Tag Archives: Baseball

Trash Talk

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Carlos Beltran

I started getting emails yesterday from my two brothers entitled, “Trash Talk”. They both live in northern California and are fans of the San Francisco Giants. I too am a fan of the Giants and have been since the fourth grade. Back then my heroes were the likes of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal. My brothers and I would root for and cheer on our beloved Giants, especially against their hated rivals, the LA Dodgers.

Them Bums featured luminaries of the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and that thief, Maury Wills. Chris and I would listen together to the Giant’s ball games on one of our matching eight transistor radios. I never did figure out what the two extra transistors did over the cheaper six transistor model, but I never regretted paying the extra cost.

In the intervening years, deeper love has since grown for the Saint Louis Cardinals. I’ve lived in Saint Louis for the last thirty-two years. I guess that you could rate the Giants now as my second favorite baseball team. In between San Francisco and Saint Louis we lived outside of Washington DC, where the hapless Senators never generated much love from me. Then it was on to Michigan and the Tigers, but there too there was little love lost. This time it was not so much the fault of the ball club, but that of girls. I discovered girls, actually one girl in particular.

I remember taking my Anne and her cousin Anne Emily to their first MLB game. It was a romp. I forget who the Tigers were playing, maybe it was the re-branded Senators, anyway every time the Tigers were up to bat, we would be in our seats, watching them fire for effect. About the time that our beers were empty, the Tigers would be retired. We then all headed off to the bathrooms, bought another round and would be back in our seats when the Tigers were next coming up to bat. I think that this game left the twin-headed Anne with a rather skewed concept of MLB play.

In between Michigan and Saint Louis my brothers moved to Arlington, Texas. There they rejoined the once hapless Senators, now re-branded as the not much more effective Texas Rangers. Time passed and Anne and I settled into Saint Louis life. In both 1985 and 1987, both Anne and the Saint Louis Cardinals delivered. Anne delivered two boys, Dan and Dave and the Cardinals delivered two pennants and one World Championship.

Fast forward to last year’s World Series, featuring the Cardinals and the Rangers. It was about this time that the trash talk began. This talk kept ratcheting up through the series, right up to the Cardinal’s first last strike, in the sixth game of the series. Well, we all know how that turned out. Apparently though, there are some people who are slow learners. We’ll just have to teach them another lesson. 😉

GO CARDS!

No Impedance to Progress

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Packard Swan Hood Ornament

Electrical impedance is the measure of opposition, a circuit presents to the passage of  current under voltage.

Things have gone really well at work this week. Yesterday, when I arrived early, I was met with at-a-boys from all around the office. The team has been working hard, trying to get a deliverable out on time. After about a week of struggling on just my small facet of the larger product, I managed to go from zero to hero, literally overnight. The computer jobs that I had submitted Tuesday night had finished. They are long jobs and take hours to run on server class machines. Even though I got up early with Anne and left early for work, it still felt as if I had showed up late. By the time I arrived, my results had already been reviewed and judged a success. Thank God! I spent the rest of the day gilding the lily, making good better.

The Saint Louis Cardinals also had a good day. They beat the Washington Nationals 8-0. This puts them up 2-1 in their divisional playoff series. If they win again today, they’ll advance. The game was played during work hours. We tried to get the game on Internet radio, but the best that we could manage was Flash play-by-play. We really are working hard, really. Later, son David posted on Facebook, “Definitely worth it to skip out of work early and watch the game.” Seeing this, I called him on it and impersonated the Work Police. He wouldn’t pickup, so I left him a ‘threatening’ voicemail, from the Work Police.

After the game and after work, I read a Slate article about the Washington National’s outfielder, Bryce Harper, who wore a pair of red-tinted contact lenses in this playoff game. The article posed the question, “Do tinted contacts make any difference?” The article also concluded that they reduce glare, just like more esoteric eye black or ordinary sunglasses. A second claim, that rose-colored contacts make target objects like baseballs visually “pop” by filtering out certain wavelengths of light, is more problematic. Harper’s Wednesday hit production was rather lackluster (0-5) and his series performance is not much better (1-15), for a series batting average of 0.067. Maybe the tinted contacts do filter out certain wavelengths. Their reddish color would indicate that his contacts filter out the red wavelengths. Could this mean that he can’t really see his Red Bird opponents?

Red Birds 6, Hostiles 3

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I listened to yesterday’s Cardinal and Braves Wildcard Playoff Game on KMOX radio, so I couldn’t see all that was going on, but it sounded pretty wild, even for a Wildcard game. Yesterday’s one game playoff series is a novelty of this year’s baseball season. Major League Baseball added a second wildcard spot and this one game playoff with the object of increasing the importance to teams of winning their division.

The Braves jumped out ahead with a 2-0 lead. The Cards came back with three runs, capitalizing on a Braves error. Two more Braves errors later, by the bottom of the eighth, the Cards were up 6-3, which turned out to also be the final score. The Braves were threatening, with men on first and second. The batter hit an easy pop-up, but confusion between two Cardinal fielders led to the fly being dropped. This didn’t matter though, because the umpire had invoked the infield fly rule.

I’ll leave understanding the infield fly rule as a homework assignment for the discerning reader. Commentary has criticized the timing of this call and to a lesser extent the call’s correctness. The Atlanta fans erupted in a twenty-minute temper tantrum, throwing trash on to the field and delaying the game. Play restarted, with the Red Birds eventually winning.

On Sunday, Saint Louis will host the Washington Nationals. I expect Saint Louis to be a more hospitable town than Atlanta was to us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

GO CARDS!

Dan texted Anne these three photographs. The paparazzi, meaning me, managed to eventually get his hands on them. Hardwood floors, bright lighting and plenty of windows make this place look pretty nice.

One More Day in the Sun

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19 Inning Game

Almost a year has passed since the Saint Louis Cardinals came from behind, to win Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. After a year, Game 7, the game that actually secured the championship seems almost like an epilogue. The Red Bird’s underdog status began a month before the end of the regular season. They secured a wildcard berth on only the last day of the regular season. They were never favored to win any of their post-season series, but some how they did.

Today, begins the Card’s 2012 playoff bid. Today, they have a one game do or die against the Atlanta Braves. Hence this post’s title, ‘One More Day in the Sun’. I suppose that the Cardinals will remain the World Champions until the final out of the final game, but calling yourselves the Champs has more gravitas, if you are still a contender. Just to get you non-Saint Louisians in the mood for another exciting October of baseball, I offer up the following synopsis of that dramatic Game 6. I believe that this video has escaped  MLB censorship, because it ‘artistically’ melds the national and local audio feeds. Watch it, dream and join with me when I yell, GO CARDS!

Front Yard Bone Yard

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Front Yard Bone Yard

Brother-in-Law Carl was the last fan left standing at Wednesday night’s Mariners versus Orioles game. At least in his section. The game ran eighteen innings until the Orioles finally prevailed. The Seattle Times posted a great photo of Carl, nearly alone in the center field stands. Jay reposted it on her blog here. Jay had linked to our experience at a nineteen inning Cardinal and Pirate game, so it seemed the right thing to do to link back to her. Ryan, another Cardinal fan and I were supposing about this picture of Carl at work on Thursday. We were trying to come up with some sort of Onion caption. The best that I could come up with is this, “Mariners trade their last fan for an undisclosed sum of cash. Yep, super-fan Carl and spouse Jay have been traded to Saint Louis.” Do the readers have any ideas? This post’s photograph is from Jay and Carl’s front yard. Carl started this front yard bone yard, but it has taken on a life of its own. Now new bats are planted by other people.

There Is No Crying In Baseball

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A Rabid Cardinal Fan

“There is no crying in baseball”, said actor Tom Hanks, as the alcoholic manager of the featured all woman baseball team in the movie, “A League of Their Own”. While I did not breakdown into tears after Sunday’s nineteen inning for nothing loss, I did whine a lot about it in my Sunday night post about it. All I can say in excuse is that I was tired. I am a little bit more rested now and I am prepared to be more upbeat than I was before. Hey, a win is a win and of course a loss is a loss. A win would have been nice, but as a consolation prize we get a three game home stand against the hapless Houston Astros.

We are the champions of the world. We may have lost our best hitter and our manager from last year, but we are still the champions, at least for now. The Cardinal fan pictured above, who was chosen totally at random is totally upbeat on the Card’s chances this year. While last Sunday’s marathon ended disappointingly, by last year’s standard it is still way too early to start peaking. Cheer up Cardinal fans! It is not even September yet. Conserve your strength for the playoffs. It’s still summer, it is still a long way to winter!