Triangle Offense

Bulls manager Charlie Montoyo said that of course "it had to be like that: a one-nothing game with their best hitter at the plate. Man on first, deep fly ball to center, and the guy who got the big hit [caught] the out." And then there was a pause as Montoyo let out a brief but soulful sigh, the exhalation of two weeks of frustration, failure and, probably, freaking out.

A few minutes after that, Bulls General Manager Mike Birling came into the manager's office, which he seldom does—wearing a suit, which is even rarer—and shook Montoyo's hand. It was like they'd just birthed a baby after a difficult, overdue pregnancy—and come to think of it, it did seem like about nine months had passed since the Bulls had borne Durham a win. (For his part, O'Malley, sporting a perhaps slumpbusting mohawk, estimated the subjective length of the losing streak at two months, which is much longer than that in baseball time.) Cesar Ramos, who pitched around a ninth-inning single to earn his first save of the season, "was carrying the whole team—the whole town, actually," Montoyo said, referring to how close his team came to setting the Durham Bulls' all-time record for consecutive losses.

This is some emotional stuff. There's no crying in baseball, but there is a hell of a lot of feeling. When you lose 13 straight games, something as painful as lovesickness sets in: that terrible separation from victory gets more and more distant; the very idea of winning recedes like a lover waving from shore as you drift away on the current of loss. As if to underscore the tenderness, the postgame clubhouse stereo was not playing thumping reggaetón or skull-battering heavy metal, but rather keening country music and then, amazingly, Michael Jackson's "Black or White"—that's the song with Macaulay Culkin in the video—whose U.N. and Rainbow Coalition-approved sentiment jived nicely with Montoyo's on the subject of the necessity of hanging tough as an all-for-one unit in times of crisis, which boiled down to this: "Let's be a team."

That's perfectly sound thinking in terms of psychology, mental attitude, and all that kind of thing. But the fact is that a large percentage of the action of baseball really stems from individual feats, not physical "teamwork."

To that end, Matt Torra.

DURHAM BULLS ATHLETIC PARK Saying the Durham Bulls have been going through hard times this season would be quite the understatement.

• Photo by Chris Baird
• Justin Wilson went most of the way in a no-hitter against the reeling Bulls.

The five-time defending South Division champions are in last place in the International League, and it’s been a steady progression to get there.

Headed into Game 3 of their four-game home series with a decent Indianapolis Indians club, the Bulls have lost a club Triple-A record 12 straight games. And they’re one loss away from tying the all-time record – that’s going back to that primeval 1902 club, which ended its season a few months before the Wright boys from Ohio had that first successful plane flight down at Kitty Hawk. That ugly 13 was accomplished by that snakebitten 1995 Carolina League club that christened the new park.

Good news for the Bulls is that ostensible ace Alex Cobb (0-2, 4.09) is on the hill. But the bad news against the Durham lineup of eight left-handers is that southpaw Justin Wilson (1-3, 3.97) is pitching for the Indians.

And it turns out to be really bad news. Wilson is part of a combined no-hitter, the first no-no ever against the Bulls at DBAP as Indy wins 2-0 to extend that losing streak to 13.

DBAP/Durham—The last time I covered the Durham Bulls was the night of April 10. They were shut out by the Charlotte Knights 5-0. After the game manager Charlie Montoyo joked that his older son Tyson said that his younger brother Alex had fallen asleep because the game was so boring. It was just one loss. No big deal. That’s baseball.

The Bulls won an 11am start the next morning, April 11, and everything seemed normal. The team departed Durham for their first road trip with a 5-2 record. Granted, that looming trip was a monster: 14 games in 14 days in Gwinnett, Charlotte, Pawtucket, and Norfolk. But the Bulls sported a talented starting pitching staff and a solid lineup and appeared well on the way to contending for a 6th consecutive division title under manager Charlie Montoyo.

Then the team lost 15 of 16 games, including 12 in a row and counting after tonight’s 2-0 loss to the Indianapolis Indians, leaving their record at 6-17. After tonight’s game, second baseman Will Rhymes, who has spent part of eight seasons in the minor leagues, looked back at that road trip, with a wry smile on his face: “It was brutal. I think it was the worst road trip I’ve ever experienced in baseball. It was poorly planned by the league, in terms of day games after night games, and long travel between games with no days off.”

Then Rhymes paused, clearly not blaming the schedulers for the Bulls’ record, and said: “There are a lot of good baseball players in this locker room. One day something will happen and we’ll turn things around. It’s still April.”

Tonight’s game was nearly a duplicate of the last game I covered eighteen days ago: An excellent performance by a Bulls’ righthander (then Alex Cobb, tonight Chris Archer) was wasted when the Bulls couldn’t score off an opponent’s lefty of the proverbial crafty variety (then it was the Knights’ Eric Stults, tonight it was the Indians’ Rudy Owens).

The Bulls outhit the Indians 6-3 tonight, but the only time they had more than one hit in an inning was the third, when CF Jesus Feliciano led off with a single and C Craig Albernaz followed with a long single into the leftfield gap that sent Feliciano to third. But Albernaz was thrown out at second trying to stretch it into a double. On the next pitch Rhymes popped up to second base and then SS Reid Brignac struck out. It would be the Bulls’ only threat of the game.

Attendance tonight was 8411, a nice turnout.

Fleming had been asked about how the pitchers were trying to recover as a group from a horrid spell that has puffed the team ERA all the way up to 6.29, one of the very worst marks in all of organized baseball. He said that the pitchers had had a meeting earlier that very day, during which "we talked about the mental side of it."

(That put me immediately in mind of what Lance Pendleton, who has quickly put up a 13.50 ERA in two appearances, told me last year after he had stymied the Bulls as a member of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. "Sometimes you get out of whack just slightly," he said, referring to allowing walks. So did walks issued point to faltering mechanically, he was asked? "Maybe not mechanically," he replied, "but maybe mentally-mechanically." Awesome. Mentally-mechanically. I find myself often uttering that borderline-nonsense phrase like a mantra. If I screw up a drink behind the bar, or do something boneheaded while I'm driving: mentally-mechanically, I'll whisper.)

Fleming talked briefly about how the pitchers' meeting included discourse about "not going into panic mode on the mound"—kind of a tacit admission that they've at least already got their fingers near the big red button—and then allowed how balls hit off of opponents' bats had a way lately of finding holes, dropping in for hits, etc. Snowballing.

"It's pretty much just one big..." and here Fleming paused for a moment before landing on the word "blah."

Did he mean "blur" or "blah"? Hard to say. Even though "blur" is what you usually hear there—"one big blur," further unfocused by the club's recent four-city, 14-game road trip—"one big blah" more accurately describes the state of the Durham Bulls.

The Durham Bulls don't play today, and they are probably thankful for that. They returned late Wednesday night from a 14-game road trip that can only be called a total disaster. The Bulls lost 13 of the 14 games, including the last 10 in a row.

To put it in perspective, that is the longest losing streak by a Durham Bulls team since the franchise joined the International League in 1998. Chances are good that it is also the longest losing streak in manager Charlie Montoyo's sparkling career, which dates back to 1997. I'm planning to ask him if he recalls such a long skid ever befalling one of his teams.

Remarkably, the Bulls' 6-15 record is not the worst in the IL. Syracuse is 5-13, and that's after winning two games in a row. Still, Durham is in last place in the South Division, 7.5 games behind front-running Gwinnett. It's early in the season and the Bulls are by no means in deep trouble, but they must rebound strongly during the 10-game home stand that commences Friday at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, starting that evening with a 7:05 p.m. game against the Indianapolis Indians.

"Devastation at last / finally we meet." That's the opening line from "Mockingbirds" by Grant Lee Buffalo, a band from the 1990s that deserved better than it got. The "at last" part is what's germane here, because the odds dictate that sooner or later the Durham Bulls were guaranteed to land in "a terrible realm," as the song puts it. This has been the proudest, most successful franchise in its league for five years. Even the biggest bull on the block will sometimes stumble. The question is, having been humbled, how will they respond?

The Durham Bulls are just over halfway through a grueling, peripatetic 14-game (!) road trip. The yield from the first eight of these games has been alarming: one win, seven losses, all against division rivals Gwinnett and Charlotte (who swept the Bulls). By my calculations, the Bulls haven't had a 1-7 stretch since way back in 2009. If you want to look on the bright side, they wound up winning the championship that year.

Some notes follow, but if you just want a quick snapshot of what ails the Bulls before you get back on the tour bus and head for another scenic (web) site, try this astounding fact: The Durham Bulls have not hit a home run since April 9.

Let me repeat that, with slightly different phrasing: the Bulls have not hit a home run in a week and a half, a span of 89 innings. That is actually rather hard to do. It is also a large part of the reason why the Bulls, who started the season with a 5-2 homestand to take an early lead in the IL South Division, have fallen to 6-9, already five games out of first place behind front-running Gwinnett (11-4) and Charlotte (8-7). They are just a game ahead of last-place Norfolk. The Bulls have not been this far out of first place since I started covering the team four seasons ago, and I would not be surprised to learn that 2006 was the last time a Durham Bulls team was five games out of first place.

As the season-opening homestand came to an end, no one in Bulls-land had anything good to say about the upcoming two-week road trip, and so far you can see why. The team is up in Pawtucket tonight to open a four-game series, followed by two more games in Norfolk before they come home. If you're a Bulls fan and you feel like writing your own Pawtucket limerick, I don't think you'll have much trouble figuring out the final rhyme.