Last night I watched my team obliterate the Phillies 19-3. We broke our club record by hitting eight home runs in a single game.
This was essentially our B-team, with three outfielders fighting to keep their position on the team. One of them, Chris Parmelee, was making his Orioles debut and went 3-for-4 with two home runs.
Jeff Francouer, a Phillies outfielder, came in to pitch the last two innings, throwing the only scoreless inning they had.
One of their pitchers faked an injury just to get off the field and stop being shelled.
Another threw at someone because he just didn't want to be there anymore.
Players like Chase Utley became mutinous for the incompetent coaching staff leaving that outfielder in to rot on the mound.
And this was all one game!
Baseball is just a wild, unpredictable sports, even when you're like me and sit there, analyzing every little stat to get a pitcher, only to have that hitter with a .160/.302/.359 triple slash and an abysmal ISO blows it all up by hitting a grand slam anyway. Or you spend a day trying to actually evaluate a pitcher's value, looking at their ERA, ERA+, FIP, xFIP, and SIERA, and then maybe if you're crazy, trying to figure out pitching WAR, or even crazier, quantifying defensive worth.
And that's all well and good, but sometime you just wanna see "them big cocksuckers that can hit the fuckin’ ball out of the fuckin’ ballpark and you can’t make any goddamn mistakes.", because we all love to see players sock some dingers
Or how bout some defense, some Bo Jackson
Or Pillar this year?
http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/11493214/v75609783/must-c-catch-pillars-climbing-catch-robs-home-run
Or maybe you're like me. You're a hopeless romantic. You find all the quirks of baseball and the wacky things happen-- like Dock Ellis pitching a game while on an acid trip-- and love them for it. You love that you're watching sport that has been played constantly for nearly 150 years. You love the history. You love looking at it all in the context of historical events happening around it. You love that it's been a beacon of social change for decades, and you love to just see history sometimes. Maybe you're like me and you sit down every so often and watch 2131 and you cry when you see that banner drop from the warehouse.
Or maybe you hate it and find it boring. I know arguewithatree with let out an annoyed groan when she sees this was my pick, but even she's going to go with me to OPACY in a few weeks and will enjoy herself, because baseball is a social sport. There's power in walking up the stands and seeing the field with the crowd, sun on your face, beer and your hand and friends around you.
- [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
-Bart Giamatti
Shoutouts: givello thenewgreen flagamuffin Keibler eightbitsamurai coffeesp00ns _refugee_ Run_Train FishEggHat bfv Meriadoc lil briandmyers unsignedinteger ecib kleinbl00 insomniasexx OftenBen forwardslash grey mk b_b tacocat Quatrarius
Also especially shouting out ButterflyEffect, galen, flag, and lil, my resident baseball fans who I've chatted with about baseball many times before. So at the very least, we have the O's, Cards, NY (AL), and Jays represented here. Who else is a fan?
And the officiating had been incredibly consistent, thorough, and fair for the most part compared with the men's. Plus the women actually play and don't take anywhere near as many theatrical dives. I understand playing to win and constantly trying to draw every foul you can always and forever, but I'm just gonna say it, -the women respect the game more.
We were the perpetrators of perhaps the most bizarre baseball story since the Ryan Braun thing. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sports/baseball/st-louis-cardinals-hack-astros-fbi.html
More bizarre than Ryan Braun. I might put it as the most bizarre story (note: In general I don't consider the steroid scandal very bizarre outside of the entity that is Jose Canseco.) since the George Steinbrenner ban. I'm almost as interested in the punishment as the crime, can MLB even do anything with regards to draft picks and post-season bans? I feel like if they try that the MLBPA will mutiny and we'll all have a bad time.
There's some vague wording in the CBA so I think the answer is we won't know until they try. I anticipate something akin to the arbitration process -- MLB won't come down too hard because they're not sure what line they might cross that would cause the MLBPA to sue, and correspondingly the Cardinals will accept whatever punishment gets sent down in the interest of cooperation and image-repair.
Honestly, this might be the most serious cheating scandal I've ever heard of outside 1919. It might have been some fuckboy employees and they never gave said data to the team at large, but it's looking more and more like it was multiple people, not for revenge, doing it repeatedly. It's going to be bad, and whatever the FBI does won't be as bad as what the league does.
It's looking more and more like ... no one knows anything yet. Speculation tends to be wrong. It is vastly more probable that it was some low-level idiots than anything else. Caught using your own IP address? Come the fuck on. The scandal is, at least, so far less significant than Pete Rose's betting, or (I think) the owners' collusion in the '70s. [EDIT: and, uh, steroids.] It's not clear to me why the episode happened at all, actually. There is no information the Astros have that the Cardinals could not obtain legitimately if they wanted to. Thus I will believe until told otherwise that this is probably not some sort of organization-sanctioned attack, because that's insane. Anyway, as long as we come out of it with our only essential employee unscathed (Mozeliak), I don't really care what happens to the rest of them. Toss 'em in jail. We'll see in a few days, I imagine. As for the team's punishment ... that will depend on how complicit the organization as a whole was (my guess: not very). Fines, draft picks, some sort of postseason ban: as far as I know the latter two have never been done in the modern era, but fines don't really hurt a successful baseball team. So who knows. For now, we're still five games better than the second-best team in baseball. That's fucked. I'll take it and be content.
r/baseball: Oh you're a Yankees, Cardinals, or Royals fan? FUCK OFF. r/baseball: Oh, Bartolo Colon or Kris Bryant did a thing!? FANTASTIC. Still better than the other sports subs though.
I love /r/nfl. I don't care about bias or echo chamber, it seems very focused on a love of the game, a good natured rivalry among fans and doesn't deviate into other topics even if they might be relevant. It's a reason I keep using reddit. The April Fools prank with the soccer sub is classic. The Orange Helmeted Sportsmen of America has me randomly smiling if I find a reason to remember it
Jays had an amazing -- amazing!! -- 11-game streak, only to be demolished twice by the Mets. Sigh. I love the quote. Copy it over to today's #quotesporn Great tag.
This season: "Wow the Yankees are really good." One week later. "Wow the Yankees are really bad." I'm pretty convinced on the later considering Stephen fucking Drew has only the fourth lowest WAR out of regular starters on the Yankees this year. And almost every stat (OPS plus, ERA plus, and total WAR) point to us being a league average team. But at least I get to watch Beltran, Drew, Didi, CC, and a mostly terrible bullpen on a regular basis. Baseball is dumb and Brian Cashman should feel bad.
I can't say I'm not enjoying the Yankees being in total limbo for the last two years, and this year is seems too. Not having players, not having much of a farm, seemingly not able/willing to spend money, and the shitshow that is ARod (despite him doing well grumble grumble). What an odd division we are. Two weeks ago, all of us were below .500. Now, all but one is above .500 (FUCK YOU, BOSTON!) and we're looking like one the strongest divisions.
Well, they do seem to do a good job at fucking themselves. What do you do at Fenway? We had two people in our reddit GDTs that are part timers at OPACY and I've always been interested in what it's like. Those two always cite their social media policy for not saying much though.
Team's a joke and has spent money in all the wrong places (looking at you Chase Headley aka Mr. Getting Paid $50 million over 4 years to have my worst ever season going off of wRC plus and UZR). Not only that, but they've been completely inconsistent and don't seem to have an actual plan...are we done signing people to ludicrous contracts or not? As for the farm...Lindgren, Flores, and Pirella have all looked at least serviceable this year and we have a few more prospects between AA and AAA that have a lot of promise, but not too many. But hey, at least we didn't re-sign Cano, right!?