Perfection and a New Era, Perhaps?

I can’t help but wondering if the rash of perfect (and unofficially perfect) games recently is the signal that the steroid era is officially over. Maybe I’m naïve, but I’d certainly like to think so. If Armando Galarraga’s game last night had been accurately officiated, there would have been as many perfect games in the past eleven months (dating back to Mark Buehrle’s July 23, 2009 victory over the Devil Rays) as there had been in nearly an entire decade between July 28, 1994 (Kenny Rogers over the Angels) and May 18, 2004 (Randy Johnson).

In all fairness, it’s easy to manipulate statistics to tell any number of stories. For instance, there was a gap of over five years between the Big Tool’s 2004 game and Buehrle’s, during which time the league took various measures to assess and address the steroids problem. And perfect games have always been few and far between; even in the dead ball era. Not counting Galarraga’s un-hitter, that even Bud Selig will kind-of-sort-of admit probably should have been a perfect game, there have only been twenty in the last 130 years.

The first two perfect games were less than a week apart (just as Halladay’s and Galarraga’s  could have been), and then nearly 24 full years went by before Cy Young had the first ‘modern’ perfect game.  And there was a 34.5-year gap (1922-1956) as the landscape of the game changed in countless ways that had nothing to do with B-12 shots. There was another lag of thirteen years (and one week) after Catfish Hunter’s 1968 perfect game that could have as much to do with random luck and Sandy Koufax’s early retirement as what may or may not have been rampant use of “greenies.”

Statistically speaking, there is no sound reason to read any significance into three (or four games) out of the roughly 2,500 games a year (including the postseason). Still, a girl can dream, right? There are those who know more about the game than I do who will point out that steroids are just part of a long history of inequities and scandals and all manner of embarrassments to the game. There may have never been a true Golden Age of baseball, but maybe things are actually getting a little bit better. 

Suck it, A-Rod, indeed

I don't know about Dallas Braden's grandmother, but I can imagine my Grandmother saying something to that effect. At any rate, although I'd heard about the perfect game over the weekend, I hadn't read the whole story or made the connection to the story from a few weeks back about A-Rod's breach of etiquette. Since my dislike of Rodriguez knows no bounds, though, I can't say how happy it makes me to see that the pitcher who didn't have enough wins to criticize him join the list of less-than-twenty pitchers in the history of baseball to pitch a perfect game.

And, since it was against yet another AL East foe, more power to him.

Another Walk-Off

Maybe I'm luckier than I thought. At least for the Red Sox. With some real craziness (more excuses, but some are legit!) going on during the last couple weeks, I've barely been able to keep up with the scoreboard, let alone watch an entire game. But I was able to see most of the endings of the last two games, so I was able to see two straight walk-off victories. Boston has now tied their longest winning streak of the season with the back-to-back wins.

This time, it went twelve innings, and it was Kevin Youkilis with a double knocking in the game-winner for an 8-7 victory. After falling into an early deficit, and then coughing up a lead to Josh Hamilton in the seventh, the Sox eventually

The Thrill is Gone

Well, it didn't take too long for the shine to wear off this season. I blame the day off Monday. It feels like the momentum got sucked out pretty quickly. But there's 159 games to go, and another fifteen chances to even things up with the Yankees. I saw about a minute of the seventh inning and got a little too smug when I saw Chan Ho pitching. I figured the Red Sox would be up 4-1 by the time I got home. I didn't get back until the very last at bat, but I had to eat my words when Chan Ho got the win after pitching three scoreless innings. I'm sure he'll still cost the Yankees more than his fair share of games, though. Maybe I'm just jinxing Boston now…

Luckily, the Sox have another day off before traveling to Kansas City this weekend. It's been a tough stretch, what with two games since their last day off.

As much as I love Tim Wakefield, I actually am relieved (no pun intended) that he'll be matched up against Kyle Davies instead of Zack Greinke. It'll be hard rooting against Greinke on Saturday, but I like Beckett's chances against him better than Wakefield's. Of course, it doesn't hurt either of them that the Royals ranked 13^th in the American League last year in runs scored. I did notice one fluke, though, when looking at their 2009 stats. The Royals ranked eleventh or worse (out of fourteen AL teams) in every offensive category except for stolen bases (ninth)… and triples. With 51 triples, they topped the American League, perhaps because Kauffman Stadium has the second-largest outfield in the league.         

It’s Finally Here!

Opening Day is one of the most magical days of the year for me, and at the risk of being smote, I dare say going to an Opening Day game is a more spine-tingling experience than going to Easter Mass. I'm not saying it's a religious experience per se, but the fanfare of opening games, which typically combine jet flyovers, gigantic flags unfurling, special guests (Hi, Pedro!), and all the feelings of team spirit, spring fever, and some patriotism thrown in for good measure, is hard to beat, even with extra choruses of Alleluia. A few fortunate teams also get to present rings or unfurl league championship banners at their openers. The Sox aren't one of those teams this year, but a 9-7 win over the Yankees (who will soon be receiving some tacky diamonds) is still quite a nice way to start a season.

I personally believe the Sunday night opener is something of an abomination. I'm not a fundamentalist who thinks there should be more day games in general. My skin is so white that it's nearly translucent, and I live in Texas where the heat during nearly every day game (and a solid two months of night games) is suffocating, so day games and I do not mix too well. But opening day is like Christmas morning, with all the excitement and presents to unwrap. Opening up presents on Christmas Eve just doesn't have that same magic of running downstairs as soon as you wake up to see what Santa left under the tree. And although the weather in Boston apparently was quite lovely tonight, it wouldn't be unusual for a starting temperature in the mid-30s on an early April evening (the average low for the month of April is 41 degrees, 31 in March). I suppose once a century isn't too bad, though.

While I'm being a cranky old man, I should mention how much I agreed with Jon Miller when he described keeping a score book as the "best way to enjoy the game." I'm a geek, old-fashioned, and completely unashamed. Learning to keep score for the first time can be daunting, or teaching somebody can be, at any rate; but it turns into a reflex eventually.

 

Kevin Youkilis might be my favorite current player, and tonight was a great reminder why. Besides scoring the Sox's first run after hitting a double, he gave Boston new life in the bottom of the sixth with a two-run, stand-up triple to narrow the Yankee lead to 5-4. Adrian Bel-tray (as Jon Miller keeps calling him and Bill Simmons has already pointed out) drove him in to tie the score up. And then he also scored the go-ahead run. What more can you ask for? 3 for 4, with two doubles and a triple. I don't pay much attention to individual averages before the All-Star break (or at least May), but that gives him a slugging percentage of 1.750 for at least one day. Still, every time they cut to a shot of him in the dugout, I want to pour baby powder all over his head.

Of course, Chan Ho Park deserves some credit tonight, too. He handed Youk his second double and allowed three earned runs- including Pedroia's two-run homer- in his brief appearance, which gives him an (admittedly skewed) 27.0 ERA to start the season. Knowing Chan Ho (and with Joe Girardi's impatience with pitchers), it could be June before he gets that down to single digits. I'm quite glad to see the Yankees pick up one of Tom Hicks's bigger boondoggles.

It's even kind of nice to see C.C. Sabathia. He won't always allow five earned runs like he did tonight, but he will at least make David Ortiz look darn near slender.

Like any self-respecting baseball fan, I'm a bit superstitious. When I realized during the sixth inning that I was no longer wearing any of my Sox gear (I had to hit the showers before the game after some exposure to toxic chemicals), I wondered if I had inadvertently given the Yankees the advantage. Sure enough, after I put on a few lucky items, the rally got going. That doesn't explain the Yankees retaking the lead, but superstitions are rarely that accurate, right?

They really pulled out all the stops tonight with entertainment, too. Steven Tyler sang "God Bless America" and Neil Diamond himself came out to lead the traditional "Sweet Caroline" sing-along. I am not in either of their fan clubs, but it certainly added a little something extra to an already exciting game.

I'm not quite sure who at ESPN thought they only needed to budget three hours on their schedule guide for a Sox-Yankees game. Last season, the teams had the longest game-time averages in baseball. The Yanks averaged 3:08 per game and the Sox 3:04, and their games against each other were about 36 hours long a piece. I don't have actual statistics for the average length of their matchups, but the teams do share the dubious distinction of the longest nine-inning game in the game's very long history. Four hours and 45 minutes. I'm not necessarily complaining- I tend to agree with Jonathan Papelbon (apparently the slowest-lingering pitcher) who asked why you'd want to see a Sox-Yankees game end- but it did throw a wrench in my DVR-ing.

Thankfully, Papelbon didn't waste too much time putting the middle of New York's order to bed. I'm already in my Sox jammies, but I won't be able to get to sleep for a while. Another reason opening day needs to start around 1 p.m.

Spring Fever

The train has really gotten derailed here. I haven’t even written a single word about the NCAA tournament, and this was easily the most exciting tournament that I can remember. I could rattle off a list a mile long of all the ‘distractions’ that have taken me away from the blog, but I will not bore myself. There is some hope for the blog and excitement for me, though, because baseball season is only twenty-six hours away! I am not generally a fan of the Sunday night opener, but this year it’s at Fenway, so I’m psyched despite my disapproval.

I don’t even know where to begin with my love for baseball. Suffice it to say, I love everything about the game except for the people involved with Major League Baseball. My love for baseball was almost derailed a few times by some of the less savory aspects of the professional game. Just as I was really getting into it, learning to keep score, getting my own subscription to SI for Kids, hanging posters in my room, the 1994 strike hit. At the time, I was especially jaded. My school band was one of the organizations that served concessions at the Ballpark in Arlington to raise funds, so I was particularly disgusted by professional athletes, many of whom had multimillion dollar salaries (and the lowest-paid of whom still earned six-figure salaries), on strike while ushers, ticket takers, and concessioners who barely made minimum wage were out of luck and out of work. With a little age and perspective, I know that the players’ case was not without its merits, but ten-year-old Laura did not see it that way.

Just when the bitter taste was starting to wear off, it was 1998 and the dueling medical marvels of McGwire and Sosa commandeered the national pastime. I know the homerun race was supposed to be the cure for baseball apathy, but I guess I was an exceedingly cynical fourteen-year old. I didn’t want to see a 37- (or 61-) year-old record be erased by players of dubious credibility. Even if it was a Yankee record.

I have a general queasiness when it comes to overpaid prima donna players, and I absolutely despise Bud Selig, but I still love baseball. I have no patience for people who have no patience for baseball. There’s something beautiful about the pace. I like football and basketball, too, but I love that I can truly follow and appreciate a baseball game. Maybe it’s because “Baseball is an individual sport disguised as a team sport,” as Bill Simmons recently pointed out. But when I’m watching a typical football game, I probably have almost no idea what more than half the players on the field are doing on any given play. It’s not that I don’t understand football, but there are 22 players on the field all moving at the same time and doing something different. The pace of baseball gives me time to see what the pitcher and batter are doing, how many different signals the catcher is going through, if there’s a shift in the infield, and if a runner is trying to steal. If somebody thinks baseball is boring, they just don’t know what is going on.

I haven’t gotten quite as geeked about spring training as I may have in the past, but I have already seen a few college games, and Easter or not, I’ll be decked out in Red Sox gear from head to toe (literally… I have Red Sox socks, not to mention caps, shirts, earrings, and a few other items) tomorrow. 

The National Pastime of Texas

Just when I said there would be no excuses, I came up with a doozie. I was walking the dog Tuesday morning, and we hit a patch of black ice on the sidewalk (it was about 40 degrees outside at the time but the ice was in a shady spot), and I took a nasty fall. I still feel like I’ve been hit by a truck, but I figured it was as good a time as any to write about my love of football since this is probably how football players feel most of the time. Of course, it hasn’t helped that my right wrist is still pretty banged up and my brain is slightly jostled, but I feel the need to play through the pain.

My introduction to football came relatively late. Growing up in southern California, football really didn’t seem like part of the culture, even though I grew up in Los Angeles county when the Raiders and Rams were still in LA. I can remember my dad watching Monday night football (and games on Sunday), but it did not seem like something “we” cared about. Looking through my old yearbooks, it turns out my school even had football teams (and the boy I had a crush on played on one), but that was news to me. I started to take an interest in the game right around the time my father started working “in Dallas.” We still lived in California, but I grew curious about the things I associated with Texas: cowboys, football, and Dallas Cowboys football.

The first Super Bowl I remember watching and following was Super Bowl XXVII. The Cowboys were not my favorite team (I still had some slight resentment towards the Lone Star state), but I was fascinated to watch them have their way with the Bills. I was too young and new to the game to realize that just a few years earlier, the Cowboys had been absolutely atrocious. As far as I knew, they were the best team in the country and that was just the way it was. By the start of the next season, we were living in the “mid-cities” between Dallas and Fort Worth. Although the Cowboys did not get off to the greatest start that year, they started looking like the Best Team in the Country again, and I began to follow them in earnest. They were exciting to watch, and were a constant topic of conversation at school. When one of our teachers, Mrs. Smith, was expecting a baby that January, negotiations began to get her to name her son Emmitt.

Speaking of Emmitt, I think the moment that sealed the deal for me was the January 1994 Giants game. I was supposed to be finishing a social studies report on Spain but kept sneaking into the living room to watch the game with Dad. Smith was playing with a separated shoulder and still had over 200 yards rushing. The game went overtime and gave the Cowboys the division title (over the Giants). And, of course, the Cowboys went on to beat the Bills in the Super Bowl again that year.

Although the “Three-Peat” effort was derailed when the Cowboys lost their rematch against the 49’ers in the Conference Championship, the 1994 season was still an exciting time to be a football fan in north Texas. And the “Three-Out-of-Four-Peat” (no, I am not making that up. I couldn’t if I tried) victory in Super Bowl XXX kept things going. Of course, by the 1997 season, the Cowboys had lost much of their luster, with some horrible 5-11 seasons as well as a handful of potentially promising seasons that ended with quick exits in the playoffs. I’d already gotten sucked in, though, and was ready for whatever came my way Sunday, whether or not the Cowboys were imploding.

Basketball Love

I have taken a very, very long sabbatical from my blog, but it's time to stop making excuses. Of course, I didn't pick the best time to get back into it. Football season just ended and spring training is still a few weeks off, leaving me with basketball, hockey (which I know almost nothing about), and… the Olympics? And the NBA is on pause for an All-Star break. I’ve never been a big fan of All-Star Games, so I am not totally over my Blogger’s Block. I've never been a big fan of All Star Games, so I am not totally over my Blogger's Block.
So, my idea to bring inspiration back is to get back to why I started doing this in the first place: why I love sports. And to stretch it out into a few posts, I decided to write one for each sport, starting with basketball.
I still need to get Bill Simmons's new Book of Basketball, but I will probably have to wait for paperback (and somebody else to buy it for me). I'm sure that would really remind me about why I love(d) basketball. He certainly can always remind me why I wanted to write about sports. There's no chance ESPN is looking for a Sports Girl, is there?
Although the NBA All-Star game is in my backyard tonight, I can’t say that holds much excitement for me. I’d rather watch a spring training baseball game than an All-Star game or the Pro Bowl. 
But what do I love about basketball? Since my love for basketball peaked around the same time as my fascination with the Late Show with David Letterman*, I'll put together the Top Ten Things I Love About Basketball:
10. The broadcasting: I really love to hate basketball play-by-play and commentary. As often as I find myself snarkily talking back to the TV, though, I must admit that the game would not be as fun to watch without the sometimes mind-boggling commentary. And if possible, I love Charles Barkley even more behind the desk than on the court… or is it love to hate?
9. Team play: Yeah, there are superstar players that are seen as larger than their teams or even the league, but, in my humble opinion, basketball is a game that has to be won by a team and cannot just be dominated by a single player. In baseball, a pitcher can single-handedly win a game (at least in the national league… and he would still probably need two hands), but even when a basketball player dominates a game with a 40-, 50-, or 60-point performance, that's almost never enough. It's not necessarily enough to even guarantee a win.
8. The pace: Baseball is my favorite sport, so I'm not one of those ADD people who can't watch a game where the score might not change for a half hour. Still, there is something to be said for the pace of a good basketball game. Of course, I do prefer a game with some defense over a Phoenix-style game with over 200 points scored. I like that basketball is one sport where the adage that 'no lead is ever safe' is almost always true. Sure, I've seen nine-run lead blown in baseball and football teams come back from 21-point deficits, but in basketball, double-digit leads can melt away almost every night (if not into losses, at least into surprisingly close finishes).
7. Texas basketball: I'm talking about the state here and not UT. Growing up in the DFW area during the lowest of the lows for the Mavericks, it was exciting to watch the Rockets and then the Spurs win some titles and bring some basketball honor to the Lone Star state. Of course, now the Spurs are something of rivals to the Mavericks, but I'd still rather see them win a title than the Lakers any day.
6. Olympic basketball: I, for one, love how much basketball has spread internationally. As much as I loved watching the Dream Team in the Barcelona games, in a way, I find it almost as exciting that Argentina knocked out Team USA and went on to win the gold in Athens. It's not that I'm unpatriotic, but with all the American dominance (Team USA has won 13 of 17 gold medals and medalled in every Olympiad not boycotted), I think it's good to see some competition from countries in the southern and eastern hemispheres.
5. Michael Jordan: I may have other personal favorite players, but I grew up in the Jordan era, and he shaped my vision of what it meant to play basketball. Needless to say, when I got the number 23 jersey in sixth grade, I was psyched.
4. The rebound: There is something glorious about the rebound, in my opinion. It's unlike anything else in sports. The quick changes in momentum, the second-chance points, the aggression…
3. The playoffs: I am not one of those fans who complains that the length and structure of the NBA playoffs make the regular season meaningless. The length of the series usually ensures that the better (if not the higher-seeded team) team wins, and a previously mediocre team doesn't usually blaze through the playoffs on a hot streak. Of course, there are flukes like in 2007 when the Mavericks had far and away the best record in the NBA and lost in the first round to Don Nelson's 8-seed Golden State Warriors. And the Finals, beyond the cheesy marketing, are almost always entertaining, even if your team has been done for weeks.
2. The NCAA Tournament: I remember filling out my first bracket in the fifth grade. I've never won a bracket pool, and I've never even been a huge college basketball fan, but I'm certainly not alone in succumbing to the mass hysteria that is March Madness.
1. The Mavericks: my Mav love has dissipated in the last few years, like so many youthful romances. Since I moved to DFW, I have witnessed the Mavericks transformed from a team that lost 71 games in a season to a team that went to the NBA Finals (winning a total of 74 games) and had a 67-win season. Without dwelling on the fate of that 67-win team, I saw the hapless losers gradually morph into a championship-caliber team… and then settle into a slightly above-average team. And for the record, I like Mark Cuban. I may not agree with everything he does, but I think he's a good owner for the team and the fans.

 
For the record, I have a women's ice hockey game on while I write this. USA! USA!
* This probably shows my age (or lack thereof). More importantly, Dave's move to CBS roughly coincided with my family's move to the Central time zone. So, I didn't see much of Dave at 12:35 when I was in third grade, but once I was in fifth grade (and his show started two hours earlier), his show was required viewing for me and my friends.