|
||
|
I was just watching paintball on ESPN. Yes: paintball. Words fail me. Not really a sport than lends itself particularly well to TV coverage, since there's too much going on at the same time. I suppose it might be quite cool if they were using real bullets though. But I prefer quality entertainment. Such as the world premiere of Mammoth, on the Sci-Fi Channel at 9pm [AZ time] tonight. I can imagine the tagline: "It's wooly...and it's pissed". The Academy might as well hand over the Oscars right now. The VCR has been set, needless to say.
Yes, VCR. We are still stuck in the dark ages of VHS, having stalwartly refused to switch to Tivo. Despite working for a hi-tech company, I am strangely Luddite about such things: it took me ages to get a DVD player, for example. Though this was partly because I already had several hundred laserdiscs [the precursor to DVD: just LP-sized rather than CD. Oh, crap, I'm going to have to explain what an "LP" is now, amn't I? Let's just forget it...] It's more of an apathy, really. Apart from 24, we don't watch any shows regularly; spare time is not our friend. Making it "easy" to record stuff, would simply result in a monstrous backlog, like the DVD one: I have discs bought on our honeymoon, July 2001, that have yet to see the inside of a players.
Baseball? Oh, if you insist. A couple of losses in a row makes our overall record 7-10. Not quite enough to begin launching lifeboats, but a good performance this road trip is doubly-important, since it's against the other members of the NL West. So far, seems that when we've hit, we haven't pitched, and when we've pitched, we haven't hit. The result? We've outscored the opposition by five runs, despite the 4th-worst record in the NL. Meanwhile, the Giants are tied for the lead, despite the 4th-worst run differential. Where's the fairness? Where's the justice? Where's Dayn Perry when you need him?
Over at Beyond the Box Score, they've started doing their Power Rankings. As of Wednesday - I know, I'm a little behind - we were ranked 17th, just behind the Dodgers (16th), with the Rockies leading the pack (11th). That seems more in line with the performances we've seen, though our rotation has got to stop believing they're 10-year olds playing Little league games, where six innings is a complete game. Thus, insert generic preview sentence, #37. "We'll be hoping for [insert non-Brandon member of the rotation] to bounce back from a poor outing in his previous appearance." Tonight, it's Miguel Batista, who has had one good start, one mediocre, and his last was really crappy. He's still racking up the K's, however, with 22 in 17.2 innings. Just a shame about the 24 hits and seven walks. Memo to Miguel: you are not a closer any more, we need more than one good inning from you.
We face Jae Seo, the man with the shortest name in the major-leagues. [I'm stating this with blind assurance, rather than based on any actual research, mind you] He's been going the opposite way from Batista, with his last outing his longest and best: six innings of two-run ball versus the Giants, though he got zero run support and took the loss. At least he's a rightie, so I'm hoping for more offense. Not that it seems to make much difference: overall, we're only six points of batting average better against RHP; our OPS is actually ten points worse. So we'll see how that holds up tonight.
And this time, I'm bringing my headphones...