Notes from Opening Day morning

Wow, I stayed up longer than the Los Angeles Times sports department last night! They went to press with “the White Sox quickly took control and built a 10-4 lead after 7 1/2 innings,” but I was awake until I caught up with the TiVo recording in the middle of the 8th inning. Speaking of the L.A. Times, here’s noted class act Vin Scully, quoted today talking about possibly being in the broadcast booth when Barry Bonds passes Babe Ruth’s and/or Hank Aaron’s home run records: “I would just as soon it not happen against the Dodgers….If I had my druthers, I would rather have that awkward moment happen to somebody else.”

Thanks to advanced technology that is currently available to me, I’m now thinking I’m going to attempt to make a post here once an hour today, with the first one around two hours from now, at 11:00 A.M. Pacific/1:00 P.M. Central. I will also attempt to be online on AIM/iChat as trainmanplus all day while I’m watching TV, so feel free to chat. (If I don’t say hi back, it’ll be because the advanced technology has turned out to be too overwhelming.)

Hey, White Sox, you could have moved to a dome in 1989, but no…

As I write this, the Sox and Indians are still in a rain delay. Tropicana Field’s not looking so bad right now, is it?

It wouldn’t be Opening Night without a picture of Chessie near my TV. I now have a different TV configuration than I did last year — my cheap Ikea entertainment cabinet got mostly destroyed when I moved last May — so it’s hard for Chessie to get next to the TV. So you’ll have to settle for her under the TV, hiding from Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, as well she should.

Opening up

Hey, the season starts in less than four hours!

I did it in 2004, I did it in 2005, and courtesy of my current lack of employment, I’ll be doing it again tomorrow: sitting in front of a TV equipped with DirecTV’s free-for-the-first-week MLB Extra Innings package and watching the Opening Day games. As far as I can tell, I won’t have the opportunity to watch all 13 games that will be going on; Cardinals at Phillies and D-Backs at Rockies are missing from the DirecTV schedule, although last year I was surprised by one game unexpectedly being available. Also, unlike last year, there are night games scheduled — including a West Coast night game (Yankees at A’s at 7:00 Pacific time) — so I probably won’t make it through the entire day, but I’ll try to stick around at least through the conclusion of the Angels-Mariners game, and maybe even until the Marlins-Astros and Giants-Padres games wrap up, especially if all the jeers, boos, and taunts at Petco Park are making Barry Bonds weep openly.

And now, off to the supermarket to purchase the fixings for chili (for tonight) and tacos (for tomorrow night).

If it’s the last Thursday in March…

In Levi’s honor, Albert Pujols is on the cover of the Sports Illustrated baseball preview issue this year. And once again, here are their predictions, posted here so we can refer to them during the season and laugh at them in October.

NL East
1. Atlanta Braves
2. New York Mets
3. Philadelphia Phillies
4. Washington Nationals
5. Florida Marlins

NL Central
1. St. Louis Cardinals
2. Milwaukee Brewers
3. Houston Astros
4. Chicago Cubs
5. Pittsburgh Pirates
6. Cincinnati Reds

NL West
1. L.A. Dodgers
2. S.F. Giants
3. San Diego Padres
4. Arizona Diamondbacks
5. Colorado Rockies

AL East
1. New York Yankees
2. Boston Red Sox
3. Toronto Blue Jays
4. Tampa Bay Devil Rays
5. Baltimore Orioles

AL Central
1. Chicago White Sox
2. Cleveland Indians
3. Minnesota Twins
4. Detroit Tigers
5. Kansas City Royals

AL West
1. Oakland A’s
2. L.A. Angels
3. Texas Rangers
4. Seattle Mariners

The two wild-card teams, they believe, will be the Angels and the Mets. White Sox vs. A’s in the ALCS, Cardinals vs. Braves in the NLCS, and White Sox over the Cardinals.

Radio daze

Remember, the Cardinals are no longer on KMOX. Now

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it’s also possible that the Pirates may be leaving their longtime radio home, KDKA.

What? More college baseball?

The usual Los Angeles-based Northwestern alumni suspects and I headed to Malibu to see our beloved Wildcats play the Pepperdine Waves in the final game of a 3-game series. The ‘Cats had lost the first two, but perhaps today would be different.

Why not Eddy D. Field Field?

Sorry, even if your pet really likes baseball, it can’t come in…

The Pacific Ocean is in this picture, although it’s doing a good job of blending in with the sky…

Pepperdine has quite the baseball tradition…

There was a range of Northwestern fans in the stands, from little to not quite as little…

Northwestern starting pitcher Julio Siberio held the Waves to 2 runs in 6 innings…

Northwestern outfielder Antonio Mule takes a cut…

In the top of the 9th, the Waves stood in front of their dugout and tried to put some mojo on the Northwestern hitters. It didn’t work; the ‘Cats tied the game at 2.

However, in the bottom of the 9th, Pepperdine DH Justin Tellam hit a walk-off home run and got mobbed by the rest of the team for his effort. Pepperdine 4, Northwestern 2…

Well, at least someone enjoyed his Fritos…

The scoreboard at the end of the game. It had begun to act up in the top of the 9th, just as Northwestern was threatening — but you’ll notice that Pepperdine got the short end of the stick.

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(Their scoring line was 100 001 002.)

One more note: although the start time of the game was supposed to be noon, when we arrived at 11:55, the second inning had just gotten under way. The same thing happened when Jason and I went to see Northwestern play Cal State Northridge last year. This is either some bizarre NCAA policy, or everyone’s so sick of Northwestern showing up in California and demanding to play baseball, they just want to get the games over with as soon as possible.

Spring is here, I hear

The Vernal Equinox has passed. It’s time for predictions.

Some ground rules:
1) Pick the Braves to win. Seriously. Just give up not doing so. I hate this rule, but if I’d followed it even once since 1991, I’d have picked better.

2) Pick the Royals for last.

3) If you’re really inspired, list the order of finish for each division in each league. If you’re lazy, pick each division winner and the wild card for each league.

4) Pick the MVP and Cy Young. Don’t pick Rookie of the Year, unless you pay more attention to the minor leagues than I do.

5) As you do your calculations, remember that Operation Shutdown is, so far as I know, still in effect. The Pirates will not have the use of the services of Derek Bell.

Play Ball, boys!*

*and girls. Girls are encouraged to post. Got lots of female friends who are rabid fans, don’t want to slight ’em.

We’d run out of puns on his name anyway

It occurred to me that

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I haven’t been following Tuffy Rhodes’ spring training adventures closely enough. Turns out, alas, the Reds cut him on Sunday after he hit .222 for the spring, and he’s calling it a career. Here’s an in-depth review of that career from the blog Get Up, Baby!

This, of course, gives us one more chance to brag that We Were There…

Life outside the diamond is a wrench

There’s one former Dodger in the title, and another former Dodger alluded to in the lyrics, and half of baseballrelated.com was in the audience, so of course “Piazza, New York Catcher” was performed in Los Angeles — even though Stuart Murdoch had to refer to a cheat sheet a couple of times for the lyrics. Of course, it now refers to a bygone era, but replacing “New York” and “Mets” with “San Diego” and “Padres” would break the rhythm.

Incidentally, $30 for a concert, not including the Ticketmaster “convenience” charges that brought it up to nearly $45, and I didn’t even get to sit down! Baseball is truly your best entertainment value, although it’s somewhat unlikely that you’ll hear a lot of Scottish art-school alterna-pop at a baseball game. (But if you are very lucky, you will hear “Walk Away Renee” — referred to in “Piazza, New York Catcher” — played on the organ.)

Which reminds me…only two weeks till the season starts.

Meow

Way back when we were in Detroit, Levi made a joke on this very blog about the Garfield movie, which was the film being promoted by the “LodgeNet” card on top of the hotel room TV.

The HBO channels are free this weekend on DirecTV, and in looking through the listings, I discovered that “Garfield: The Movie” was showing on MoreMax, so out of curiosity, I set the TiVo.

As it turns out, this movie is worse than you can possibly imagine. I couldn’t get past 10 minutes, which means I didn’t even see Jennifer Love Hewitt. What is in the first 10 minutes is Breckin Meyer as Jon Arbuckle microwaving a round plastic container of “Hash in a Dash” for breakfast — a container and a food that are pretty much indistinguishable from Garfield’s liver-flavored cat food, so I’m sure you can imagine the hilarity that is supposed to have ensued. Then Garfield goes outside and has some wacky misadventures with Nermal, who is a Siamese cat in the movie but the “world’s cutest kitten,” a gray tabby, in the comic strip. Now, cats that are a mixture of Siamese and gray tabby tend to be as cute as can be, but surely the filmmakers didn’t set out to specifically remind everyone of my cat; obviously, the problem was that they couldn’t get their hands on a well-trained gray tabby, just a well-trained Siamese. This is because while Garfield is completely a CGI creation so that he can look vaguely like he does in the comic strip, all the other animals in the film only have CGI applied to their faces when they’re talking, so it’s completely creepy and strange.

Then we are led to believe that there is a dairy that delivers old-fashioned bottles of milk to homes that are within sight of the downtown Los Angeles skyline, and Garfield uses Nermal as a pawn as part of a Rube Goldbergian scheme to get some of that milk. After his drink, Garfield is none the worse for wear — he doesn’t start throwing up everywhere, unlike real cats.

Fortunately, “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (And Don’t Come Back!)” appeared on HBO Family a little later — it has a few problems of its own, but it managed to get the bad taste of “Garfield” out of my mouth.