Sports Writing

Big up to Johnny Damon for his consistent hitting. As I said over at Surviving Grady, Johnny is a ROCK STAR. And frankly, given the Boston media sometimes, we need players who’re rock stars. The script was all ready and written: man spends too much time in the spotlight, forgets how to play, and Damon just tore it up. He’s hitting, he’s running into walls… okay, he’s still got a noodle arm but we’ve always known that.

In honour of the Yankees being swept by the Royals and dropping 6 straight… (I was sorting out my “My Pictures” folder, and I found this funny little animated GIF. It was taken from someone’s LiveJournal, if I recall correctly, and damn if I don’t know where I got it from… any help with the attribution?

I’m a big believer in the “let’s just wear out the starters and get to the middle relief” strategy, but man, when they try it against the Angels and their awesome relievers it’s scary. Fortunately, it worked: Escobar out after 95 pitches in the 6th, then the Sox got all those runs against Brendan Donnelly and Scot Shields… but wow, it’s a heart attack waiting to happen, especially with how Escobar made them look.

Been a while since I had a chance to do this! Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this The fourth, the fifth

So, yet another matchup of ineluctable forces: Tim Wakefield’s old penchant for giving up homers, and the Orioles’ love of bashing on the Sox. And so it goes: 3 homers (more than Timmeh gave up in the whole of May) helped kill the Sox yesterday, particularly Geronimo Gil’s 3-run shot. The Sammy Sosa homer was a funny thing, bouncing off the top of the Monstah - somehow it never seems as “true” a home run when it’s a ground-rule homer. They showed the replay of his first homer, also back at Fenway against Roger Clemens, and also a shot to left-field. Both Sosa and Clemens looked a lot younger, naturally, but also a lot skinnier.

Man, now that Derek Lowe is in LA, he’s gone all TV-star… okay, okay, he’s only hosting This Week in Baseball. Would be interesting to watch… Speaking of TV personalities, Jerry Remy is pimping his Yawkey Way bar again on NESN…

Does anyone LIKE the Foxwood commercial with the leprechauns? And don’t the little people feel degraded by having to do things like pillow fights on the bed?

Good win, and good to see Wade Miller recover his form, but that Damon crash into the fence looked scary - a full-fledged face plant straight into a hard surface. I’m sure everyone saw that and thought of the infamous concussion with Damian Jackson back in 2003… Daniel Cabrera looked okay and then was unravelled by one bad inning.

Looking around MLB, I read a post on the Rooftop Report doubting whether Ryan Dempster of the Cubs would make it as a closer. Personally, I always thought he would - I drafted him in one of my fantasy teams expecting him to close - because I thought he could K people (a high K-rate, average BB-rate guy, A.J. Burnett or Matt Clement pre-2005 writ lite), but the blog seemed to have his doubts:

This had all the markings of a let-down day: two splendiferous victories over the Yankees, plus Rodrigo Lopez taking the mound, who for some reason turns into an ace against the Sox. Expectations high against a team decimated by injuries.

Jim Caple’s column on ESPN discussed old-timers like Oil Can Boyd and Rickey Henderson playing for the independent leagues: And Rickey Henderson, now of the San Diego Surf Dawgs, told reporters he should be playing in Yankee Stadium. “The Yankees have that guy (Tony) Womack playing left field,” Henderson said. “If I can’t play that position at least as well as he can, I’ll hang up the spikes right now.”

The Boston Globe had a piece on why “Sweet Caroline” plays at every 8th inning. I hate “Tessie”, but “Sweet Caroline” has always had a so-bad-it’s-kitschy appeal to it for me. Reminds me of that scene in Beautiful Girls where they all sing along to that song… come to think of it, that was written by a Massachusetts native, Scott Rosenberg, before “Sweet Caroline” became a standard at Fenway. For that matter, I have a recording of U2 singing that song in Foxboro (purportedly) and everyone joins in the “bah-bah-bah” and “so good, so good, so good” parts. What’s with the Massachusetts connections to the song?

So Wells gets Renteria’s number, Renteria gets Wells’, and everybody does well in their renewed outfits. Not sure why Renteria had to pay Wells, and not the other way around, especially with the results - 8.1 innings, 2 ER, after 2 first-inning homers! (Edgar didn’t do shabbily for himself either.) As usual, the key seemed to be throwing strikes - I think these patient teams like the Sox and the Yankees have problems with extreme strike-throwing machines. Wells clearly still has some love in his heart for New York - just listen to his quote about pitching in Yankee Stadium:“The greats, man, they’re shining down. If you don’t want to pitch here, there’s something wrong with you.” But as long as he produces results like today’s, I don’t care where his favourites are.

Peter Gammons had some nice tidbits in his column today, including this one: Reds players let it be known that their distaste for the Danny Graves release started with the fact that he was notified with a phone call, but more important, what set off his [obscene] gesture was a fan who according to teammates yelled, “go back to Vietnam.” That told players that the fans’ racist behavior is acceptable. (Gammons, plus some background on Graves’ release and the gesture.)

I was reading in Thursday’s USA Today about an increased prevalence of broken bats in the major leagues (possibly caused by the increased use of maple bats, although other factors including smaller bat handles might be causing it) and one of the games I managed to catch during my European sojourn involved Youkilis at 1st being forced to move out of the way of a broken bat piece… then I caught up with old baseball news and the news of Rick Helling’s forearm being impaled by a bat shard caught my eye. Man, makes me nervous about ever getting seats down the right-field line… not sure my reflexes would be fast enough to get out of the way!

Wow. Given all the frustrations of the past weeks’ play, combined with the Yankees’ form, that was incredibly cathartic. Especially given that Renteria and Manny came up big. Biggest win ever against the Yankees.

Dale Sveum seemed to have been overly cautious at the start of the season, perhaps in response to last year’s overly enthusiastic baserunning, but the pendulum seems back at the gung-ho extreme. Once two people were out at home in one inning, that was clearly the ballgame, even though the Cano and Sheffield homers came later. 5 consecutive hits off Randy Johnson, for 1 run and 2 outs? UGH.

Wade Miller lost a couple of mph on his fastball yesterday/this morning (yessiree, back in Singapore) and didn’t have the curve, and was punished for it. It’s weird. Right now I think the Sox pitching is unpredictably bad - which in a way is worse than Blaine Neal bad, since knowing Neal can’t pitch means he can always be saved for mopup, whereas Miller had a couple of good outings before this one.

Somewhere in the 6th inning, I peeked out of my spot in the cybercafe to realise everyone had left, and the old woman who was running the place was sweetly waiting for me to finish (it was 10pm on a Sunday night) to close up, so I had to catch up this morning.