Running 2017 MLB regular season thread

Sit down Hobbs.

 

As if the last few weeks haven't been strange enough for the Dodgers, or the whole season for the Giants: A rare lightning storm delayed the start of Monday's game at AT&T, then a downpour halted the game after one batter. They're now looking at a 10:50 p.m. PDT restart.

 

I just got home.

Did the car/train combo up, waited out the early delay, saw the first batter, then the long delay began, EPIC lightning storm, bailed to catch the 9:30 train, got to car at 10:00, got home at 10:50 -- while listening to the second batter.

For the story of the time we went to an MLB game and saw one batter, I'll take it. Was also hilarious to watch the grounds crew begin to lift the tarp on three separate occasions, only to have God immediately smite them down with more rain and/or lightning.

On the baseball side of things, the Dodgers stacked their lineup with five lefties against Giants right-handed Chris Stratton -- which is really a problem now because Stratton didn't come back after the delay and the Giants went with lefty Ty Blach.

3-0 Giants after 2.

 

Per teh Twitterez, Dodgers didn't want to play on Thursday, a mutual day off, since they're scheduled to be in Washington on Friday.

 

Thursday is their only day off in a 30-day stretch.

 

And they only have one more day off the rest of the way after that.

 

So tempted to try to watch this one until it's over. Why do I think it's going to go 19 innings and end up 23-22?

 

Giants win 8-6. Game ended about 2:11 a.m. PDT. 11th straight loss for the Dodgers.

 

A couple interesting things about that movie. The kid who played the batboy was working at a Buffalo-area fruit stand when one of the movie people saw him and put him in the film. Talk about getting discovered.

I found this site, which describes the current status of the different locations of the film in Buffalo. The Buffalo train station that served as the Chicago station where Roy and Sam walk through later closed and became abandoned. There's a couple of pics here, but if you look online, you'll see more of the station in its abandoned state. Quite sad, actually, although preservation efforts are continuing.

Forgotten Buffalo featuring Locations of the Natural - film, movie

And on a personal note, I saw a bunch of comments on a Yahoo story about the movie a couple of years ago. One of the commenters said that he had worked in the film, and described how much fun it was. He said Redford used to host picnics for the entire cast and crew and was just a regular guy. So I asked him who he played in the film, and he said he was Young Berry, the Pirates starting pitcher in the final game. I asked him how he got the role, and he said there was an ad seeking baseball players in the area for the movie. He answered the ad and got the role. If it truly was him, it was kinda cool to communicate with someone who had a role in one of my favorite films.

 

19.

 

Can we please call the wildcard game what it is, a Play-In game. They should play both games as a double header in Dayton