Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Catching up

I went to Vegas for the weekend to hang out with some friends. I had my laptop with me, and a wireless connection, but it wasn't particularly good, and I wasn't really paying attention to baseball anyway. All the sports betting bars, unsurprisingly, had college basketball games on.

However, I got back last night and watched the last two innings of the Japan-USA WBC game from Sunday, and I'm really annoyed. That was a TERRIBLE call by the umps, you can clearly see on the replays that Nishioka tagged up just fine, and Randy Winn's throw was terrible. (Infact, as they even pointed out, Nishioka knew there was no reason to leave early.) Sure, it doesn't necessarily mean Japan would have won the game -- but this is just wrong. It's a terrible, terrible call against an extremely, extremely good base runner.

(On the other hand, they did get the call wrong on Matsunaka's checked swing a few batters earlier, which clearly went across the plate. I have to wonder if the plate umpire denied Japan that run to make up for it.)

While I was gone, Derek Zumsteg apparently decided he needed to give the Cartoon Laws of Physics writers a run for their money, and wrote an impressive piece about Baseball Bugs Bunny. Derek scares me.

In other news, from Rain Delay, we learn that the official Damian Moss Deathwatch is over, as he's been signed to a minor league contract by the Braves, coming full circle.

Also, there's a pretty funny article in the P-I about Matt Thornton. Just throw strikes, son.

Today was Kirby Puckett's birthday. RIP, Puck. Batgirl's got a story about Sunday's memorial with some pictures and stuff.

It's also Kevin Brown's birthday, Bobby Jenks's birthday, and speaking of coming full circle, it's also Pi Day. We here at Marinerds will not divulge exactly how many digits of Pi we have memorized, but we will admit that it's higher than the number of batters Matt Thornton has walked in his career.

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