2013 MLB Regular Season running thread

I score every Major League game I go to and some of the minor league ones. Going to one on Sunday — might not get a hot dog since I'm trying to lose weight but a card will be mandatory. The cheapskates that sell you the pen/pencil separately, however, can go to that deep part of hell reserved for the Black Sox and Bud Selig.

I don't even score games I cover (I prefer to write out the play-by-play so I don't have to translate it back into sentences when I write).

The thing about the Tigers isn't necessarily that they have a batch of undeserving All-Stars, it's that for a team with so much talent, they have so many glaring holes right now.

Alex Avila was so bad in the first three months of the season (currently .177/.276/.297) that he went on the 15-day DL with a suck in late June. He's actually been slightly BETTER than the above numbers in the last 10 games. The options behind him at catcher are Brayan Pena, who has played to roughly replacement level, and Bryan Holaday, who is an average everyday catcher...in AAA.

In the outfield, Torii Hunter has been dramatically better than I expected, but Austin Jackson missed a month with a bad hammy after getting out to a great start, leftfielder Andy Dirks has regressed from 2012 Dominican Winter League hero to singles hitter (while platoon partner Matt Tuiasosopo plays suprisingly little for someone who has the second-highest OPS on the team) and Martinez had me seriously wondering if his career was over up until about three weeks ago.

Then, of course, there's the bullpen, which has been a complete dumpster fire.

The plan was for chunky fireballer Bruce Rondon to come in and close, but he only started throwing strikes two weeks ago, so they had to do the Valverde thing (that ended predictably) leading to the current state of affairs:

Joaquin Benoit — good eighth-inning guy who gives up too many HRs and always has one horrifically bad month a year (which he hasn't yet — yikes!)
Al Albuquerque — one of the best sliders in the AL, but only when he throws his other pitches for strikes, which happens about one in every three outings.
Phil Coke — currently physically incapable of getting a righty out.
Octavio Dotel — 60-day DL (elbow)
Drew Smyly — solid long guy who lost the Tigers' fifth-starter battle and happens to be the only Tiger pitcher with mono-chromatic eyes and a WHIP under 1.

And a bunch of below-average mop-up guys like Darin Downs, Luke Putkonen, et. al.

What you get is a team that is 3-9 in extra-inning games, 9-12 in one-run games and does not respond well in pressure situations (18 of their wins have been by 5 or more). I figure they'll be fine over the second half, but they currently are annoying the hell out of me.

 

One of my favorite things about going through my boxes and boxes of old things at my parents' house from time to time is finding an old ballpark scorecard with my childhood handwriting in them with names like "Calderon" or "Moreland" or "Cey" or "Baines."

 

I've got you beat, and this is no joke. I was an avid 'Bases Loaded' Nintendo player as a kid, and I would often keep score for my games. As a side-note tangent to that, I didn't kiss a girl until I was 16.

 

I never went *that* far but I was very good (the best) at RBI Baseball. In my first apartment we had RBI marathons that lasted into the night -- but we added a twist and started betting on them. I was very good, so were my 2 roomies and a few of our common friends.

One night I'm on a roll, can't be touched, but George V. thinks he can scrape some money off me. I beat him 1-0 the first game and win 50 bucks or something. He doubles down and I beat him again. And again and before you know it I'm into him for $1,300. At that point I stopped playing and demanded some of the money. George refused and said he'd win it back in the morning. He never paid me. I'm not a violent man but I was ready to break some kneecaps because had I lost that amount of money to George he would have been in my face till I paid him every penny.

 

Sometimes I can't tell if a scorecard I've found in a notebook at my mom's house is from a real game or a Strat-O-Matic game.

 

You should post a few of them here and let people try to figure it out. Could be fun.

 

My dad was a huge baseball fan. When I was a kid, he bought the 1980 ABBA card set. For those unfamiliar, it was a dice and card game. Each player had numbers printed on the card (like 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-2, 2-3, etc., all the way up to 6-6). You rolled one red die and one white die, looked up the number and went to a poster-sized cardboard card with all sorts of game situations on it to find out what happened. Rolling doubles always resulted in some sort of hit, 1-3 was always a strikeout, then any other situation was possible with other rolls.

Anyway, we used to play that game for hours. We drafted two 25-man teams and, later, two 10-man minor league teams. We combined the ABBA set-up with another baseball game that had a board and player pieces, and would swap out the teams between innings. We'd write down lineups, keep score, and played an entire season. My dad taught me how to keep score that way. I still use his system to this day. Some years later I found the scorebook in my mom's attic and it was like reliving every game.
Some of my best memories of my dad are playing that game together.

 

At the end of the game, did you play "The Winner Takes It All" on your 8-track?

 

Max Scherzer will not improve to 14-0 today. Looks headed to his first loss.

 

Giants-Red rainout on 7/4 to be made up in SF 7/23 as traditional doubleheader, but, Reds will be home team and wear their home unis in one of the games.

 

Nothing happening in San Diego through six.

 

He's thrown 103 pitches. Won't last unless it's a combined effort.