Game 65, Mariners at Padres
The natural rivalry as declared by Bud Selig before the false idol of interleague play continues! Olson vs Gaudin (not Gaudi, famous Spanish architect). I often find that when I’m talking to non-fans about baseball that the absurdities of the game are revealed to me. I (seriously) do like talking to random people about some of this stuff, though yeah, it gets a little bit annoying when everyone at work who knows I write here wants to drop by and ask “hey what do you think about the Griffey signing, pretty awesome, huh?”
Which I know sounds a little bit petty, but it’s like… when I shared a season ticket package I found these kids in my seats all the time (I think they must have attended somewhere nearby), and as a long-time seat jumper myself I started off pretty polite about it until it got to the point where I’d get there, they’d look over, and I’d shrug and say “Come on now” or something similarly curt. And then people would get on me for being rude (ie, w/r/t my jersey, “Snelling? More like Asshole”) because they hadn’t found the same kids out of the same seats a dozen times. So I try and give the tenth person the complete, sociable answer like the first one.
This all leads to questions like “Why are the Mariners playing San Diego again? Don’t they always play them?” and I have by now a little set speech, which goes:
When Bud Selig set up interleague play, he wanted to make sure that some teams would be able to play every year because they’d be really high attendance games. Think Yankees-Mets, White Sox Cubs, right? The problem is not every club had anything like that, so the leftovers got matched up and declared natural rivals, and the Mariners and Padres got each other, and they play every year, while the rest of interleague games are on a kind of rotation system between divisions.
And I swear to Ichiro! that every time I’ve given that speech, the reaction has been a half-second pause followed by “Well that’s stupid.”
Every time.
R.J. Anderson wrote a little bit about whether Brian Giles is the worst regular in baseball. Giles is out of the lineup today, but Betancourt, who I’d like to argue is certainly the worst regular in baseball if you ignore salary, is in the lineup again, and again, he’s inexplicably batting behind the fearsome #5 Lopez, who is rapidly acquiring a totally undeserved reputation as a hitter based on his RBI total, which as you’d expect drives me up the f’ing wall every time it’s mentioned. And Gutierrez bats #8, ahead of an automatic out, for reasons no one’s been able to explain to me.
7:05.
Also, the Sagrada Familia is both amazingly impressive and abominably kitsch. If everyone could just not tell my dad that I wrote that, I’d appreciate it. He’s a Gaudi fan. So am I. It’s just for all the amazing engineering and design work, all that cathedral needs to be sold on QVC is a paired set of Precious Moments worshiper dolls.
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Atta kid Carp! A “professional” AB … was Yuni watching?
You beat me to the punch, Carson. Felix WAS #59 when he was called up
What are the odds Wakamatsu pulls the double switch with Branyan and Carp after this inning?
Carp doesn’t even have a hit this season and yet he’s already more valuable than Yuni is!
Jeez, Kouz made a nice play there. Beltresque.
I traded Lopez for Kouzmanoff in an OOTP 10 league. Got he 2009 M’s within three games of the playoffs, but 2010 started off horribly with a spate of injuries and I got fired as GM. Deciced to start a PCL league instead of looking for a job with another team.
It took Yuni 102 AB’s before his first walk this year … Carp will have 2 by the end of tomorrow night
Brandon Morrow bobblehead commericial, take two:
BALOON CREATURE: Brandon Morrow bobblehead, I’m so excited about you. Are you happy as a reliever?
BRANDON MORROW BOBBLEHEAD:
BC: Oh, so you want to go back to being a starter?
BMBH:
BC: Oh, Brandon Morrow Bobblehead, doesn’t that mean you have to go to the minors for a while?
BMBH:
BC: Couldn’t you learn to be a starter with the big league club?
BMBH:
er, so BMBH was supposed to have stage directions of “head shakes in random circles”. Oops.
So, er, uh – Yuni learned a lot from that benching.
Whew: did anybody else have Gameday tell them a run had (somehow) scored on the Beltre groundout?
Yes, ESPN, shows the score as 4-4.
We are getting an ESPN feed from an alternate time stream in which Beltre didn’t field the ball.
They just updated it to 4-3. Time-space continuum is restored.
They are, however, still showing that White allowed a run. An earned run, even though the runner reached on catcher interference. Shouldn’t that be an unearned run? If it had happened?
“The natural rivalry as declared by Bud Selig before the false idol of interleague play continues!”
Should the proper phrase for this Selig-invented sham be “Designated Rivalry”?
And to think the real price for this nonsense is so many fewer games against teams fans in most “Designated Rivalry” markets really want to see (read Red Sox & Yankees). I know the relative dearth of games against those two is one of the reasons I finally gave up my M’s season tickets.
Baseball already had ample “interleague play” before this – Spring Training, the All-Star Game & the World Series. Interleague play certainly cheapens the latter. (As a an expat New Yorker, it’s obvius to me that no future Subway Series will ever again have the same fan cachet… Same can probably be said for any future WS involving any of the other “real” shared-market rivalries.)
Well, the Sounders FC match was almost as high-scoring as this game.
Only 16th one run game? Or was that one run victory? Because they’ve easily lost by one run at least 16 times.
Madness.
They’ve only lost 12 one-run games, actually, they’re more likely to get blown out a little.
Bill Krueger says Griffey should play more outfield — arrgh!
He’s not a very good analyst for being “senior”
Having watched the game on t.v. in San Diego, I had to laugh when the guys in the booth twice defended Lopez for having 9 errors. Look how many rbi he has, the errors mean nothing! The one who was crowing the most is Mark Grant a former Marniers pitcher in the 90’s. He had a few stories about Jr. The fans down here really respect Jr. Going to the game tomorrow, wearing my marniers jersey, padre fans are so mellow i should bring my broom for the sweep. Have to admit this season so far is interesting.
You hit the nail on the head with the “Gutierrez playing in front of an automatic out” comment, Derek. I noticed this when Burke came up to bat with two on and one out. While Burke was stepping into the box, I noticed DFT in the background. Burke proceeded to hit into an inning ending DP. Ugh.
Does anyone have Wakamatsu’s cell phone number?
I missed the game, but reading the box score I see that we had both a pinch-hitter in Carp (for the pitcher, but still…) and a defensive sub in Chavez. Things are looking pretty good on the manager decisionmaking front if this stuff keeps up. I’m not sure that we’ve had another game this year with both a pinch hitter and a defensive sub.
I can’t believe I’m actually excited that Joh will be back soon. I mean at least he’s not a complete black hole and we won’t need to see Johnson more than once or twice a week. It’s a small upgrade, but an upgrade none-the-less.
Gaudi isn’t Spanish, he’s Catalan.
well, it isn’t Precious Moments, but I have a Gaudi refrigerator magnet …
I snorted a little last night when Rizzs was discussing how terrible the Padres have been offensively this season. Yes, they have, but after last night’s game they’ve scored 244 runs in 64 games, while the Mariners have scored 243 in 65 games.