I really can’t say that Jeff Samardzija didn’t have a solid outing tonight. Yeah, he gave up a ton of hits, and booted a ball, but the stuff looked good, and so did the velocity. He wasn’t getting any borderline calls, and every single hit he gave up was a single. Several of those singles were grounders that easily could have been outs if they were a couple feet in another direction.
Brian Schlitter will get a lot of grief for losing this one, but I can’t be too hard on him, either. He’s a guy who’s pitched to a lot of good luck this year, and some regression was always expected. He pitched 1.1 innings last night, and he’s probably always going to be a contact guy. This kind of thing will happen. As a middle reliever, he’s still got value, even in a good bullpen.
Offensively, that bomb by Junior Lake was just a beautiful stroke on a pitch down and in. And he pimped it in approximate relation to how much of a no-doubter it was.
Oh, and hey, there was this: