Rays 2, Blue Jays 1: It Might Also Have Been Possible to Not Send Jose Right There

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Ah, the home opener, I know it well: you get your whole squad together and show up like twelve-deep in the 500s and listen to a bunch of drunk bro assholes start chanting "Go Leafs Go" by the fifth inning while the Blue Jays blow it to, like, the Twins, or something, and then there are fights. Maybe it doesn't happen like that anymore, exactly, who knows, as I have not been to one of these in holy shit nine years, but I expect the broad lines of the occasion remain largely unchanged; the camera seemed to luxuriate in the fresh faces of whole vast crews of dewy maidens adorned in their team-apparel finery and those too of the young suitors who suit them, which is much of what I recall of these home openers d'antan. By the second game of the season, all of these youthful funseekers will be replaced by the miserabilisit horde of fierce old ladies still mad at Homer Bush for a baserunning mistake in like 1999 and deliberately unfun young men with scorekeeping books and resolute viewz on advanced metrics; both with have little radios; neither will find any real joy. A crowd of 12 000 will be announced, but it will be a damnable lie.

BUT NOT ON OPENING DAY where a cheerful crowd north of 48 000 watched R. A. Dickey walk in the two runs that were all the Rays needed because nothing else ever really got going! Hey! You don't often say this about somebody who walked in a couple runs, but Dickey was really pretty OK, and has looked fairly good in both of his starts so far, actually. Down 2-1, Jose Bautista, who I see has a bobblehead day coming up (in a way it is strange that as a people we have not wearied of the bobblehead yet), drew a walk to lead-off the bottom of the ninth and I was like OOOOOOH SHIIIIIIIIIT and I was certainly no less that way when E5 started taking these huge rips up there as though he had fully considered how raw it would be to win the home opener with a walk-off home run and had decided this was a dare-to-be-great moment (not wrongly) that he could not let pass him by without taking mammoth fvkkn rips. 

But alas, he whiffed on a what looked like a pretty decent 3-2 fastball to hit, and Bautista, who had been sent, was out by a mile at second (or at least a quarter-mile, the length at which deeply-felt lives are sometimes lived), and that was pretty much that. 

But that's baseball, friends! It is often very much like that! And yet here we remain.

Oh hey also, since we were going to do an Old English word every R. A. Dickey start, to celebrate his Beowulf enthusiasm, let's do wealcan, which is where "walk" comes from. (I am not doing this to be mean about R. A. Dickey, because whether the runs were walked in or not [they extremely were], that was not a bad start, and Dickey has been better than a guy at work and I had decided he would be this year, and so is entitled to his propers.) 

wealcan

From Proto-Germanic *walkaną, from Proto-Indo-European *wolg- < *wel- (“to bend, twist, run, roll”). Akin to Old High German walchan, Old Norse valka, Old English ġewealcan "to go, go about, walk", Old English wealcian "to roll up, curl, twist", Old English weallian "to roam about, ramble", German wallen

Verb[edit]

wealcan

1. to move around
2. to revolve
3. to roll, roll around, be rolling
4. to toss
5. to fluctuate
6. to revolve in one's mind; scheme; reflect
7. to discuss

(That's from wiktionary.)

I don't know about you but I am already kind of excited about the next R. A. Dickey start because of all that etymology! 

KS