29 earned runs on 63 hits, walking seven and striking out 13 in 41 2/3 innings of work. Nine of those hits have been home runs. That’s an ERA of 6.26 and a WHIP of 1.680, and opponents have hit .339 against him over that span.
Those are awful numbers – not unnatural for a 22 year-old in his first full season in the major leagues, but awful nonetheless. It’s reasonable to think that he’d be staring a trip to Las Vegas, or more likely New Hampshire, in the face if not for the recent rotational carnage.
The latest addition to that rotation is Jesse Chavez, who will start in Kyle Drabek’s place Tuesday night. Drabek will undergo his second Tommy John surgery earlier in the day and won’t pitch in the big leagues again until at least June of 2013, though the safer bet is that we might see him that September, or maybe not until 2014. Drabek will become one of a very few to undergo two surgical replacements of his ulnar collateral ligament, but his teammate Jason Frasor is among the others who have had it done. You can hear my conversation with Frasor about his experiences here.
The Blue Jays still need a starter to take Drew Hutchison’s place in the series finale on Wednesday afternoon, and so far they’re not telling. My money is on Carlos Villanueva coming out of the bullpen to join the rotation for a little bit, but you never know.