Los Angeles Dodgers against the Washington Nationals

By Jon Weisman

Still feels like there’s a buzz in the air over how very #Puignotlate the ending was to Wednesday’s game. Let’s provide some epilogues to that, as well as catching up on some other recent Dodger ephemera.

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Los Angeles Dodgers against the Washington Nationals

  • Puig’s dash around the bases was 15.2 seconds, which is tied for the fastest home-to-home run in baseball this year, as seen in the video above.
  • What was going through Puig’s mind? “I was ready for the hit, and nobody thought that the ball would go through,” Puig said through an interpreter, according to Doug Padilla of ESPN.com. “So when I did see the ball go through, I had to talk to my hamstring so I can figure out how far I could go on the bases. … I didn’t see [the stop sign]. I was listening to my hamstring and I was trying to figure out how far it could go. If it exploded there, that’s what was going to happen, but I was able to make it home.”
  • The big finish called to mind 1988’s Kirk Gibson scoring from second base on a wild pitch, as Phil Gurnee writes at his new blog, Dodgers, Yesterday and Today.

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  • It’s reflective of the drama, but also of Julio Urías’ growth, that five solid innings with one walk and six strikeouts simply faded into the background, and are no longer considered momentous themselves. Yes, he needs to get deeper into games one of these days, but we continue to eagerly await his next appearance. Padilla has more on Urías’ night.
  • It was also a special night for Urías because he got to reunite with his own hometown hero, Nationals reliever Oliver Perez. Dylan Hernandez of the Times describes the effect Perez had on Urías.
  • There was some postgame conversation about whether any visiting player had ever had a worse game from start to finish in Dodger Stadium’s 55 seasons than Washington outfielder Michael Taylor, who struck out five times and made the game-ending error. Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post provides the Taylor perspective from Wednesday.
  • The first player to strike out five times against the Dodgers, Bob Sadowski, topped that with six strikeouts on the mound in a 7-1 victory at Dodger Stadium on April 20, 1964.

OK, a few more non-postgame linnks to wrap things up.

  • First, Kenta Maeda’s ability to generate soft contact gets a deep dive from August Fagerstrom at Fangraphs, which also offers a look at Adrián González’s power production by Jeff Sullivan.
  • Deep from the bowels of Dodger history comes this story of rage involving Leo Durocher, Larry MacPhail and Joe Medwick, relayed by Steven Goldman at Vice Sports.
  • Want to see what the famous Joc Pederson-Trayce Thompson-Corey Seager-Alex Wood-Ross Stripling pad looks like? Watch the video below. I think I saw two penguins.

 

https://youtu.be/q7QHM71oLnE