Charlotte Knights blank Durham Bulls: From garbage to cotton candy | Bull City Summer Home
Right. Exactly. That's why it looks so bad. The Bulls' confident strides in midsummer, when they steadily outpaced Gwinnett and pushed their division lead up to six games with 15 to play, are no longer fresh in the mind. All we see now is this final lack of dash; we may have forgotten that the Bulls built themselves a virtually insurmountable advantage long before "the sprint part." They don't actually need to sprint, and they are in fact doing better than crawling: In these last 13 consecutive games I've covered from Norfolk down to Charlotte, the Bulls have gone 5-8. That's not good by any means (it's a .385 winning percentage; only Rochester's is worse) but not a total collapse, either—and the Bulls would have to have a total collapse to miss the playoffs: They'd have to lose all four of their remaining games, and the Gwinnett Braves and the Lehigh Valley IronPigs would have to win all four of theirs.
Archer leaned hard on the fastball, and it worked for him. He threw it up high, down low, in and out. He used his slider well, he dropped his curve in for strikes. And when he finally ran into trouble in his seventh and last inning—putting runners on second and third with one out—he pitched out of it. "He found another gear when he had runners in scoring position," McEwing said of the 22-year-old who blanked his team for seven innings. "He's a special kid." And after finding that extra gear, Archer stalked triumphantly off the field to exchange a demonstrative high-five with his pal, Tim Beckham. It's Beckham whose walkup music at the DBAP is Travis Porter's "I Put on a Show," but Archer was the showman last night. He has what they call strong "mound presence," and isn't immune to shows of excitement when he does something good.
That's what the Bulls need: an extra gear for the last few strides of this marathon-turned-sprint. I think I'd rather use a different metaphor, though, and one that is much sweeter than the one with which I started this story—I'm just a bright-side kind of guy. My colleague at Bull City Summer, Sam Stephenson, recently profiled Herman Reeder, a cotton candy vender at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Asked about the physical rigors of carrying the pole of cotton candy around all night, Reeder answered: "There are 30 bags on a pole and the poles get lighter as you sell bags, but the bags get heavier. A bag of cotton candy starts out light but it gets heavier after it sits in the bag for a while, if you don’t sell it."
Four more to go. Will Durham win one of them? Is the team as good as it was two weeks ago, or as bad as it has been since then? Is it just a hitting slump, or are the Bulls just bad hitters? It was sort of helpful to see them out of town again for the last two of these unlucky 13 games. Charlotte is the worst-drawing team in the league, averaging fewer than 4,000 spectators per game, so it doesn't take much for any given fan to stand out in the crowd (as the Uh-Huh Guy does whenever he shows up). Last night, on Thirsty Thursday—little eight-ounce beers cost just a dollar—a group of them sat not far from the field behind home plate. Loud and louche throughout, they got louder and loucher as they drank more and more beers. They didn't even know who they were heckling, but still they heckled. To them, the Bulls were just small beer: another anonymous road team to scream at. And after Ray Olmedo flied out in the top of the eighth inning, one of them yelled out something I've never heard before:
HAMediaKnights Stadium, 1 Sept 2011.
Charlotte Knights blank Durham Bulls: From garbage to cotton candy | Bull City Summer Home
Right. Exactly. That's why it looks so bad. The Bulls' confident strides in midsummer, when they steadily outpaced Gwinnett and pushed their division lead up to six games with 15 to play, are no longer fresh in the mind. All we see now is this final lack of dash; we may have forgotten that the Bulls built themselves a virtually insurmountable advantage long before "the sprint part." They don't actually need to sprint, and they are in fact doing better than crawling: In these last 13 consecutive games I've covered from Norfolk down to Charlotte, the Bulls have gone 5-8. That's not good by any means (it's a .385 winning percentage; only Rochester's is worse) but not a total collapse, either—and the Bulls would have to have a total collapse to miss the playoffs: They'd have to lose all four of their remaining games, and the Gwinnett Braves and the Lehigh Valley IronPigs would have to win all four of theirs.
Archer leaned hard on the fastball, and it worked for him. He threw it up high, down low, in and out. He used his slider well, he dropped his curve in for strikes. And when he finally ran into trouble in his seventh and last inning—putting runners on second and third with one out—he pitched out of it. "He found another gear when he had runners in scoring position," McEwing said of the 22-year-old who blanked his team for seven innings. "He's a special kid." And after finding that extra gear, Archer stalked triumphantly off the field to exchange a demonstrative high-five with his pal, Tim Beckham. It's Beckham whose walkup music at the DBAP is Travis Porter's "I Put on a Show," but Archer was the showman last night. He has what they call strong "mound presence," and isn't immune to shows
 of excitement when he does something good.
That's what the Bulls need: an extra gear for the last few strides of this marathon-turned-sprint. I think I'd rather use a different metaphor, though, and one that is much sweeter than the one with which I started this story—I'm just a bright-side kind of guy. My colleague at Bull City Summer, Sam Stephenson, recently profiled Herman Reeder, a cotton candy vender at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Asked about the physical rigors of carrying the pole of cotton candy around all night, Reeder answered: "There are 30 bags on a pole and the poles get lighter as you sell bags, but the bags get heavier. A bag of cotton candy starts out light but it gets heavier after it sits in the bag for a while, if you don’t sell it."
Four more to go. Will Durham win one of them? Is the team as good as it was two weeks ago, or as bad as it has been since then? Is it just a hitting slump, or are the Bulls just bad hitters? It was sort of helpful to see them out of town again for the last two of these unlucky 13 games. Charlotte is the worst-drawing team in the league, averaging fewer than 4,000 spectators per game, so it doesn't take much for any given fan to stand out in the crowd (as the Uh-Huh Guy does whenever he shows up). Last night, on Thirsty Thursday—little eight-ounce beers cost just a dollar—a group of them sat not far from the field behind home plate. Loud and louche throughout, they got louder and loucher as they drank more and more beers. They didn't even know who they were heckling, but still they heckled. To them, the Bulls were just small beer: another anonymous road team to scream at. And after Ray Olmedo flied out in the top of the eighth inning, one of them yelled out something I've never heard before:
HAMediaKnights Stadium, 1 Sept 2011.