Prospect Reed no-hits Dodgers for three innings
Lefty whiffs Crawford, Cruz and Hairston; Puig 0-for-3 in first Minors action
While the red-hot Puig was held hitless in his first three at-bats since being optioned to Double-A on Tuesday, Quakes left-hander Chris Reed -- the Dodgers' top pick in the 2011 First-Year Player Draft -- looked sharp in tossing three no-hit innings.
Reed, ranked the club's No. 5 prospect by MLB.com, allowed only a walk to Adrian Gonzalez and struck out three big leaguers -- Jerry Hairston Jr., Luis Cruz and Carl Crawford.
"It was a packed house, and it was fun," Reed said. "It's still Spring Training, and obviously you're trying to work on things. But at the same time, you're facing big league hitters. You want to keep the ball down, go out there and throw strikes."
Puig, the club's top-rated prospect, whose offense was the talk of the Cactus League (.526, three homers, 11 RBIs), had the closest thing to a hit off Reed. In the second, he popped a blooper to right that bounced off the glove of Quakes second baseman Darnell Sweeney. But Gonzalez, who was on first, headed back to the bag thinking the ball had been caught, setting up a force at second.
Dodgers legend Tommy Lasorda, who skippered the club to a pair of World Series titles in the 1980s, managed the split squad on Thursday. His primary role as a special advisor to the chairman is to work with and teach the club's prospects, and he said Thursday's game was really about them.
"It's a great idea," Lasorda said. "It's nice for them to be playing against Major League players. That's what it's all about."
The Quakes got on the board twice in the bottom of the first with four consecutive singles, capped by Jonathan Garcia's two-run knock up the middle. Right-hander Stephen Fife, who went 2-0 with a 3.45 ERA in four Cactus League appearances for the Dodgers, settled in and didn't allow another earned run, striking out six in 4 1/3 innings.
"I rely on ground balls, and sometimes they don't always go your way," Fife said. "So I just tried to compete in the zone. I did all right and settled in a little bit, but I was a little bit long in terms of my mechanics."
The Dodgers looked a bit sloppy in the field, committing three errors in the first three innings. The third came when Fife made a poor throw to first on a chopper back to the mound in the third, setting up the Quakes' third run of the game.
Three different Rancho Cucamonga pitchers combined to hold the Dodgers to just two hits over six innings, before Los Angeles stormed back to tie the game with three runs in the seventh. Crawford's two-out, two-run single evened the game at 3.
Angelo Songco's RBI single in the bottom of the seventh won it for the Quakes.