Tag: baseball

Full circle

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Back to where it all began: Tampa Bay Rays trade Jonny Venters to the Atlanta Braves

Honestly, I thought I’d be more pumped up about this trade, considering how much I love Jonny Venters, and that he’s coming back to the Atlanta Braves.  But I guess there’s this permanent small resentment towards the Braves in my brain, involving their unnecessary move, their affiliation with ScumTrust, the tax increases they caused, and their general apathetic baseball operations that kind of makes me feel that they didn’t deserve to have the services of a classy guy like Jonny Venters.

Especially since the Braves basically cut Venters loose while he was at his very lowest point after numerous injuries, it was the Rays that kept his career alive, and I guess it was with the Rays in which I would’ve liked to have seen his career reignite.  Or at least, I would’ve loved to have seen the Rays trade Venters to an actual contender, and not like the currently free-falling Braves, who need starting pitching and not more relievers.

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This could only happen to the Mets

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It couldn’t possibly happen to any other team: all-star pitcher Noah Syndergaard put on the disabled list for hand-and-foot-and-mouth disease

Most people who follow baseball are remotely aware that Noah Syndergaard is actually a really good pitcher, and not just a good pitcher for the perpetual-woeful Mets.  But to those who aren’t, know that Noah Syndergaard is a really good pitcher, definitely among the best in the game today.  It’s no more evident than looking for an ironic picture of him sitting on the bench looking dejected, or a pic of the manager taking the ball away from him on the mound as he’s pathetically removed from the game.  Even finding this one image of him moments after giving up a home run to an Atlanta Brave was a one-in-a-hundred kind of find.

That’s how good of a pitcher he is; even the internet has a hard time finding photographic evidence of when he’s having an off-day.

Regardless of his talent of throwing a baseball, he’s still on the Mets, and if there’s one thing the Mets have become synonymous with over the last few decades is that the players of their team are slightly more subjective to injuries than other teams.  Sure, it might sound like a bullshit assessment, but the proof is there – Mets players just get injured in the weirdest ways, or just so frequently to where they even thought simply making a sign would exorcise the bad juju to stop it.

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Eleven years later

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After the Texas Rangers hung five runs on the Colorado Rockies in the first inning, it seemed like the home team would prevail on my first trip to The Ballpark in Arlington, or whatever Globe Life corporate name that’s attached to it now.  However, the Rockies would proceed to answer back immediately scoring six-runs in the second inning to take the lead, and then tack on three more unanswered runs throughout the rest of the game, all while holding the Rangers to effectively a two-hitter the remainder of the way.

I suspect that my divine blessing by visit isn’t going to work this season, and that the Rangers probably won’t make the playoffs in spite of my well-documented history of personally ushering teams into the postseason.  Then again, at the time I’m writing this, the Rangers have won five in a row, and there’s a lot of season left to be played, so who really knows what’s going to happen?

Anyway, the point really is that with my trip to Texas and having seen a Texas Rangers game in their ballpark, I have effectively finished a life’s goal of visiting all 30 Major League Baseball ballparks.  Sure, since the time I started in 2007, several parks have closed and been replaced with ones that I’ve yet to visit, but for all intents and purposes, the goal was really to catch a home game at every team’s park, regardless of which it was when I visited.  I have successfully been to every team’s city, watched baseball, and often times, ate a fuckton of food along the way, sampling the local cuisines all across the country.

One of these days, I’ll have a baseball park site up again in some way shape or form, so I’m not going to straight up review Globe Life Park outright here, but I have to say that I’m very excited and left in a state of disbelief that I’m actually finished with the journey.  I mean, after 11 years, it felt like one of those things that never felt like it was ever going to end, despite there being a very finite number of 30 teams to visit, and that I was gradually chipping away at the remaining total.

Although it averages to like three parks a year, the fact of the matter is that my general fandom, despite still loving the game itself, I’ve just grown less gung-ho of feeling the necessity to be physically at games these days.  And it’s never been more evident in the fact that the last few parks have been some of the only games I’ve been to over the last few seasons, and I’ve literally hit Texas, Arizona and Cleveland solely in the span of the last three seasons.

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Photos: Globe Life Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers

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[2020 note]: this is unposted content back from 2018, of my trip to Dallas, Texas, to visit my brother, but also to knock out the last ballpark in my journey to visit every single MLB team.

It only took 11 years to accomplish, and by this time, my fandom was pretty unenthusiastic due to the Braves sucking all the enjoyment out of baseball over the last few years, but I wasn’t about to give up on a quest that was so close to being completed.

When I started, it was still called The Ballpark in Arlington, but as is often the case with modern baseball parks, corporate naming rights swoop in and take all character out of these venues, and Globe Life was no exception to the rule.  But for what it’s worth, it was a fine baseball establishment, nice scenics, good backdrops, and most importantly, a pretty epic $27 chicken sandwich, and I enjoyed my time there spent with my brother and his wife.

I think I made the right call by having this one be last in the journey.

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Baseball players can be such greedy bitches sometimes

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I love outside-the-box unorthodox strategizing.  In every form of competition.  I love wildcats and flea flickers in football, I love the point forward in basketball.  I enjoy running tank Lulu, tank Karma and other weird builds in League of Legends.  And no other form of competition is open to the notion of unorthodox strategizing than baseball, where the pace of the game and the individual events of every single pitcher versus batter matchup completely creates the perfect environment for some unique strategies to be born.  The DeVanzo Shift, four-man outfields.  Moneyball, moneyball, moneyball.

The Tampa Bay Rays did something that I’ve always talked about would be an interesting concept to try, but nobody in baseball ever did; until now.  I’ve bounced the idea around before, suggesting teams should start a relief pitcher occasionally; primarily on the notion that there are a number of pitchers who for reasons completely unknown, have rough first innings, or there are some matchups that they should avoid for a first time through an order.  Once, I thought the New York Yankees should have employed this, when Mariano Rivera was on his farewell tour, and there would be no more appropriate way for him to go out than to start a game at Yankee Stadium, cutter the top of the first inning to death, and then get removed from the game to the bonkers raucous crowd reaction he rightfully deserved.

But nah, the notion of starting a guy with the intention of going one inning never seemed like it was going to happen until now.  The Rays, facing the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in Orange County off of Interstate 5 South, started not just a game, but two straight games, with relief pitcher Sergio Romo.  In those two games, he pitched 2.1 innings, faced nine batters, walked two but struck out six.  In one game, he was lifted for an actual starting pitcher, Ryan Yarbrough, who proceeded to pitch the next 6.1 innings and get the win for the Rays, and in the other, he was relieved by a series of other relief pitchers who lost the game.

Regardless, Sergio Romo did his job and pitched efficiently in two straight starts.  And because it worked once, it definitely has opened some eyes as a viable strategy; except that the Angels, namely infielder Zack Cozart has been immediately vocal about how it’s not a good thing for the entire sport, and then he’s basically backed by the MLB Players Association, stating that such a strategy is going to be financially detrimental to players who are designated starting pitchers.

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The DeVanzo Shift in an actual MLB game

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A guilty pleasure of mine is the film, Artie Lange’s Beer League.  It’s more or less a love letter to all things New Jersey, featuring Artie Lange and a bunch of small time New Jersey losers who enjoy beer league softball in their town while going through the motions of their own mundane lives.  It’s by no means good, but to someone who appreciates sophomoric humor, rec league softball, and one of the random things that Ralph Macchio actually performs in, the flick still holds a place in my well as a go-to for a cheap and reliable laugh.

One of the things in the film that I make references to almost regularly is The DeVanzo Shift, a defensive strategy employed by one of the antagonist teams, designed to feast on the fact that Artie Lange is completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere but the left side of the field, so the Manganelli Fitness team blatantly positions all fielders on the left, leaving the right side completely open.  Naturally, being the underachiever he is, Artie still hits the ball into the teeth of the defense and is easily rendered out.

Throughout the last decade or so, Major League Baseball has gone in the direction of teams employing radical shifts, in order to capitalize on the tendency of more and more hitters to pull the ball more than anything else, because pulling = power, power = homers, and homers = $$$.  It’s become laughably commonplace these days that every team’s left-handed power bats will see shifts where either a second baseman or a shortstop will position themselves pretty much in shallow right field, and be pitched in manners that will try to get them to hit it directly into the shifts.

Regardless, any team that shifts will almost always still have a guy or two position on the opposite side of the field, in the event that a hitter will drop a bunt to counter the shift, or some fluke of a swing slaps a ball to the opposite side of the field.  After all, these are paid professionals who are supposedly the best in the world at baseball and should be able to read a defense and react accordingly to how the opposition is trying to play them.  So shifts are not uncommon in the big leagues, but it’s like we’d ever see a real DeVanzo Shift in the majors.

That is, until Joey Gallo started playing baseball for the Texas Rangers.  Apparently the book is pretty short and concise on Gallo: strikes out a ton, and if he makes contact with the ball, he’s pulling it.  And the Houston Astros have clearly gotten the message, and have basically deployed the DeVanzo Shift, in Major League Baseball.  The Astros positioned nearly every single fielder on the right side of the field, save for left fielder Marwin Gonzalez, who was the sole left-side safety net in the event that Gallo hit anything remotely to the left.  Needless to say, the Astros were very confident that they were going to get Joey Gallo to hit a ball to the right side of the field.

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Only the Mets

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It’s not Bobby Bonilla Day yet, but it’s never too early for the Mets to get into the national spotlight for doing something stupid and foolish that only the Mets seem capable of doing and whom the sports media loves to point out their screw ups.  So when the Mets manage to screw up something as simple as batting lineups, and give away a free out because they submit an incorrect batting lineup card to the umpires and opposing team, and subsequently lose the game, it’s newsworthy.

At this point, I’ve watched thousands of baseball games in my life.  I’ve never once seen an instance where a team has managed to bat out of order in a game before.  I mean, I’ve seen blunders on double switches and managers accidentally burn a pinch-hitter or a relief pitcher in critical situations before.  I’ve seen a guy walk on three balls instead of four balls because absolutely nobody from the umpires, players and both teams were paying attention.  But never before have I ever seen a game where a batter went up and took an at-bat out of the predetermined order, and then get caught for it.

I’d say that this is something that only the Mets would seem capable of doing, but seeing as how absolutely everything baseball is recorded, naturally, there’s citation of when this happened last time, and apparently it really wasn’t that long ago when this happened, back in 2016.  But because nobody gives a shit about the Milwaukee Brewers, nobody seems to have noticed when they did it, but because the Mets are notorious for screwing up just about everything there is to screw up in the game of baseball, and the media loves to point out when it does, it becomes news worth talking about.

Seriously though, what stupid shit for the Mets to fall for, and despite the fact that he was kind of a colossal fuck up in Washington, good on Reds manager Jim Riggleman for knowing exactly how to play the situation, and waiting for the precise moment when the Mets were building up some momentum to reveal the blunder, and completely wipe out any positive juju that they were beginning to feel with a runner on second with only one out.  Naturally, the Mets would have to, and did lose the game, in extra innings no less, where had their blunder not occurred, might not have even been on the table.  Who would ever know how things would have played out had the Mets not been so perpetually boneheaded?

Nobody will ever know, but because it’s the Mets, they’d probably find a different way to mess things up and lose, because that’s simply what the franchise seems to do best.