Spring Training Game 8 - Saturday Afternoon, March 10th in Clearwater
Record - 4-4
One Sentence Summary: The Phils were shut out and held to just six hits against Brian Matusz and the Orioles.
What It Means: What it means is we're another day closer to the regular season. Also, it's hard to come up with something meaningful to write for these spring training game summary posts.
What Went Wrong: There wasn't enough offense. Shane Victorino and Tuffy Gosewisch both doubled, but they were stranded on the basepaths.
On a positive note, Joe Blanton and Scott Elarton both pitched well. Blanton threw three scoreless innings while striking out three. Elarton, who hasn't pitched in the Majors since 2008, allowed a lead-off home run in the fourth but he then settled in to pitch four perfect innings.
Featured Card: Eight games into the Grapefruit League schedule and Chase Utley has yet to see game action. He's nursing a chronic knee injury and the team is in no hurry to rush him along. But it was still a little surprising that top prospect Freddy Galvis got the start at second for this game. Galvis came very close to becoming the team's regular shortstop had they not been able to re-sign Jimmy Rollins. In his five years in the organization, he had never ventured over to the right side of the infield until a few days ago and yesterday marked his first ever start at second. This of course leads to a lot of speculation as to the true extent of Utley's injury.
How is it that Galvis, regularly ranked at the top of the Phillies top prospects list over the past three or so years, has never been featured in a Bowman set? Topps picks Low-A prospects and Double-A to Triple-A suspects for their annual Bowman releases, but Galvis has eluded the Bowman checklist makers so far. He's appeared in Phillies minor league team sets since 2007, but this is his only mainstream baseball card to date.
Other Stuff: I have a decent draft together for my 1997 Topps Phillies post, but my non-stop work schedule the past few weeks has left me with little to no time to wrap the thing up. I've had March 15th circled on my calendar since January as that should be the last day of crazy work malarkey for a little bit.
4 comments:
Actually, he hasn't appeared in a proper Bowman set thanks to the Rookie Card rule. However, he showed up on plenty of Bowman inserts in 2008 & 2009: http://www.beckett.com/search/#term=freddy%20galvis
Yep, you're right. I missed the 2009 Bowman Prospects card since I don't have it in my collection yet. (It's even on my 2009 Phillies wantlist.)
If Utley has sore knees after a whole off-season of rest, he will be useless this season.
Amaro should have anticipated this, acquired a big bat to play 3B, and alternate the injury twins at 2B during 2012.
I hope you're wrong, but I fear you may be right.
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