Welcome to the Hog Blog, a blog chronicling minor-league baseball in the Lehigh Valley. Tom Housenick, The Morning Call's IronPigs beat writer, has been at The Morning Call since 2008. In a previous lifetime, he was at Lackawanna County Stadium in Moosic talking with future Phillies Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard, among many others.
He’ll now be spending his summers in search of who the Phillies are hoping to be the next Chase Utley and Cole Hamels plus any outfielder who catch and hit. What he really hopes to find are the next Mariano Rivera, Todd Helton and Jim Thome --- great human beings who happened to be great at this sport.
He spent the last five years covering Colonial League football, college basketball and high school track & field.

Like most pitchers, Jesse Biddle has a routine he follows before his start.

The last thing he does before leaving the bullpen is pitch to a simulated hitter, with a hitter standing by the plate and his catcher calling pitches.

Last Monday night in Harrisburg, he "walked" pitching coach Dave Lundquist on four pitches.

"They were all over the place but I knew ... I said, 'Hey, that felt great,'" Biddle said Friday night. "It felt great coming out of the hand, and I felt I got the bad ones out of the way early."

A few hours later, the 21-year-old left hander headed to the Metro Bank Park clubhouse following what he said was the best start of his career and one of the most overpowering efforts in Reading history.

Biddle struck out 16 in seven innings and had a perfect game through 6 1/3 innings, earning his second Double-A victory with in a 3-2 win over the Senators. He struck out the side four times, threw 55 of his first 73 pitches for strikes and 74 of 104 overall. He eventually lost his perfect game bid by issuing a one-out walkin the seventh, and his no-hit bid to the next battersd, Darrin Hood, on a clean single to left.

Social media spread Biddle's performance among the Phillies partisans almost instantaneously, and Biddle marveled at the response.

""I guess it kind of makes me realize how many people are paying attention and how big Philly Nation really is," he said. "There's a lot of fans who follow the minor leagues and follow all of the prospects all the way through the system. And to have that reacton that overwhelmingly positive of me and the whole team, it was great. it felt really good to be a part of that."

There were those who felt that Biddle, the club's first-round pick in 2010 out of Germantown Friends in suburban Philadelphia, should have been pitching at Citizens Bank Park Monday instead of in Harrisburg. He was the populist choice among the fans to get the call when John Lannan went on the disabled list with a knee injury, but much to their disappointment, general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. immediately dismissed that notion and instead later plucked Jonathan Pettibone from the IronPigs to replace Lannan.

Biddle, already seemingly as poised and polished a speaker with the media as any major league veteran could hope to be, said Amaro made the right choice.

"We have so many good guys in front of me; I don't really put myself in the mix with them because they're in Triple-A, they're having success," said Biddle, the consensus pick as the No. 1 prospect in the system. "Guys like Pettibone, [Tyler] Cloyd, [Ethan] Martin, [Adam] Morgan, they're all very very good pitchers, They're all very talented and when it comes down to it, they're in front of me right now."

While the media and public fawned all over Biddle's outing, the organization treated it as business as usual. That's the way Biddle said he wants it.

"I don't want to have people blowing it up into what it's not," he said. "The fact is, it was just one outing during the year. That's the way I look at it. I have to pitch again [Sunday], and it's not like anything changes.

"We went over the game, talked about what happened, and one of the things I really wanted to address is how it happened and hot to replicate it as best I can. I know every time I'm going to out there, I'm not giong to be able to do that. But I'd like to have success every time I go out there."

Biddle faced the Senators just six days earlier, pitching six strong innings in a no-decision at FirstEnergy Stadium. After that game he talked about the challenge of facing the same team om back-to-back outings, and what he might have to do to keep Harrisburg hitters off-balance a second time.

He said he and Reading pitching coach Dave Lundquist came up with a slightly different game plan to use against them, but ultimately, Biddle said, he's going to stick with what works until it doesn't.

"One thing Lundy always says is, you never want to pitch away from your strengths if you don't have to," Biddle said. "For the most part it was a relatively similar game plan, and to keep pitching to my strengths until they made me adjust. And fortunately, they game they didn't really force me to adjust until the seventh inning."

The Phillies insist they're not going to rush the youngster, and Biddle doesn't think one game really changes anything, "other than the fact that I know I can do that.

"One game does nothing for me," he said. "The goal is not to have the best April of anybody; the goal is to pitch the best during the season and have a good year. The game on Sunday is what matters to me now. I'm done with Monday."