If You Have To Ask...You'll Never Know

I get it. There are other sports out there. Other sports that draw a bigger audience, have more rabid fans, generate more revenue. But there will never be another sport that has more heart, creates more magic, or engenders more wisdom than baseball. I can spend years talking about it and explaining all its minute, wonderful details, but the truth is, if you have to ask, you'll never understand it.
So do me a favor, if you don't get it, just STFU and quit your yapping. Baseball isn't boring; you're just stupid. You don't have to like it, but you should try and understand it before you open your giant maw and let your ignorance spew out. I don't care for other sports much, but I still know what's going on when they play. So if you don't get baseball and especially if you have the gall to criticize, I'll channel the esteemed Bill Simmons who once said, if you don't like Field of Dreams, then we can't be friends.
To all my friends who suffer the whinings of non-baseball people during our glorious 162 game season in the summer, I leave you these gems: 


"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."


"Well, you know I... I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases - stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish, Ray Kinsella. That's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?"


I hope there is... 

"When Did We Get Rich Garces Back?"

I mean, really. Twinsies!

I'm Not Panicking

I AM wicked frustrated though. And it's not just that I'm pissed the Sox sank 3-0 in the series to the Rangers - they're a good team and it's hard to take it away from that - but I'm pissed because I'm right. I called it in the off-season that our primary focus needed to be catcher, SS, and pitching, pitching, pitching. How happy am I that we bagged Crawford and AGon? Happier than a fat kid drowning in cake. But those acquisitions are for positions that were already semi-solid to begin with. We have a plethora of OFers and I loved BelTRE. You may argue that he'll never see another offensive power year like 2010, but I'd rather put my money on medium production from him than hope to God that Dice-K finally turns it around this year.
Which brings me back to my original point - our pitching is teh suck. And wtf are Theo & Gang doing about it? Getting star talent isn't going to solve the problem. In fact, it would make us look even worse and make the team feel like more of a collective failure because we have all this great power and pop but no pitching for them to get behind. All this expectation and anticipation is for naught if we keep having high scoring games and losing. If 2010 teaches us anything, it's that decent hitters will find their stride eventually and almost everyone gets hot at some point. We fielded a team of reject toys and they still did pretty damn awesome.
But you can't fool pitching. Even great pitchers will have off days, but bad pitchers will never be able to overcome decent hitting. Especially when we have technology to teach us how to work the count, watch for patterns, etc.
I love love love Beckett and I hope to God he's healthy enough to be productive this year, but ST did not give me much confidence. I really don't get why people like Lackey so much. From what I've seen of him, he really has not lived up to my expectations. And yet, he's our second starter. Lester is a beast but I'm not entirely comfortable with him being our ace. He's too quiet and not enough of a motivator (apart from the whole beating the crap out of cancer thing...). Buccles is still a kid, and Dice-K...well, Dice-K should be a $150 million batboy. All I'm saying is that you look at the Phillies and their nasty pitching rotation. It doesn't matter that practically all their power hitters are on the DL, those guys will still make it to the WS. And if we don't get our act together, we might not even make it there and we definitely will not be able to beat a pitching team like the Phillies.
So dear Theo, GET US SOME GD PITCHING STAT!!!

Thanks a lot, De Quervain...

I got a shot of cortisone in my wrist today thanks to an idiopathic (i.e. we have no idea how it happened) ailment called De Quervain's Tendinitis. You know, with all these injuries and such, I should be getting paid bank to play some sport in the big leagues. There's just no sense in getting hurt while vacuuming the house. All I can say is that it hurt something bad because of the inflamed tendons in a very tight sheath. Sounds dirty but it is tremendously unsexy.

Next up, lumbar epidural!

A Ground Ball Stabbed By Foulke...

It's not possible for me to care any less about the Mariners (except when they play the O's) but this article is so lovely and Duff really echoes how baseball fans love their radio announcers. First off, it's DUFF MCKAGAN from G'n'R (oh remember those days?) and then it's him extolling the virtues of the people who ultimately make or break the watching/listening experience. Nothing sends shivers down my spine or tears to my eyes like Joe Castiglione's calling of the last out in Game 5 of the 2004 WS. And I can't watch the video of Remy dancing and falling off the announcer's desk without dying laughing. No matter how many times D.O. calls "way back! way back!" I'll still go ballistic watching that ball sail through the air to land on some lucky windshield pahked in the Landsdowne Street garage. And haven't we all turned the volume off when Joe Buck and Tim McCarver squawk on and on about how they want to make sweet sweet love to A-Rod? I actually watched the entire 2004 ALCS sans sound, I kid you not. Now that I live in a city without any sports cred whatsoever, I long for the drives down Comm Ave, Brighton Ave, and Washington Street, where I have the windows down, the breeze on my face, and Joe calling the counts on the AM dial.