Baseball Roundup: With Beckett Sharp, Boston’s Torment Takes the Day Off

Beckett (2-1) held Toronto to one run in seven innings Saturday as host Boston beat the Blue Jays, 4-1. Jed Lowrie hit a two-run homer for the Red Sox, who are 3-10, still the worst in the majors.

Beckett (2-1) had nine strikeouts and he allowed two base runners in an inning only once. Through three starts, Beckett has a 1.80 earned run average. Last season, Beckett missed two months with a strained back and went 6-6 with a 5.78 E.R.A.

“I definitely pushed myself a little bit more; I definitely felt good today,” he said. “That was one of the things where on a day game like today, where maybe the energy is down a little bit — that’s a way of picking myself up.”

The victory ended Boston’s three-game losing streak.

RAYS 4, TWINS 3 Ben Zobrist led off the bottom of the ninth with a tying home run against Minnesota closer Joe Nathan (0-1), and Johnny Damon ended the game with a two-out, bases-loaded single, giving host Tampa Bay its fifth straight victory. Damon, though hitting just .218, has driven in 12 runs.

The blown save was Nathan’s second of the series.

INDIANS 8, ORIOLES 3 Josh Tomlin (3-0) pitched six innings and Orlando Cabrera drove in four runs for Cleveland, which won its sixth straight at home and sent Baltimore to its sixth straight loss.

In the last 12 games, Indians starters are 8-1 with a 1.91 E.R.A. Cleveland’s 10-4 start is its best in nine years.

ROYALS 7, MARINERS 0 Alex Gordon had three hits, increasing his league-leading total to 22 and extending his hitting streak to 10 games, as host Kansas City beat Seattle for the third straight day. Sean O’Sullivan (1-1) threw five scoreless innings in his first start.

The Mariners stranded 11 runners, committed two errors and allowed three unearned runs, all charged to Felix Hernandez (1-2).

ANGELS 7, WHITE SOX 2 Tyler Chatwood, a 21-year-old in his second career start, pitched seven impressive innings for his first victory, and Hank Conger hit a three-run homer for visiting Los Angeles.

Chatwood allowed five hits and one run, on Carlos Quentin’s 100th career home run.

GIANTS 5, DIAMONDBACKS 3 Freddy Sanchez doubled in the tying run in the sixth inning, then put visiting San Francisco up for good with a two-run single in the seventh.

Giants starter Barry Zito left after spraining his right foot lunging for a bunt in the second inning. The Giants said X-rays were negative, but Zito was on crutches after the game, and a magnetic resonance imaging test was planned.

REDS 11, PIRATES 2 Ramon Hernandez of host Cincinnati hit his sixth career grand slam during a seven-run fifth inning against James McDonald, breaking a 2-2 tie and sending Pittsburgh to its fifth loss in six games.

CUBS 8, ROCKIES 3 Casey Coleman pitched into the sixth, scattering four hits, and Starlin Castro went 4 for 5 with a three-run homer as Chicago ended host Colorado’s winning streak at seven.

ASTROS 5, PADRES 3 Joe Inglett’s pinch-hit single broke a 3-3 tie in the seventh inning for host Houston. Inglett, acquired from Tampa Bay in March, had had one hit in his first 12 at-bats with the Astros.

SIZEMORE READY TO RETURN Cleveland outfielder Grady Sizemore, who had microfracture surgery on his left knee in June, could be activated from the disabled list in the next two days and return to the lineup. Manager Manny Acta declined to specify the day. “We don’t know when, but it’s going to be soon,” Acta said.

NATIONALS PROSPECT DIES Shortstop Yewri Guillen, an 18-year-old Washington prospect, died Thursday of bacterial meningitis in the Dominican Republic, prompting the team to protect other players at its training academy there.

Guillen first showed symptoms of the disease around Monday, according to Dr. Wiemi Douoguih, the Nationals’ medical director. He said the team was still trying to determine how Guillen contracted the disease.

Douoguih said that other players at the academy were not at risk and that the Nationals were assessing what they could do to prevent a recurrence. It is unclear whether Guillen was in contact with other players at the academy.

 

On Baseball: Rangers Move On And Fire Away Without Lee

The Yankees stashed Phil Hughes on the disabled list, essentially because of a sudden inability to throw hard. Their rookie right-hander, Ivan Nova, then failed to complete five innings for the second start in a row. In one night, two rotation spots looked fragile.

The Rangers, meanwhile, lined up three pitchers who did not start in their run to the World Series last fall. The Rangers had hoped to start the season with the injured right-handers Tommy Hunter and Brandon Webb in the rotation, and strongly considered shifting closer Neftali Feliz. Yet they started Saturday with a 2.50 earned run average, the lowest in the majors.

Matt Harrison lasted eight innings in a victory on Friday, and Derek Holland went seven and two-thirds innings in a 5-2 loss on Saturday. Alexi Ogando, who faces C. C. Sabathia on Sunday night, has won twice this season, allowing no runs.

“They have great stuff and they’re young,” said the left-hander C. J. Wilson, who started on opening day. “That’s the thing, people always discount guys that haven’t done it yet, but nobody has until they do it. So you have to look at the guys who have potential to do it.”

Holland, another left-hander, said he talked much more with Wilson than he did with Lee, who arrived last July with the Rangers comfortably in first place. Lee helped the team immensely in the playoffs, but not so much in the regular season; the Rangers won just 6 of his 15 starts.

The Yankees, who never had Lee, probably needed him more, especially after Andy Pettitte retired. They were smart to sign the veterans Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia, though their upside is limited. Hughes, 24, was supposed to be embarking on his prime, but for now he is lost, a slide that began well before the Rangers thrashed him twice in the American League Championship Series.

Hughes looked terrific last April, the way the Rangers’ pitchers look now. A lot can change in a long season. But Ron Washington, the Texas manager, said he sensed that Harrison, 25, and Holland, 24, had matured.

“When you’ve got youth, you never know when there’s going to be that hiccup,” Washington said. “In the first inning last night, when Harrison came out and threw all those balls?

“Last year, that would have snowballed. When he got into the fifth inning and couldn’t find the strike zone? That would have snowballed. When he got into the eighth inning and they started rattling him? That would have snowballed. But he stopped every threat.”

Holland, who beat the Yankees in relief in the playoffs, matched his career high with 118 pitches Saturday. Washington said he liked the matchups in the eighth inning, and Holland still seemed strong. With Nolan Ryan atop the organization and Mike Maddux guiding the pitchers, the Rangers preach endurance from their starters.

Wilson switched to the rotation from the bullpen last season and worked 204 innings, going 15-8. A hamstring injury slowed him this spring, but he has pitched well enough so far and sees a side benefit to his lighter workload in camp.

“I feel like, physically, it’ll allow me to maybe peak a little bit later this year,” Wilson said.

The Rangers, who sat out the playoffs in the first decade of the 2000s, can think confidently now about the postseason. The A.L. West is challenging, loaded with dominant starters. But the Rangers — who salute good plays with claw-and-antler hand motions — play with an endearing style.

“I saw it last year, with the claw and all that stuff,” said catcher Mike Napoli, a former Angel.

“You can always tell when teams have fun, and they’re loose and they go out and play hard. We didn’t like it because they were our rivals in the division. But I’m glad I’m a part of it now.”

The engine of the Rangers’ offense is Josh Hamilton, last season’s A.L. most valuable player, who could miss the next two months after breaking a bone in his right arm on a headfirst slide at the plate last Tuesday.

But the Rangers lost Hamilton, Nelson Cruz and Ian Kinsler for long stretches last season, and still wound up in the World Series.

Cruz and Kinsler are healthy now, and Michael Young — who had asked to be traded after the signing of Adrian Beltre bumped him off third base — is hitting .339. If their pitchers keep performing, the Rangers could stay in first place for a while.

“Character- and makeup-wise, this group’s off the charts,” Young said. “It’s a great group to be around every day, and I think it’s just the way every guy’s wired here. When you have 25 guys who are the same way, we feel like we can overcome a lot of things.”

 

Mixed Martial Arts Makes Inroads in Baseball Training

Adam Dunn of the Chicago White Sox, Brad Penny of the Detroit Tigers and Russell Martin of the Yankees have used the sport’s punches and kicks to improve their throwing and swinging. In addition to improving overall fitness, Martin said, mixed martial arts can make an athlete mentally tougher.

“You tolerate the pain and get through it,” he said. “Mentally, I know I’m in a good place because I worked hard.”

Mixed martial arts is a combination of karate, judo, jujitsu, boxing, wrestling and tae kwon do. The sport is also popular in Brazil and Japan. Pay-per-view telecasts in the United States began in 1993, with the Ultimate Fighting Championship staging the most lucrative matches.

Unlike Martin, Dunn and Penny guard the secrets of their workouts as if they were team signs.

Penny acknowledged training with Dan Henderson, a star M.M.A. competitor, but he declined through a Tigers spokesman to discuss his training. Dunn declined through the White Sox media-relations office.

Henderson said that he had had Penny practice the kicks and punches used in M.M.A., but there was no sparring.

“We use focus mitts,” Henderson said, referring to the oversize padded gloves that he wears while athletes kick and punch them. “Physically, it works different muscles than players tend to use in their own sport. The training gives them something different to push themselves through.”

Henderson said the workouts could indirectly help Penny’s strategy on the mound.

“It might give Brad a little more confidence when he’s pitching inside,” Henderson said. “And he’s prepared in case anyone rushes the mound.”

Jay Glazer, a football analyst for Fox Sports who runs MMAthletics with Randy Couture, a mixed martial arts star, has trained N.F.L. players in the sport. Glazer said his clients included Ryan Grant, Jared Allen, Clay Matthews and the Atlanta Falcons team.

While the workouts for the football players emphasize wrestling and hand-fighting techniques, Glazer said the routine for baseball players concentrated on emulating the movements of their sport.

Ryan Rowland-Smith, a left-handed pitcher in the Houston Astros organization who battled arm and back injuries the last couple of years with the Seattle Mariners, worked with Glazer in the winter. “I’m in the best shape of my life, for sure,” said Rowland-Smith, a surfer while growing up in Australia.

Glazer said: “In the case of Ryan, we look at film and break it down frame by frame and come up with a combination that mirrors his pitching delivery. A knee, a punch, followed by a kick. We have him do a ton of that for his hips. Power comes from his core, his hips and his legs, even though he uses his arm to pitch.”

Mentally, Glazer said, the mantra is the same for baseball players as it is for N.F.L. players.

“Own your space,” Glazer said seveal times. “We get the players thinking like a cage fighter. When the door shuts, it’s time to break that man’s will across from you. For Ryan, as a pitcher, it’s that 60 feet 6 inches that you own.”

Rowland-Smith said the rigors of M.M.A. training made it easier to tolerate physical and mental challenges on the mound.

“If you have some small injuries or you’re not feeling 100 percent, nothing can compare with what you go through with the training, so you can fight through it,” he said.

Martin, a catcher, worked with Jonathan Chaimberg, who trains Georges St.-Pierre, the U.F.C.’s welterweight champion. Martin said he was searching for a way to regain his All-Star form after two injury-marred seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

After a few months of six-days-a-week M.M.A.-style training sessions with Chaimberg in Montreal, where he lives, Martin increased his endurance and explosiveness and lost body fat. He said his upper-body routine was called the big rope.

“It’s a thick rope that you attach to a base of a wall and has a loop,” he said. “You create waves with the rope, and it’s like a 20-second sprint, a 10-second rest. You don’t do it for a long period of time. You do it for five minutes, get a good workout in and work on your conditioning.”

It seems to be helping. Martin is hitting .300 with three homers and eight runs batted in.

Bobby Valentine, an ESPN baseball analyst, has managed in the major leagues and in Japan, where one would think mixed martial arts training is popular among players. But that is not the case, he said.

“It’s more prominent in the States,” said Valentine, who said he believes the training is beneficial.

He added: “Most mixed martial arts instructors teach balance, quickness and awareness of your surroundings. There are a few cases in Japan, but most players just play baseball over there.”

INSIDE PITCH

The Yankees’ scheduled game Tuesday against the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium was postponed because of rain and was not immediately rescheduled. Manager Joe Girardi said that A. J. Burnett (2-0), Tuesday’s scheduled starter, would pitch Wednesday, and Phil Hughes (0-1) would start Thursday. Girardi said he planned to start Freddy Garcia for the first time later this week; Girardi added that the date had yet to be determined. ... Reliever Pedro Feliciano, who has been sidelined with tightness in his left triceps, played catch, but Girardi said the session “did not go well.” Feliciano will have another test Wednesday. “It’s a concern,” Girardi said of Feliciano, who had to cut short a similar throwing session March 27. “We were hoping after these two weeks that he’d be able to take the next step.” DAVE CALDWELL