Tuesday, March 23, 2004
IT'S ANOTHER CLOUDY NIGHT...
...without sanity.
After waking up late, I went to where I've worked in the summer to see if they might hire me for spring break (I'm guessing not), then I went to the local Knight baseball game, where they were creamed by Klahowya. Then I went and got a bunch of blank CDs to run off my collection because I don't want any grubby evildoers' hands getting on the original copies when I go to field school this summer. Ridiculous? Maybe, but I'm horribly territorial over my CDs.
And now, a slew of Mariner articles...
First, the duplicative ones. Finnigan and Hickey let us know that Danny Bautista of the Diamondbacks lined a ball off Joel Pineiro's elbow. Joel toughed it out and got his work in, though the elbow hurt afterward. Let's hope he's all right. Terry Mulholland lost thanks in part to ee-ROM Bocachica, who dove for a ball and missed, allowing the leadoff runner to reach base. Bret Boone hit a wind-aided home run. Hickey brings the news that Olerud and Boone may have seen a straight change out of Randy Johnson. Arizona doesn't pop up on the Mariner schedule this year, but no worries...they'll probably scrounge up a start from Clemens, Pettitte, or Matt Morris given the NL Central interleague play this year, and maybe one out of Wells since, as everyone knows, the Padres are the Mariners' natural rival. Sure gets me fired up, I don't know about you; it just makes my blood boil. Marriages have been broken up over this intense Padres/Mariners rivalry, after all.
The surprise part of these two notebook articles for me was the two somewhat different accounts of a weird Eddie Guardado pitch, the difference being whether he wanted to throw to first or pitch out, as an amazingly slow pitch went across for a strike. The surprise to me in all this was that Bumbling Bob Melvin didn't try to add some fuel to the fire, because Ben Davis was behind the plate when this happened. One of three things could have happened: (1) BlowMel's been reading Sports and B's (or many of our esteemed blogging colleagues) and heeded our advice, (2) someone higher up put him in his place (maybe Lincoln didn't want Melvin to be a prima donna? This is the only instance where I might like that policy), or (3) Melvin just got rusty. My money's on Reason Number 3.
Before I bring the rest of the articles here...FSNNW has been running their schmaltzy "Before the Bigs" segments featuring cheesy TV-Y7-rated stories with notorious homer Rick Rizzs voicing over and with melodramatic background music, designed to bring a tear to the Mariners' target demographic: late-30s/early-40s soccer moms making over $70k/yr who watch because they love Dan Wilson's ass, not because they want to see this team win or something. Anyway, what I was really going to complain about was this: who the hell's idea was it to run one of these segments about Howard Lincoln?!! You know, it's almost sad what Fox Sports has become. It can only be trusted for televising Mariner games, and nothing more. Here's my history of that there channel: Fox Sports took over Prime Sports, where the Mariners had their cable deal for a couple of years. Fox Sports Net comes up with the very noble idea of making nightly regional sports recap shows (in our case, the Northwest Regional Sports Report) at 10pm, next to their National Sports Report (anchored by Chris Myers, I believe, who they had wooed from ESPN), which they tried to run up against SportsCenter (i.e., the show was doomed from the start). It was all great, though...we got an hour of regional sports, and the dead weight of the NSR was cut off. Meanwhile, at the NW RSR desk, the turnover was rapid. The original crew of Rod Simons (Coug and KSTW vet, helped build the KSTW sportscasts into arguably the best sportscasts in the Seattle TV market at the time) and Tom Glasgow (fmr KIRO), both solid in my opinion, were run out, and the revolving door was open (former KING-5er Gaard Swanson was thrown in the fire too) for everyone that wasn't named Brad Adam or Angie Marzetta/Arlati/Mentink/Segui/whoever the hell she's going to marry next (never married Segui; just a joke there). Where has this all gone? Well, it might be due to a national trend, but the NWSR (the world "Regional" was taken off sometime around when the word "Net" was added into the phrase "Fox Sports Northwest") is now only 30 minutes long, according to an ad I saw the other day. That's right, at 10pm, it's your Northwest Sports Report. At 10:30? You guessed it -- LATE NIGHT POKER. Enough said. I've got a more useful idea for that half-hour: give Bill Krueger (think what you will of him, but you at least figure out what's going through a pitcher's head) his own show and make him take calls. Bonus points to anyone out there who can convince me that a Krueger show in the Seattle market would get worse ratings than Late Night Poker.
Okay, now you're waiting with baited breath for the two other links...
Hickey has an article about the five starters. It's kind of weirdly structured, with so much emphasis in the beginning on stopping Eric Chavez, Garret Anderson, and Raf Palmeiro. They're eventually going to worry about balls hit to left field and balls in the gaps. Cue Richard Rizzitello: "Two down, two aboard, top of the eighth, Mariners up 1-0. Villone comes set. Here's the 3-1 pitch on the way to Bobby Crosby...swung on and it's a high fly ball to fairly deep left field, Ibanez drifts back a few steps and IT DROPS IN FOR A BASE HIT!! Both Durazo and Dye come around to score, Crosby rounds second, and Ibanez kicks the ball toward the bullpen!! Crosby rounds third and is heading home!! Ibanez finally gets a hold of the ball and hands it to one of the great fans at Safeco Field, because he's a 'world class human being'!! EVERYBODY SCORES!!! YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
Of course, with the above hypothetical Rizzs call, it should be noted that at this point of the season, Gil Meche has blown his arm out so Raf Soriano is in the rotation -- that's why he's not protecting the 1-0 lead in the 8th against Oakland. Also, most of Rizzs' calls when in times of despair for the Mariners usually have him exhibiting a sort of slower drawl, almost in the realm of Shakespearean iambic pentameter (caps for stressed words): "...and the A'S have RETAKEN the LEAD by a SCORE of FOUR to TWO." He drags out the words in much the same way that Bill Shatner uses the dramatic pause. Also, I just had to throw in the Joe Namath/Howard Dean/Li'l Jon (depending on your preference) "YEEEAAHH" for dramatic effect and for kicks.
Not much to say about the article, really. Bryan Price says "J.J. (Putz) and (Aaron) Looper are major league pitchers right now." In an interesting note, Kevin Jarvis is not. I don't have to tell you who out of those three has the money and the roster spot.
Final article: Finnigan on Randy Winn.
In Winn's first few years with the Devil Rays, Quinton McCracken played center most of the time.
Hopefully knowing that Crack is now on the bench will help lessen the sure self-esteem blow from that Tampa Bay situation.
There's some filler/baseballese in the article about thinking with every pitch, which is an article smokescreen for...
Melvin said he has no concerns that Winn's arm is not as strong as Cameron's.
"You won't see many center fielders throwing guys out at home," the manager said. "In our defensive scheme, the most important things for them are to run balls down, cut off extra-base hits and keep that runner from going around first to third."
In a related story, the Mariners' defensive "scheme" allows for runners taking off from second base on a sharp one/two-hopper base hit to centerfield to automatically score, regardless of how many outs there are. If any of you remember the games when Cameron was out last year and Winn was in CF, he had a couple of opportunities to show his arm, and oh my goodness, it is hilariously bad. I know Cameron's arm wasn't something to write home about, but Randy Winn's arm is something to write home about, and not because it's a cannon. It's more like a thin rubber band compared to Jose Guillen's Howitzer. One bold prediction from me for 2004: opposing third-base coaches will have sore shoulders after series with the Mariners if their hitters know how to hit ground balls to centerfield.
And an interesting quote from new first base coach Mike Aldrete, who apparently wears another hat for the Mariners, too...
"The best thing about Winn is that he's a smart player," said Aldrete, Seattle's new outfield coach. "Yes, Cameron plays the heck out of center. But Randy's a confident player; he's not a mistake guy."
Here's my thought process while reading this...
Angel on left shoulder: Randy Winn is good. He's not a mistake guy. He's smart.
Devil on right shoulder: Mike Cameron is a mistake guy, according to Aldrete's logic, and he probably took lessons from Bob Melvin in a coaching staff-wide email Bumbling Bob sent out with an attachment entitled "cameron_sucks.doc."
Sorry, angel, but the devil's argument is just too good here.
I wish this stuff were just crap that I made up with my mind on a really late night, but I can convince myself that some variation of this is actually happening, and it's not a nice thought.
There you have it...that's what I'm doing for a late night in Bremerton after a four-hour nap.
After waking up late, I went to where I've worked in the summer to see if they might hire me for spring break (I'm guessing not), then I went to the local Knight baseball game, where they were creamed by Klahowya. Then I went and got a bunch of blank CDs to run off my collection because I don't want any grubby evildoers' hands getting on the original copies when I go to field school this summer. Ridiculous? Maybe, but I'm horribly territorial over my CDs.
And now, a slew of Mariner articles...
First, the duplicative ones. Finnigan and Hickey let us know that Danny Bautista of the Diamondbacks lined a ball off Joel Pineiro's elbow. Joel toughed it out and got his work in, though the elbow hurt afterward. Let's hope he's all right. Terry Mulholland lost thanks in part to ee-ROM Bocachica, who dove for a ball and missed, allowing the leadoff runner to reach base. Bret Boone hit a wind-aided home run. Hickey brings the news that Olerud and Boone may have seen a straight change out of Randy Johnson. Arizona doesn't pop up on the Mariner schedule this year, but no worries...they'll probably scrounge up a start from Clemens, Pettitte, or Matt Morris given the NL Central interleague play this year, and maybe one out of Wells since, as everyone knows, the Padres are the Mariners' natural rival. Sure gets me fired up, I don't know about you; it just makes my blood boil. Marriages have been broken up over this intense Padres/Mariners rivalry, after all.
The surprise part of these two notebook articles for me was the two somewhat different accounts of a weird Eddie Guardado pitch, the difference being whether he wanted to throw to first or pitch out, as an amazingly slow pitch went across for a strike. The surprise to me in all this was that Bumbling Bob Melvin didn't try to add some fuel to the fire, because Ben Davis was behind the plate when this happened. One of three things could have happened: (1) BlowMel's been reading Sports and B's (or many of our esteemed blogging colleagues) and heeded our advice, (2) someone higher up put him in his place (maybe Lincoln didn't want Melvin to be a prima donna? This is the only instance where I might like that policy), or (3) Melvin just got rusty. My money's on Reason Number 3.
Before I bring the rest of the articles here...FSNNW has been running their schmaltzy "Before the Bigs" segments featuring cheesy TV-Y7-rated stories with notorious homer Rick Rizzs voicing over and with melodramatic background music, designed to bring a tear to the Mariners' target demographic: late-30s/early-40s soccer moms making over $70k/yr who watch because they love Dan Wilson's ass, not because they want to see this team win or something. Anyway, what I was really going to complain about was this: who the hell's idea was it to run one of these segments about Howard Lincoln?!! You know, it's almost sad what Fox Sports has become. It can only be trusted for televising Mariner games, and nothing more. Here's my history of that there channel: Fox Sports took over Prime Sports, where the Mariners had their cable deal for a couple of years. Fox Sports Net comes up with the very noble idea of making nightly regional sports recap shows (in our case, the Northwest Regional Sports Report) at 10pm, next to their National Sports Report (anchored by Chris Myers, I believe, who they had wooed from ESPN), which they tried to run up against SportsCenter (i.e., the show was doomed from the start). It was all great, though...we got an hour of regional sports, and the dead weight of the NSR was cut off. Meanwhile, at the NW RSR desk, the turnover was rapid. The original crew of Rod Simons (Coug and KSTW vet, helped build the KSTW sportscasts into arguably the best sportscasts in the Seattle TV market at the time) and Tom Glasgow (fmr KIRO), both solid in my opinion, were run out, and the revolving door was open (former KING-5er Gaard Swanson was thrown in the fire too) for everyone that wasn't named Brad Adam or Angie Marzetta/Arlati/Mentink/Segui/whoever the hell she's going to marry next (never married Segui; just a joke there). Where has this all gone? Well, it might be due to a national trend, but the NWSR (the world "Regional" was taken off sometime around when the word "Net" was added into the phrase "Fox Sports Northwest") is now only 30 minutes long, according to an ad I saw the other day. That's right, at 10pm, it's your Northwest Sports Report. At 10:30? You guessed it -- LATE NIGHT POKER. Enough said. I've got a more useful idea for that half-hour: give Bill Krueger (think what you will of him, but you at least figure out what's going through a pitcher's head) his own show and make him take calls. Bonus points to anyone out there who can convince me that a Krueger show in the Seattle market would get worse ratings than Late Night Poker.
Okay, now you're waiting with baited breath for the two other links...
Hickey has an article about the five starters. It's kind of weirdly structured, with so much emphasis in the beginning on stopping Eric Chavez, Garret Anderson, and Raf Palmeiro. They're eventually going to worry about balls hit to left field and balls in the gaps. Cue Richard Rizzitello: "Two down, two aboard, top of the eighth, Mariners up 1-0. Villone comes set. Here's the 3-1 pitch on the way to Bobby Crosby...swung on and it's a high fly ball to fairly deep left field, Ibanez drifts back a few steps and IT DROPS IN FOR A BASE HIT!! Both Durazo and Dye come around to score, Crosby rounds second, and Ibanez kicks the ball toward the bullpen!! Crosby rounds third and is heading home!! Ibanez finally gets a hold of the ball and hands it to one of the great fans at Safeco Field, because he's a 'world class human being'!! EVERYBODY SCORES!!! YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
Of course, with the above hypothetical Rizzs call, it should be noted that at this point of the season, Gil Meche has blown his arm out so Raf Soriano is in the rotation -- that's why he's not protecting the 1-0 lead in the 8th against Oakland. Also, most of Rizzs' calls when in times of despair for the Mariners usually have him exhibiting a sort of slower drawl, almost in the realm of Shakespearean iambic pentameter (caps for stressed words): "...and the A'S have RETAKEN the LEAD by a SCORE of FOUR to TWO." He drags out the words in much the same way that Bill Shatner uses the dramatic pause. Also, I just had to throw in the Joe Namath/Howard Dean/Li'l Jon (depending on your preference) "YEEEAAHH" for dramatic effect and for kicks.
Not much to say about the article, really. Bryan Price says "J.J. (Putz) and (Aaron) Looper are major league pitchers right now." In an interesting note, Kevin Jarvis is not. I don't have to tell you who out of those three has the money and the roster spot.
Final article: Finnigan on Randy Winn.
In Winn's first few years with the Devil Rays, Quinton McCracken played center most of the time.
Hopefully knowing that Crack is now on the bench will help lessen the sure self-esteem blow from that Tampa Bay situation.
There's some filler/baseballese in the article about thinking with every pitch, which is an article smokescreen for...
Melvin said he has no concerns that Winn's arm is not as strong as Cameron's.
"You won't see many center fielders throwing guys out at home," the manager said. "In our defensive scheme, the most important things for them are to run balls down, cut off extra-base hits and keep that runner from going around first to third."
In a related story, the Mariners' defensive "scheme" allows for runners taking off from second base on a sharp one/two-hopper base hit to centerfield to automatically score, regardless of how many outs there are. If any of you remember the games when Cameron was out last year and Winn was in CF, he had a couple of opportunities to show his arm, and oh my goodness, it is hilariously bad. I know Cameron's arm wasn't something to write home about, but Randy Winn's arm is something to write home about, and not because it's a cannon. It's more like a thin rubber band compared to Jose Guillen's Howitzer. One bold prediction from me for 2004: opposing third-base coaches will have sore shoulders after series with the Mariners if their hitters know how to hit ground balls to centerfield.
And an interesting quote from new first base coach Mike Aldrete, who apparently wears another hat for the Mariners, too...
"The best thing about Winn is that he's a smart player," said Aldrete, Seattle's new outfield coach. "Yes, Cameron plays the heck out of center. But Randy's a confident player; he's not a mistake guy."
Here's my thought process while reading this...
Angel on left shoulder: Randy Winn is good. He's not a mistake guy. He's smart.
Devil on right shoulder: Mike Cameron is a mistake guy, according to Aldrete's logic, and he probably took lessons from Bob Melvin in a coaching staff-wide email Bumbling Bob sent out with an attachment entitled "cameron_sucks.doc."
Sorry, angel, but the devil's argument is just too good here.
I wish this stuff were just crap that I made up with my mind on a really late night, but I can convince myself that some variation of this is actually happening, and it's not a nice thought.
There you have it...that's what I'm doing for a late night in Bremerton after a four-hour nap.
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