Bud Norris Makes O's Debut...Against the Team That Traded Him

Today is the first day of the "dog days of August."  This is the month where your favorite team plays against it's divisional enemies like 80% of their games.  As a Braves fan, this means a ton of Nationals, Phillies and Marlins games.  Also as a Braves fan, this is a good thing.

Today's match ups are okay, I suppose, but there is one game on the schedule today/tonight that really got me intrigued.

Here's all the starters and what not from around baseball today.

As you can see as of my writing this, the Indians have already beaten the White Sox today 6-1.  It's interesting because I would have maybe picked Masterson against Sale as a potential Match Up Of The Day candidate, because Chris Sale can't get a win despite pitching quite well lately.  Anyway, he lost again, and I feel bad for him because he's a good pitcher on a terrible team.  

The most intersting thing on the schedule today has to be Bud Norris making his Orioles debut against the team that just traded him to Baltimore, the Astros.  I wonder who has the advantage here, the hitters who have seen every one of Norris' starts this season, so they know what he likes to throw, or Norris, who knows these hitters weaknesses?  I imagine that since the O's are a far superior team that they will probably win, but it's a weird element to what would normally have been a rather mundane Thursday night game in Baltimore.  

Matt Cain against Cole Hammels is interesting because they're both regarded as top pitchers, but they've not performed up to their expectations this season.  In fact, neither the Phillies nor the Giants have played like themselves this year.  But that's really all that makes this interesting.  The game itself is pretty meaningless.

Will the Royals finally lose? They're playing right now and I don't know the score, but they're heating up, as much as the Royals can really heat up, I suppose.  I believe the term for them would be "Streaky."

Hey, how about those red hot Atlanta Braves, eh?

Okay, that's all for today.  Enjoy baseball.  

Probable Starters for MLB 7-21-13! Harvey vs Lee

So what happened here?  I'm allergic to posting in July or something?  I'll tell you what happened, I had my family visiting for the week of the 4th of July and didn't really have the boring downtime to write up the daily pitching matchups of the days.  Then the family left and I felt weird jumping back into it as if nothing happened, and now I'm sitting here wondering what went wrong after that?  I guess it was just an All-Star break.  Not much to write about there, except perhaps a recap, in my own opinion, of the first half of the season.  But I didn't do that either.  Now I'm here, back at the same spot before I had a week or two of posts that were not even that bad for once.  Oh well, let's just jump back into it.

Today there are many pitching match ups that you should be aware of, and some are better than others, as usual.  That's why I highlight one here and call it the Safety Squeeze Pitching Matchup of the Day ™

First off, a screen grab of those match ups from around the league.  (also I think I'll finally admit that matchup is two words starting now.)

For me, I have to choose Cliff Lee against Matt Harvey.  Matt Harvey had a bit of a coming out moment getting to start the All-Star game on Tuesday, which is nice for him.  I mean, he mostly got the nod because he's the home town hero right now, as much as the Mets have as far as heros go.  He's been solid, as many predicted.  Cliff Lee is absolutely no slouch, in fact, I'd say he's at least top five in the world.  Too bad he plays for the Phillies.  And too bad Harver pitches for the Mets, too.  Because I really want to like these guys, but man, I just can't do it too loudly because of the hats they wear.  I pick this one because I really don't know who's going to win this game.  I think the Mets are a better team than the Phillies (seriously) but Cliff Lee is too good to lose to the Mets.  What a quandary.  

Other notable match ups include Doug Fister against "Big Game" James Shields.  Did you know Big Game James gave himself that nickname?  YOU CAN'T DO THAT JIMMY.  It doesn't work that way.  Other people have to call you a name before it becomes a nickname that can be repeated,  

Enjoy baseball today.  

New Direction

I've been struggling with what to do with this space.  I know I want to write about baseball, but I've been trying to figure out a new way to do it.  I don't have the time to dig for the real interesting, perhaps obscure tidbits from around the league, but that was my first inclination.  You know, sort of an "in case you missed it" sort of thing.  Well, I probably missed it, so I can't do that.

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!