• HAMedia
• Outside Harbor Park, Norfolk, Va., August 20, 2011

A little interlude here (well, really a long one) while the Durham Bulls enjoy what Brandon Guyer called "this glorious off day"—the Bulls' last of the regular season—in a Tweet early this afternoon. After they split two games this past weekend up in Norfolk (see reports here and here), they find themselves six games ahead of second-place Gwinnett in the International League South Division with 15 to play. Gwinnett plays Charlotte at home tonight, so the number will change by half a game before the Bulls play Norfolk, again, on Tuesday; but either way Durham will still hold its largest division lead of 2011.

Let's say the G-Braves beat Charlotte tonight. That would make them 69-61. Durham is 74-53. Because of two games canceled by rain earlier this season (both at Syracuse), the Bulls will play two fewer games than Gwinnett. In a scenario in which the teams finish in what they call a virtual tie for first—that is, without numerically identical records but proportionally even ones—the Bulls would have a slightly higher winning percentage than the Braves. Thus the Braves have to finish a game better than the Bulls in order to win the division. Even if the Bulls were to go, say, 5-10 over these last 15 games—which would be their worst stretch of the season, by far—Gwinnett would still have to go 12-3 to overtake them.

Teams can fall apart at any time, but it should be noted that the Bulls haven't really done that this year, at any point. The team's worst slump this year lasted five games. That actually happened twice, once in late April and once in late May. Since the latter five-game skid, the Bulls have lost as many as three straight games only once, and that was in the first week of June. For the last two months or so, the team has slowly but steadily won the race, or at least nearly won it. Durham was just three games over .500 on June 12, when they lost to Norfolk in a game delayed over three hours by rain. They've gone 41-23 since then, and have really surged recently, having gone 12-4 over their last 16 games.

The dread September 1 major-league roster expansion threshold is approaching; that means, as it does every year, that some of the best Bulls will be called up to a higher pasture. But if the Bulls put together a good home stand, they could extend their lead to a more or less unreachable length. That would make September 1 just another day to say rabbit-rabbit, and Durham could leap on into the playoffs without missing a hop.

Still, they'll have to find a little more spring in their step in order to get there. The baseball season is long and taxing and full of wearying travel and nagging injury. My road trip to Norfolk left me with plenty to chew on, but nothing so chewy as this: Most of these players, much as they love what they do—they get to play baseball for a living!—would really like to go home.

More on that, by way of Dane De La Rosa, and then some thoughts about Norfolk—its team, its ballpark and its town—follows.

• Photo by Al Drago
• Matt Torra, still an enigma as of August 21 (photo taken August 11)

Montoyo actually tried to interrupt me before I could say the word '"six." "Don't tell me!" he pleaded, too late. Then he looked down at his desk, a little glumly, like a kid who has just been informed three days before Christmas what his presents are.

It's well-known that Montoyo works very hard not to know exactly where his team stands, even late in the season, as long as "we're playing for something." That phrase, which Montoyo has used a few times recently, is a surrogate for "heading for the post-season."

The Gwinnett Braves had already lost to Charlotte before the Bulls even took the field yesterday. Montoyo noted, almost resentfully, that the Harbor Park scoreboard cycles through the International League scores all during the game, making it impossible not to know how his closest rivals had fared.

He had other things on his mind early. Durham and Norfolk combined to score six runs in the first three innings of last night's game, collecting 10 hits and six walks in that early stretch. Tides starter Chris George allowed five hits and five walks in just three innings of work, yet the Bulls scored only three times off of him, grounding into a double play, getting caught stealing, and stranding four runners in scoring position through three times at bat against George.

Meanwhile, the Bulls' Matt Torra, not sharp and victimized by first-inning bad luck, gave up five hits and a walk of his own. The score was tied, 3-3, after 2 1/2 innings, and we appeared to be headed for one of those ugly 11-8 games. Rain fell steadily from the second inning into the middle part of the game. There was lightning. There was also smoky haze that had drifted up from a fire in Dismal Swamp, the (currently closed) state park down over the North Carolina border. It seemed we might be here all night, peering through the polluted night at a polluted game.

But then, oddly, the game totally changed its course. Neither team scored again from the third inning until the top of the 10th, when Tim Beckham hit the third of three consecutive one-out singles to score Ray Olmedo. The Bulls held on, Dane De La Rosa laboring through two tense innings to earn the win, and Rob Delaney benefiting from two good fielding plays to save it for his bullpen comrade.

I owe Matt Torra an apology, too, and I'll tell you why below. That apology has to do with why tonight's post will again be relatively short. I'll be back later Monday—an off-day for the Bulls as they gear up for their final home stand of the season—with more detailed notes and thoughts about the game, the team and Norfolk. I'll also have some cheering news about the future of our Bulls coverage here at the Independent. Read on, and then check back later for more.

• www.zooperstars.com
• A "Zooperstar."

The Bulls charged into town last night—actually, at around 5:00 a.m. much, much earlier yesterday morning, after a seven-hour bus ride from Pennsylvania—as the proud owners of a season-high six-game winning streak. They had just improbably swept the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees; they had worked out their little bullpen kinks, which plagued them for the first two games of the trip up in Buffalo; and their closest division rivals, the Gwinnett Braves, had fallen off some, allowing the Bulls to build their South Division lead out to five games.

And then the Bulls lost 3-2 to Norfolk, the league's second-worst team. Tides starter Rick Vandenhurk threw well and held Durham to two hits over six innings, and the Bulls weren't quite able to break through against Norfolk's bullpen. Andy Sonnanstine was the hard-luck loser, giving up three runs in six-plus innings but pitching better than his line showed.

This report is going to be on the short side (for me, anyway). When you cover a team only at home, as I normally do, road games are strange. Harbor Park drew its largest crowd of the season last night, over 11,000—so it was both eye-opening to witness and, at the same time, I was assured, quite unusual: even Tides employees seemed a little perplexed by the turnout. Some of the fans were really just there for a pregame concert by an Elvis Presley impersonator—he and his band, which was pretty good, set up their little stage right on home plate (Elvis died 34 years ago last week, is that why we saw this?)—and some others were apparently lured in by the between-innings antics of the Zooperstars (follow the link if you really must know). There is also a brand new metro rail system that stops at the ballpark—really brand new; its first ever day of service was the day before yesterday—and apparently it was free to ride all week. I repeat, Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill: a metro rail system.

So there was a lot of stuff going on, what with the unfamiliar setting; the huge crowd; the big oversized inflatable Zooperstars; the Elvis; the trip from the Press Box to the clubhouse that took reporters through what I believe were actual catacombs; etc. The game was very nearly an afterthought. Except that it wasn't, and those before- and afterthoughts follow.

• Image by Michael Morgulis

The day after the second loss up in the City of No Illusions, it rained, washing out yet another Bulls game—I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I bet that something like one in every five games this season has been delayed, postponed or canceled by rain.

Usually, rain is unwelcome, of course—what little momentum baseball generates owes not to its fitful in-game action but to its nearly unbroken run of days and innings over the long spring and summer.

Yet this rain-out was a welcome one, or at least the subsequent results suggest as much. The Bulls swept a doubleheader from the Bisons the following night, Monday, and then went down to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Penna., where they took the first two games of that series from the Yankees—whose third baseman was a major-league rehabber by the name of Alex Rodriguez. Sometimes, perhaps, you need the threat of the drought of a potential losing streak doused by a forced day off.

A sprinkling of details of how the North has been won (so far), prefaced by some thoughts about developments closer to home—right in downtown Durham, in fact—that could very well be relevant.