Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Allow me to summarize tonights game for you.
Wade Miller: The ball has been hit right at me! I can catch it and make a quick out! OK, OK... got it! Now I'll turn around and WOAH BRAIN CRAMP.
*Wade Miller throws the ball to second base even though there is not anyone covering the bag at second base. The men on both first and second are safe and no outs are recorded on the play*
Manny Ramirez: I hit de ball! Yay! Yay hit! Run run run! They got de ball! Keep runnin' Manny, keep runnin'!
*Manny Ramirez is out at second base by a billion feet because the ball he hit was, in fact, a single*
Manny Ramirez: Ha ha oh well!
*Manny Ramirez skips back to the dugout*
Ricardo Rodriguez: Aargh, a hit! I will proceed to walk the next eleventy eight men until the bases are loaded.
*Ricardo Rodriguez walks in a run with the bases loaded*
Ricardo Rodriguez: Oh I did not mean to do that I am so angry with myself. Bad Ricardo! Bad bad BAD!
*Ricardo Rodriguez has thrown a wild pitch, the runner at third base scores*
Wade Miller: I feel marginally better about life and will proceed to record 7 Ks in the next 3 innings.
*Wade Miller proceeds to do just that*
Manny Ramirez: Yay another at-bat I will make the most of it! Yay hitting! Yay baseball!
*Manny Ramirez has hit an enormous two-run homer just because he can*
Manny Ramirez: Hooray for puppies!
Keith Foulke: I hate my job, I hate my sport, I hate my life, I hate the fans, but most of all I hate girls. I hate girls, and I want to make them cry.
*Keith Foulke has given up a triple and a double in quick succession to tie the game in the bottom of the 9th*
Keith Foulke: Here you go ladies, sob your hearts out! TATER TIME!
*Keith Foulke has walked Hank Blalock, hit Alfonso Soriano by a pitch, and given up a walkoff RBI single to Kevin Mench. The Texas Rangers have won the game 6-5.*
Keith Foulke: Look out Braden Looper! Worst closer in baseball! The title shall be mine and mine alone!
And that's all I have to say about that.
Now, I was at Sunday afternoons game, with my dad. Let me quickly summarize that game for you.
Eee-yup. What can you do? We've been floundering, and running into Roy Halladay under those circumstances is like running into a brick wall at full speed. A brick wall wearing a black jersey with a bad font across the front and a weird teal off-blue hat, and with a curiously terrifying scruffy red beard.
I scored the game in the official Red Sox program (which features a great big photo of Manny on the front, notable because Manny's trotting with his arms turned out so that his armband is one of the most prominent features of the photo... and yes, it's got number 34 on it. Oh Manny), and it tells the story all too clearly. There are 4 innings where the Sox went down 1-2-3, and there are only two columns with completed diamonds in them. Halladay had a rough inning to start out and Miguel Batista made it interesting in the end before turning it over to Scott Schoeneweis (whom I detest for reasons I won't get into right now) for the final out, but for most of the game the Sox were just plain old blanked.
Arroyo deserved better than he got, although his rocky first inning drove his pitch count up something awful, and he was kept him for a ridiculously long time. He did settle down and pitch well, quite well, but you've got to believe that most of why he was run out there again and again was because Francona doesn't trust the bullpen any farther than he can throw an enraged oppossum, and that's not very far at all, because an enraged oppossum would be pretty hard to get a good grip on for throwing purposes. This isn't a knock on Tito, it's a knock on the general shititude of the bullpen these days.
The game, completely removed from the score, was a good one though. The weather was perfect, sunny and in the mid-to-low 70s. We got there early enough to see Tom Caron and Gary DiSarcina doing the pregame show outside the park at Remdawg's and to watch a bit of the Blue Jays' batting practice inside. A guy with 55 on his jersey (turns out it's Brian Butterfield, their 3rd base coach) was milling around, but everyone else had those shell jackets on so I couldn't see uniform numbers. My dad identified one of them as Alexis Rios, the more-or-less rookie, who took every single BP ball he saw and drove it low to the opposite field.
Much later Rios got in the game as a pinch hitter for Gabe Gross, and for some unspecified reason he got intensely heckled. He took a really long at-bat, which gave the more vocal hecklers time to really develop their theme.
"HEY! ALICE! You SUCK, Alice!"
"Way to swing at the ball, Alice!"
"Hey, Alice, welcome to Wondahland!"
He singled. Then he moved to second on an Orlando Hudson groundout, stole third base, and came home to score on Reed Johnson's triple (thank you, Alan Embree), so it quieted things down some. It was all pretty funny, in a painful way... I'm just not sure why he was getting so enthusiastically heckled in the first place. I mean, he's basically new. And surely Shea Hillenbrand (who only got a few halfhearted boos), or the hideous Gregg Zaun, would be the more likely target.
Also before the game (i.e. before the Time of the Hurting) there was some cheering going on in the crowd right around the Sox dugout, across the diamond from our seats. A figure in a pitcher's jacket emerged and walked over to the area right in front of the bullpens, where he proceeded to do some light longtossing. It obviously wasn't Bronson, whose long-legged form and high leg kick make him easy to ID from a distance. After a minute my dad and I realized that it was Curt Schilling... the stocky torso with relatively slender legs, the way he went through his delivery, the barely imperceptible way he seemed to favor one foot when he was walking back to the dugout. And, of course, the massive cheers that greeted him when he went back in. Nice to see him out and about, even if it was just to dick around before the game.
It was the first time I'd scored a game actually at the game, and for all the chatter about game scoring being a dying art and whatnot, I must say there were quite a few scorers around. Perhaps it was just my section, but I was scoring the game (bugging my dad when I wasn't sure how to score a play). Behind me was a 25-some-odd year-old guy scoring the game, and a few seats down from him was a middle-aged guy scoring the game in his own scorebook, you know, with the fancy light blue lines and all.
The fact that it was such a perfect day to be at the ballpark went a long way towards overshadowing the vile nature of the game (Mark Bellhorn, three strikeouts and a popout, I'm lookin' at you). I was watching from home today, and there were no such warm fuzzies to distract me from the fact that, sometimes, this team can just be sheer, bloody awfulness.
Le sigh.
Oh, and by the by, Tigers catcher 44th Round, aka Vance Wilson, was ejected from the second game of the doubleheader today. For arguing with the umpire. Which umpire? You remember David Wells' little screaming fit with the secondbase ump who had no business getting involved in the argument? Guccione? Yes. The very same. I'm not sure if some umpires are more prone to getting into fights with players than others, but if so, Guccione sure seems to be such a one.
Ah, and for some tidbits. MGoBlog celebrates 100,000 hits-- congrats, Brian!
Witch City Sox Girl has moved to Blogger, huzzah!
"that sound... is me... weeping, thousands of miles away." Sorry, SC. That O's loss to the Yankees was particularly heartbreaking, if you're an O's fan (or just hate the Yankees which, let's face it, we all do).
Things are rough in Detroit right now. People are, sort of inexplicably, not hitting. The club exchanges a series of emails in an attempt to rectify this situation, and Roar of the Tigers gets their sticky little paws on a transcript. Which I totally made up. In my head. You know you want to read it.
Finally, I know that by the timestamp this will end up looking a day late, but oh well.
I hope you all had a very Happy 4th of July!
3:39 AM
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