Went to my first Canadians game of the year last night. They're a seriously limp-hitting .235, and duly lost in a terminally routine game to Salem-Keizer Volcanoes 3–1. The Veronica Lake double feature I saw tonight was way more exciting. However a English teenage rugby team kept everyone in the crowd more or less entertained (or confused) with songs and ... ummm ... activities throughout. The Canadians did provide two pretty decent candidates for my Great Names in Baseball archive though. Sporting a .151 average there was Dante Love — pronounced at each at bat by the stadium announcer as "Dawntay LuuuuuuurrrrrrRRRRVE!" Then, at first base, Dusty Napoleon. As incongruous a moniker as I've ever come across. Both sound as though they should be refugees from Chippendale's, and play like it too.
Not MLB, but this column from a Bergen Record writer's experiences taking a baseball off his face is a great (if scary) read:
I've always thought the real lesson in Jim Bouton's classic book, "Ball Four" was found in its final passage, when he wrote, "you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."
Like the former Yankee hurler, I've spent my entire amateur career chasing that Holy Grail – getting the ball to run, sink, curve or just nudging it up the radar gun by a few mph. But Bouton ultimately was right: Control of the ball - and with it, the at-bat, the game, sometimes even your life - ends the moment it leaves a pitcher's fingertips.
I learned this hard lesson July 10 at Smith Field in Parsippany, when the curveball I threw not only froze in the middle of the strike zone, it turned into a missile searing toward my skull. Thanks to a combination of topspin off the hitter's bat, and a rock near the mound, a last-second bad hop left me defenseless as the ball struck me in the eye.
The explosion in my head might as well have come from a 12-gauge shotgun; that's how loud it was. The ball sliced open my cornea, completely detached my retina, ruptured several areas of the eye socket and broke nearly every bone on the right side of my face.
I remember drifting, floating - was I dying, I wondered? - then landing on the ground with a sick thud. I could feel the blood pouring out of my nose, my mouth and from the cut on my cheekbone, which had been split in half.
"I can't see, I can't see," is what I kept screaming before my words dissolved into a sound that can only be described as a rung lower than primal. One of my teammates, a Roxbury police officer, turned away in horror.
An iron, black curtain was now covering half my field of vision, and as I felt my face beginning to swell, I heard another teammate say, "it's worse than Tony C."
He was talking about Tony Conigliaro, whose gruesome, purple-eyed contusion will forever be remembered by baseball fans. Forty-plus years later, the Red Sox' outfielder, struck in the face by a Jack Hamilton fastball, remains the worst-case scenario of baseball injuries.
At least Conigliaro regained his vision; the emergency room doctors at Morristown Memorial Hospital weren't as optimistic for me. One of the surgeons advised me to prepare for a life with only one functioning eye. "Hey, it didn't stop Sammy Davis Jr." he said, trying to be light-hearted.
At that point, I asked for a moment of privacy: The doctor left the room, as did the half-dozen teammates who accompanied me to the hospital. The Morris Mariners were my friends, fellow warriors, but at this moment I was utterly alone. I called my wife who was home with our two young children and told her I was half blind. We both started to cry.
It's not completely depressing. Read the whole thing.
I'm not sure I understand your question. If I say that the Angles are American League and the Dodgers are National, will you say, "Duh, I knew that, what I'm asking is..."?
Long before Clint Hurdle was a manager, he was a fan with irrational beliefs and knee-jerk responses to every game. Still is, when a Detroit hockey or football team is involved. It was in this context that he made a surprising admission last Saturday.
"I just hate the Dodgers. I love to see them lose," Hurdle said. "It's nothing personal with anyone there. You know how some people love the Yankees? I choose to hate the Dodgers."
It's nice when players and coaches say something that makes them seem like regular fans.
14 homers and 40 RBIs in 38 games with the Dodgers. If he played a full season at that pace, it would be 60 home runs and 170 RBI.
Dodgers 3 1/2 games up on the D-Backs.
I don't want to say what I'm thinking in fears of jinxing it, but what I'm thinking would sure be awesome, even if the rest of the country wouldn't care.
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