5.14.01 ROCHESTER RED WINGS vs CHARLOTTE KNIGHTS
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“So how’d the Dead Wings do last night?” my next-door neighbor asked me today. The Dead Wings. I hadn’t thought of that one.
One play in particular pretty much told the story of the Rochester Red Wings’ season to this point. Top of the third inning, Red Wings down 2–1, Charlotte Knights’ towering third baseman Joe Crede at the plate with a man on. Crede waits on a Sean Douglass change and drives the pitch to deepest left center, the spot where the outfield wall wraps around the visitors’ bullpen. Red Wings left fielder Carlos Casimiro runs out to meet it as fast as he can, looking back over his left shoulder, looking back over his right shoulder, arms and legs flailing about helplessly as the ball bounces off the wall and back out into center field. By the time he reaches it one run is in and Crede is rounding second. In comes the throw, its trajectory barely altered as it sails through the unsure hands of cut-off man Eddy Garabito, glances off the glove of Steve Sisco backing him up, and slowly dribbles into the Knights’ dugout as Crede trots home with an inside-the-park home run. It rolled off the table, and onto the floor/And then my poor meatball, it rolled out the door.
Crede later hit an honest home run to go along with a couple singles to make for a 4-for-5 night. Red Wings hitters were held to two runs through the first six innings by a couple guys the White Sox–affiliate Knights had brought up from Single-A just that morning, Kyle Kane and Joe Curreri, to spell their staff after three consecutive extra-innings games in Rochester. The Red Wings coped by sending out John Parrish, usually a starter, to throw a perfect inning in relief of Douglass, who gave up ten hits and seven runs to the slugging Knights over five innings.
The evening’s best moment, however, came when Charlotte took the field for the bottom of the sixth inning. To their credit, the guys running the scoreboard and music at Frontier Field typically exercise a level of restraint uncommon in the world of minor league baseball. There’s a noticable absence of gimmicky sound effects, for instance, and the announcer frequently adopts a slightly ironic, self-deprecating tone that makes the requisite between-innings nonsense a little easier to take. All the more hilarious then, as the announcer introduced the new pitcher for the Knights, 28-year-old righthander Derek Hasselhoff, that a vaguely familiar sequencer riff began quietly emanating from the ballpark P.A. It took me a second to place it, and I think I was one of about five people in the park who even noticed. It was the theme from freaking Knight Rider. Excellent.
FINAL SCORE: KNIGHTS 7, RED WINGS 3
FOOD CONSUMED: Back to the tried and true. Foot-long, peanuts, a Genny.