Sal's Pals lives on in Toronto

Okay, I just saw this on The 700 Level and had to share, because it's too funny and too awesome.

Sal's mustache has returned in the offseason (damn you, Yankees) and so has his fan club:


Sal's Pals Canada (photo courtesy of the700level.com)
Awesome.

Sal appeared in a game on Saturday and was hit by a pitch from another ex-Phillie, Kevin Millwood, and came around to score a run.

But seriously. Just look at the facial hair of the Blue Jays catchers:


(Sal Fasano, Gregg Zaun, Jason Phillips)

It's pretty cold up there in Toronto sometimes, but one catcher is obviously cooler than the rest.

Game Report: Mariners vs. Royals - There and Baek Again

Mariners 5, Royals 1

Say what you will about Cha Seung Baek, and say what you will about the Kansas City Royals, but he did have a no-hitter going into the 6th inning, until Grudzilla slapped one up the middle for a single.

Say what you will about Willie Bloomquist, but he managed to stay alive in the bottom of the 7th and hit a valid double into centerfield which brought in the two go-ahead runs.

Say what you will about Brandon Morrow, but he deserved his win today. In the immortal words of Peter Venkman, he came, he saw, he kicked its ass.


Grudzielanek: "Hey you, you get your dirty hands off my base."
Betancourt: "All your base are belong to me!"

"Short" version: Cha Seung Baek was perfect for his first three innings and almost had a no-hitter through six, walking David DeJesus in the 4th and Alex Gordon in the 5th. Mark Grudzielanek broke up the no-hitter in the 6th with a single, and sadly Baek also lost the shutout in the 7th inning, as Mike Sweeney led off with a double, was pinch-run for by Emil Brown, who was driven in by a Reggie Sanders single to shallow center which Willie Bloomquist dove for and missed. With runners at second and third and one out, Brandon Morrow came in and struck out Tony Pena and John Buck to keep the score tied at 1-1. Baek struck out 6 batters in 6 innings.

Yes, it was only 1-1 at that point, because despite Brian Bannister only managing to strike out one Willie Bloomquist, the Mariners still couldn't really do all that great a job of getting their bats on the ball. Beltre threatened in the first inning, singling to center, stealing, and advancing on a wild pitch, but Richie Sexson grounded into a fielder's choice to end the inning. Guillen reached on a Pena-Gordon fumble in the second, and Betancourt replaced him in a fielder's choice, also stealing, and then scoring on a solid double by Jamie Burke. But that was it for the Mariners offense, as Bannister retired the next 14 batters.

Richie Sexson started off the 7th inning by walking, and Jose Guillen grounded into a 6-4 fielder's choice. Yuniesky Betancourt then hit the ball into the left-center gap for a double, almost getting thrown out at second, having to scramble back to the bag to beat Grudzielanek's tag. Jamie Burke popped out to first, and Willie Bloomquist came to bat with two outs and runners at second and third. He got up to a full count, and then appeared to strike out, but the umpire called it a foul tip. Willie took the next pitch he saw and cracked it into center field. DeJesus misjudged it and dove for the ball, missing, turning Willie's single into a double, scoring Guillen and Betancourt and bringing the score to 3-1. Jimmy Gobble replaced Bannister at that point, and Ichiro singled home Willie after that to make it 4-1. Adrian Beltre hit into an infield single where Tony Pena made a nice stop on the ball but had no time for a throw. Jose Vidro hit a drive into the gap in right center, and David DeJesus chased it down, ending the inning.

Ibanez "tripled" in the next inning but the scorers called it an error after DeJesus dropped the ball, though he really had no right even reaching the ball in the first place. Joel Peralta replaced Gobble, and Richie Sexson singled home Ibanez to make the score 5-1, where it would stay when Betancourt grounded into a double play shortly afterwards.

Brandon Morrow retired five batters in a row to earn the win. JJ Putz pitched a scoreless 9th inning, though part of that was due to a diving catch by Jason Ellison. Ross Gload singled, advanced on defensive indifference and on a wild pitch, but Putz struck out Reggie Sanders and Alex Gordon, both swinging, to end the game.

There was a moment of silence before the game to honor the memory of Josh Hancock, who passed away early this morning in a car accident. Hancock was a relief pitcher for the Cardinals and had just thrown three innings in yesterday's game, even. I don't really have good words for this. My thoughts go out to his friends and family.


Down on the corner, out in the street, Willie and the poor boys are playing...

Today was one of the nicest days I've ever had the opportunity to spend watching a baseball game, weather-wise. It was sunny, but it was still something like 60 degrees out. Sadly, though, there was no batting or fielding practice before the game. I arrived at the stadium around 11:40am, and there were a few Mariners playing catch on the field, and then there were two huge lines of people waiting to get autographs from Jose Lopez and Kenji Johjima. I didn't feel like waiting in line, so I just went down and took a few pictures of pitchers -- notably, Jarrod Washburn was "catching" for Jeff Weaver, which was just plain comical.

I went over to the third-base side to watch Todd Wellemeyer and Jimmy Gobble playing catch, and saw a really tall Royals player signing stuff, so I went over to get him to sign my ticket stub. Turned out it was John Buck. He is a LOT taller than I thought! Wellemeyer and Gobble also signed stuff, but I only had one Royals ticket stub, so I didn't bother them. Now, if it had been Mark Teahen or Gil Meche (I was even wearing my Meche #55 shirt for the occasion), it might have been another story. Anyway.

I was sitting on the first base side for this game. Section 117, row 4. Beautiful day, plenty sunny, and so I shot about 400 pictures total. The people around me were pretty tolerant of the constant camera clicking, though -- the couple on my left mostly seemed to have no idea what was going on most of the time, and the guy on my right spent the whole game yelling things like "CMON BUDDY! CMON GO WILLIE GO! YEAH BAEK, YOU STRIKE HIM OUT YEAH! CMON ICHI, GET A HIT ICHI! YEAH BIG SEXY, YOU'RE BATTING 143, CMON GET A HIT CMON CMON BUDDY!", and behind me was a lady with a screaming baby. You take the good with the bad, I guess. Loud Dude also kept telling me how Willie Bloomquist is his favorite player, and then he tried to convince me that Jamie Burke went to high school with Willie, and I tried to explain to him that he meant Jason Ellison, and eventually I just gave up.

My section was a magnet for foul balls today; one landed three rows behind me, and another was 6 seats to my left, in my row. At one point, Ross Gload fouled off a ball that a middle-aged guy in the front row of my section caught, but the ball barely bounced out of his glove. Amber the ball girl runs up and recovers the ball... and starts going away to hand it to a kid elsewhere, when a bunch of people in the section yell "Give it back! Cmon, give him the ball!" Some others took up the chant of "Give it back!" and so she did. I know it's the ball girl's job to give baseballs to little kids and all, but I think in this case it was certainly right to give it to the guy.

Dan Wilson threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the game, and was there with his whole family. He got a big standing ovation, of course. They also showed one of the old Dan Wilson Quik Flix videos before Jose Guillen led off the bottom of the 2nd, which was weird, since Guillen is wearing Dan's old #6.

Jamie Burke is cool. I mean, I like Kenji Johjima and all, but I think we've finally got a backup catcher that doesn't suck. In addition to his hitting, he also called a good game, and then they did one of those "interview with a kid" clips between innings, with him. At one point he asks the kid "Who's your favorite athlete?" and the kid's like "You... and Ichiro..." and he's like "Me? Really? Thanks!" and then asks the kid about siblings, and starts talking about how he had three sisters, all older, and BOY was that a pain growing up. It was cute.

The AM-PM "too much of a good thing" prize was about 20 rows back and 2 sections over from me. The prize was 300 mini-donuts. I think just as many people got up and went crazy trying to get thrown mini-donuts as people got up and went crazy trying to catch a foul ball.

Today was informally "Knock down Mark Grudzielanek Day", apparently. He was taken out at second base at least three times. But hey, take a look at this -- in the second inning, Jose Guillen slid hard into second base and effectively broke up what would have been a 5-4-3 double play. He also ripped his pants, and I of course captured it on camera. Check out Guillen's left pants leg:




Guillen vs. Grudzilla - When Spikes Collide

Something that's also kind of crazy is that the Mariners were stealing off Bannister/LaRue fairly effectively, but Baek was trying pretty hard to hold people to the bag. David DeJesus and Alex Gordon in particular had a lot of pickoff throws aimed at them. After about five tries in a row, even Richie Sexson was getting sick of the pickoff routine:


DeJesus: Aren't you guys getting sick of this yet?
Sexson: Shut up and take it like a man.

And last, but not least, let me talk again about Brandon Morrow for a second.

When I first saw Morrow come into a game during the second game of the season, on April 3rd, he looked horribly shaky, like he couldn't believe he was out there pitching to big-leaguers in a major league game. He managed to keep his composure and get out of a scoreless inning then, but it looked like he had a ways to go before he would be able to go out there and throw strikes.

That seems to have changed. I haven't seen his performances in the interim, but the Brandon Morrow I saw today pretty much came out there, in a fairly high-leverage situation (runners on second and third, tie game in the 7th inning), and said "I don't really care whose son this guy is, or whether John Buck is unusually tall for a catcher. I am a major league pitcher, and I am going to throw the ball really fast, and these guys are going to swing and miss."

And he did. And they did.

Morrow stayed in for the 8th inning as well to actually earn his win. Sure, this was the Royals, but DeJesus, Grudzilla, and Teahen are all legitimate major leaguers, and Morrow pretty much went right after them. He got some help from Adrian Beltre, who made a fantastic play on a Grudzielanek grounder -- Beltre stopped it with his glove, but didn't make the pickup, but in the same motion just swooped up the ball barehanded and fired it to first base in time for the out. (It was the finale for the Great Plays Video Vault after that inning.) Morrow then struck out Teahen, and in all honesty, he almost looked better out there today than JJ Putz did in the 9th.


Morrowned.

I don't really want to talk about JJ Putz's appearance. It looks good on paper if all you see is "flyout, single, strikeout, strikeout", but really, he was all over the place. We all stood up for the final out, with Alex Gordon at the plate, and suddenly, there went JJ again, like a Blass from the Past, bouncing a pitch in the dirt and then throwing a wild one to his friends in the Diamond Club.

I'm just hoping it was due to him being a bit off his game after having a few slightly-longer-than-one-inning outings, or something.

Also, Ryan Shealy sucks. Guess it serves me right for drafting a Kansas City player on my fantasy team. He wasn't even in the game today for me to heckle.

Anyway, it was a good game to watch. I'll try to get more of my photos up in a real set soon, since there are a lot of pretty cool ones. Sometimes I wonder what I could accomplish with some better camera lenses and a press pass...

Grand Slammin' Yukio Tanaka

Fighters 10, Eagles 2

Yukio Tanaka had 10 hits left to go for the Meikyukai entry goal of 2000 before today's game started.

Now, he has 9 left.

Today's hit was a pretty good one. The Fighters were already up 5-2 in the seventh inning, and Hichori Morimoto started things off with a single to center. Kensuke Tanaka bunted him over to second. Atsunori Inaba popped out to short after that, and Fernando Seguignol was intentionally walked for whatever reason -- I guess in theory to go after Shinji Takahashi, who was already 2-for-3 for the day at that point. Huh. So Takahashi hits the ball to third, and Jose Fernandez boots it, loading the bases.

Yukio Tanaka comes in as a pinch-hitter for Naoto Inada, and rather than singing his cheer song, which starts "Let's go, Yukio, home run!", I'm sure the Fighters fans were actually singing the "chance music".

Which is ironic, because Yukio took the second pitch he saw, a slider breaking low and inside, and walloped it into the first row of seats in left field for a grand slam home run!

It had been two years since Yukio last hit a home run, and the last time he hit a grand slam was August 13, 2001, back when the Fighters were still calling the Tokyo Dome their home. (Source: Nikkan Sports)

Maybe my estimate of late May for his 2000th hit was a little hasty after all; the old man undoubtedly just earned himself some more playing time with that blast!

(This reminds me of following the 2004 Mariners -- even though they sucked, you checked the score every day to see how many hits Ichiro got, in the Sisler chase. The Fighters are sucking it up this year so far too, but the first thing I check in each box score is whether Yukio played and got a hit. I also check every Dragons box score to see how Masahiko Morino did, but alas, Dragonbutt is finally settling into a comfortable low-300's batting average and not stealing Fukudome's fire anymore, sadly. Norichika Aoki of the Swallows also finally fell below .400; he was really starting to scare me, though if anyone in Japan right now had the potential to hit .400 for the season, it's him, for sure.)

Body Part of the Week: Kazumi Saitoh's Shoulder

I got an email request this morning to translate Kazumi Saitoh's latest diary entry. I didn't think too much of it until I started checking up on the dailies and saw that he was taken off the roster, for possibly quite a while, with fatigue in his right shoulder.

CRAP.

Unfortunately, this is a known defect; he's had shoulder trouble in the past, and an operation several years ago. I had actually noticed that he seemed off his game during the Fighters-Hawks game I liveblogged a few weeks ago -- notably, he couldn't throw a curveball for a strike, and his velocity was down a bit. And he's been throwing a lot more pitches than he usually does. So, for the Saitoh fans who were wondering why he wasn't flat-out dominating this year -- now you know why. Seems like they're hoping he'll be back in shape to play in a few months, but man -- that's a HUGE hit to the Hawks to have him out for a while, even though Arakaki-Wada-Sugiuchi is STILL quite a punch at the top of the rotation.

Anyway for Grace, who requested it, his latest diary entry reads:

右肩の疲労のため、登録抹消する事になりました。
開幕前から、肩の回復具合が今年は遅いと感じて、今年の開幕を向かえました。
現在もそうですが“痛み”は無く、少しの希望や可能性を信じて、色々と調整法を変えたりいていたんですが。
この１週間～１０日間の回復具合があまりに良くないので、自分なりに色々考え決断しました。
決断するまでは、少しでもチームに貢献出来るというものがあったんですが、これ以上はチームにも自分自身にも良い方向ではない、と判断しました。
ファンの皆さんには、大変申し訳ないんですが、万全の体調で復帰し、「朝の声だし」で言った約束を守るために、頑張ります！

And here I translate:

Because of fatigue in my right shoulder, I have been taken off the roster.
Even since before Opening Day, I felt like my shoulder was slow to recover, but I stepped up to the mound on Opening Day regardless.
Recently I don't actually feel *pain* in my shoulder, and I've been hopeful and believing in the possibility that I could just change my preparation routine between starts, but.
After the last week or ten days or so where my shoulder recovery has been lousy, we came to a bunch of decisions.
It has been decided thats even though I have been contributing a little to the team, it's not good for either me OR the team for me to continue pitching like this.
To all the fans, I am REALLY sorry about this. But I am going to do my best to get back to full health, and to keep the promises I made during the "Morning Voice".

(I went back and listened to what he said during the Morning voice stuff during spring training, but it was basically "We will be the best in the world! We will throw manager Oh up in the air in victory after the season!")

You know who I really feel bad for? Naoki Matoba, the guy who pretty much only still has a job on the top-level team because he's Saitoh's personal catcher for the most part, who has gotten all of one hit in 17 plate appearances this year. Of course, catchers have pretty much been a black hole in the Hawks lineup since Kenji Johjima left, so whatever.

By the way, yes, the Fighters are still the only team in the Pacific League who haven't reached double digits in wins. When I predicted that Rakuten was not going to finish in the cellar this year, I wasn't expecting the team below them to be my Sapporo squad, but alas, that seems to be the way it's going. Aside from Darvish, none of the pitchers are really dealing like they were last year, and nobody on the team is slugging over .500; Seguignol and Inaba are trying, but the loss of Ogasawara and Shinjo in the lineup is actually making a fairly big difference. Tsuboi's doing his usual high-average low-power thing, Hichori's not bad but he still needs to cut down on his strikeouts, and Kensuke Tanaka is finally picking up the pace a bit. I guess all is not lost, especially if they can find a foreign slugger who can actually hit (Sorry, Mr. Green.). Brian Sweeney is starting to learn the Japanese strike zone a bit better, too. But, eh. We'll see, I guess.

Washburninated!

Mariners 2, Athletics 0

It has a much nicer ring than "Blantowned", which was the theme of last season.

I only watched the first four innings of the game, because I had a birthday gathering to go to at 8pm. We were ice skating, and by the time the zamboni came out to redo the rink halfway through the session, I checked the game score on my cellphone and it was already over.

I realize that a lot of people are saying things like, "Great, Jarrod Washburn shut out the Sacramento Rivercats of Oakland on three hits", and so on, but you know, they play the games for a reason. Yeah, the current squad of non-injured A's aren't hitting particularly well, and maybe it's just lucky that Guillen and Johjima's hits were home runs (I mean, I saw Guillen's -- I thought it was foul with the first camera angle, even), but hey, give a guy credit for going out there and pitching a complete game win, and give the Mariners credit for continuing to win against the A's, and more importantly, win against Joe Blanton. I think it's fair to say that the Cupcakes Curse has been dispelled for now.

Despite getting swept by the Angels last weekend, the Mariners are still 6-5 against divisional rivals, which is a far shot better than last year. Small steps. You have to walk before you can run. Just ask Jose Vidro.

Today's game starts in about half an hour, and at this rate, will be over by the time I get out of my normal Thursday 2pm meeting. Marco Scutaro will undoubtedly get the game-winning hit for the A's. and the Mariners managed to make it to 7-5 against the AL West. Wowie!

As an aside, since I have nowhere good to mention it in particular: Fighters veteran Yukio Tanaka needs 10 hits to reach 2000 for his career. The Fighters even have a little graphic/Flash countdown on their home page, linking to a records countdown page. At this rate, he'll probably reach 2000 somewhere around late May, I'm guessing.

Book Review: Watching Baseball Smarter, by Zack Hample

I'm back from Pittsburgh. Since the Mariners managed to get yet ANOTHER game postponed today, I might as well put off catching up on the weekend games a little longer and write a book review instead. (Seriously, is there any reason I should catch up at all? Getting swept by the Twins and Angels isn't exactly my idea of a fun thing to watch.)

This is the second book in a row I'm reviewing where I actually sort of know the author, although in this case it's mostly that I've been following the chronicles of Zack's baseball collecting for the last year or so on his blog. Zack and I share the viewpoint that writing about a game shouldn't just be about the events on the field, although he takes it to much more of an extreme than I do. Anyway, his FIRST book was about getting baseballs, but this one is his second book, and it's about... everything.

Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks by Zack Hample

A week or two ago, there was a thread on Lookout Landing asking what would be some good ways to teach a friend or significant other more about baseball, if they were interested in learning but didn't really know where to start. At the time, I'd read about 60 pages of Zack's book, and already wholeheartedly recommended it. I haven't changed my opinion since finishing the rest.

What's great about this book is that it actually manages to be something that can be read and enjoyed by all sorts of baseball fans. The subtitle is not a joke; Zack manages to make sure that there's fun stuff in the book for fans of all interest and knowledge levels. Whether you don't know what a ground ball is, or whether you know all about the infield fly rule and what year it became official, you'll still learn something from this book.

To be fair, it's hard for me to evaluate exactly how good it would be to a complete baseball newbie, though I could definitely see a lot of the same sort of tricks that I used to use when I worked as a technical writer, trying to cater to a wide variety of audience skill levels. Italicizing jargon words and keeping a glossary at the back keeps the text flowing well, but the reader shouldn't feel awkward if they don't understand the usage of a particular word; they also know that an explanation is readily available if needed. The book organization is pretty good overall, and it does cover all of the bases, no pun intended. There's even a chapter on umpires (with a situational quiz on "foul or fair?" that I could only get 7 out of 11 correct on), and a chapter on Baseball Stats For Dummies, interweaved with fun little factoids and quotes so that the advanced reader doesn't get bored. (The second half of the chapter is about scorekeeping and boxscores, and the sample boxscore has all of the players ending in -ez. You know, that badass Tavarez-Ibanez-Ordonez-Benitez lineup we've all dreamed of. Just kidding.)

There's a lot of good pictures and diagrams, too, showing anything from the way to grip different pitches to how fielders position themselves, to how they hold the bat in different situations, and so on. Lots of good explanations of things a lot of us take for granted, too, especially "what the hell are those guys thinking out in the field when it looks like they're just chewing gum," and "why are baseball contracts so thoroughly ridiculous?" There's even a poem made out of the "151 Ways To Hit A Ball".

Of course, there's no mention of Bill Wambsganss in the section on triple plays, but, hey, I think I can forgive that given the wealth of information on everything else.

My recommendation is to buy this book, read through it yourself, and then keep it in your backpack or on your desk at work -- and the next time you're in a conversation about baseball and feeling like "I don't have the time to explain all of this stuff!" to a friend or coworker, you'll have a book to lend them instead. Tell them it's even got an explanation of why baseball players are always grabbing their crotches, if they seem iffy about reading it. Of course, they're never actually going to give the book back to you once they realize what an indispensable baseball guide it is, so maybe this isn't the best plan, but you get the idea.

Cole Hamels is Ours, And You Can't Have Him

Well, if you're a Phillies fan, at least.

I'll admit I didn't see the game, nor any others, since I spent most of today either in the 80-degree sunny Pittsburgh weather or inside buildings avoiding said sunny weather once it became overwhelming, but I've got Hamels on my fantasy team (whoever said that drafting cute lefties doesn't work is obviously WRONG), so when I first checked the lines I saw the 15 strikeouts and was like "Great, ESPN's all screwed up again," except IT WASN'T SCREWED UP. Old King Cole was a merry old soul indeed.

Phillies 4, Reds 1

This game seems to have had plenty of awesomeness in it:

1) Cole Hamels pitched a complete-game win, throwing 115 pitches, giving up exactly one run -- a home run to Jeff Conine, who's like four times his age -- and gave up 5 hits overall, two walks, and STRUCK OUT 15.
2) The Phillies turned a 5-4-3 triple play! WOW!
3) Chase Cameron Utley, aka "An ace homers cutely", hit a home run (and no doubt it was done in a cute manner). So did Aaron Rowand, whose name does not anagram conveniently.

Seriously, 15 strikeouts may very well end up being the top strikeout performance of the season. If you look back over the last few years, there's only a handful of games in the 14-16 range in general.

On the other hand, while looking up the ESPN game score for this one (an 86 -- tying Felix's Opening Day game score and 3 short of his one against the Sox), I noticed that while I was in the midst of travelling to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Mark Buehrle was throwing a no-hitter. Crazy! Man, I go away from baseball for a few days and all hell breaks loose! :)

Charting Masahiro Tanaka

Hey, I'm in Pittsburgh for a college reunion (Carnegie Mellon Spring Carnival, for those who know it) until Monday night, so I'm not sure how much I'll be updating this blog in the next few days. There aren't even any baseball games going on while I'm in town unless I feel like going to Altoona, so. I did finish reading Zack Hample's book on the plane and I'll try to post a review soon.

I wrote up a script the other day to try to do pitch charting off the Yahoo Japan gameday logs. The game I ended up testing it on was the Hawks-Eagles game the other day, where Rakuten's rookie pitcher Masahiro Tanaka pitched a complete-game 13-strikeout 140-pitch win over the Hawks, winning 6-2.

I mostly had been wondering whether he was throwing mostly sliders or not, as I had vivid memories of watching him pitch at Koshien last year and thinking "wow, that's one hell of a slider". As it turns out, the breakdown of his pitches was something like:

Slider: 68 (48.57%)
Fastball: 44 (31.43%)
Curve: 14 (10%)
Shooto: 9 (6.43)
Fork: 3 (2.14%)
Changeup: 2 (1.43%)

Of the 9 hits he gave up, 4 came on fastballs, 4 on sliders, and one on a shooto.

Of the three times he struck out lefty Nobuhiko Matsunaka (who I think would offhand be the biggest threat in the Hawks lineup for him), the strikeout pitches were a forkball, a fastball, and a slider.

Overall he threw 48 balls and 92 strikes, for 65% strikes, which is pretty good.

He got 8 flyball outs and 6 groundball outs, though given the Rakuten defense it's possible that you'd want more flyballs than groundballs.

I have more data, but am not really sure exactly which parts of it to write about.

All in all, it's pretty impressive for an 18-year-old kid to pull off that sort of performance against the Hawks. It won't get the press to shut up about Yuki Saito, though.

Also, I hear that Felix is not dead. That is good.