Here’s about five and a half minutes of home-movie footage from an Orioles-White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park on August 22, 1976.
Author: Jim Ellwanger
Keeping score with the pros
Here’s a scorecard as kept by baseball announcer/television writer Ken Levine, whose work has been referred to on this blog before (he co-wrote the “Dancin’ Homer” episode of “The Simpsons,” mentioned here early on).
Current baseball events
Well, about as current as one can be in a comic strip. This is the “Doonesbury” strip for today, Friday, May 21, referencing an event that occurred on Sunday, May 9, twelve days earlier. Back in my younger days when I had dreams of becoming a nationally syndicated cartoonist (i.e., the early-to-mid-1980s), the rule of thumb in every book about becoming a nationally syndicated cartoonist was that daily comic strips needed to be done 8 weeks in advance — or maybe you could push it as little
as 6 weeks — and Sunday strips needed a 10-to-12-week lead time. Obviously, that is no longer the case, thanks to technology. At least for daily strips. Sunday strips need more time, although I believe it’s gone down from 10 to 12 weeks to half that. And, thanks to technology, the Sunday strips look better on the page than they ever have before; the production and printing techniques are allowing, for example, gradients that are actually gradations, and reproduce correctly in perfect registration and don’t rub off on your hands. It’s just too bad they’re printed so small that no one can tell. Okay, my periodic rant about comic strips over. I hope we’ll have some exciting news about baseball-related program activities to share soon. (Exciting for me and probably Levi, at least.)
French and Saunders
I got an instant message from a co-worker at about 2:00 saying a friend of hers had an extra ticket for tonight’s Angels-A’s game. Yes, even though I had made the 80-plus-mile round-trip to Anaheim for games Tuesday and Wednesday, since my rule is to never turn down a last-minute baseball invitation (especially when the ticket is free), I made the trip again.
One storyline in this game was that it was Dallas Braden’s first start after his perfect game last Sunday. He needed to retire the first three batters to break Catfish Hunter’s A’s record of 29 consecutive batters retired — and Braden retired only the first two. The game did become a pitchers’ duel, with Braden battling Joe Saunders, and with the difference being the Angels’ big 6th inning.
Both pitchers went the distance, just as in the Angels-Royals game Levi, Jason, and I saw last May in which Zack Greinke went up against Joe Saunders. Same result: a complete-game win for Saunders.
Let me highlight this fact: Joe Saunders has pitched exactly two complete-game shutouts in his major-league career. I have seen both of them live.
Another day, another Rays win
Sorry, I have no overheard cute conversations during the Angels-Rays game yesterday afternoon. A 40-something couple in the row in front of me left in the middle of the 9th inning with their team down by only one run, which I can’t understand. Also, I spent $17.25 total for a smallish cheesesteak sandwich and a strawberry milkshake, which I can’t understand, either. (The cheesesteak was “Whiz wit,” no less. I prefer provolone wit.)
Regular Angels catcher Mike Napoli was in the game at DH, and the Rays scored
two of their runs on passed balls by backup catcher Ryan Budde (described as “little-used” in Thursday’s L.A. Times). I
couldn’t help but imagine a conversation in the Angels locker room after the game involving the phrase “I’m not your guy, Budde.”
Evan Longoria is quite a good hitter
Not much to say about last night’s Angels-Rays game, which I attended with hanger-on Jason.
Actually, I do have one tale to recount: in the third inning, the boy sitting next to us, who was maybe 3 or 4 years old, started telling his father he wanted to leave. Dad tried to bargain with him, saying that if they went home, he’d have to go to bed.
“Play and then go to bed?”
“No, straight to bed.”
The boy thought this over for a while, and then decided he did want to go to bed, and then get up the next morning and go to church. “That’s not until Sunday,” pointed out Dad.
There was some more hushed negotiation, to which I wasn’t paying close attention because the Rays were in the process of scoring two runs, and then they actually did end up leaving. Oh, well, it saved the kid from learning the sad truth, that the Angels sometimes do lose to the Joe Maddon-led Rays at home.
I’ll see this afternoon if that happens again. I’m leaving work early to go to the game, which has a somewhat-unusual 4:05 P.M. start time. That would be perfectly suited for a national Wednesday Night Baseball broadcast at 7:00 Eastern, but — I’m sure everyone is going to be surprised by this — ESPN is showing the Yankees vs. whatever patsy has been ordered by Bud Selig to take a dive. I believe it will be a team of 8-year-old Chinese gymnasts dressed as the Detroit Tigers.
Another Washington scandal
Senatorial staff members ordered a cake for a ceremony honoring Bobby Cox’s 50 years in baseball. The order was placed by phone, apparently. If you’re a fan of Cake Wrecks, there’s a lot to like about the cake — it’s pretty horrible even aside from the misspelling.
You know what’s going to happen
Watch this now before
MLB realizes it exists online: the last 10 minutes or so of Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
A definite Blue Jays difference
From the blog Torontoist, here is a great 1980 advertisement for Toronto Blue Jays-branded food items, exclusively available at Dominion supermarkets. The products are mostly of the “if you enjoy it at the ballpark, you’ll enjoy it at home” variety, but there are a couple of outliers: granola bars? Peanut butter?
There’s also milk in a Blue Jays logo glass. I assume that’s because they were selling Blue Jays glassware in the stores; however, I’d like to think it was a near-last-minute addition during the photo shoot when someone decided that, with the kids depicted eating baseball stadium “junk food” (a hot dog, popcorn, and potato chips), there should be some indication that they might be consuming something healthy at some point in the near future.
Despite having taken a year of French in college, I don’t remember having seen the French word for “peanuts” before — not even at Olympic Stadium in 2004 — and now that I see it on these packages, “arachides” is a little too close to “arachnids” for comfort. There better not be spiders roasted in those shells!
Early warning: Baseball-related movies
Happened to see this on the Uni Watch blog: Thursday, stuff June 10, and at 7:00 P.M., the Block Museum at Northwestern University is presenting a program called “Rare Films from the Baseball Hall of Fame.”