So, What Did I Miss? (5/20/16)

Author by indaburgPosted in Baseball, Daily Recap

Hey, South Side. I see you there, with your 25-16 record. It’s very good. Don’t think because your North Side brothers get all the love that nobody notices. You’re just ornery bastards, that’s all. Anyhow, your ace Chris Sale, did his best to catch Clayton in the Best Pitcher 2016 Sweeps. The White Sox won tonight, naturally, because Sale put them in a great position to win. He pitched a complete game allowing 1 ER, 4 hits, striking out 9, no walks. The one run–a homer. That mistake cost him the lead in BP16. His bWAR 2.6. Kershaw bWAR 2.8. It sucks not have to face a pitcher in the line-up. It really helps the old ERA. Final score: White Sox 2-Astros 1. El Oso Blanco hit the home run. What I really love though are pitching and defense. Check out Springer’s catch.

Oh, in case you’re 90 years old at heart: that puts Sale at 9 wins and 0 losses for the season. 😉 Sale was the man last night.

The Blue Jays were so shaken by the Rays that they put Jose Bautista as lead-off today. I was dying laughing when I saw the line-up on Twitter. We broke the Jays? I guess the change worked. They beat the Twins, a semi-pro team with a record of 10-30 in 11 innings with a score of 3-2. Both teams were on losing streaks prior to this game (Jays 5 games, Twins 4), so somebody had to break their streak. I guess.  Both Santana and Estrada pitched well enough to deserve to win, but those are the breaks. Osuna “earned” the win by simply being lucky enough to be standing on the mound the inning prior to which his team scored the winning run. I mean, if your team gives you no offense, it’s a hard knock life and all of a sudden , Chris Sale is 3-6 instead of 9-0, with the exact same pitching line.

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I understand the value of tracking the likelihood of winning when a particular pitcher is on the mound (hey, it seems like every time this Sale fella pitches, our team wins!), but to award the pitcher the win? Who came up with that?

I like good defense:

 

When did the Mariners (23-17) get good? I mean, it’s Seattle, we’re all sleeping by the time they win, but who knew? Mariners 7-Orioles 2. I don’t want to see the O’s lose necessarily, but it makes me feel a little better about my own rooting interest’s failings in Seattle. This team is legit. “The Orioles took their first series loss at Camden Yards” reports MLB.com.

The Cubs continue to struggle against inferior-on-paper teams. First the Padres, now the Brewers. They took the series loss as they dropped the game yesterday, 5-3.

Cover the bag, baby. Double steals are exciting.

Status quo for the Braves. They lost to the Pirates, 8-2. Pirates wore uniforms with vomit on them for some reason. Maybe solidarity for their opponent? Poor Erick Aybar (his brother though, screw him).  A lot of people are making fun of his going to the hospital because he got a chicken bone stuck in his throat. The jokes were funny, so don’t get me wrong. I love humor but I could see that a lot of the jokes on Twitter were coming from a place of ignorance. I am a recovery room nurse in a surgery center that specializes in gastrointestinal issues. My specialty is GI. This is no joke. Per ESPN:

“That poor guy had to be scared to death,” Snitker told reporters, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He looked OK when he left, but I don’t think he’s feeling very good. Let’s just hope everything works out all right.”

According to the newspaper, one Braves player said Aybar had some blood coming from his mouth and was unable to lift his shoulder because the bone had caused so much discomfort.

Yahoo is calling it the “strangest injury of the season.” Yahoo, you ignorant slut. Esophageal food bolus, fancy medical talk for what happened to Aybar, is common. I joked on Twitter that esophageal food boluses and butts give me a job. Before you start making silly jokes and look unintentionally dumb, at least read up on what he has. From the National Institute of Health: esophageal food bolus–then make more educated jokes. Many times the pathophysiology of this disorder has to do with the state of the esophagus. My wild conjecture? He might have something called eosinophilic esophagitis. It is an autoimmune disorder that is becoming more and more common. We’re diagnosing it with alarming frequency. Basically, your army of white blood cells, normally your friends in disease management, have decided that your esophagus is the enemy, and…  ATTACK! Why this happens, we don’t know. But I bet the biopsies taken during the EGD he had to extract the bolus will reveal the issue. Food boluses can be painful and scary. I hope you and your loved ones never have to go through that. Anyhow….

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Okay, now go make fun of the Braves. Aybar is going to be just fine.

Nationals 9-Mets 1. The Dark  Knight, Harvey, had a very rough night, getting KO’d in the 3rd inning; this is his shortest career outing. He allowed 9 runs, 6 earned. He is not missing many bats this season. Something is definitely wrong with Harvey and with his history, I’d get him checked. My nurse’s Spidey senses are tingling. Strasburg, another pitcher with a thick medical chart, pitched very well.

Ok, little quicker. I need to sleep. This has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Just one of my favorite Pixies songs. I saw them live at USF and I lost my voice for 3 days. This is my all-time favorite band and what brought me to HBT in the first place. Calcaterra is a big fan.

Cardinals  13-Rockies 7. “Neither starter made it past the fourth.” Glad I skipped this game even though Trevor Story almost hit for a cycle.

LAA 7-LAD 4. Trout making Scully look good with the praise he heaped on him last night (homer and 3 RBI–next time we’ll review why RBI is another team dependent stat 😉

Angels’ fans with the classy gesture. This is Scully’s last game in Anaheim. Crap, it’s starting to sink in. Last season.

This is my idea of a love song.

Yankees 4-A’s 1. Well, my pox on the A’s finally started working… when they play the Empire. I am a dumb witch. I told you, very inexperienced witch. I shouldn’t mess with this stuff. Reddick homered, but then fractured a thumb on a head first slide? Oh, crap. My curses never involve injury. At worst, they might itch a little. Someone else did that.

Giants 3-Padres 1. Shark dominant. What kind of shark is he anyway? Hammerhead? Nurse? Great white?

Cleveland 7-Reds 2. Cleveland takes the Ohio Cup? Is that really a thing? It sounds like the worst trophy ever. Keep your Ohio Cup. I have been to Ohio. It sucks. I could not differentiate between the sky and the asphalt. The people were pretty okay. Nice, kinda bland but it was so depressing.  I could not wait to leave. I saw why so many just hop on I-75 and don’t stop until they get to Florida.

Define weird.

So, what did I miss? Have a great Friday!

 

 

36 thoughts on “So, What Did I Miss? (5/20/16)”

  1. You’re right about Harvey; dude’s not right, and really seems to be a shell of his former self.

    Last night’s game began with Mets fans serenading Strasburg with chants of “Harvey’s better”, but those same fans were booing Harvey when he got yanked in the 3rd.

    Because it was Harvey v. Strasburg, you won’t have to search far today to read think pieces about each man’s post-TJ treatment, and whether it was worth it for the Mets to ride Harvey as hard as they did last year. Part of me hopes he gets it figured out, because I want the Nats to face the best.

    This game was another radio game for me, and the Mets’ play-by-play guy uttered this gem during a Ben Revere triple in the third: “Revere motorboats his way into third base”, which

    Nats move on to Miami this weekend for their 319th series with the Feesh this year, and then welcome the Mets to town next week. Be interesting to see if Harvey takes his turn during that series.

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  4. The lineup changes for the Jays were a player-driven initiative. Tim and Sid on Sportsnet talked about it at length on their show yesterday. Apparently the veteran players (JB, JD, EE, Tulo, Martin, etc) have been discussing how to shake things up and took this suggestion to management, who decided to give it a try. You laugh, but Bautista in the leadoff spot makes more sense when you factor in that he has the best plate discipline in all of baseball in terms of BB/K ratio and the best career OBP on the Jays. So why not bat him leadoff and have a better chance of JD and EE coming up with someone on base? Besides the first inning, the leadoff hitter rarely leads off an inning anyway. Putting Smoak and Saunders in the 4 and 5 holes makes sense as they have the highest batting averages and have been relatively hot hitters lately. Anyway, a W is a W and Estrada going 8 gave the ‘pen a good rest (which they will need more of with Cecil out for a few weeks).

    All that aside, I missed the win, as I was in bed when it was still 2-0 Twins. Getting old sucks, because it takes so long to recover from everything, but I guess it still beats the alternative.

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    1. Oops… forgot a song. Since Someguyinva is doing the radio baseball games thing and ‘Burgie is posting songs that Calcaterra likes, I’ll kill two birds with one stone here…

      I present CC’s “favourite” band, whose bassist is a huge baseball fan, paying homage to the radio:

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        1. At least it took this fuckhead nine paragraphs (comprised of a total of ten sentences) to bust out Social Justice Warrior.

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        2. It says there’s 19 comments, but I don’t see any of them. I guess they must have gotten tired of people calling that jackass a jackass.

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        3. How are you viewing them? On mobile I think you have to actually tap the Comments hyperlink at the top.

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        4. I’m on my lappy, and I’ve tried clicking that link. It just adds “#comments” to the end of the url and changes nothing. I even turned off my adblocker shit just in case something in there was blocking it. Nothing.

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        6. Jacob is a stunted child. This Slater asshole in the comments is old enough to know better and not a little bit obsessed with the subject.

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        7. And then this creep quotes Paglia, the fucking asshole who said, “many of these working class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot…How come we won’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships?”

          JFC.

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  5. Last night saw Ivan the Is He Maybe Possibly Regaining His Pre-TJS Form followed by a strong showing from No-Run DMC. The strikeout game was strong, but more importantly, No-Run DMC issued No-Walk This Ways.

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      1. Yeah. He’d had a year where his peripherals were strong but the results weren’t there, and then he had a year where that flipped. He’d finally seemed to put it all together and then the elbow snapped.

        He’s not the same style of pitcher exactly, but the extreme way he offsets not striking anybody out with walking absolutely nobody and keeping everything on the ground is starting to remind me of peak Chien-Ming Wang. It’s early, and who knows if he’ll keep this together, but I’m starting to become cautiously optimistic. I think many Yankee fans, myself included, were ready to write him off after last year instead of realizing “Duh, first year back from Tommy John.”

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  6. Well, you missed the Oklahoma Legislature reminding me why I never want to go home again. If I wasn’t on antibiotics, I would drink heavily. ..which, I guess, would help me feel better about funding a new stadium anyway…

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      1. Just about. They passed a bill making it illegal to perform abortions. See, they aren’t trying to punish the women! They’re just making it literally impossible to get a legal abortion. This shit shouldn’t even have to make its way through the court system, and it’s fucked up how they’re allowed to waste everybody’s time with this.

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        1. The money quote from the floor “debate”: If we take care of the morality, God will take care of the economy. They’re just trying to patch that budget shortfall, y’all.

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        3. Well, at least the daughters and mistresses of the politicians who voted for it will still be able to obtain professional and judgment free assistance.

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        4. “Since I believe life begins at conception, it should be protected, and I believe it’s a core function of state government to defend that life from the beginning of conception,” Republican Sen. Nathan Dahm, the bill’s author, said.

          This, in a nutshell, is the problem with letting religious beliefs form the basis of legislation. This guy thinks that because HE believes something, that everyone else must believe the same and the laws MUST reflect that belief. SMDH.

          “Sen. Ervin Yen, the only doctor in the Senate, described the legislation as “insane” and voted against it.”

          But the best quote came from the OK Senate Democratic leader…

          “Republicans don’t have an answer for their failed education policies, failing health care policies and failing fiscal policies, so what do you do in that situation?” said Senate Democratic leader Sen. John Sparks. “You come up with an emotional distraction. That’s what this bill is.”

          ‘Nuff said.

          Liked by 2 people

      1. But what about the Spiders? I mean, the Mets won the World Series seven years later. The Spiders just vanished from existence.

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        1. They would have caught a lot more shit for it if they would done that just one year later.

          I can’t believe no sports franchise has used that name since, though.

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