NATS RISE TO GLORY game forty-five

(image searches like this is how we fix our broke shit in 2015)

Saturday morning, rode an hour away w/ 16 year old daughter to do some DMV shit on a new *used* ride we just bought, and to set up bank account for the kid as she's in community college & got mad money from her various hustles. My shitty '94 Toyota truck did fine, despite some strange behavior this past week, but then when we left the bank, nothing - no click, no RUHRUHRUH, nothing. I figured battery, so took it out and walked A FUCKING MILE carrying the battery to the Advance, with my daughter walking along too. It gave us a chance to vibe on Main Street Farmville, Virginia, and in situations like this I usually think to myself, "What would I do if I was in Nigeria?" You walk the fuckin' fucked-up battery and find a new one.

Well, the battery tested fine, so we walked it back, with me figuring, "It has to be the starter." My wife was on her way, and after I partially *jacked* the front end up enough to squeeze underneath with the tire jack resting on a brick I keep in the back of the truck because you never know when you'll need a random brick (like now), I got the starter off, eventually. Years ago I would have cussed and broke things and beaten the vehicle with my boot, but I am proud to say I am in a calm enough place in life that I can, with some finagling, get the starter off a shitty old truck in a small parking lot beside the fucking bank on a Saturday when necessary. The starter tested both good and bad at the store (I don't know man) so I figured it had to be the culprit. Got it back on way quicker than taking it off, but it still didn't start. So I gave up. Wife was there & I left the fuckin' truck there, mad at it, but got it towed later this weekend.

Today in fact, after finding a chill ass tow truck dude who took $20 cash to tow it, and he talked shit about the other tow truck guy in town, who usually would've towed my shit for being left in that bank parking lot overnight, but I got lucky because that dude had to go to Raleigh or some shit. But got the truck to a shop, where I will be American and not Nigerian, and let some other dude figure the shit out (which makes me feel like a cuckold tbh).

Of course you can figure out I am driving the new *used* car to do all this, which is a 2001 Volvo S80, with shitty factory stereo, or at least you have to use a cassette adapter to run the ipod which makes the ipod sound like a thousand mosquitoes are angry at any treble sound. I let my 16 yo daughter do some driving as she has learner's, and she didn't wreck into a thing or go off the road too far, although she gunned it turning into our driveway and got pine needles all in my open window all over me but we had a good laugh. But it was also first local pool day, so the family went up there, and all the hoochie mamas were out overfilling their bikinis, and kids were being kids including dickhead redneck teen boys throwing girls into the deep end, but I did some diving with the little ones so that the dickhead teens wouldn't begrudge the little ones diving instead of the older kids doing their stupid fucking rover game.

And yet I just wanted to come home, as it had been a long weekend full of broken shit trifles and also responsible crap like bank accounts and DMVs, so I just wanted to chill the fuck out. My 16 yo rode home with me, and the treble mosquito ipod adapter was too much. But luckily it was baseball game time, so I flipped it to the FM station and listened the Nats and Cubs on actual radio - a slow, mundane, meandering linguistic experience like codeine molasses but drug-free entirely. My daughter was like "ugh, hashtag boring" because she is 16 and actually says "hashtag" before other things, and I briefly thought about explaining the perfect American-ness of riding slowly down the hill into our town while the radio played a baseball game, windows down, just being people living lives, similar to how I was explaining that type of shit when we were carrying the battery down some shit town's Main Street two days earlier. But you can't explain everything all the time, and sometimes you just have to let shit soak in and maybe it leaves a stain and maybe it doesn't, but you did what you could without forcing it. So I didn't force it.

Apparently I had just missed Wilson Ramos' go-ahead homer, and the Cubs briefly threatened while we were driving home as slow as I could go, so slow the honeysuckle smell made you think it was growing into the car as we crept at 30 mph (20 in these Blue Ridge foothill curves), but the Nats held. I came home and sliced up zucchini and yellow squash for cooking in the oven, along with some asparagus I had forgotten we bought last week, and heard the rest of the game out inside, and of course the Nats won and of course my truck is still broke and of course I go back to work after a three-day weekend tomorrow and of course my kid could give half a fuck about baseball but it is life man, we all are living it, and that's all you can fucking ask from any day because without that, you are dead. Literally, dead.

Nats are 27-18.

Phillies 7, Blue Jays 0; Blue Jays 3, Red Sox 3; Blue Jays 6, Yankees 1; Blue Jays 11, Astros 1; Blue Jays 5, Astros 2: Not Enough of These Were On the Radio

Joseph Batstista, pondering haters 

I get that not everybody is going to listen to every inning of every spring training game and it might not make sense to broadcast every last one of them, but at the same time, I mind this fact more than you might think. Like, this week, even my admittedly and perhaps enviably bohemian life did not allow me to listen to as much of one of the games that was in fact broadcast as I would have liked, but I caught some of it, and even that felt pretty good, you know? Even if I can't really settle in for more than an inning or two, that inning or two can be pretty transporting, if I may be so bold as to say that about this. And a bro of mine who just signed up for Gameday Audio on the strength of my recommendation found on the first night of his subscription nothing available but a Spanish broadcast of the Marlins game. Finding it unlikely he would learn the language in one evening, he tuned out (also it is complicated because he is a bitter Expos fan and still understandably has feelings in the direction of Jeffry Loria who is undeniably evil, an aspect of his character not sufficiently examined in the recent Miami Marlins cover story in Sports Ilustrated in my view).


Putting all of that aside, in a triumphant return to the airwaves this afternoon Jose Bautista hit two home runs and Travis Snider hit another and Dustin McGowan pitched or two innings without his shoulder erupting into flames so that is a win in the fullest sense. Go Jays.


KS

Baseball On The Radio In These Important Times

GO TEAM

May I ask how, exactly, you are going about these League Championship Series, friends? As I have previously mentioned, I'm an all-audio guy right now with thoroughly cancelled cable and a humble Gameday subscription. I am not bemoaning this situation; it is entirely my preference. But if you are watching the games on TBS and Fox, is it possible for you to enjoy them with the sound up?


With the NLCS, the TBS clips that are coming up on MLB.com reveal a certain not-greatness to the broadcasts, and if we are going to be straight with one another one of the first things we would have to talk about in that spirit of straightness would be the fact that any station that would employ Buck Martinez in any capacity for any series ever is questionable, so whether he is working any one particular series or not, he casts a long shadow. Fortunately, the sound-down options are pretty good for the NLCS: Jon Sciambi and Bobby Valentine aren't going to do you any harm at all on ESPN Radio (stream it live from espnradio.com! I dare you!), and Bob Uecker is of course relentlessly, almost antagonistically awesome on WTMJ. On a recent episode of FanGraphs Audio, poet, hipster, and baseball ironist Carson Cistulli determined (with the help of Dave Cameron) that while Vin Scully is arguably superior in terms of actually telling you things that are happening during a baseball game, Scully is like a wonderful grandfather, whereas Uecker is like an amazing uncle, which gets it exactly right, and makes me even gladder than ever that they are both still in our lives despite being astoundingly old. Really, it's almost unthinkable to me that anyone would willingly opt for anything but Uecker for this NLCS, but you're entirely OK if you have to go with ESPN (I have no idea about the St. Louis broadcast, because they mostly talk about the Cardinals, which is an understandable but unfortunate situation).

Over in the American League, you can put aside the perfectly fine WXYT Detroit and KESN Dallas local crews because you've got Dan Shulman and Orel Hershiser on ESPN Radio. The secretly Canadian Dan Shulman is by far the best of the guys who are not ancient, and Orel Hershiser is awkward but extremely knowledgeable (also the baseball glove I use to this day is an Orel Hershiser model, though I am considering a new glove for next spring, to be honest). This is basically the sweetest possible relief from the annual Joe Buck horror show on Fox, whether it is with his usual partner Tim McCarver (whom we at Baseball Feelings wish a speedy recovery from heart surgery) or, because he is making news in recent days, I guess, Terry Francona this time around. It doesn't matter who you pair with Joe Buck; he's still the worst. The choice between Dan Shulman and Joe Buck is like if you had a skin condition, or something, and you had to decide between a soothing balm and fire ants: I would literally never take the ants.


Your thoughts?


KS

Why AM Radio is the Superior Form of Baseball Following

So work is crazy - like three 14 hour days to start the week, then wind down to the regular 8, and wait until you die, because "that's the nature of the job" as it is explained. So I don't do shit other than work, and when I am in that mode, I tend to slip into sports radio during the commute, because it gives me the false impression of other human beings being in my life. During the regular year, your local team is all that you find on AM radio in the day time (Orioles and Nationals where I live), and at night, AM goes into that chaos zone where you don't get local radio but all of a sudden some powermonger signal from Denver comes in better than anything else. During the playoffs, this is fun because then there is pretty much important baseball on, instead of randomly getting like a meaningless Reds/Pirates game like a month ago.
Well, yesterday night, the wife was wore out as I called her on the way home, so I ordered pizza from the little joint in our little town called Slice of Heaven, who sometimes makes awesome pizza and sometimes makes not-so-awesome pizza, but when the dude who works there answered the phone, I knew it was good because he is the awesome pizza maker at that 4-person establishment. Ordered up a pepperoni (out of pepperoni, so had to go sausage) and a white pizza with tomatoes and basil (out of basil, so we went with just tomatoes). "20 minutes" which was my ride to my hometown from stupid work, so I scan through the AM and get a feed of the Phillies/Cardinals game which I assume was the Phillies team because the color dude was referred to as "Sarge" which I have to guess was Gary Matthews (who I also guess now must be referred to as Gary Matthews Sr.).
Game sounded cool, AM radio baseball is such a soothing meditative background effect to life, and really, I can imagine nothing better than some sort of super cybertronic AM radio magic machine that is more radio than smart phone and I can sit in my back yard in my old age in the summer time, drinking vegetable juice out of a mason jar, listening to baseball games from around the universe. (I assume we will have space baseball by then, with epic long balls due to gravitational factors. Also epic curveballs though.)
I get back in the truck with the pizzas after picking them up, and the radio is calling the game, and basically it's like this: Oswalt throws a strike, but a squirrel ran across home plate, but Angel Hernandez didn't call it a strike and it's 2-1, how is that a ball, Oswalt is wondering what is up with that call, the squirrel is running up the stairs, Charlie Manuel is coming out...
So basically, that instance, which happened live on the radio broadcast is discussed by a baritone voiced play-by-play guy and Sarge for the next ten minutes (it seemed like) before Roy Oswalt finally got around to throwing his next pitch. I'm sure being this is the interwebs there is some sort of audio clip of the whole affair, but I also am sure being this is the interwebs you've already seen an animated gif of the squirrel. I just want you to know that seeing that thing pales in comparison to hearing it through the snap and crackle of AM radio, where your mind fleshes out the words with your own internal visions based on your personal frame of reference. Thank you AM radio, for still existing, and being transpermutated into my raggedy Nissan truck last night.

Nationals 5-5, 1/16 of our way to Mighty Decent

(early development of gyroball)

I do not really remember baseball exists too well most of the time. I used to care, and was a Giants fan, but then the strike season and Barry Bonds kinda just crushed the care out of me. Baseball seems very American - not old school immigrant came to America to become millionaire America historical story, but today entitled as fuck to everything ever America, thus not really deserving of anything, and will probably suffer an agonizingly slow death. That's baseball, and that's America.
But I really want to try, ever since the Nats came to D.C. They haven't given me much outside of Future Promise up to this point, and even that has been clouded in mismanagement up until the last couple years. Anyways, we are already 1/16 of the way through their 2011 campaign, which I am deeming The Road to Five Hundred, meaning we will finally finish without flirting (or achieving) triple digit losses. (I do this in /16s fractions because I am mechanically inclined, and twist ratchets and sockets all day long, helping to rebuild America, futilely, one actual thing at a time. I use strange fractions because fuck metrics.)
Last Friday I had remembered, "Oh yeah... baseball. I should figure out how to listen to the games online because listening to baseball is a true pleasure, and nothing is more great than to zone out to a baseball game on the radio, letting it absorb into your mind through the soothing linguistical inflections of the play-by-play dudes." Where will these men come from in our internetted future, I wonder? But then my wife was out of town so I had all three kids, and thus forgot to listen to radio baseball. Oddly enough, I watched the original Karate Kid with my 12-year-old daughter that night, for a nice and pure father/daughter time together, and there was a drunk man on the beach wearing a Washington Nationals hat, who was belligerent until Miyagi karate chopped the top off of four beer bottles ALL AT ONCE! This was a moment of psychic clarity the universe was throwing at me. I must listen to baseball games on the radio.
I did read about the game and it was the home opener for the Mets, who lost, with our Zimmermann pitcher with the extra "n" at the end of his name successfully pitching a solid amount of pitches, nearing triple digit pitch count, for the first time since Tommy John surgery last year. This of course speaks to the Nats psyche not in terms of the actual Jordan Zimmermann who did this deed, but the Future Promise of our young Stevie Strasburg, who was to be the Ordained Nolan Ryan of His Generation, but was sidetracked by fucking himself up right out the gates, which means we think he will instead be the Ordained Greg Maddux of His Generation.
Of course I did not actually start listening to radio baseball, because psychic clarity is all too often out-buzzed by the next 37 sources of mindless entertainment shooting at me from seventeen different devices. But today at work, I was like, "You know what? I am an American bureaucrat, and I've worked hard for about four of the hours of bothered to be at work these first two days of the week. I'm gonna look up the baseballs inside the interwebs."
The most startling thing for me to come upon was the Nats starting line-up for this game last night against the dreaded Philadelphia Phillies, in D.C., which has been home-away-home for Philly, and was probably why the Nats signed Jayson Werth, so that the fans had somebody they could cheer for during every game. Batting clean-up and playing 1B was Matt Stairs. The Matt Stairs. Mr. Softball. Also of note was Livan Hernandez pitching a solid game again and continuing to be the most amazing freak in a lovable way left. He has become a Pedro Martinez-lite version for the 2011 baseball fan. And also Jerry Hairston was starting at 3B, who made me think of those terrible White Sox uniforms of like 1983 or so, and that just made me think of Greg Luzinski, and then I wondered what Greg Luzinski was doing nowadays. I figured probably bowling and living somewhere in the midwest where the white people actually still know what brand of white people from Europe they are, and middle-aged dudes with vibrant facial hairs will get into very serious pseudo-arguments about what is a better type of sausage or deli meat or something artisanly handcrafted from carcass in the old world traditions. For some reason this made me think about bowling, probably because those types of dudes always bowl, and really without them and their kind, duckpin bowling would probably be dead to the world by now.
But the Nats won, beating the dread Phillies, which put us at 5-5. Livan got his first win of the year, and Shaggy Werth knocked his second homer of the year against his old homies to seal a lead that he spark plugged in motion with a lead-off double in the 4th that ended in 3 runs and an INSURMOUNTABLE LEAD with that wacky and wily Cuban maestro on the mound. 5-5. That's all I ask, at least for now, until it comes time for that Future Promise to start paying some goddamned dividends.