And Now, A Word From Our Bonser

Not really, mind you. I'm just pretending to be clever.

The Marke Lowe Elbowe Lowe-Downe

So we all know that Mariners reliever Mark Lowe had surgery recently, and the M's make it sound like everything's all happy-fun, but Jeff Sullivan points out that this may be more serious than we think.

Summing The Summer

The Mariners mlb.com site offers a review of the season, which saves me the trouble of writing one. Aside from the fact that they seem to think our 30-year-old catcher is part of the "youth movement", most of what they have to say isn't unreasonable. It's true that when playing the AL West, we sucked enough ass to start a donkey farm, and it's encouraging that they call Snelling a keeper.

On the other hand, it's funny that Jon Huber ninja'ed Mark Lowe's reliever ERA title. Also, they left out strikeouts in the leader columns. It's obvious Felix leads the team with 176 -- heck, he was tied with Danny Haren for 6th in the AL -- but the funny story here is that Putz pushed himself up to 104 strikeouts when he closed out Saturday's game, putting him one ahead of Jarrod Washburn's 103. Apparently that made J-Rod the Washburninator bitter.

Guys Dig Chicks Who Know the Infield Fly Rule

Or so says David Wright.

Man, I bet he'd be even more impressed if he knew that at softball this year, I was playing second base, a pop fly was hit towards me, the infield fly rule was called, and I dropped the ball by accident anyway.

The Plot Thickens

A's 5, Twins 2

So my computer at work died this morning.
Good: I didn't have to do work for an hour or two.
Bad: I didn't have the A's-Twins Gameday ticker available.
Good: There's a TV in the lobby of my office building that was showing ESPN.
Bad: My boss caught me watching TV (but I explained to him that I was waiting to get my computer back from the IT guys).
Good: I saw Neshek pitching and Little Nicky Punto the Boy Superhero making an awesome catch in the stands.
Bad: I missed Kotsay's freaking inside-the-park home run. (I did get to see it later in the day on Sportscenter, though. I love how his jersey came completely untucked.)

Weird: The A's are heading home, and they're up 2-0 on the Twins. NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition. I sense a new nickname for Esteban Loaiza...

Mets 6, Dodgers 5

This one was probably a lot closer than anyone really wanted to admit.

But rather than an inside-the-park home run by one centerfielder against another, it featured two guys being thrown out at home plate on the same play, as both J.D. Drew and Jeff Kent reached home at the same time on a Russell Martin single, and Paul Lo Duca did what any catcher in his situation would do -- he tagged out everyone in sight.

In the grand tradition of the Dodgers -- you know, three men on third base and all -- this seems perfectly appropriate to me.

Eric Byrnes cracks me up

Unfortunately, I have no pictures or links for this one yet, but due to the Yankees game raining out, there wasn't much baseball to watch on TV by the time I got home at 7pm. On the other hand, I got to see the tail end of SportsCenter, which featured Eric Byrnes and Vernon Wells as commentators. Wells actually comes off as pretty conservative and intelligent from what I saw.

But Byrnes, man, he's just still so funny, and I swear he doesn't have nearly enough blood in his caffeine system. You can tell he's not really trying to be cool or announcer-like, he's just being candid and babbling about his ex-teammates on the A's, about the way different guys pitch, all the while talking about ninety miles a minute. Sometimes I think Byrnes would be a lot of fun to sit and watch a game with, although that might be because I also talk at a higher baud rate than most normal people.

Apparently he even said something about having "man-love for Derek Jeter" before I got home, but sadly, I missed it. Yeah, I know, the amount of man-love that ESPN has in general for Derek Jeter is somewhat apalling, but I love that Byrnes used a word like "man-love".

The Player's Blog-roll

I updated my earlier post to include all the ones I know of now that are actually blogging the postseason (Haren doesn't seem to be updating, so he's off the roll). These are actually pretty awesome to read:

Derek Lowe: "Tomorrow, we’ve got Hong-Chih Kuo going, and I know he’s a rookie and he’s only got one win -- and they’ve got Tom Glavine going and he’s got about a million wins -- but I like our chances."

Cliff Floyd: "[Mike] Cameron’s my boy. When he was here, with the Mets, we were like Frick and Frack. I was Frack."

Barry Zito: "This place is crazy, man. For whatever reason, they put a white roof on it. I guess nobody told them baseballs are white or something. We need to bring back those orange glow-in-the-dark balls we used to have growing up for games here."

Michael Cuddyer: "I've never been such a Royals fan in my life except for yesterday. It was a really cool situation."

While it's not a funny quote, I thought it was interesting that David Wright mentioned that his family couldn't come up for the weekday games, due to his brothers being in college and both of his parents working. That's both really cool and really sad -- I mean, it's not like he doesn't make plenty of money, but they're reputedly pretty down-to-earth and not going to do the whole quit-our-jobs-and-live-off-our-famous-son thing. On the other hand, I know that if *I* had a close relative playing in the MLB postseason, there's no way in hell I wouldn't be there to see it in person.

Stay Tuned

Upcoming posts from me will include my thoughts on the Hawaiian Winter Baseball league and which teams/players to keep an eye on, the 2006 roster of the All-Cute Team, and some funny statistics about my own baseball season, the oddest of which might be that in 56 baseball games attended this summer, I literally went to exactly one major-league game on a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays...