If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it actually make a sound?
If I craft a baseball blog in the woods, would anyone read it? What about in a city?
Welcome everyone to Safety Squeeze, a baseball blog no one bothers to read. I could write the greatest baseball post of all time, with sweeping coverage and analysis, written with the grace of great poets, covering of all 30 major league teams with in-depth coverage of all the results and stories from each game, previews of all the next days action and perhaps the stories that might otherwise fall through the cracks, but it matters not; no one will be reading. Why do I write anyway? Because I don't care if no one reads it. I just want to write it.
With that being said, let's talk about baseball. Yasiel Puig of the Los Angeles Dodgers has debuted this week with a splash, hitting four homeruns in four games. That's special, but I wish he wasn't hitting clutch homers against the Braves. He grand slam on Thursday night to extend the games lead to 5 runs, and he broke a 1-1 tie in the late innings on Friday night to set up extra innings, where the Dodgers won on a walk-off wild pitch. Great. I know that baseball is a marathon not a sprint, and losing two games in Los Angeles in early June is nothing to cry about in the long run, but as a competitive fan, I don't like to see my team lose. It's going to happen, and they say that if you don't like losing, you shouldn't be involved with baseball, but I sure wouldn't mind it the Atlanta Braves would go 162-0.
Last time I wrote here I wrote about Jeremy Bonderman and his return to the majors after a three year absence due to many horrible health ailments. I wrote about how wonderful it would be if we all watched to see how the man performed. Well, I didn't watch the game. I watched Bonderman record one out, to end an inning, and I don't even remember how that out was recorded or what inning it was. I got busy when I got home, okay? The Mariners got beat that day, I don't know, something like 10-1 and Bonderman seems to have pitched like someone who hasn't pitched to big leaguers in three years. I don't know for sure, like I said, I didn't watch the game. I read the line, and it seems as if that was the case. Anyway, he got another start on Friday, and he beat the slumping Yankees, so that's cool. Good job, Jeremy. I didn't watch that game either, or even watch any highlights yet, because it's just hard for me to watch Mariners baseball.
It was brought to my attention last weekend that there is a treasure trove of classic baseball games on a YouTube page called
MLB Classics. I've included a hyperlink there to the page. Anyway, I decided to check it out this past Monday, since there were no day games and I had watched most of the previous day's Braves game so I needed some sort of baseball to watch. There are many old, black and white games, mostly from World Series' and such. But the one that caught my eye was the first ever game for the Florida Marlins against the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 5th, 1993. Chris Berman was on the mic doing play-by-play for the game that aired on ESPN that opening day. One thing I noticed is that a younger Chris Berman was a lot more...how do you say...uniform in his delivery as a play-by-play man. I mean to say, he sounded more formulaic than what he is these days, which is Schticky, and gimmicky. That was nice. Anyway, I couldn't help but notice and comment on Twitter about the Marlins horrible (in retrospect) decision to wear teal. There was this fascination of new pro sports teams to use new, rarely seen color schemes when debuting in the 90's. Not just in baseball, but in all sports. Teal was exceptionally popular a color, with the Jacksonville Jaguars, San Jose Sharks and the Marlins all debuting in the 90's with that color. The Jaguars have since shifted to a dark green, and the Marlins are primarily orange and black these days, but the Sharks are still riding high, wavin' the flag of team teal, and I got to respect that. Also, purple was popular. The Rockies and Diamondbacks wore purple. Anyway, this isn't supposed to be a rant on color choices of teams, it's about the Marlins. The thing that stood out about the teal color is their weird teal batting helmets. They looked so weird, like an eraser head or something. They made everyone's head seem bigger and more cumbersome. I also liked that the first opening day pitcher for the Marlins was 45 year old veteran knuckleballer Charlie Hough. Seeing a 45 year old man wear a teal hat throw a knuckleball at a young Mike Piazza or Eric Karros, truly something to behold. Another thing, I know they've only been out of the football stadium for one full season now, but watching them play there that day, it had this temporary feel to it, like they would play in Joe Robbie stadium for a couple seasons and then get their own park like a lot of other expansion teams have done (Mets, Nationals for example) yet it took almost 20 years to get it done. I'm not going to make any sort of sweeping analysis of baseball in Florida (or any sports in Florida for that matter) but as long as I've been watching baseball, Marlins baseball has always felt the weirdest. Their opening day game in 1993 was no different. I only watched the first three of four innings, and then went off and did other things, but I'd seen enough to know that it felt awkward, and would feel awkward for the rest of my baseball watching life. I guess that's a sweeping analysis, isn't it? For some reason, even though they played in that mammoth stadium as recently as 2011, it was strange to see baseball being played in what is obviously a football stadium, even though teams like the A's do it 82 times a season. I don't know, it felt off.
Okay, that's all. Enjoy today's games. Enjoy that YouTube page. Have a good day, and let's all hope for a no-no this weekend, eh? Or a cycle? Both? For the Padres? By the same guy? After all, it is the National League, the one league where a guy could conceivably pitch a no-hitter and also hit for the cycle in the same game. Anything is possible in the National League!
