It’s always nice to see the C’s get a little space in the pages of the hometown newspapers, mostly because it doesn’t happen very often. Both the big papers in town are early morning dailies, and their deadlines are too tight for anything but the scorelines to make the paper, more often than not.

But yesterday’s game was a matinee special, which gave The Vancouver Sun’s Lyndon Little a little room to talk about Jeff Gray’s big start to the year.

Sadly, the Sun’s parent company restricts online content to subscribers of the paper only, and because I don’t want to be sued for copyright infringement, I can’t copy the whole thing for you here.

I can, however, under the laws of fair use, give you the choice pieces of the article:

Jeff Gray hails from the "Show Me State" and that’s exactly what he’s doing for the Oakland A’s brass.

When you’re a 32nd round draft choice you need to show something fairly quickly to prove you deserve to stay around in pro baseball. Gray, a 23-year-old right-hander from Chesterfield, Mo., did that last year when he went 3-0 with a fancy 1.89 ERA in the Arizona Rookie League.

This season, after making the step up to the Single-A level, he seems to be picking up where he left off in 2004. Wednesday, Gray’s strong mound effort enabled the C’s to snap a mini two-game slide with a 3-1 victory over the Tri-City Dust Devils before a crowd of 2,407 in the first mid-week afternoon matinee of the Northwest League season at Nat Bailey Stadium.

[…]

With Oakland’s director of player personnel Keith Lieppman watching from the stands, the second-year pro from Southwest Missouri State limited the Dust Devils to just three hits and one run over seven innings. Gray struck out four and didn’t allow a walk.

[…]

"I felt great," grinned Gray. "I was getting my outs with a fast ball away and then a changeup to the same spot. The biggest thing was no walks. I gave up three on the road and wasn’t happy with that."

[…] Canadians’ manager Juan Navarrete liked the way Gray attacked the Tri-City hitters. "Jeff had good command of all his pitches today," he said. "He was spotting them well. What I liked most, though, was the way he stayed aggressive the whole [way] through."

Nothing groundbreaking, but props to Gray for getting noticed, and even more props to Lyndon Little for giving some love to the homeboys in a town that, for the most part, ignores baseball for being ‘not hockey-like enough’.