Guardians Baseball Insider

A daily feature of Indians Baseball Insider, Around the Farm, obviously won’t be able to be produced until there are minor league games played. In its place, for the time being, a fun feature we are going to try out is This Day in Indians Minor League History. We will do some research and try to find some interesting or random box scores or information that happened in the Indians minor leagues on this particular day. We will try to make this a daily feature as long as we can find something to post other than just repeating items from the last few years to avoid too much repetitiveness. Hope you enjoy, stay well and hope we can get baseball back soon!

April 15, 2012

Bowling Green Hot Rods 22, Lake County Captains 12

A warm and sunny Sunday afternoon at Classic Park on April 15, 2012 got wild as the game moved along.

The Lake County Captains jumped out to a 2-0 lead but traded runs quickly with the Bowling Green Hot Rods (Tampa Bay) early in the game. The dust looked to settle a little as by the sixth inning the Captains led, 6-4. The mad dash to the end pushed the game past three hours as it only got wilder.

The Hot Rods Todd Glaesmann blasted a three run homer to give them a 7-6 lead in the top of the seventh.

Captains OF Luigi Rodriguez drove in two with a two out double in the bottom of the inning, making it 8-7 in favor of the home nine (Lake County).

A walk, single and a hit by pitch led the bases for Bowling Green in the top half of the eighth. Tyler Goeddel hit a grand slam, putting the Hot Rods back in front, 11-8. That was also with two outs.

Jordan Smith and Cleveland-native Alex Lavisky hit back to back homers in the bottom of the eighth for the Captains to pull the score back to 11-10 in favor of the Hot Rods.

Then, things got wild.

Bowling Green sent 16 batters to the plate in the top of the 9th inning, scoring 11 runs.

Drew Vettleson hit a three run homer as the first two batters of the inning reached base to make it 14-10. Joel Caminero struck out next for what should have been the first out of the inning, but Kyle Blair, who had been on the mound for the Captains since the sixth inning, struck Caminero out on a wild pitch and he ended up reaching first base, so four batters into the ninth there were still no outs.

Blair got a fly out by the next batter, but then allowed two straight singles before the Captains had to replace him with Jeff Johnson.

Johnson gave up a single immediately, issued a walk to load the bases and gave up a two run double to Glaesmann. He struck out the next batter for the second out, which should have been the last out. However, he allowed four straight singles after that, which allowed four more runs to score.

The Hot Rods scored 11 runs in the ninth off of two Captains pitched with 16 batters. They collected 11 hits in the inning and worked two walks.

The Captains entered the bottom of the ninth inning down 22-10 after being down just 11-10 to start the top half of the inning.

Patrick Tolentino hit a feeble two run homer in the bottom of the ninth for the Captains.

Cody Anderson started the game for Lake County and allowed four runs in five innings.

Kyle Blair’s line unfortunately took a major brunt of the damage –  3.1IP, 10H, 13ER, 2BB, 2K.

Jeff Johnson didn’t fare much better – 0.2IP, 6H, 5ER, BB, K

Blair was piggybacking Anderson and had allowed four runs in four innings in his first start of the season. After this inning, his ERA went from 9.00 to 20.86. Blair was a fourth round pick by the Indians in 2010 out of San Diego, but suffered various injuries and actually was out of baseball by 2013.

Johnson’s ERA was 32.40 after this one, though he’d also only had one appearance before this. He pitched with the Indians org until 2017 and has been pitching in Latin American league’s since.

Francisco Lindor was 0-5 in this contest. The only other major leaguer in this lineup for the Indians (besides Anderson) on this day was Robel Garcia, who made his debut in 2019 for the Cubs after several years away from playing ball in the US, playing in Italy.

Cameron Seitzer, the son of former Indian Kevin Seizter, was the most notable Hot Rods name on this day. He was 2-5.

Amazingly, neither team was credited with any errors in this wild affair, combining for 34 earned runs and six homers.

BOX SCORE