I go camping and miss out…
Except this time, it was so nice, I decided to stay for a while longer, and camp. I ended up staying at the park until late Tuesday, and then I went back for most of the day Wednesday.
I did listen to the games on my handy XM radio in my car, but it’s just not the same as watching it on TV. Listening to a baseball game on the radio is a bit like watching the game through a cardboard tube. You know what happened, and how it turned out, but the big picture is a little fuzzy and you feel like you missed out on a lot of the details. Especially when you have to listen to an Angels broadcast…
I spent part of Thursday catching up to what happened in baseball over the past couple days, and part of the day helping my dad remove, clean, and grease all the zerks on the planter. (That’s farm stuff, for those who are befuddled as to what I’m talking about.)
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As far as I can tell, here’s what happened while I was enjoying the great outdoors of Nebraska:
- Jason Kendall and John Lackey got into a surprisingly fair fight in the second game against the Angels, until the benches had a dogpile contest on the field. I would have guessed Lackey would have taken the smaller, lighter Kendall down pretty quickly, but as it turned out, Kendall brought down “Slingblade” Lackey. It must have been the grit and heart and leadership that did it. It sure wasn’t his power…
- It appears that Cleveland and Oakland played a couple football games over the past two days. Scores of 14-3 and 12-4 in a split two game series are a bit unusual. That’s what you get when you add two inconsistent but powerful offenses to a couple bullpens still trying to find their identities. I would try and find out how often something like that has happened in the past, but I’m typing this from my laptop at the farm in Elkhorn, so I can’t run any retrosheet queries with mysql. Sorry… maybe later. To be honest, I’ll likely just forget, though.
- My friend Tim Smith of Lenexa, KS, whom I visited this past weekend, posted a diary on AN describing the series. He posted some nice pictures, too. Check it out, if you get a chance.
- The A’s signed a rather impressive Div II college kid on Thursday. Carlos Gutierrez is a two time CIAA player of the year, and owns pretty much every offensive record at his school. Very impressive, as far as I can tell. He decided not to enter the draft in June, opting for a free agent signing instead. I’m not too sure why he chose to do that, but I’m guessing he thought he would have a bigger payday this way. I don’t think it’s a common route to take these days.
HollywoodOz, of Notes from the Nat, has a good rundown on the kid. As a sidenote, that blog is one of the better ones I’ve run across, and I highly recommend checking it out, especially if you like well written commentary and minor league baseball.
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Over the next few days, I have a few things that will be keeping me busy, such as a friend’s 21st birthday, two college graduations and parties, and some farm work, so it’s going to be a little more time before I can write again on here. Ideally, I’d like to be able to post 8-10 times a week, but sometimes life distracts me… hey, look over there…
Anyway, I’ll be back with plenty more by Monday, including at least one book review, a look into the stats of the A’s at this point in the season, an interesting email run-in with an author of one of the books I reviewed, and much more.
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Oh, and last but not least… Who is in charge over at the A’s site? Last week it was Dan Johnson getting shafted on a homer by being replaced by a Kotsay reference, and now it seems Ron Flores isn’t even being called by the correct name in the post game wrap. It still hasn’t been fixed, by the way, even though it’s been up for well over a day.
