At 9:48 central daylight you declared, "It's the Gut vs the Toad!" That would be Bartolo Colón, now of the Minnesota Twins, matched against Hyun-Jin Ryu of the Los Angeles Dodgers. That game begins at 21:10 at Chavez Ravine. A nickname The Gut for Colón is self-explanatory is self-explanatory, if you watch him work. The Toad sobriquet for Ryu I will briefly attempt to explain. It harkens back to when Ryu first showed up at a Dodgers Spring Training workout. As I remember it, there was a report from that workout that Ryu had difficulty keeping up with his teammates in completing the workout. I slapped the 'Toad' label on him in part as a reference to George Steinbrenner's slam of the late Hideki Irabu when The Boss called Irabu a "fat pussy toad" after a Spring Training play in which Irabu failed to cover first on a ground ball hit to the first baseman.
Toads, most of which are nocturnal, are asleep right now but there is some day baseball in Chicago this afternoon, where the Cubs are hosting the White Sox to kick off a four-game home-and-home series that continues under the sun tomorrow as well. The Cubs lead the opener 1-0, top 4, one on with Adam Engel facing Kyle Hendricks. Engel, 7, on what Cubs radio heralded as a nice play Schwarber, one of several they say he has made of late.
...
Quite a bit later. Engel later homered in that game, and the White Sox won, SwarZak the save. It's 21:30 central daylight. I've got KC at Detroit, deadlocked at three, bottom ten, two on, two out. Miggy just flew out to center, after looking at a pitch that should've been called strike three and ended the at-bat. After flying out Miggy slammed his bat down. He has batted .256 with 48 RBI. I hear about his "hard hit rate" being good. These rates. Yeah, maybe he hits it hard when he hits it but what about when he doesn't hit it? And, by the way, that pop fly he just hit to center was a can of corn, not a hard-hit ball. Who assigns the ones and zeroes of hardness to these batted balls? Is there a computer or a human pair of eyes anywhere assigning a value to Miggy's body language? On a scale of zero to ten where zero is bad and ten is good, I'd rate him a three. He is struggling. Castellanos, another hard-hit-rate darling, just went 6-3 to end the inning. He wanted to crush his helmet with his batting-gloved hands. This game goes to the eleventh, at the eleventh hour in Detroit.
Salvador Perez, who B says has the worst hair in baseball, homers to left, top 12, putting KC up 4-3. He is one hell of a player.
< End, Book 2, 2017 >
P.S. Moustakas goes back-to-back.
...
< Continuing in a different journal: >
It has been more than nine years since I have written anything in this journal. I had dubbed it Teas Champagnes Wines. I was reading some of my old reviews of said libations and found them funny. I have left room to add more such reviews, but I will fill the latter half with these baseball missives.
My MLB.TV screen has been red white and blue for a while. Now I realize it said not "Commercial Break in Progress" but "Thank You For Watching". Eventually it defaults from this polite voyáge and redirects back out to the console view, featuring the large scoreboard. Houston over Philly, not close; the Diamondbacks at home lead Atlanta 4-2, top 5; Seattle over Boston.
To LA. Sanó, 7 (Taylor). Ryu the pitcher. He is opposite Bartolo Colón in a little something we like to call the HotCut. The commercial rotation is: Buick (wrong cake for the baby shower), AT&T (Mark Wahlberg and a fee played by legendary actress Anjelica Huston), Phillips 66 (I have previously covered this commercial in this entirety). There is also a Chevy commercial that is set in a desert and which seems to be an amalgamation of various 'takes' where supposed Ford truck owners are supposed to be surprised when a cloth-covered truck is revealed to be, in fact, a Chevy. Certain participants in the exercise appear early in the commercial and then never again; or appear early in the commercial but then not in the middle, only to reappear at the end. The only detail we learn about the truck is that its bed is made out of steel, not aluminum, to which one of the participants says, "The stronger the better." B and I have a sense that the commercials running on MLB.TV are the ad equivalent of the clothing that shows up at outlet malls—it wasn't good enough to run on cable so it gets routed to MLB.TV.
I sent you a headline, maybe only my second of the year. It was: 'LA Times: Gut Feeds, Toad Creaks Midway thru 'Cut'. Colón is working now, top five, he fans Forsythe looking at a fastball right down the middle. I'm sure there's a reason he was expecting a different sort of pitch but I can't fathom it. Next pitch, same pitch, Grandal goes yard. Minnesota 2, LA 1. Then Pederson loses one, tying it. Now Puig triples on a ball he laced down the first base line, Puig running hard, going into third base standing up, no throw. I wonder if he could have scored had he rounded third, forcing a surprised throw, he was really moving from first to third. Chris Taylor stands in. Taylor singles to score Puig. He got a pitch to hit, a strike, in the lower southwest quadrant of the zone. Ryu is in line for the win with the Dodgers now ahead 3-2. Seager singles, Grandal scores, Taylor to third. Here comes Molitor—no, it's the pitching coach. These are the last pitches of Bartolo Colón. It's Justin Turner, red and dirty. A foul back. Turner, 9.
Toads, most of which are nocturnal, are asleep right now but there is some day baseball in Chicago this afternoon, where the Cubs are hosting the White Sox to kick off a four-game home-and-home series that continues under the sun tomorrow as well. The Cubs lead the opener 1-0, top 4, one on with Adam Engel facing Kyle Hendricks. Engel, 7, on what Cubs radio heralded as a nice play Schwarber, one of several they say he has made of late.
...
Quite a bit later. Engel later homered in that game, and the White Sox won, SwarZak the save. It's 21:30 central daylight. I've got KC at Detroit, deadlocked at three, bottom ten, two on, two out. Miggy just flew out to center, after looking at a pitch that should've been called strike three and ended the at-bat. After flying out Miggy slammed his bat down. He has batted .256 with 48 RBI. I hear about his "hard hit rate" being good. These rates. Yeah, maybe he hits it hard when he hits it but what about when he doesn't hit it? And, by the way, that pop fly he just hit to center was a can of corn, not a hard-hit ball. Who assigns the ones and zeroes of hardness to these batted balls? Is there a computer or a human pair of eyes anywhere assigning a value to Miggy's body language? On a scale of zero to ten where zero is bad and ten is good, I'd rate him a three. He is struggling. Castellanos, another hard-hit-rate darling, just went 6-3 to end the inning. He wanted to crush his helmet with his batting-gloved hands. This game goes to the eleventh, at the eleventh hour in Detroit.
Salvador Perez, who B says has the worst hair in baseball, homers to left, top 12, putting KC up 4-3. He is one hell of a player.
< End, Book 2, 2017 >
P.S. Moustakas goes back-to-back.
...
< Continuing in a different journal: >
It has been more than nine years since I have written anything in this journal. I had dubbed it Teas Champagnes Wines. I was reading some of my old reviews of said libations and found them funny. I have left room to add more such reviews, but I will fill the latter half with these baseball missives.
My MLB.TV screen has been red white and blue for a while. Now I realize it said not "Commercial Break in Progress" but "Thank You For Watching". Eventually it defaults from this polite voyáge and redirects back out to the console view, featuring the large scoreboard. Houston over Philly, not close; the Diamondbacks at home lead Atlanta 4-2, top 5; Seattle over Boston.
To LA. Sanó, 7 (Taylor). Ryu the pitcher. He is opposite Bartolo Colón in a little something we like to call the HotCut. The commercial rotation is: Buick (wrong cake for the baby shower), AT&T (Mark Wahlberg and a fee played by legendary actress Anjelica Huston), Phillips 66 (I have previously covered this commercial in this entirety). There is also a Chevy commercial that is set in a desert and which seems to be an amalgamation of various 'takes' where supposed Ford truck owners are supposed to be surprised when a cloth-covered truck is revealed to be, in fact, a Chevy. Certain participants in the exercise appear early in the commercial and then never again; or appear early in the commercial but then not in the middle, only to reappear at the end. The only detail we learn about the truck is that its bed is made out of steel, not aluminum, to which one of the participants says, "The stronger the better." B and I have a sense that the commercials running on MLB.TV are the ad equivalent of the clothing that shows up at outlet malls—it wasn't good enough to run on cable so it gets routed to MLB.TV.
I sent you a headline, maybe only my second of the year. It was: 'LA Times: Gut Feeds, Toad Creaks Midway thru 'Cut'. Colón is working now, top five, he fans Forsythe looking at a fastball right down the middle. I'm sure there's a reason he was expecting a different sort of pitch but I can't fathom it. Next pitch, same pitch, Grandal goes yard. Minnesota 2, LA 1. Then Pederson loses one, tying it. Now Puig triples on a ball he laced down the first base line, Puig running hard, going into third base standing up, no throw. I wonder if he could have scored had he rounded third, forcing a surprised throw, he was really moving from first to third. Chris Taylor stands in. Taylor singles to score Puig. He got a pitch to hit, a strike, in the lower southwest quadrant of the zone. Ryu is in line for the win with the Dodgers now ahead 3-2. Seager singles, Grandal scores, Taylor to third. Here comes Molitor—no, it's the pitching coach. These are the last pitches of Bartolo Colón. It's Justin Turner, red and dirty. A foul back. Turner, 9.
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