Opening Day 2007: Hour 1

When Opening Day came around a year ago, I was unemployed with no immediate prospects. Within a month, I had been hired for a full-time temp job. And by the time the World Series rolled around, I was hired as an actual employee.

So it’s clear that baseball is a force for good. Let’s see what it can do for me this year.

10:00Tampa Bay Devil Rays at New York Yankees (ESPN and YES)
Atlanta Braves at Philadelphia Phillies (TBS)
Toronto Blue Jays at Detroit Tigers (FSN Detroit)
Florida Marlins at Washington Nationals (MASN)
Time for everyone’s pre-produced “Opening Day” intros.
10:05 — The Tigers manage to get under way first.
10:06 — The Blue Jays have the first at-bat of the season — a walk.
10:08 — And the Blue Jays steal against Ivan Rodriguez. This season is going great for the Tigers so far.
10:09 — The Marlins steal third! Looks like this is going to be the Year of the Stolen Base, as the L.A. Times sort of predicted today.
10:11 — Carl Crawford leads off for the Devil Rays with a hit against the Yankees.
10:12 — Crawford steals second!
10:15 — Rocco Baldelli, whose name is on the back of the Devil Rays T-shirt I’m wearing, hits to the warning track. The Yankees announcers say it could have been a home run if the humidity were lower today.
10:19 — I have to go get my laundry out of the dryer. Meanwhile, things fall apart for the Devil Rays.
10:30 — The Yankees score two runs, which the YES graphics briefly award to the Devil Rays.

10:40 — Hey, it’s Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., in the stands at RFK Stadium, being interviewed with a radio mike that’s not quite working properly.
10:49 — The Devil Rays get their first run of 2007. First of many, I’m sure.
10:52 — Not particularly baseball-related, but I get an automated phone call from the L.A. Times telling me that the “TV Times” section is being discontinued after next week, but I’ll still be able to get TV listings online. They don’t know I have a TiVo.

The baseball singularity is here

Ray Kurzweil, in his recent book The Singularity is Near writes about the moment, which he sees just over the horizon, when machines will surpass human abilities and be actual thinking machines (Bob, please help me out with the explanation in comments if I’ve gotten this wrong.).

Well, in baseball terms, the moment of machine superiority may already be here. At a Marlins exhibition game yesterday, the star wasn’t any of the Marlins’ suspect prospects.

It was a pitching machine. That recorded five strikeouts.

Which lead me to think about how a pitching machine should be programmed to pitch to Old Sammy Sosa, pre-batting eye (or New New Sammy, post-batting eye): “Pitch 1: low and away slider. Pitch two:

low and away slider. Pitch 3: low and away slider. Strikeout!”

Corey Patterson, on the other hand: “Pitch one: throw ball into stands. Pitch two: throw ball into dugout. Pitch threee: roll ball to plate. Strikeout!”
And I think even a robot would take Lefty Gomez’s advice about pitching to Stan Musial: “Make your best pitch and back up third base. That relay might get away and you’ve got another shot at him.”

Opening Day can’t come too soon, if I’m talking about baseball robots.

Get ’em while they’re hot!

It looks like the Florida Marlins are beginning yet another fire sale.

This will be their second such sale in their twelve years of existence. Are they determined to make the Devil Rays look good?

Anyway, if you want a speedy center fielder for your beer-league team, you might call them up. Sounds like they’d consider an offer of a bag of batting practice balls.

Just keep repeating to yourself: Bud Selig has been good for baseball. Saddam Hussein was a threat. Bud Selig has been good for baseball.

Ten games for Steroids, Six for Milk

A Marlins batboy has been suspended for attempting to

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drink a gallon of milk on a bet before a game.

Many, many things about this story seem wrong to me.

Suckah!

The gloy of the hidden ball trick was shewn forth again last night at the Marlins/Diamondbacks game. The simplicity of it was, as usual, its beauty: Mike Lowell took the throw from the outfield, then simply didn’t toss the ball to noted homophobe Todd Jones. Seconds later, he applied the tag to an unsuspecting Luis Terrero.

Harold Reynolds on Baseball Tonight broke it down nicely, pointing out the way Jones noticed what Lowell was up to and, instead of heading to the mound, casually circled it. One thing I learned from this is that, if the pitcher steps on the mound, the ball is dead; his presence on the mound suggests that he intends to pitch, and therefore being on the mound while the ball is elsewhere is, apparently, a no-no.

National goddam treasure Retrosheet.org has a list of all the known successful hidden ball tricks here. Ozzie Guillen, whom I believe Bill James pointed out as one of the dumbest baserunners ever, was caught three times. Fool Ozzie once . . .

In the form of a question

“Jeopardy!” is currently in the midst of a gigantic, 3-month-long tournament in which they’ve invited scads of former champions from throughout the 21-year run of the show back to see who gets to play in a special 3-day-long match against Ken Jennings. So on tonight’s show, a 5-time champion from 1989, a 5-time champion from 1995, and the College Tournament champion from 1993 were faced with this Final Jeopardy! clue, in the category Major League Baseball:

“The team names of these 2 expansion clubs start with the same 3 letters; one might catch the other.”

Only the 1989 champion got it correct. (The college champion got one of the two.)

Original comments…

thatbob: Which makes me wonder, when does an “expansion club” just start being thought of as a club? I thought the Mariners were around when I was (broadly) a kid.

Levi: Depends on how broad you were in 1977.

thatbob: For almost all of 1977, I was 2 years broad.

Jim: Given baseball’s love of history, as long as there are people who still remember when the Angels didn’t exist, they’re still an expansion club. (They were the first expansion team in modern baseball, in 1961, along with the team that’s now the Texas Rangers, but then was the Washington Senators, replacing the other Washington Senators, who had moved to Minnesota and become the Twins.)

A baseball dream

I’ll write later this week about our Montreal weekend, which featured at least a couple of points of interest to baseballrelated fans, but today I’m busy with work, so I’ll just share the dream I had right before waking this morning.

I was dreaming about the Cubs/Marlins doubleheader today. The Marlins announced their starting lineup for game one:
Leading off: a sesame red bean ball
Batting second: a cute, furry kitten
Batting third: Stacey

I thought to myself, “But . . . but . . . but . . . those aren’t major-league ballplayers! The Marlins are throwing this game!”

Then I woke.
Now, I love eating a sesame rice ball, and I love petting a cute, furry kitten, and I love playing catch with Stacey. But my dream thought was right: none of those is a major-league-quality ballplayer.

Marlins should be announcing their starting lineup for game one in minutes. You heard it here first.

Original comments…

thatbob: Wait, were Mike Piazza and Ichiro Suzuki playing for the Expos, too? Because maybe they decided to field Stacey’s All Cuite Team for a change.

None of them may be major-league quality players (except Piazza), but any one of them (except Suzuki) could get me to switch my allegiance from the Cubs to the Expos. And I bet the cute, furry kitten pulls a lot of walks, but I doubt (s)he’s as good at fielding as a certain canine playing shortstop somewhere up in St. Paul.

Dan: You’re goddamn right about Snoopy.

stacey: aw bob, i’m not on the all cute team! that’s just silly.

levi, i have to say that i’m disappointed it that it took the mention of MY NAME to bring you to your senses. sure, a sesame ball can lead off, followed by a furry kitten. but once they mention your wife, you suddenly realize it’s a bad idea?

thatbob: Stace, I just figured you’d be the manager of your All Cute Team, which I think means you could put yourself in if the situation, or cuteness, required.

Levi: I think it was Cap Anson (and if it wasn’t, it should have been) who a couple of times, as player/manager, announced himself as entering a ballgame just in time that he could hop off the bench and catch a foul popup that was headed his way.

Rules–those damnable things–now prevent such action.

Home Sweet Home

I apologize for being late with this–work (along with my upcoming weekend trip to Montreal) has kept me busy this week.

But here you go: some thoughts on Monday afternoon’s Expos/Marlins game, such as they are.

1) Luke and I met at 12:45, because MLB.com said the game was to begin at 1:35. Alas, the game began at 1:05, which meant that many fans were already there ahead of us and we were reduced to sitting on the sixth row, behind the on-deck circle. We were so far away I almost couldn’t count the crows feet around Jeff “The Original Marlin” Conine’s eyes.

2) Our estimates of the crowd size, apparently, were wildly inaccurate. The upper decks were closed completely (In fact, there were some construction–or, I suppose in this case, destruction–guys ripping out a section of seats in the upper deck in left. Not like the Sox have another ten home games or anything.), and the lower deck, though more full than I would have guessed, wasn’t anywhere near capacity. I guessed 900 or so, Luke dithered between 800 and 1200. Attendance wasn’t announced during the game, but it was later listed at 4,003.

3) Luke and I had both expected the fans to be rooting for the Expos, hoping for a Marlins defeat that would push Florida farther behind the Cubs in the Wild Card race. There’s nothing like a little North Side blindness, which we all fall prey to sometimes. Turns out about half the audience was composed of Sox fans rooting for a Marlins rout, a Sosa suspension, and more concrete cave-ins at Wrigley. One funny side effect of the general admission seating was that people chose sections like at a high school game: the Expos fans sat on the Expos dugout side, the Marlins fans did the same with the Marlins dugout.

4) The Marlins brought their hometown PA announcer and graphics package, which included the obligatory scoreboard races, a gratuitous shot of Steve Bartman, and a lot of “your Florida Marlins.” One of the scoreboard races was an exotic Florida-type race: fan boats, being raced by several different Billy the Marlin. Bill was also in attendance, as was Marlins owner (and Expos destroyer) Jeffrey Loria. The only thing missing was local traffic information to help us get home to South Beach after the game.

5) The atmosphere at the game, Luke and I agreed, was one of the most pleasant of any game we’ve been to. No one (except the players) had much invested in the game’s outcome, so the cheering was genial, and people seemed to be really enjoying being part of a weird occurrence on a beautiful late summer day. It felt a lot like attending a minor-league game with major-league players–until the Expos made four errors in the 8th inning, at which point it seemed like, well, maybe a T-Ball game.

6) Not wanting to miss an opportunity, I made the day into a doubleheader, hurrying home after the game to get some dinner, then turning around and heading to Wrigley Field for the Cubs/Pirates game. Greg Maddux, given an early lead, did what he nearly always does, and a fine day of baseball came to a pleasant end.

7) And one unrelated note: let’s take a moment to congratulate the Big Unit, who last night fanned Vinny Castilla to move into third all-time on the strikeout list. He might even eventually catch Clemens for second, since he shows no signs of aging.

Original comments…

Jim: You wanted local traffic information for Miami?

“I-95 north is backed up due to slow-moving Cadillacs with turn signals on in all lanes. The Turnpike south is temporarily closed due to alligators crossing the roadway. A1A is flooded due to this week’s hurricane.”

Luke, hanger-on: One of the Florida papers on Tuesday — sorry, I forget which one — said it was the Marlins who wanted the later start Monday, but MLB nixed it. And it said Loria was annoyed at Bartman’s visage — A regular feature after fan interference at Sox Park? The story made it sound like it was. — and made an enraged call to the scoreboard operator to get it yanked. Apparently he’s a bit defensive vis-a-vis the idea that anyone but the Marlins had anything to do with Florida’s unlikely championship.

In addition to the absence of “You suck!” heckles and “Yo, four beers!” bellowing, there was another pleasantness to the game that I’m surprised that Levi didn’t mention: very few children. It was a weekday, so they must have all been in school or jail, where they belong. There were just enough there — youngsters too young for school or out on parole — so that just about every foul ball seemed to get passed on to a nearby child, an indicator of the genial, generous mood that the crowd was in.

Luke: Found that story. (Login: bugmenot2; pass: whatever .)

Luke: And it wasn’t Loria, but Marlins President David Samson.

Jason: Did they have any south Florida items at the concession stands, like oranges or cocaine?

maura: (we weren’t really sure of what time monday’s game was going to start until about five minutes before it actually did. so much confusion.)

How could I pass it up?

I’ve decided to attend Monday’s Marlins/Expos game at Comiskey Park.

With Hurricane Pudge approaching, MLB has rescheduled the first two games of the Marlins/Expos series for Comiskey on Monday and Tuesday aftenoons. Tickets will be general admission, $15, with $5 going to hurricane relief. I’m going because I can’t pass up the chance to be one of a couple hundred people at one of the weirdest games ever.

Who’s with me?

Original comments…

thatbob: If you root hard enough for the Expos in Comiskey, maybe they’ll move here.

Jason: Maybe BOTH the Expos & Marlins will move to Comiskey, if the Fish don’t get their new stadium.

Levi: I think Alan Keyes already moved there, but he’ll be back in Maryland by the end of the World Series, so no conflict there.

Jon Solomon: How was the game?!