Wednesday, September 28, 2005

I'm A Traitor

I went into the belly of the beast last night, visiting our former 'hometown' nine as they took on the team I may or may not still have some allegiance to. I was all set to come back and make a joke about seeing real major-league offense, but every time I looked at the score, the Nationals were piling another run on. And against one of the two Cy Young favorites, Dontrelle Willis, no less!

Obviously, I missed the game, and have barely had enough time to scan the boxscore. Barry and Mark fill is in on the details.

From looking at the scores, it looks like Marlon Byrd was in the middle of everything. Four runs is a lot -- and I'm guessing the Nats' season high, as well. I'll name him the Majority Whip, but if anyone has any other nominees, throw them in the comments.

Jon Rauch pitched three effective innings as he continues to rebound from the torn labrum. I'd love to see him get a shot as a starter next season. His stuff is good enough, and he's shown that he's capable, especially with how he pitched down the stretch last season.

  • The game that I actually watched last night was brutal. Of the ten longest games, 6 or 7 of them are Yankees/Orioles games, and I've probably been to 5 of them. Last night's went 4:17. Given the long drive, I bailed out when the Orioles started pounding the Yankees' 15th pitcher of the game, Tanyon Scheise.

    I won't bore you with a full game recap, just some selfish look-at-meisms: I made the jumbotron twice! Woohoo. Yeah, who cares? I know.

    I had pretty good seats for last night's game. I always buy from the No-Scalping section, so not a dime of mine directly goes towards the bastard disguised as an owner. But they've made it exceedingly difficult. Buyers and sellers now have to register. So instead of a smooth, orderly process, it's long, drawn out and complicated. Despite there being 40 or so people selling tickets inside the gate, and there not being anyone in line as buyers, they wouldn't let us for some strange reason.

    Instead, I negotiated with a seller standing in line, and ended up sitting directly behind homeplate about 20-30 rows back -- just far enough so that you can get perspective game, but just close enough so that you could still see the mediocrity and movement on Wayne Franklin's 'slider'. Wayne Franklin should be executed. Not only is he a craptastic pitcher, but he has the slowest delivery between pitches. ZZZZ.

    One interesting thing about the seats. We were right in front of the press box, so we had a good view of everyone there -- including a Jorge Arangure sighting. There was a huge contingent of Japanese media there to record every movement their hero Hideki Matsui made. When he was at the plate, each would dutifully lower their heads and scribble a note after EACH pitch. Imagine 20 or so Japanese men moving in unison. All it needed was some bad Asian Technopop and a strobe light. Inscrutable indeed.

    If you're interested in the actual game -- and lord knows why you'd be interested in a 398-pitch exhibition of crappy pitching, our friends at Bronx Banter have it covered.

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