Almost forgot about Harris. He's been giving up late inning homers too though. The pen just needs help.
Bregman hit the ball in a damn fine place, and it took a phenomenal play on one of our slowest runners or else we win. Aoki shat the bed hitting the ball straight to the pulled-in shortstop. I don't know why they wouldn't at least try a squeeze in that situation. Your least powerful hitter is up with one out, the winning run on third and no force in effect; that is THE situation to squeeze if there ever was one. In the end, our bullpen wasn't clutch (sans Giles), and Hinch, I think, was too overconfident in many of his choices tonight. This is a particularly rough loss. The team might be reeling for a couple days after this, especially if they get in their mind that they've got to crush the ball at the plate or blow it by the batters from the mound.
it's all hindsight of course, but if Correa hadn't left the game, that would have left Marwin on the bench to pinch run for slow guys like McCann. As it was, we had to use our only available pinch runner (Aoki) to take Beltran's place. tough loss, but like the one a couple of days ago, the opponent had to have some very unlikely gifts of luck to pull it out. At least we made their bullpen take a pounding. Should make it easier to win the next two.
I was surprised we didn't pinch hit with Gattis, given we just needed a sac fly. In hindsight, if Correa doesn't get hurt, we'd have definitely pinch hit with either Gattis or Marwin, but I supposed Hinch didn't want to use our last bench bat?
The only thing I can imagine is that Hinch was worried about what he'd have to do if McCann somehow got ejected or injured. Then Gattis would have to catch and we'd lose the DH for the rest of the game. Aoki is a career .281 hitter with bases loaded while Gattis is .313 with bases loaded. So I'd have gone with Gattis in that situation. Another hypothetical to speculate about is whether it might have helped for Gattis to pinch run for McCann in the 9th. Gattis is no speed demon but I do think he clocks in as a faster runner than McCann. He might have been just fast enough to beat out that throw from SS.
Tonight was 3 appearances in 4 days. That's usually the limit as he's not available tomorrow. But coming off 6 days rest before that, then 7 days before that, he should've pitched 2 tonight. The alternative was Sipp.