CAN'T CATCH MARLINS PENNY LOSES FIRST MEETING VS. OLD TEAM FLORIDA 6, DODGERS 2.Byline: Tony Jackson
Anthony (Antonio) Jackson, best known as Tony Jackson Staff Writer Brad Penny's bid for a perfect game lasted all of five pitches, which is how long it took Florida's Juan Pierre Juan D'Vaughn Pierre (born August 14, 1977 in Mobile, Alabama), is a professional baseball center fielder who plays for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He bats and throws left-handed. In his seven years through 2006, Pierre has batted . to lead off the game with a bloop bloop Baseball n. A blooper. tr.v. blooped, bloop·ing, bloops To hit (a ball) into the air just beyond the infield. adj. Hit just beyond the infield. single. Penny's bid for a shutout lasted all of four batters, until Miguel Cabrera For the Mexican painter, see . José Miguel Torres Cabrera (born April 18, 1983 in Maracay, Aragua State, Venezuela) is a Major League Baseball player for the Florida Marlins. drove a two-run homer into the bleachers in left field. With that, Penny's fate effectively was sealed. These days, that's the way it works when you pitch for the Dodgers, an offensively impotent club for which a two-run deficit is next to insurmountable, and the notion of a well-timed hit with a runner in scoring position In the sport of baseball, a baserunner is said to be in scoring position when he is on second or third base. The distinction between being on first base and second or third base is that a runner on first can usually only score if the batter hits an extra base hit, while a runner on is beginning to take on a mythical quality. After Cabrera's homer put the Marlins in front, the Dodgers coughed, sputtered and false-started their way to a 6-2 loss in front of 46,632 on Monday night at Dodger Stadium • • [ . Part of the blame can be laid on Penny, who made his first career start against his former club and gave up four runs on nine hits over six innings. But most of it can't be. The Dodgers went 1 for 6 with runners in scoring position and have gone 3 for 21 in such situations over their past two games. Since Milton Bradley's game-winning grand slam grand slam n. 1. The winning of all the tricks during the play of one hand in bridge and other whist-derived card games. 2. Sports The winning of all the major or specified events, especially on a professional circuit. against Atlanta on Friday night, they now have scored a total of five runs in their past 27 innings. The team that spent the season's first three weeks staging one dramatic come-from-behind victory after another now seems hopelessly incapable of battling back from anything. The question now is whether the Dodgers can battle back from this, a maddening slump that has seen them drop 15 of their past 24 games since beginning the season 12-2. ``It's a lot of things,'' Dodgers left fielder Ricky Ledee said. ``At the beginning of the season, we were scoring a lot of runs and we were having better at-bats. Now, we're not having either one of those. It's not that we decided to do something different. But we're just not taking advantage of our opportunities.'' Appropriately enough, the Dodgers' only run through the first six innings scored on a double-play grounder by Jason Phillips Jason Phillips can refer to:
It's enough to make a starting pitcher Noun 1. starting pitcher - (baseball) a pitcher who starts in a baseball game baseball, baseball game - a ball game played with a bat and ball between two teams of nine players; teams take turns at bat trying to score runs; "he played baseball in high school"; feel like he has to be perfect to have any chance to win. Although if that was the case for Penny, he wasn't about to admit it. ``Not really, because they're going to come out of this,'' Penny said of his struggling teammates. ``Any day now, they're going to come out of it.'' Perhaps, but it probably won't be today, when former National League Rookie of the Year Rookie of the Year may refer to:
Right now, the Dodgers would make just about any pitcher look like Willis or Beckett. Just ask Brian Moehler, Florida's fifth starter, who became the second pitcher in two days (along with Atlanta's Tim Hudson) to allow the Dodgers nine hits but hold them to two runs. ``Obviously, it's a very tough phase we're going through right now,'' Dodgers manager Jim Tracy said. ``Some of the at-bats we took with runners on base, we hit some balls hard. But you get into ruts periodically where every time the other (team) hits the ball, it finds grass.'' The third-place Dodgers (21-17) fell 1 1/2 games behind Arizona and San Diego in the National League West, the farthest off the lead they have been since last July 4. The Marlins banged out 16 hits, including at least one in every inning, but once Penny (2-2) left the game after the sixth, most of that was just piling on. The irreparable damage was done in the first, when Penny came so tantalizingly tan·ta·lize tr.v. tan·ta·lized, tan·ta·liz·ing, tan·ta·liz·es To excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach. close to getting out of a jam after a double-play grounder by Carlos Delgado, but he then gave up the home run to Cabrera. Then in the second, he gave up back-to-back doubles to Damion Easley and Alex Gonzalez. In the fourth, he gave up a leadoff homer to Juan Encarnacion, one of the three players for whom Penny and Hee-Seop Choi were traded last July 31. Moehler (2-1) was helped by two double-play grounders, including one from Jeff Kent, who is 1 for his last 16. Tony Jackson,(818) 713-3675 tony.jackson(at)dailynews.com CAPTION(S): 2 photos, 5 boxes Photo: (1 -- color) Miguel Cabrera's first-inning homer, a two-run shot, was almost all Florida needed to beat the Dodgers on Monday. Nick Laham/Getty Images (2) A groundball gets away from Dodgers shortstop Cesar Izturis in the eighth inning of Monday's loss to the Florida Marlins. John McCoy/Staff Photographer Box: (1) DODGERS vs. FLORIDA - Tony Jackson (2) GAME RECAP (3) HOW THE RUNS SCORED (4) ALMANAC almanac, originally, a calendar with notations of astronomical and other data. Almanacs have been known in simple form almost since the invention of writing, for they served to record religious feasts, seasonal changes, and the like. (5) STORY LINES |
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