Whew.

There are lots of baseball games like tonight's — taut little affairs that are closer than the final score indicates, not a lot of scoring, good pitching performances but not anything that leaps up and demands to be counted as brilliant, a long ball to admire, a managerial decision (of the non-fatal variety) to scratch […]

WW, of course, being scorecard shorthand for “wasn't watching.”

Last night went down as a rare WW on multiple fronts. I did catch an inning or two during dinner at 2 Toms, the justifiably legendary old-school Italian place in Gowanus, seeing enough on their old black-and-white set to grasp that we were tenuously ahead and the […]

…that if I weren't so tired, and hadn't imagined like three innings ago that the Care Bears were skipping around the room laughing at me, and hadn't been yelling “SAVE US!” at each new Met batter in a voice more than a bit tinged with hysteria, and hadn't been hiding under the covers during random […]

What a strange game.

Every West Coast game is strange, from our perspective over here on the other side of the continent. Right about the time body and mind are getting ready to shut down for the night, there's three hours of baseball to be dissected and fretted over. Now throw in Steve Trachsel, who can […]

Well, this one was over the moment the $3 million arm and 10-cent psyche of Victor Zambrano shuffled to the mound (though Pedro Feliciano gets the Ashburn award for valiant service in a hopeless cause), leaving me with less-weighty matters to ponder.

Like this: What the fuck is up with this new song?

If you haven't heard […]

As Brian Bannister continued to battle the Brewers and himself today, en route to a rather hard-fought, exhausting win, I was struck by an odd, unwelcome thought: Why am I not giving him the Zambrano treatment?

This was B.B.'s line today: 5 IP, 6 H, 1 ER, 5 BB, 4 K, 112 pitches, 63 for […]

Well, rats.

It's a funny game — you go from marveling at being behind in exactly two innings to wondering how on earth the team got beat by the likes of Tomo Ohka. Stifled, in fact. Well, so it goes. I'll take 8-2 for the next 10 games with nary a complaint. Meanwhile, some thoughts:

* […]

No, not a fantasy of 8-1 or 21-1 or 161-1, though I'm happy to indulge in those. And no, we're not talking about '80s cheese-rock hits, though if you now have Aldo Nova stuck in your head, I apologize. (Unless you're now air-guitaring up a storm, in which case you're welcome. And I'll now avert […]

“Happy baseball teams are all alike; every unhappy baseball team is unhappy in its own way.”

The noted baseball scribe Tolstoy wrote those words sometime back, long before the DH, and they're as true for bloggers now as they were for newspaper men with lots of agate to fill with minute analysis then. (Anna Karenina also […]