Wednesday, July 25, 2007
This is somewhat belated, but I've been busy, so. Yeah. I was at the Sox/Royals game on the 18th, and naturally took a bunch of photos, all of which you can see here. I wanted to get into some of them, though.
First off, I was very excited to maybe see Real Live Royals Fans at the park. I know that they're a rare breed, and while I have seen some of them on the magical internets, I had never seen one in person... kind of like how I've seen photos of giant deepsea squid online, but I've never seen one in the flesh. The arrival of the Royals at Fenway was a kind of challenge: would any Real Live Royals Fans show up? Do any of them live in Boston? And if so, could I see some?
The first Real Live Royals Fan that I spotted was wearing a Red Sox hat, it is true, but she was also sporting a classic John Buck jersey (I think he stopped wearing #2 and picked up #14, his preferred number, when Tony Graffanino left the team in 2005. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that seems to actually be signed. I (obviously) can't knock someone who loves two teams, and if this girl remains a Royals fan even with the sweet, sweet temptation of Red Soxdom on hand all the time, more power to her.
The second Real Live Royals Fan was all Royalled out. I don't know if his seats were up at field level here, or if he had just snuck down to take some close-up shots of his beloved Royals. Either way, hardcore, man. Major props.
At this point the game started, which made Real Live Royals Fan viewing a secondary pursuit (presumably it would've been better had I gone in for BP, but it was so rainy that day, I didn't end up heading in early, and in fact I don't even know if they took BP).
Real Live Royals Fan #3 was sitting a few rows in front of me, showin' off another classic Royals jersey: Joe Randa, last seen in KC back in 2004. I guess you have to be pretty dedicated to a) be a Royals fan at all and b) be willing to pay Fenway prices to see the Royals in Boston. I guess there aren't too many bandwagon Royals fans. In fact, I would boggle at the level of recently unrewarded dedication it takes to be a Royals fan and actually pay real money for a Royals shirt these days, but I'm a Lions fan who owns a Joey Harrington jersey, so I can't exactly talk.
Real Live Royals Fan #4 was merely a tantalizing fly-by as he walked past my section. I only got a haunting glimpse of his mesh-backed Royals hat and all the royal blue suffering that it entailed.
This was the game that the Royals won 6-5 (with Manny stranding Ortiz/pinch runner Alex Cora at first to end the game), so I hope that all these Real Live Royals Fans thoroughly enjoyed their Real Live Royals Victory in Fenway Park. It wasn't very enjoyable for Red Sox fans; if there were at least a few Royals-faithful in the crowd, we can take solace in the fact that someone had a great time that night.
A few more highlights from the game itself:
Julian Tavarez digging in his pants. It wasn't a little grope, like most ballplayers enjoy; he very deliberately tugged his belt away from his body, plunged his hand down his pants, and did whatever ferocious adjustment he needed to do.
Dustin Pedroia had himself a nice night, both offensively...
(cruising into second with a double here)
...and defensively.
Manny homered.
Mike Timlin's back to wearing his camo glove.... again.
Julio Lugo has magical powers.
And, just for the heck of it....
This was the first game at Fenway to which I brought my wide-angle lens. To see the difference this makes, you can compare it to this photo, which is basically the same shot, from the same seats, but with a non-wide-angle lens. You can see how much more I can get in the wide lens. It's definitely a neat bit of equipment.Labels: baseball, in attendance, MLB, photoblog, Red Sox, Royals
2:06 PM
Monday, July 16, 2007
I'm a baseball card fiend. That's the first thing you should know.
Topps, in addition to the usual player cards, does these little whole team class-photo-esque cards every year. They're not too thrilling, but what can you do.
Here's the Astros team card from 2006:
Aside from the fact that it's not at all clear whether the 'stros really were in the stands, or if they were Photoshopped in, a wholly unremarkable card.
I got my hands on a bunch of '07 Topps card a couple weeks ago, and was sorting them out so I could file them away in my overly obsessive baseball card arrangement system. Team cards go at the back of each team section in my system (which is alphabetized by team, then by player within team, by year if there's more than one card for a player, then alphabetized by card company for multiple cards of the same guy in the same year...). This means that they're very easy to file in, so I was flipping through them with no more than a cursory glance.
Ho hum, Orioles...
La di da, Red Sox...
Dum te dum, Royals...
....
... waaaaait a second...
.... that can't be right...
My eyes must be playing tricks on me. Surely they wouldn't... I mean, these are team cards, so... there has to be... a team...
... let me look at that again...
Yup. The Royals team card has no Royals on it.
Lest you think this is some strange ballpark card, as opposed to a team card, I can assure you that the information on the back of it is exactly the same as on the other team cards, and I have a good number of Topps '07 cards by now... and I have not seen another "ballpark" card. I'm fairly certain this is a team card. Just... without the team.
I wonder if this is a deliberate message about the state of the team by a really, really disgruntled Royals fan somewhere in the depths of the Topps company.Labels: baseball, baseball cards, MLB, Royals
4:22 PM
Friday, August 11, 2006
Ugh. Did that really happen? Were we really just forced to watch the Red Sox get swept by the Royals?
And did it have to happen with Runny Elves on the mound? I hate Runny Elves. Hate him. This of course is why, and when he nearly took Lowell's head off last night, all sorts of memories came flooding back. You really should go read that linked story; not only is it a glorious moment in baseball history, it explains my feelings for Runny Elves quite thoroughly.
Alas for our lack of a Kyle Farnsworth on the team to act as an enforcer. In fact, with Tek and Trot out, I don't know who would have done the beating if beating had been required. I guess Gabe Kapler... he did beat up Sturtze last brawl out. Maybe Wily Mo; he's certainly large enough, but I don't believe we have enough information about his level of potential crazy.
Ugh. Ugh. I just feel dirty about this whole thing. The Royals? A sweep? I didn't post about this last night because I stayed up to watch the Yankee game and then went straight to bed, hoping in some dank, irrational pit of my mind that it was all a bad dream and when I woke up it would have never happened. Then I woke up this morning late afternoon and found that it wasn't. Ugh.
Dougie went deep, and Wily Mo had one of those blasts that was so massive it cleared the fountains, but the Royals... I dunno. Stuff went down. I don't really want to look at the box score for this game, because it's just going to upset me, but I do definitely remember Reggie Sanders playing really well, despite the fact that he's 87 years old and I keep thinking he's a Cardinal. And I feel like Teahen did stuff. Probably.
I know, OK, I know that this year was supposed to be the "rebuilding" year. Oh man, I know. That's the whole point of Theo coming back; he wanted it to be that way and wasn't willing to go out, rookies in hand, and sell the future to win this year. Which is cool. It's a rational way of running a ballclub and something that Boston hasn't really done much of in the past.
We were still playing really well despite that, though, that's the hard part to get over. Kids were stepping up much earlier than we though they'd be able to. David Wells hasn't been here much, Matt Clement* is dead, Coco and Wily Mo both spent time hurt, Keith Foulke still hasn't been right yet this year. But people stepped up. Who would've thought Lester had it in him ('tho he's definitely still a work in progress; his high pitch counts, if nothing else, tell you that) or that Papelbon would continue to be quite this good?
Where we're screwed now, of course, is 'Tek. He's not the kind of player you can replace on a team. When the pitchers went down, we had young pitchers in the minors who were in line to play anyways. Maybe ideally not for another year or two, but they were there, and when pressed into duty they did pretty well. We don't have that for a catcher. I'm not very well-up on the situation for other clubs, so I guess it's probably the same most anywhere you look (except for the Braves... jeez, they have McCann and Saltalamacchia, that is so unfair), but the fact is that when Varitek got hurt there wasn't anything we could bring up that was comparable to what we'd done with the pitchers.
Mirabelli is not an everyday catcher. He just isn't. He's better than some backups, but he's certainly not better than, say, Vance Wilson (and that's not a phrase I thought I'd ever have occasion to write). Javy Lopez hasn't caught basically all year, of course he's going to be rusty as the dickens, and he hasn't worked with this pitching staff at all. Corky Miller is a 30 year old career minor leaguer who would bounce up to the majors with the Reds for like 15 games a year between 2001 and 2004, which tells you pretty much all you need to know about him (except that his real name is Abraham).
The other injuries we've been able to bounce back from. Losing Jason Varitek is looking more and more like the kind of thing we either don't bounce back from at all, or we do bounce back from, but not for a while and by the time of the bounce-back we've dug ourselves into such a deep hole in the division, and the Central is so strong, that we're out of the playoffs and that's that.
Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Now I'm just depressing myself. The point was that even though this was always supposed to be a rebuilding year, the fact that we had been doing so well makes a slump like this sting all the more.
We need to beat up the Orioles. Because after the Orioles are the Tigers and, um. Erm. Well. If the Red Sox decide to lose to the Tigers, that, um, might be kind of OK.
I know you're all going to yell at me for that but, look. This is a rebuilding year for the Sox, awful as it now seems. The Tigers have been building and rebuilding for ages, it's kind of now or never with them. So. Shut up.
*I was wearing my "Self defense is not a crime" tshirt yesterday, which prompted my brother to say he didn't get it, despite the fact that he must have seen me wear it 100 times before yesterday. Eh, whatever. I told him it was from the rally, which was for clemency.
Brother: Matt Clemency?
Me: No, no one gives a shit about him.
So there you have it.Labels: baseball, loss, MLB, Red Sox, Royals, Runelvys Hernandez, sweep
4:24 PM
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Ugh. Royals.
At the game on Saturday, I was keeping an eye on the out-of-town scoreboard to see how the Tigers were doing, of course. This happened to be the night where Verlander did his awesome Verlander thing and the Royals were shut out, but just the night before the Tigs had had to resort to a walkoff homerun in order to win, so I kept saying things like, "Yeah, Tigers still ahead! Woo! Look at that score! Woo!" over the course of our game.
SOME of the people I was with (not gonna name names or anything...) responded to these sentiments with mirth. "That's nice," they would say, "but it's the Royals." "Yeah, I saw that Guillen walkoff on Sportscenter... they were calling it [insert overexcited praising ESPN-used adjective here]. You can't have a [insert overexcited praising ESPN-used adjective here] hit against the Royals." Chuckle chuckle, giggle giggle, what good fun.
Of course the Royals went on to win the last game of the Tigers series and took a close one into the 8th inning against us today.
Point is, no one goes 0-for-162. Everyone's got to win sometimes, even the Royals and the Pirates of the world. So on the other side of the coin, someone's gotta get taken to task by the Royals on occasion. It's never fun and it's always a deeply shaming experience but, over such a long season, it happens.
The lineup we fielded yesterday had 5 guys hitting over .300 in it. The Royals had one. DeJesus. Dougie hitting a bomb is always cause for celebration and hilarity in Red Sox Nation, but when you get right down to it Dougie shouldn't ever have to hit a bomb to save the game for us. I'm sure he enjoys it, because then he gets to trot sedately around the bases instead of struggling to race his ponderous, square-shaped self onto the basepaths for a hit. But if it's his hitting that stands between us and a loss, we probably didn't play a very good game.
Wake's injury, or whatever the heck it is, is pretty troubling. He is up there in age, although no one thinks he's anywhere near retiring yet, not with the knuckleball. But if he's got a tweaked muscle in his back, well, he's not at an age where that sort of thing is going to heal quickly and elastically. I hope it turns out to be nothing much; he is after all signed to a contract with us for the rest of his natural life, and I'd like to get as much out of him as we can in that time.
Anyways. Photos.
Thursday's game against the A's was the one we lost in extra innings. Photos here, 'tho here are some highlights for the terminally lazy among you.
Zito looks back into the crowd.
Lester and Al Nipper looks like they're about to make out. They aren't, of course, but it looks that way.
Huston Street kisses his hand and looks up to the sky before taking the mound.
Go see the rest and enjoy.
Saturday's game, as luck would have it, was Schill's dominant outing and the only win of the series for us. Photos can be seen here.
Definitely a highlight. You can see Papi going in for his patented 'down low hug' on Craig Hansen near the middle there.Labels: baseball, in attendance, loss, MLB, Red Sox, Royals
4:19 AM
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