Asheville was rained out so I'll start at Modesto where Marc Kaiser turned out a gem against Lake Elsinore. In the comments to yesterday's post I said "you can't really call him a disappointment" and yesterday he proved to be much better than the mediocrity I ascribed to him with his eight inning scoreless outing. His groundout to fly out ratio was 13-5 including two GIDP's (plus one more on a soft line drive to first) and none of the hits were for extra bases (two of the singles were in the air, the other two ground through holes). It wasn't enough to earn the victory, but Tomas Santiago, Jamey Burch and Jim Miller closed out the twelve-inning win with Miller picking up his 14th save (apparently he's doing better after a rough patch a week and a half ago) and Burch the win with a perfect inning where he struck out the side. Burch remains on the radar and has some impressive numbers this year, I want to see him make the jump to the Texas League, though, and then we'll see what we think of the last remaining vestiges of Larry Walker (Burch came over from St. Louis in that trade) left in the system. Seth Smith's double roll continues as he hit number twenty on the year in the twelfth to score Jordan Czarniecki (Czarniecki continues to be an OBP machine with two more hits) with the last run of the Nuts 2-0 win.
Tulsa lost four to two, this time it was Christian Parker who got the start, and not Zach, who started yesterday in my wrong attribution. Believe me, I dislike the confusion as much as you, one of these two needs to be called up just for clarity, although make sure it's only even though both are worthy of it right now. Before C. Parker went out for his suspension he was ahead of Z. Parker in the rotation order and now he is behind anyway, back to the game: Ryan Spillborghs had two more hits and Jeff Salazar is proving to be very streaky as his 0 for 5 night dropped his AVG back down to .273 after it was nearly .300 a few days ago.
Esposito(left) and Hampson are taking the slow jog to the majors, but we wouldn't mind if they picked up the pace a little.
Colorado Springs won 5-4. You can follow the link if you want to read about AAAA guy Jeff Pickler's heroic exploits although you won't read about Mike Esposito's start which is too bad because it was fairly decent. He gave up the two run shot to Chin-feng Chen in the second, but that was the only really hard hit ball and his ground out to fly out ratio (10 to 4) also bodes well for his ascension to Coors. He only walked one unintentionally in five innings, but only struck out one also and we want to see a bit more of an ability to manufacture outs on his own with strikeouts before we deem him ready to replace Joe K or Jamey W in the rotation in Denver.