Probable Pitchers for 7-23-13 around the MLB

Tough day here at Safety Squeeze.  Why is that?  Trying to pick a pitching match up to highlight for tonight.  Sure, there are some quality pitchers toeing the rubber this evening, but most of them are against far infurior pitchers.  Well, see for yourself...

You see, not much to choose from.  Even the pitchers that are quality aren't that great.  I suppose this is what you get when everyone is on their fifth start after the All-Star break.  But if I have to choose one, I'll go with Jose Fernandez of the Marlins against Jhoulys Chacin of the Rockies.  Now, this game features two teams that are not doing too well in the grand scheme of the National League, but both of these pitchers are notable for different reasons.  Jose Fernandez is expected to be the teams ace...eventually.  He's pitched well this season, especially for a rookie on the worst team in the NL (maybe.)  Jhoulys Chacin is just flat out pitching over his head, but until he proves to me and everyone else that he's coming back to earth, I have to expect he's going to have a quality outing time in and time out.  I think Fernandez will be a solid starter...eventually. Right now he's doing fine, and I'll be curious to see how this one shakes out.  Well, as curious as anyone would be when the Rockies and Marlins get together.  

Okay, that's it for today.  Watch some baseball, eh?

If a Tree Falls...

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!

Ballparks are the Best

I love ballparks.  It's one of the unique things about baseball I love.  Hockey used to have unique home ice advantages, but all that got taken away some time ago.  Like for example, the ice surface at the Boston Garden was actually shorter than "regulation" because of the smaller size of the old arena.  That's cool, but it's all gone now. In baseball, you can have weird demensions in ballparks for a home field advantage.  Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't.

Like when Houston builds a stupid, gimick mound in centerfield, I don't like that.  You only did that to get attention.  But like, the ivy and the shape of the outfield wall of Wrigley.  That's cool.  It's uniquely Wrigley.  Green Monster, obviously is another.  I don't want to just say the weird walls are only allowed in ballparks 100 years old or older, but it's sort of just always been there that way, so that's cool to me.  If there is a usefull reason for a quirky jut in the outfield fence in a ballpark, I'm okay with it.  If it's there so that people will talk about the fact that it's there, that's not okay.

Like, if a team wants to make their park tough to hit in for righties, but a bandbox for lefties and then load up the roster with left-handed batters, that's a good strategy and that makes sense.  You can do that in baseball, and I love it.

Also, I was trying to think of teams that really need a new ballpark, and I could really only come up with one.  Oakland plays in a football stadium, and I can't wait for that era to officially be over.  When the Reds, Cardinals, Phillies, Pirates, Astros, Mariners, Padres, Twins, Nationals, Marlins and Giants all moved out of the gigantic, cookie cutter, multiuse, soulless stadiums in the 90's and 2000's, it was just all-around better for the game of baseball.  The only teams still playing in giganic stadiums like that are the Blue Jays and the A's.  For some reason, I don't really have a problem with the Jays still playing in SkyDome, AKA Rogers Centre, is that dispite it being 25 years old, it still has this cutting edge, newness to it.  It was the first time I'd ever heard of a retractable roof.  What a marvel of engineering.  Plus it's the Blue Jays, Canadians don't deserve our game up there.  (signed, bitter Nashville Predators fan)

But when you look around, there are some wonderful ballparks built around baseball, and that matters a lot to me when I'm choosing what teams to watch.  I don't mind watching the A's play in that football stadium, actually, despite everything I'm saying here, because I like the team. But normally, I don't like that atmosphere.  So like I said, I was thinking about what teams need a new park, and there really isn't anyone besides Oakland and perhaps the Rays.  Everything I hear about Tropicana Field is that it's a dump.  I imagine it is, maybe that's why no one goes to Rays games?  Must be.  But at least it doesn't feel like there's 672 people in the stands because the building is too large for baseball crowds, like it was in Miami for Marlins games.  And when the Marlins were bad (were, lol) and it was really empty, it was like watching the empty arena match between the Rock and Mankind during the halftime of Super Bowl XXXIII (I think). Just a weird atmosphere for those watching at home.

When a building is full and everyone is hanging on every play, it's so much more engaging for the person at home to watch.  That's why I like watching San Francisco Giants games.  That place is always packed, it's a cool, modern stadium with a throwback feel.  It's great.  Many teams have done the right thing in the past 10-15 years to upgrade their home ballpark experience, and I think it benefits all of baseball as a result.

I've only visited four MLB ballparks.  Wrigley, Miller Park, Turner Field and Fenway, in that order.  I've got 26 to go. Easiest for me to get to would be Cincinatti and St. Louis.   Let's get on the road, Caleb.  We've got baseball to watch.

-BJP