Colby Lewis did this game what he did a few too many times in 2011. Gave up home runs. If I remember right, Lewis lead the AL in home runs allowed last year, and in this game he gave up two of them in his 5 innings of work. Also allowed a walk and NINE hits. A dangerous combination. As it was, he gave up six earned runs with that combination, and it was a pretty ugly outing. Not what you want to see coming into the final stretch of spring. Bah.
Uehara was even worse, giving up three hits and a walk, and FOUR earned runs in his one inning of work. His spring ERA is now 16.88 – pretty horrific. Even Mark Clark would think that sucked. Mark Lowe gave up a run, but Tateyama & Joe Nathan put up scoreless frames. As Nathan has been kind of “meh” this spring, it’s nice to see a few zeroes from him – his ERA is way too high as well (13.50), but a closer’s ERA can always be strange, so I’m not terribly worried with him – just yet. I’m more worried with Nathan about what happens to the team if he can’t get it done. Pull Feliz back to closer? Ogando as closer? It’s a bit unsettled of Joe Nathan goes out and pitches like Eric Gagne did after he was traded to the Red Sox. The bottom line this game – our pitching sucked.
Offensively, we didn’t have much of an attack. Only got three hits total. Each of them singles. One by Josh Hamilton, one by Michael Young, and the last one by Luis Martinez. The Cubs tried to help with three errors of their own, which accounted for the three unearned runs on Matt Garza’s ledger. But Cubs reliever Marcos Mateo had a strange line. 0.0 innings pitched, zero hits, one walk, and one earned run. The guy who followed him (De La Cruz) had just one hit and two walks, but no runs given up of his own. You gotta love weird stats like that.
I didn’t see or hear any of this game, as I was busy with some other stuff, but it appears I didn’t miss anything.