If there’s one thing that doesn’t surprise me anymore, it’s when the Vancouver Canadians get a nice fat crowd and get utterly destroyed on the field. It always happens. The more Fireworks Nights the team has scheduled in a season, the more losses that team will suffer.

Opening night, big crowd, huge loss.
Fireworks night, big crowd, huge loss.
Playoffs, pitiful crowd… still huge loss.

It’s the curse of the C’s, and it’s been going on since I can remember. The 2004 and 2005 C’s wore their road blue jerseys all the time, believing the home jerseys were cursed. Little did they know, it wasn’t the jersey, it was the fact that people were watching.

Tonight was no different. 4800 people paid to get in. And what did they see?

JD Pruitt hitting a lead-off homerun… and nothing else. At all.

Oh, a couple of errors and some sloppy pitching. And fireworks. But nothing beyond that.

Well done to JD Pruitt for banging one out over the left field wall while the hometown fans were still finding their seats. That should have set the tone for a big night for the Van fans, but things conspired against them.

Thing that conspired to prevent a win #1:
Rick Magnante’s decision to put Ryne ‘The Journeyman’ Jernigan in as number two hitter.

Q: What do you get if you elevate a .063 hitter seven spots up the order?
A: You get a .042 hitter. 

Thing that conspired to prevent a win #2:
No Dante Love. No Juan Nunez. Yes Julio Rivera.

0-3 with two K’s… but hey, at least he picked a guy off at first. That’s something, right? … Right?

Thing that conspired to prevent a win #3:
Dusty Napoleon dropping back to a statistical norm. You can’t keep up a .400 BA forever.

Thing that conspired to prevent a win #4:
Batters 2 through 6 going a collective 0-17 on the day. Meat of the order? Maybe if we’re talking ground (out) turkey.

Thing that conspired to prevent a win #5:
Francisco ‘Tornado’ Tirado at third base. It’s not that he’s 0-15 this season at the plate. It’s that 8 of those at bats have produced strikeouts. None have produced walks. Francisco Tirado has literally been at first base as often as I have this year. 

On the upside, the team only left four runners on base.
On the downside, the team only had five runners on base. 

This team is going to have to learn to hit sometime. We can manufacture wins out of whole cloth (as happened Sunday), and we can catch lightning in a bottle and ride a few good performances to victory on occasion (as happened yesterday), but does anyone really want to hitch their wagon to being the ‘Rudy’ team of the league – every single game?

Quit choking the bat, quit swinging for the fences, start slapping the ball into shallow outfield, and make the pitchers earn that strikezone.

It’s what got you here lads. 

	July 1, 2008
	Final    1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9      R   H   E   Everett   0   0   0   3   0   0   2   0   1      6   8   1   Vancouver   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0      1   3   2  Recap | Box | W: R. Dominguez (1-0, 3.68); L: H. Garcia (0-2, 2.45) HR: VAN: J. Pruitt (1).