Kobayashi Saves the Day; Indians Sweep A’s

Rafael Betancourt couldn’t nail it down, and Eric Wedge made the right move to bring in Kobayashi, because when things aren’t going well, you just have to stuff all the food in your mouth, and chipmunk it.

Kobayashi Picks Up 2nd Save: It looks like Rafael Betancourt has lost his closers spot. At least just for the day. Right now who knows, because Joe Borowski is schedule to make a rehab start pretty soon.

Betancourt struggled in the top of the ninth. He loaded the bases and got one out before Wedge gave him the hook.

In comes Kobayashi for his second save of his major league career. Things looked bad when he threw a wild pitch to score a run, but he struck out the brothers Sweeney to end the game and notch the sweep of Oakland.

Laffey Wins, Streak Ends: The streak is over, we only added one more inning onto it before Laffey gave up a run on his own error.

The good news is it was an unearned run(even though Laffey committed the mistake), so unearned scoreless is going even farther.

The homestand saw 2 runs given up by starters score, and only one of those was earned. So kudos to the starters, and Laffey had his hand in on it. He goes to 2-2 with a 5 hits, 1 unearned run, one walk and six punchouts. He lowered his ERA to 1.35.

Offense Hits: This was an Indians type of offensive performance. They didn’t clobber the A’s…They simply worked the count, built up Greg Smith’s pitch count, and just go into that pen. They got a lot of hits, and just manufactured runs the old fashioned way. Go a home run late, and took home the win.

The biggest part was the 3-4-5 hitters all getting RBIs. Francisco knocked one in, Garko knocked one in and Hafner knocked one in. Then Peralta from the two spot knocked in one with the home run. So the top of the order produced.

Peralta went 2-3 with the jack, three runs scored and a walk. He seems to be getting it going, maybe he isn’t that bad in the two spot after all.

Hafner went 1-2 with the RBI and he walked twice which was huge.

Francisco went 3-4 with the RBI and he made a great play in left field to cut off Frank Thomas from a double.

Greg Smith gave up 7 hits and walked 3, so he had a lot of baserunners and most of the time it was the lead off guy. You do want to see them score more runs with lead off guys, but getting the starter out is the name of the game, and that is just what they did.

Marte got a hit and was thrown out at 2nd trying to steal. That was all Eric Wedge trying to be aggressive and stay out of a double play, but Smith’s pick off move was pretty good and he pretty much had him dead to rights.

Tomorrow we head to Cincinnati for interleague play, and we get to see Johnny Cueto face off against Jeremy Sowers. I’ll have more on that later today about Hafner and the lineup.

[BOXSCORE]