All the rest of baseball

I forgot to post about watching game deuce, which we also did at Floyd. It was much more exciting than the first, of course. I didn't see any of the last two games, just overhearing some TV viewers' cheers during a party on Saturday and then catching only the final pitch as I came home last night from another. Would have been nice to have had more of a contest, I think, but at least the sad, misguided Yankees fans of the world will be upset. The Red Sox are now beating them 2-0 in World Series this century.

Red Sox vs. Rockies

Peter and I enjoyed a viewing of the baseball starting in the fourth or so...I remember Varitek had just driven in two runs on a ground-rule double as Peter arrived.

I had the idea that Jason Varitek might be a bit on the tall side for a catcher, but none of the baseball stats sites had a search by height. Then google provided me with only a handful of players thus described, all measuring in at 6'4" or 6'5", so I guess Varitek's 6'2" is considered within normal parameters. Ah well.

Not really too exciting of a game. Seeing all those Boston runs scored with two already out brought back some painful wiffleball memories, as Peter helped me remember. I did enjoy Matt Herges's relief pitching (nullus). He seemed to be throwing a lot of dramatical curves.

Do I have to support my League?

So this is hilarious that Rudy[eez-nutz] Giuliani[eez-nutz] is now claiming to be a Red Sox fan. I like also that the Republican fascists at his hate rally applauded him for it. Or, more likely, they applauded the (again, hilarious) spectacle of a Yankee[z-nutz] fan shaming himself. Beautiful.

But in the TalkLeft thread there is this idea I have never heard about before, that when your team fails to make or gets eliminated from the playoffs, you're then supposed to support whoever wins your league, the exception being crossing the lines of the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry.

But I don't want to root for the National League, because a) I don't really care about the Rockies, b) I have lots of friends from Boston, c) I also like the Mariners, so I can choose which league I root for in the Series, and d) a Red Sox win would piss off Yankees fans and force them to throw away their "1918 - 2004 - 2090" t-shirts, which event must be considered a universal Good.

So, go Red Socks.

Red Sox vs. Indians

Some friends and I managed to watch most of Boston's ALCS win on the big screen at Floyd's. The Cleveland fans sitting in front of us made themselves scarce around the seventh inning, I believe.

We had a good discussion about the Indians' horribly racist "Chief Wahoo" emblem, and this morning Peter came across a good blog post on that topic.

I was also going to post an update to my last entry, but I think the embedded map has confounded Blogger and I can't seem to edit the post. I wanted to note that my defeat in wiffleball yesterday was not as bad as the 22-0 drubbing the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club experienced at the hands of a bunch of cricket players in the first officially recorded baseball game in history. Thank you, Ken Burns, for providing me with some historical perspective.

More Wiffleball, Baseball

Peter and I played a seven-inning wiffleball rematch yesterday. Cadman Plaza was full of people, so we headed down to DUMBO and found a great spot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.


View Larger Map

Somewhere around the fourth inning, Peter figured out how to hit my high faster pitches, and I just fell apart. With the wind at the batter's back, fly balls were more often doubles and triples than anything catchable, and I was only able to get swinging strikes off my changeup. Meanwhile, no sooner had I learned to stop chasing the high and away sliders Peter had relied on for K's last week, than he started fanning me on the inside breaking balls, plus a wicked off-speed pitch of his own. It was brutal. If I don't start getting some more movement on my full-speed pitches, I don't think I'll be able to compete. When the carnage was complete, I believe it stood at 23 runs to only 3. Though, understandably, I may have missed one or two in there. Ouch.

Afterwards we took up some food from Rice and went over to Peter's to watch the first disc of Ken Burns' Baseball, which was so awesome. I thought it would be dull, but of course it was just hilarious and actually really informative. The labor stuff is fascinating. I love the implicit critique of state capitalism in the history of America's pasttime. I was disappointed to hear about the National League's puritan bourgeois history: the American "beer and whiskey" League sounded like much more my speed. The first disc only got us through the turn of the century, so I don't know what would eventually lead the AL to stray to evils such as the DH rule, not to mention the hated Yankees.

Meanwhile, there was apparently some actual baseball being played yesterday. Sounds like it was dramatical!

Oh, and I did a little illustration of a character I came up with called The Umpire. He's a villain or antihero type who casts judgment on people and vigilantifies their asses with a chest protector. SO AWESOME RIGHT. I wasn't sure how to show someone wielding a shield-type implement, so I did an image search and did the pose after this still from Captain America. Lines need some cleaning up, but I think you get the idea:

Wiffleball!

On Saturday Peter and I hit up the new artificial turf at Cadman Plaza for a little wiffleball:


View Larger Map

Or that was the plan, anyway. We traded one- and two-run innings for a bit until I broke out and took a 9-4 lead in the top of the fourth. A scoreless fifth, and then Peter came back with nine runs in the bottom of the sixth inning, a 13-9 lead. We hadn't decided on an official game length beforehand, so I kept asking for just one more chance to come back, and before we knew it we had played through the top of the ninth, with Peter taking it 16-9.

We were playing with no strike zone and no balls, and no strikeouts on fouls. So aside from a few short at-bats where the ball was put into play early, most of them were easily going to ten or fifteen pitches. I think we probably each must have thrown around 250 pitches.

You don't really think "physically exhausting" when you think of wiffleball (or I didn't), but after more than three hours of playing I was spent. I crashed pretty early, and was really sore yesterday. Not just my entire arm and shoulder (which still hurt today), but even my legs and "core." I had no idea.

It was super fun, though. We were both getting a bit of movement on our pitches, and Peter got me to chase his riser many times (nullus). I did benefit from his tendency to look way too sneaky and then crack up whenever he tried a knuckleball.