Good teams win more than their share of close games, but the Arizona Diamondbacks weren’t doing much of that in April and into May of the regular season.As the D-Backs entered a three-game series against the Minnesota Twins at Chase Field, they had lost six straight one-run games in a…
Going into this game at San Diego’s Petco Park, the Diamondbacks were six games below .500 and a half-game out of last place in the not-so-great NL West division. Another one-run loss on the previous evening had hurt. Big relief pitcher Chad Qualls, whom had been a disaster zone when…
We’ll take a break now from our paean to the Arizona Diamondbacks successes in the 2011 season to get back to our regular gig digging up dirt and what-have-you. Will add five more tomorrow as the D-Backs open their best-of-five series against the Milwaukee Brewers in Wisconsin…
One of the greatest moments of the 2011 season came at Chase Field in early May against the Colorado Rockies. We were about to leave after the 7th inning with the D-Backs down 2-0 and stinking up the joint offensively, but decided to stick it out until the end–sure glad…
The Diamondbacks opened a ten-game home stand on a Monday night against arguably baseball’s best team, the Philadelphia Phillies. On paper, it was something of a mismatch, little right-hander Ian Kennedy against southpaw Cliff Lee, one of the game’s most dominating pitchers.But Kennedy was the star on this night, throwing…
We don’t have video highlights for this one, but the D-Backs’ early-season come-from-behind win over the Giants to salvage the final game of a three-game series at Chase Field was a beaut. We were there as Arizona squandered an early three-run lead to the world champs, and it looked like…
It was the kind of game that the D-Backs lost just about every time last year — a game in which they lost a lead late and had to go into extra innings.Arizona opened its season in Denver against the Rockies, a team that many pundits expected to give the…
More than four years ago, we wrote about the quirky kidnapping case involving (then) 4-year-old Raven Laws, some local Native-Americans and a quasi-Indian tribe based in Alabama. The name of the story was “Indian Givers,” and here it is. Interested readers should hit that link button for a primer,…
Stayed up to watch all of the baseball games that mattered last night–which were several. May we be allowed to understate for once?Greatest finish to a regular season in the history of the game.At home, the Arizona Diamondbacks needed to win and the Milwaukee Brewers needed to lose to give…
Chuck Bauer loved his job as a lieutenant at the Lewis Prison Complex in Buckeye. He gradually had risen in rank over eight years (in two stints) with the Arizona Department of Corrections, winning Supervisor of the Year at Lewis twice. But the 56-year-old Peoria resident says he became increasingly…
We actually were compiling our list of top-20 moments and characters from the Arizona Diamondbacks’ improbable 2011 season, when (to steal a line from the great Vin Scully), the impossible happened and Ryan Roberts hit his grand-slam walk-off homer to beat the Dodgers. Scully, of course, made his legendary call when…
Merry Shaydak went to work as usual at the Mexico border on a very chilly March day in 2010. Cute dog photo #6,432 She was a waitress at the Turquoise Valley Golf and RV Park in Naco, which sits right on the line a few miles south of Bisbee. …
We spent a few hours last Saturday night at the 5th annual Jason Schechterle Scholarship Ball, and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Schechterle’s name (and his face) are recognizable to most Valley residents: He’s the former Phoenix cop who was rear-ended by a speeding taxi in his Ford Victoria cruiser a decade…
We wrote a little story for this paper in the Dark Ages (before, yikes, the Internet!) about the last meals that Arizona’s death row inmates order in advance should their time ever come. We asked Mike Arra, then the public-information officer for the Arizona corrections department, to provide us…
Just got word that he defense team of Mark Goudeau, accused of murdering nine people in an infamous 2005-06 crime spree, will not be calling any witnesses to the stand at his ongoing trial…
Just after noon on December 15, 2009, a Tempe police detective sent a very specific e-mail about how to conduct a child pornography investigation to this private address: detectiveoneal32[at]ma.com. Detective Burke Mattlin was writing from his work computer to a former colleague, Shaquille O’Neal — a.k.a. Shaq, The Big Cactus,…
The Arizona Diamondbacks’ recently dormant bats finally came alive this afternoon, and it couldn’t have been at a better time. The locals held on to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 8-5 at Chase Field in front of a lively crowd of about 25,000, all of whom seemed well-aware that the team…
We remember Debra Weyermann from our long-ago days trolling for stories for the Sierra Vista and Bisbee dailies down at the Mexican border. She was known as “D” in those days when she covered the courts for the Arizona Daily Star, and did a bang-up job. Fast-forward to now: Weyermann’s…
Seems like a decade ago that we wrote about the murder of 30-year-old Navneet Kaur, the estranged Ahwatukee wife of Avtar Grewal. We called the story “Snake on a Plane,” referring to Mr. Grewal’s midnight escape to India on a Continental Airlines flight. Here it is, The native of India…
Every special season has its extra-special moments, and last night’s seventh-inning homer by Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Gerardo Parra was one of them. The D-Backs were down 4-3 to the Los Angeles Dodgers when the scrappy Parra stepped to the plate against reliever Hong-Chih Kuo. Parra had batted against the hard-throwing…
So, it’s come to this: If the Arizona Diamondbacks end up losing the NL West crown in the final three weeks of the 2011 season it will go down as one of the biggest folds of all-time. Who woulda thunk it? Not us, that’s for sure. We…
Jasper Rushing is reflecting about why he pummeled, slashed, and mutilated his seriously mentally ill cellmate to death last September 10. “It was not a healthy environment in there,” he tells New Times from his current residence at the Maricopa County Jail. Rushing is talking about what happened inside Cell…
