FORT WAYNE – “Everything’s gonna get microscoped.”
–
Jose Flores
And so train the microscope right here: the baseball sailing out toward right field.
It comes off the bat of Great Lakes right fielder Blake Smith on a rising line, a white dot growing smaller and smaller as it wings away toward open green space at Parkview Field. It’s the top of the seventh in Game 1 of the first round of the Midwest League playoffs between Fort Wayne and Great Lakes.
The TinCaps have a 1-0 lead they’ve been gripping so tightly the blood’s drained out of it. There are two outs, and first and third are full of Loons.
“I knew if it dropped, it was a 1-1 ballgame,” TinCaps manager Jose Flores said later.
Now train the microscope here: Daniel Meeley. Out in right field, he sprints madly toward the open space. Stretches out his glove, stretches, stretches … makes the catch.
Inning over. Young reliever Matt Branham, making only his second appearance of the season, has preserved the lead.
Next will come Stiven Osuna, who’ll retire the Loons 1-2-3 in the eighth for the first time all night.
Then will come Miles Mikolas, who’ll open the ninth by getting Jaime Ortiz to slap a grounder to second that Jeudy Valdez scoops and relays to first. After which he’ll get Brian Ruggiano to fly out to center. After which Nick Buss will slap another grounder to Valdez, who backs up on it carefully, surrounds it, throws to first for the final out.
TinCaps 1, Great Lakes 0. TinCaps up 1-0 in the best-of-three series. The Loons going meekly into the night with a goose egg for the only the sixth time all season.
Train the microscope on Meeley. Train it on Everett Williams, who broke the off-speed spell of Loons starter Allen Webster with a NASA launch in the fifth. And train it, mostly, on the TinCaps’ bullpen, which when it needed to be Wednesday was six kinds of sublime: three innings, two hits, two straight 1-2-3 innings to close it out.
“That’s huge,” Flores said. “Branham has only pitched once for us, so we didn’t know what we were gonna get. We just didn’t want any big innings.”
They didn’t get even tiny ones, as it turned out. And if there were echoes of last September in that – last September, when the TinCaps’ pen was bulletproof on the march to the Midwest League title – it was all the more gratifying because this year’s ’pen has been a work in progress whose progress may just now be coming to full flower.
If everything is more microscoped in the playoffs, no one was more under the microscope than Branham, Osuna, Mikolas and Co. And yet no one was more focused beneath its scrutiny when their time came.
“We saw how Matt (Lollis, who allowed seven hits in six scoreless innings) was following the game plan,” said Mikolas, who had 13 of the TinCaps’ 27 saves in the regular season. “We just had to do what he was doing.”
Easy to say, tough to do, in the accordion pressure of a best-of-three series. Which is why no one down there in the TinCaps’ ’pen acted like it was a best-of-three.
“It’s different than the regular season, because there might not be a tomorrow,” Mikolas said. “But if you think like that, you’re just gonna get nervous. … We’ve had a lot of guys up and down this year, but it’s been kind of solid the last couple of months. When it’s time to go in the game, everybody just bears down and focuses.”
Under the microscope or not.
