Postgame Shot Of Joe: Halfway To Where?
Uncategorized June 29th. 2011, 2:29pm
Today James Shields paid for his mistakes, unlike in his past few starts. Sure he wasn’t his “complete game” best, but he was still pretty damn good as the Rays lost the series to the Reds.
If Evan Longoria doesn’t run like Prince Fielder, maybe that bottom of the ninth looks a lot a different. It sure felt like another walk-off was simmering. … A guy can fantasize.
Joe’s going to hope/assume Shields walks away without losing a drop of confidence. And maybe J.P. Howell is hopefully hitting a new level — or old level.
So here the Rays sit at the halfway point on track for 90 wins and missing the playoffs. The record looks good, but it’s probably not enough. It all just goes to show how far pitching can carry a club. But if Howell can keep it up and Goggles doesn’t get traded or implode, surely the Rays can at least duplicate the first half barring a win-later fire sale.
Joe’s looking for Dirbag to put the team on his freakin’ back in the second half. Seems like the easiest and most likely path to the playoffs.
Oh, and with 25K this afternoon, and the Cards, Sox and Yanks next up at the FruitDome, maybe attendance whining and moaning will fall of the map for a month or so. Wouldn’t that be nice.
Was today a camp day or mostly regular fans? Just curious for the attendance.
It was a camp day. The place was packed with kids, so this attendance figure is a bit skewed.
C’mon. The “camp” people are real people paying real money. It’s not like they’re flown in from out of town or are freaking space aliens. It’s not a skewed number. It’s called putting butts in the seats. Other teams do the same stuff outside of the handful of massive markets.
What’s “skewed” about that? Unless the Rays gave those tickets away for free. And if those figures are skewed then we need to make the same correction for every other ballpark, because they all depend on camp groups to fill weekday afternoon games.
Ugh, this is one of those we had to win, with the pitching matchup and Shields definatley pitched well enough for a win. These hurt the most at the end of the season. And now we get to face the 3 most effective Cardinal pitchers this season with Davis and Neimann both going in the series.
It’s amazing how close we are with this offense, imagine if we turned Brignac/Elliot/Rodriguez into Jose Reyes….
Thanks for answering I only listen to the game on the radio so I didn’t see the stands. Having a camp day doesn’t make things worse. I run the box office for a minor league team and the money from the camps count as groups for most teams. However its still people walking through the gate and they are counted as attendance.