While eventually only losing by a score of 7-6, the Milwaukee Brewers conceded five of the Cardinals’ seven total runs in the first inning of the clubs’ Friday night game in St. Louis (box).
That the evening might be a difficult one was not lost on veteran broadcaster and muscular bodyguard of leisure Bob Uecker, who informed the Listening Public how much beer would be a sufficient amount to bring him peace.
Fellow FanGrapher and Internet superstar Drew Sheppard gifted us with the closeup footage of Ian Kinsler’s slide-fall into third from yesterday’s game.
It is a GIF of quiet sadness. Of baseballing malaise. Much like the subject of the Bydlo movement from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Ian Kinsler is treating his neck like a beast of burden. Or perhaps the theory of momentum is the ox, and Kinsler is just the cart being pulled along the path– bumps and all.
Watch:
Listen (this is the Ravel orchestration, obvs.):
Yesterday marked the home opener for the Saint Paul Saints, an independent team from the American Association of Professional Baseball. The Saints would end up losing in extra innings to New Jersey Jackals, but like most Saints games, the efforts on the field are less important to the majority of fans. Saints games harken back to the old days a little, with the team using tricks, gags, promotions, events, and anything else they can to get people to the ballpark (the ownership group involves Bill Veeck’s son, after all). Yes there’s a baseball game going on, but the atmosphere and reasonable prices are what draws fans.
I, due to proclivities that have haunted/assisted me throughout my life, usually give too much attention to the play on the field. I certainly enjoy the races and trivia and people getting dunked in cottage cheese between the innings, but I pay more attention than most to what’s going on during the game. It’s because of this that I got to see Jose Hernandez.
Jose Hernandez was drafted in the late rounds of 2009 by the Pittsburgh Pirates, but has apparently fallen out of favor there and is now in the independent leagues. It may be because of the lowered level of competition, but Hernandez was the star for the Saints on Thursday. He went 2 for 4 (both doubles) with an RBI, and had two great defensive plays. Playing center field, he laid out for a very nice inning-ending, run-saving catch. In a later inning, he kept a runner at third from scoring on a sacrifice by throwing an absolute pea to home from shallow center. No bounce, almost no arc. Just a frozen rope. Moments like these stick out to me. The Saints and whoever their opponents are usually play sloppy baseball. The pitching can be OK, but there are lots of throwing errors, poor outfield defense, and a head-shaking amount of outs made on the bases. It’s kind of the fun of it, but it be comes tiresome after a while. This is why Hernandez’s play is a welcome site. He is a diamond in the rough, even if his diamond were somewhat cloudy to begin with.
Hernandez is also the owner of something I can’t say I’ve seen often, if ever. One of his doubles, the one in the bottom of the 7th inning, was a broken-bat double. This wasn’t a solid double where I could tell his bat had cracked. His bat exploded in two, the ball flared out to right-center, and a combination of outfield incompetence and Hernandez’s speed allowed him to take second. I feel as if my words do not do it justice. It was just fantastic.
And this is why I love independent baseball. I’m certainly aware that there are good and terrible plays to be found in MLB. But in the American Association, the bad happens so much more, that the good shines that much brighter. There aren’t a whole lot of success stories of players getting plucked from the AA to a major-league system, and Jose Hernandez certainly has a long shot. But I know I’ll be circling his name in my score card when I go to my next game. I usually pick a player of interest for every season, for reasons due to baseball or not, and Hernandez is in the front running for this totally worthless prize this year. Let’s hope he doesn’t disappoint.
To suggest that the author has spent nearly two hours of his Thursday night/Friday morning browsing through videos of outfielders recording spectacular assists would be to suggest a true thing.
To suggest that same thing within the vicinity of the author’s wife would be what is known generally as an “exercise in folly.”
There are 44 players in the history of baseball, by my count, for whom we have only a last name. Unknown Gilroy, Unknown O’Rourke, Unknown Long. Each of these men snuck his way into a boxscore — just one, usually — and then vanished into the mists of time, thereby enacting a most human of tragedies: to scale the Olympian heights, only to be struck down while etching one’s name in eternal stone.
The following tweet — concerning primarily Miami left-hander Brad Hand’s involvement in the theater arts — is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):
This may not work. That’s fine, y’all know I’m lucky if I bat at the mendoza line here. But I’ve got no snark, no jokes, no memes today. All I have for you is something I’ve never seen before in baseball. And you may not be able to see it, even though I made this GIF so that you might:
El Venado Herido — or, in English, The Wounded Deer — is an instant masterpiece by Joseph. The image is of Joseph’s head placed on top of a stag, which is pierced with arrows. The arrows no doubt refer to his own pain and suffering due to having been demoted twice within the span of a month — this, despite his conspicuously mature offensive approach. At the bottom of the painting, Joseph has written “carma,” — one meaning of which is something like “destiny” or “fate.” In this painting, as in most of Joseph’s self-portraits, he presents himself as incapable of changing his own destiny.
BALTIMORE– Brian Roberts strained a flexor tendoligastring yesterday while riding a stationary bike, when the bike suddenly became not-stationary and started moving. Roberts, unprepared for the bike’s motion, fell off. This injury marks the fourteenth consecutive rehab assignment that has caused Roberts more injury than he was trying to heal in the first place, and cements his status as extremely cursed and very broken.
“I don’t know how my arm fell off at the elbow,” Roberts said last week in front of a crowd of reporters, before a piece of the ceiling fell and hit him on the knee, shattering it into hundreds of tiny knee-parts and also causing him to contract Fallen Ceiling Fever, an infectious disease that will keep him sidelined for the next 9-12 generations.
“I don’t know how my arm fell off at the elbow,” Roberts repeated in front of a different crowd of reporters, evidence of the post-post-post-concussion syndrome he’s been suffering from ever since he hit his head on his high chair at age 2. Roberts, who retains as much speed and agility as a player could possibly have after losing both legs, and then losing each of the prosthetic replacements upwards of a dozen times, was most recently injured while explaining his latest injury to a reporter. While talking, Roberts’ tongue somehow got caught in a pitching machine, an injury which required fourteen stitches and is likely to keep him out of action until the polar ice caps finish melting.
Roberts insists he will make it back to regular status one day, even if the Orioles are no longer a professional baseball team, and second base has been replaced with a robot drone in the post-apocalyptic version of baseball. While dreaming of this future, Roberts unfortunately sprained an eye, and strained his head. He is expected to begin a rehab assignment next week in Alpha Centauri.
It should not surprise the reader to learn that the present author — who is covered both in gold chains and Drakkar Noir — has written, recorded, and is currently mixing/editing a sexy R&B single addressed predominantly to Yankees prospect Corban Joseph’s plate discipline. While Joseph himself was demoted to Triple-A earlier this week, he recorded seven major-league plate appearances — and swung, during those same plate appearances, at either just zero or one pitches outside the strike zone (depending on the source).
What follows is not the aforementioned song in its entirety — because that will be released in such a way as to make the author Goddamn Wealthy — but rather, in the tradition of Barry White and that one guy from Boyz II Men, a transcript of the song’s brief, but powerful, spoken-word interlude.
I just can’t get my mind off of you,
Corban Joseph’s PITCHf/x swing chart
from the Texas Leaguers website.
I bookmarked you on my web browser of choice.
I even emailed a link of you to my own self,
so I could access you more easily
via my brand-name smart phone later on.