let's baseball

Haven't kept up with this short season, but I'm excited about the Cubs AND Sox in the postseason. Do I smell a subway series in our future??? Looking forward to some playoff baseball!

The core of this Cubs team have been an absolute embarrassment since winning the World Series. I am pretty interested in how they are going to approach this offseason. I am really hoping they finally fire Hoyer and Epstein because I don't trust those ivy league dorks. You could assemble a really solid team from the players they traded away for almost nothing (LeMahieu, Torres, Eloy, LaStella, etc.)

I can’t believe this pitcher’s name is Walker Buehler.

I haven’t watched more than 5 innings of baseball this “season” and if you’re an LA fan and don’t mind an asterisk next to your championship season I suppose this is exciting.

But I’d also add two things here: You cannot have the city of Tampa becoming the center of sporting excellence for professional American sports. They won hockey already and have a legit Super Bowl contender. Second, I actually think 60-80 games should become the norm for baseball. Playing over 100 games which for the vast majority of the league is meaningless after like 40 or 50 is ridiculous.

Not only should the season be reduced to no more than 82 regular season games (like basketball or hockey) but the games themselves probably should not be nine innings. I know that is unholy for real baseball fans to even ponder but no casual fan is ever going to sit through these three and a half hour marathon regular season games. Either they have to figure out some way to adjust the pacing of the game to suit the altered attention span of modern consumers or they are going to slowly wither into absolute cultural obscurity, which they've been working themselves towards for the greater part of the last decade.

The World Series used to be the sporting event of the fall season. My first World Series recollections was from 2001. I was seven years old and it was an incredible seven game series that Luis Gonzalez won for the Diamondbacks on a walkoff bloop single. Of course it is easy to scoff at some of the theatrics of Bush throwing out the first pitch but that World Series was actually a really critical process to the national "healing" from the terror attacks of that year. Most of the country even ended up rooting for the fucking Yankees to win their fourth straight championship, which is unthinkable in any other circumstance.

It is unimaginable to think that baseball could ever realistically play that kind of cultural role in this country ever again. But who knows. The sport went through some really difficult periods in the late 60s and 70s.

LOL sweet fucking christ Sox

undo wrote:

OtMFm.

About a year ago I moved three doors down from Jon Lester. His wife and kids are really friendly, his dogs are hilarious, but he's pretty reserved. We never were invited over for a BBQ even though we have a son the same age which, to be fair, is semi-standard for this neighborhood so I'd rate him a 7/10 on the neighbor scale.

We never watched much baseball previously but were all excited to start going to cubs games now that we can walk to Wrigley. Bummer that COVID put a damper on those plans but hopefully next season we will be able to.

RIP Hank Aaron. What a legend.

I've been getting back into baseball lately. Marquee Networks pulled themselves off Hulu, which means I can't watch Cubs games anymore (at least not legally). I've just been listening to the radio crew while getting work assignments done on my laptop. The Ricketts have managed to really suck all the joy out of this sport for me over the past five years but it seems like the Cubs fanbase is finally waking up to the fact that the whole 1080 Project was just a means for them to become Wrigleyville's primary landlord. They are fucking rentier scum. It would be cool if the liberal yuppie fanbase started to really pressure them this season and they eventually sell the franchise and fuck off back to Nebraska.

In the meantime, I am just going to try to enjoy baseball. It is great to see people back inside the stadiums. If all goes well, this baseball season should be the nation's reintroduction to safe mass gatherings, which is cool. Also, the White Sox are exciting. I hope Tony LaRussa and the Reinsdorfs manage to fuck it up!

Baseball in this city remains classist. If you’re poor working class then you Sox, if you’re white collar then you Cubs. There is some overlap with these groups but I think this remains as true as it was since I was a kid. Wriglyville has been too expensive to live in since the late 90s and in the 20 years that I lived in the city and frequented establishments of the area this has only expanded. Anything that made that neighborhood ‘cool’ is gone. Even stuff that isn’t cool but was cool because of the late night culture that developed around it is gone. Talking about the Taco Bell and McDonalds. I had so much fun as a teen and twenty something just hanging out in those parking lots late into the night just talking. The frat house vibe that hung over the area in the 00s and 10s is even sorta giving way to a full corporate Disneyland of baseball vibe. I hate the area.

With all that being said the Sox organization only wishes they could get some of that magic... you even sorta said it about the Bulls games recently. The 100 level section is essentially for those with money or have been bought by corporations to entertain guests, don’t get me started on floor seats.

However, I’m also watching again for some reason. I used to watch out of boredom but now I feel slightly engaged this season. Either way, I normally would have deleted a post like this but I’m gonna let it ride this time.

The last MLB game I went to was 9 years ago, I just found the ticket stub the other day. It was a White Sox game, they played the Mariners. I went alone and sat in the upper deck along the first base side, maybe 15 rows back or so.

Halfway through the first inning, a group of 5 or 6 dudes filed into my row and sat one seat away from me. They immediately started yelling at other fans, particularly one guy seated seven or eight rows in front of them, a guy wearing a Derrick Rose jersey. "Hey faggot! Hey, you in the Bulls jersey! Why you wearing a basketball jersey to a baseball game, you fucking faggot!? Hey you fag in the Derrick Rose jersey, I'm talking to you, faggot! You heard me, you fucking pussy ass faggot!" They'd barely even had time to start drinking, if they even had yet at all.

I left my seat and walked around for a while, eventually sitting down in a whole different section. The bad vibes just kind of killed any fun I was having. I left after 5 innings and I have never wanted to go back.

Jesus

Can you really expect anything else from the fans at Comiskey/Guaranteed Rate Field? But yeah, I do agree with BGWaves. If someone in the Chicagoland area told me they were trying to get into baseball, I would tell them to follow the Sox. They are an exciting young team. Tim Anderson is really fucking cool.

One of the few times I’ve been laughed at publicly happened at Comsikey. I was carrying a couple of drinks and tripped up the stairs. Somehow I barely spilled the drinks but the whole section blew up laughing. I was maybe 14. I never said the fan base was friendly!

“Fans fight in the bleachers during the 9th inning as the #WhiteSox defeat the Cardinals 5-1”



lots going on in that pic

America’s pastime.

Some time in the 1990s I was watching a baseball game on television (not the Cubs or Sox so this was probably a nationally-televised postseason game featuring other teams). It must have been in the bottom of the ninth inning (or in extra innings) with 0 or 1 out. There was a runner on third base who had to touch home plate to win the game.

The batter hit a high pop fly into shallow right field that was clearly fading into foul territory fast. Some fielder pursued it with determination, running with wild abandon to try to catch it Willie Mays-style or something.

I think he actually caught it* but was in absolutely no position to throw the now tagged up and sprinting home baserunner from third base. It's possible that he never even got the throw off at all and just tripped and fell or actually ran into the wall or some ill-placed chair or something (I don't have the most clear memory of this part). The runner scored easily and the game was over.

Have you ever heard of a game ending like this? I think about this all the time but have no idea how to search for it.

I remember realizing that trying to catch this ball was a really bad idea and yelling at this guy through the TV to stop but this did not work.

*if he'd failed to catch it, if it popped out of his glove or bounced off the side, would runners be able to advance? Or is that just a dead foul ball like any other?

I was thinking about very rare baseball plays when I wrote that post because of this

I don't know the particular incident but that is really funny, Undo. Also that La Russa picture honestly fucking rocks.

I don't think about it often but if you had asked me how many World Series the Atlanta Braves had won during the 1990s, I would guess three but then wonder if maybe I should have guessed four.

Now I see they went to the World Series five times during that decade but only ever won once!?

I always thought that decade/decade and a half was one of the greatest runs in all of sports but it turns out it was actually tragic and disappointing on a level I was never aware of before.

undo wrote:I don't think about it often but if you had asked me how many World Series the Atlanta Braves had won during the 1990s, I would guess three but then wonder if maybe I should have guessed four.

Now I see they went to the World Series five times during that decade but only ever won once!?

I always thought that decade/decade and a half was one of the greatest runs in all of sports but it turns out it was actually tragic and disappointing on a level I was never aware of before.

It is wild to think about that pitching staff and how thoroughly dominating The Big 3 were and yet just a single World Series title. The hitters they had too were a 90s kid collecting baseball cards dream gets. David Justice, Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones, Ryan Klesko and Ron Gant!

Maddux is probably my favorite pitcher of all time. He was my idol when I was in little league.

Dude is the Jim Kelly of baseball.