Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Baseball Note

I hate to be rooting for the team once owned by George W. Bush, but boy, I have to tell you, I am loving the way the Texas Rangers are running the bases here in game 5. [1]

When was the last time you saw two different runs scored from second base, on slow ground balls, fielded cleanly?

Not to mention that one of those two was by Vlady Guerrero, whose physical presence, on the bases as at bat, can most politely be described as "hulking?" The real old pros never miss the spots. You wait a whole season for a chance like this, and when you do not miss it, that's where we most sincerely tip our caps.

And further: after Nelson Cruz ended up on second with a double on what should have been an easy triple (due to posing at home plate after his I'm-sure-that's-gone swing), how fabulous was that steal of third on the very next pitch (and then the score on the bad throw)?

Antlers. I do like the antlers.

And over in the National League, I'm still wondering why no one told me before about Tim Lincecum? What a joy he was to watch pitch. And to watch him leaping up and down in the dugout in a game he wasn't pitching, like a pure and unadulterated high school kid? Gotta love that. (Almost as much as you do hearing Geezer Stockton call Tim's team "the New York Giants." ← we may have found something older than John McCain.)

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[1] Credit here is due largely to manager Ron Washington, and decidedly not to W, whose only other baseball accomplishment besides getting Daddy's rich friends to buy him out at a fat personal profit appears to have been trading Sammy Sosa, about 600 dingers prematurely.)

2 comments:

Jinnet said...

Lincecum is one of my favorite pitchers. When he's not pitching against Cincinnati, that is.

(This is going to be quite the pitching series, it seems, for both leagues.)

bjkeefe said...

Oh boy do I know that love/hate feeling about the other team's ace.

I think you're right about the likely continued dominance of the pitching from here on out. (This makes me pretty nervous, as a fan of the team with the weakest staff, at this point.) Just happened to notice some preemptive expectations-lowering from Mark Teixiera about this, too: “I think their pitching is very good, very solid. If we pitch the way we’re capable of, if they pitch the way they’re capable of, there may not be a lot of runs scored.”

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