Triangle Offense

DBAP/DURHAM It’s going to be a near-perfect night for baseball now that the grounds crew has finished its work.

• File photo by Al Drago
• Bulls mascot Wool E. Bull is always happy about a South Division victory.

It’s a showdown for early-season supremacy in the International League’s South Division. The Bulls come into the contest in their usual first-place spot in the division — they have won it in nine of their 13 seasons in the league — while Gwinnett is a game back.

They’re meeting for the fifth time this year, after splitting their season-opening four-game set in the Atlanta suburbs with ever game a serious nail-biter.

Southpaw Alex Torres (0-0, 0.00) makes his DBAP debut against the Braves’ Todd Redmond (0-1, 3.00). And there’s certainly a respectable crowd in the house.

The Bulls get an unearned run and begin the series on a high note, escaping with a rare 1-0 DBAP victory.

• File photo by Jeremy M. Lange
• Desmond Jennings has reasons to smile.

In fact, Desmond Jennings nearly beat Norfolk all by himself. He hit a three-run home run in the second inning and narrowly missed another later in the game, when he blasted a long drive way, way out of the ballpark but a little bit foul, west of the snorting Bull above the Blue Monster. He also drew a pair of walks, scored after one of them, and stole his third base of the season in as many tries.

The homer is the highlight, of course, because it was Jennings's second of the season so far after he hit just three all of last year: The power is back, he's swinging without impediments—he's healthy. Everything about Jennings's game right now tells you that he feels good and is ready to make a push to the big leagues.

Almost as important as the home run, though, were Jennings's two walks. He has always been a disciplined and patient hitter, and you might have expected him to lose a little of that discipline out of sheer excitement at feeling healthy enough to swing away for the first time in a year. But his approach was the same last night as it has pretty much always been: He saw 20 pitches, 11 of them taken for balls (a 12th hit him). Jennings has drawn seven walks so far this year and struck out six times, a slight improvement on his already very good career K/BB ratio. More and more, it seems to me that hitting at the highest level, assuming you can swing a bat decently, is simply a matter of being able to tell the difference between a ball and a strike. Simple, yes, but not easy, since you have about four 10ths of a second to make your decision. But that's the hitter's job.

Why go straight into the details of Jennings's performance last night? Because that was about the only real excitement of the sludgy, 2:56 affair, which was filled with walks and deep counts and poor hitting and a lot of runners left on base by both teams. Orioles and Tides fans, I hate to tell you this, and I know it's early in the year, but your Triple-A team, now 1-8 this year, already looks listless and frustrated on the field barely five percent of the way into the season. Bulls starter Edgar Gonzalez was nothing like dominant; he doesn't have electric stuff and he put eight men on base in five functional innings, but Norfolk didn't take advantage. The only run the Tides scored off of him was aided by a fielding error by second baseman J. J. Furmaniak and an infield single that might have been an out had Gonzalez not deflected (a reflexive stab he couldn't help making) Brandon Snyder's bouncer up the middle. Chris George, who replaced a very shaky Steve Johnson—making his first Triple-A appearance and lasting only four innings—had bad body language on the mound, looking frustrated and down in the mouth. That's why it wasn't really a surprise that, after he pitched two scoreless relief innings in the fifth and sixth, George self-destructed in the seventh. But apparently he was out there to eat up some innings for the Tides, because it wasn't until all four runs had scored in that inning that his eventual replacement started to warm up in the bullpen. Bulls manager Charlie Montoyo said after the game, in his generously sportsmanlike way, that the Tides would eventually get hot, but right now they look like a team just playing out a string.

The Bulls, meanwhile, are, as Jennings put it, "relaxed, laid back." Where the scrappy 2009 team was often raucous and frothy and the 2010 edition coolly affable but businesslike, the 2011 bunch—younger overall, I think, than the two previous squads—has a breezy confidence about it. Many of them have been in the Rays organization for a while, and three of the new players were together in the Chicago Cubs organization last season. The collective attitude seems to be one of a sense of belonging here now, in the right place at the right time (no doubt fifth-year Bull Justin Ruggiano would disagree). Every man jack of them would rather be in the majors, of course, but the team has fewer old salts anxiously watching the sands drop through the hourglass, grain by grain and day by day; fewer super-prospects itching to get called up; and zero just-demoted longtime big-leaguers resentful of their downwardly mobile direction. It's probably good for the Bulls, frankly, that Casey Kotchman and Felipe Lopez, both veteran major-league players stuck in unfavorable minor-league circumstances, were both called up to Tampa Bay immediately after the season began: Whatever disgruntlement they might have inflicted on the clubhouse followed them right out the Durham door.

The team that remains—and again, it should be stressed that it's early in the year, too soon to draw conclusions—seems like peers—a club, rather than just a bunch of players. As we reporters collected around Jennings for a postgame interview, pitcher Dane De La Rosa—who I imagine barely knows Jennings—asked a mock question on our behalf: "Desmond Jennings, why'd you do so well tonight?" Everyone laughed, partially because De La Rosa's question both cut to the chase that we often take too long to arrive at, and also exposed its own essential unanswerability: Jennings did so well because he's really good at what he does, and like anyone with a job, he has everything from really good days at it to really bad ones. Last night, he had one of the good ones.

More after the jump.

• Photo by Al Drago
• Durham Bulls pitcher Alex Cobb in action, April 14, 2011

And in his first start at the DBAP in 2011, Cobb began with three no-hit innings—perfect ones, in fact. He wound up allowing three hits, just as he did against Louisville in 2010, and he struck out 10 Norfolk Tides, the same number of Ks he had against the Bats. This time, he went six innings, removed after 82 pitches, right around the current early-season limit imposed by the Tampa Bay Rays. (Coincidentally, he also threw 82 pitches in his second and final start for the Bulls last year, a difficult and blister-shortened but nonetheless scoreless four-inning stint against the Columbus Clippers in Game Three of the Governors Cup Championship series.)

The difference? This time, Cobb made no mistakes; or if he did, they went unpunished. He and two relievers, Mike Ekstrom and Brandon Gomes, shut out the Norfolk Tides, 4-0. The Bulls improved to 5-3; Norfolk fell to a glum 1-7 for the season so far. In support, new Durham third baseman Russ Canzler hit a solo homer, his second dinger in two days, in the sixth inning, an impressive opposite-field drive to right-center field; and the Bulls clawed at Tides starter Rick VandenHurk, who took the loss, for three additional runs early on in this deceptively quick game, which was rather dull once Cobb left but only took just over two hours to play. It had the feel of a solid early-season win, a sort of still-in-beta performance for a team that hasn't really found its bearings yet; they arrived in Durham after Spring Training in Florida just a couple of days before the season began, and then immediately left for a week-long road trip. And they have already had to adjust to a fistful of surprising roster moves.

If the essential makeup of the 2011 team holds for most of the season, last night's home-opener may be indicative of what's to come. Counting some of the ways after the jump.

The Durham Bulls' season has already had a few twists and turns, thanks mainly to surprises in Tampa Bay like the injury to the Rays' superstar third baseman, Evan Longoria, and the abrupt retirement of Manny Ramirez, just a few days into his Tampa tenure, after he tested positive again for performance-enhancing drugs. Two brand-new Bulls, Casey Kotchman and Felipe Lopez, have already been summoned to the major leagues. A couple of others have already missed time with injuries. The starting pitchers haven't lasted deep into games, partially owing to the Rays' early-season 75-pitch limit imposed on them from above; as a consequence, the Durham bullpen, year in and year out one of the most overworked cadres around, is already groaning under its workload.

Stay tuned—plenty more drama to come.

We'll see you all on Thursday, April 14 at the DBAP—one-dollar concessions on the first night of the home season. Read on for a glossary/primer.