Tag: baseball

World. Fucking. Series. Can you believe it?

We were at Monday’s game, where the Diamondbacks were swept, advancing the Rockies to the World Series, a first for the club. Are you ready for a post-season bulleted list summary?

• Tickets to this game were $70 each for possibly the worst field-level seats you could get. And they were hard to get, unless you did like me and bought them back when it looked like the Rockies weren’t going to get the wild card.
• We left at 6:00, and first pitch was 8:18, but the place filled up ultra fast. There were also way more people than usual in purple, with purple hair, with signs, with posters, and in costume. Granted, the thing was being broadcast on TBS across the country, which was a new one.
• Sunday’s game got on and off rain and temps in the 40s, which was pretty horrid. We had the same temps, and some wind, but no moisture. It started out not bad, then got cold, then after the game, it was unbearable. I went there with a t-shirt and black leather jacket; after an inning or two, I added a hooded sweatshirt to it. Taking off my coat to put on the sweater was like changing spacesuits in a vacuum.
• Eric Byrnes, who had not-kind words to say about the Rockies, was in left field, right below us. The people in our section were absolutely horrible to him. It went beyond the entire section chanting “YOU SUCK” and booing at every at bat; people were screaming some fairly fucked up shit at him. I’m not complaining, but it was funny, especially the guy who yelled “HEY ERIC, I HOPE YOU LIKE TO PLAY GOLF, BECAUSE YOU AREN’T PLAYING BASEBALL TOMORROW”.
• Unique plays: someone hit a line drive right at Troy Tulowitzki, but maybe nine feet in the air. Without even showing any effort, he leaped in the air and caught it. It was like a basketball manuver or something. Also, a baserunner took off when Ubaldo Jimanez was pitching. Instead of throwing to third to get the guy, he kept the ball, sprinted off the mound, and tagged him.
• I went to take a leak, and when I was coming back and when the usher wouldn’t let me in, Matt Holliday smashed his three-run homer. I watched it practically float way above the stands in the air, and then plummet down and into the fountain at the far side of the field.
• John Elway was at the game, and when they showed him on the big screen, people cheered like Jesus announced he would be cutting an album with Tim McGraw and Shooter Jennings.
• People didn’t cheer, but George Brett was also there. I’m guessing he’s pals with old teammate Clint Hurdle, but maybe he just likes baseball.
• The game was another one of these back-and-forth pitching battles, and although the Rockies had a five-run lead at one point, that shrunk to two points.
• Our seats were okay with two issues. One was this group of two girls sitting next to me, who basically paid $70 plus $10 a beer to spill beer all over themselves, not watch the game, piss off everyone behind them, and yell stupid shit. The other was this whorish girl sitting behind us who kept yelling at every possible moment in one of those too-loud, I am a whore who will sleep with anyone at a sports bar sort of voices. Also, the one next to me kept swinging her towel around, and every time, it came within millimeters of knocking me in the face. Luckily, both entities had to leave for an inning every inning to go smoke or buy more beer to spill, so it wasn’t that bad.
• By the height of the game, it was so incredible just how many people were there and how nobody was leaving. After going to so many day games where the attendance didn’t crack ten thousand, it was so overwhelming to see 52,000 people, all on their feet, all yelling and cheering.
• Byrnes made the final out in the top of the ninth, which was fitting. Then the line of a thousand cops came out, the fireworks went out, everybody was screaming, the new NL Champion graphics came up, and a ton of workers constructed this makeshift stage at second base. The team was awarded a trophy the size of a grandfather clock, and all of the players had their wives and kids out on the field. (Matsui was with wife and kid, and I didn’t even know he was married.) When an interviewer asked Holliday if he and coach Hurdle talked a lot about the series day-to-day, he said they spent more time talking about their fantasy football pool. Then a bunch of players ran back to right above our seats to hoist up the 2007 NL Champion flag onto the flagpole, and everyone else ran into the locker room for yet another round of Bathing in Champagne.
• Everyone either went apeshit yelling and screaming, or found the TBS cameras and went crazy trying to get on TV. We had to walk all the way around the stadium, which took forever. Outside, there were cops everywhere, and a bunch of people got arrested for dancing on top of a cop car and denting it in. But otherwise, we got home with no major problem, except it was 12:30 and the car horns went off for another hour or so.

Pictures? Of course!. Don’t mind the blurriness; I had to shoot fast, and the whole lit up at night thing confuses the camera sometimes.

It’s been a strange summer for baseball for me, and I thought that it was over back on the 19th when we saw the Dodgers. Colorado won, and the Rockies were doing well coming out of that, but my schedule got too weird to get in on any of the other games, and I figured that victory would be a nice high note to end on, and then the team would get blocked by the end of the year by the Padres or something.

And it has been strange being a baseball fan here. First of all, I was not really that much of a baseball fan prior to moving here – I saw a couple of games, it was neat, but I didn’t know the difference between a foul tip and a strike. And when we moved to Colorado, most people asked me if Denver even had a major league team, and I found that among many locals, the Rockies were somewhat of an inside joke, something that took off with a flash about fifteen years ago, and then slowly took its place behind football, hockey, soccer, and basketball. Hell, the rodeo is bigger than football was back in Indiana.

But I had an apartment a block from the stadium, I had a work-at-home/part-time gig that let me skip out for day games, and tickets were usually cheaper than going to a movie in New York. So I went whenever I could. And two things happened. First, I learned to really love baseball. I love the mathematical aspect of it, the statistics and numbers and team records and batting averages. I also love the subtleties behind the game. Football (as far as I see it) is this brute force game of conquest, of pushing and shoving and blocking. (The passing game is another story, though.) Basketball: endurance, and running back and forth; it’s basically a track and field event with a ball added. Hockey: I don’t even understand hockey. But everything in baseball is knowing how to gradually change your stance or your angle or your position in order to exploit a known issue with the other team. The difference between a strikeout and a home run is a millimeter’s difference in how you hold the bat. A split-second decision in fielding is the difference between the other team scoring two or three times in one hit versus turning a triple play. You have to be strong to belt one 500 feet, but a little dude (like Kaz Matsui) can easily dominate the offense based on his ability to read the other team and react. And if a guy like Prince Fielder, who makes me look like a damn anorexic, can dominate the game, it makes me feel closer to the game, even if I could never play at the company softball skill level.

The other thing that happened is that the Rockies got good. They didn’t at first, but right around the time I started going, they started winning more games, and doing more impressive things on the field. They swept the Giants; they won two of three against the Red Sox at Boston. Then after a ton of losses, they swept the Mets. They swept the Yankees. They went into a slump, but swept the Brewers in one of the most lopsided set of games of the year. And as this picked up, I followed more games on the computer. I bought an AM radio to listen when I wasn’t there. I spent a lot of time reading up on players and opponents and history and the game itself. And I loved it even more.

And then it got weird. The Rockies simply could not lose. They lost three pitchers and had to replace them with triple-A transplants or kids right off the boat from the Dominican Republic. Matt Holliday messed up his oblique muscle. Matsui strained a ligament. They brought up a catcher, a replacement for a replacement, that dorked up his leg early in his very first MLB start. But they kept winning. A four-game sweep against the Dodgers. A road trip where they swept the Padres, then swept the Dodgers again. Then two of three against the Diamondbacks. And that meant the Rockies were tied with San Diego for the wildcard. In a 13-inning game at Coors Field, the Rockies just barely squeaked by and got the spot. People were going absolutely apeshit here – some people were actually more interested in the Rockies than the Broncos. And then the Rockies beat Philly twice on the road, (which included a phenomenal grand slam by non-power-hitter Matsui) setting up a huge huge huge Saturday night game, which could advance the Rockies to the next level, where they’ve never been before.

Anyway, I managed to get two tickets to the Saturday game by sheer luck. I bought them online before the wild card was decided, meaning I basically made a $150 bet that they’d finish. But they did, and I went to the box office and picked up my tickets on Friday. They’re different than the regular season tickets, printed on a golden-looking ticket blank. I even managed to get club seats, which meant we got to hang out in the fancy concourse and we had padded seats that were wider than the regular ones. Nice.

The game started at 7:30, so we left at 6:00, and there were already masses of people everywhere. Notably absent were ticket scalpers, since it was a sold out game and nobody was parting with their seats. Everyone got a free Rockies towel to wave around. By the time we got to our seats, it was almost an hour before the game started, and over half of the seats were already full. That’s about how many people show up for the average ho-hum game during the season, and I knew the crowd would double. It was at least as crowded as when we saw the Yankees, an event that brought out droves of no-neck shitheads to boo the home team because their $200 million dollar roster was getting slaughtered by a $50 million dollar team. This time, it was a sea of purple and spinning towels.

There were many changes this evening over all of the regular season games I saw. First, the NLDS logos were everywhere: on the grass, on the signs, on the souvenir cups you get with a Coke, and on many t-shirts, official and bootleg, in and on the audience. The advertisements were different; probably because of some MLB-brokered postseason deal. Some of the ads contradicted other ads in the stadium: a Budweiser next to a Coors; a Pepsi next to a Coke. Some were ads completely new to Coors Field: XM, Nike, TBS. They also showed some between-inning PSAs that we don’t usually get, like one about steroids. Ironically, another was for some “best season ever” thing that spotlighted Barry “will work for HGH” Bonds, which got many boos. The biggest change was the national anthem; a million Marines brought out this football field-sized flag and opened it up. Then there were a few shots of fireworks, and a million purple balloons were released into the sky. There was also a long, protracted introduction of all of the players and staff of each team. There were six umpires instead of four. Also, there was a video of John Elway saying “go Rockies” or some shit, and if Jesus would have showed up and told everyone there were keys under their seats for a free Hummer H1, it would have gotten less applause.

One of the more moving things in the game (as if there was a shortage) was the first pitch. Mike Coolbaugh was a player turned batting coach for one of Colorado’s minor league teams. Last July, he was coaching at first base and was hit in the head with a line drive, which killed him. He left behind a pregnant wife and two young boys, three and five years old. The Rockies have gone the extra mile in helping out the Coolbaugh family, holding charity events, and opening up their own checkbooks. When Matt Holliday won the Clemente award, he basically signed the back of the check and gave it to Amanda Coolbaugh. The team also unanimously voted to give the family a full share of their playoff earnings (not the *team’s* earnings, but the *player’s* earnings, right out of their pockets), and guessing at how the stadium sold out, that should be a decent chunk of change. Anyway, young Josh and Jacob were cute, and got a standing ovation from 51,000 people without a dry eye among them. As I read on a constant basis about what total shitheads most professional athletes are these days, it always amazes me when the Rockies do something like this.

We joked a lot about the plague of locusts or whatever that fucked with the pitchers in the Yankees-Indians game the night before. And a second later, these huge gale-force winds started blowing in, right into home plate. They whipped around a ton of garbage, and pitchers were able to put major heat on the ball, while the offense couldn’t hit anything out. And with the wind, the temp dropped fast. I was wearing a light jacket and thin t-shirt, and suddenly wanted a winter coat and gloves. Sarah went to the gift shop and bought a ton of stuff, and I guess everyone else did too, because the store looked like a grocery store the day before a blizzard. I put on a second shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, and that mostly kept me warm. I felt sorry for all of those Latin American ball players who never saw temps below the mid-80s in their lives.

Then, in the middle of the second inning, all of the lights in all of the light clusters went out, one by one, and in about three seconds, the entire field was dark. I seem to remember this happening at a Cubs game recently, and of course Lou threw a fit, because that is a game-calling event. A minute later, a small subset of the field lights went on, like those emergency lights that go on when the power goes out. All of the other lights were on, though. A quick-thinking PA dude put on the Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”. Within 15 minutes, the lights were back on, and the game continued.

And what a weird game. It was one of those pitching battles, where there were no hits or walks, and it just went back and forth, except every time Jimanez threw a pitch, there was a huge cheer. If it was two outs and a 1-1 count, everyone was on their feet like it was the final out of the final game of the World Series. Same goes for balls thrown against Rockies players. But nobody was making any progress, until the 5th inning, when the Rockies got in one. I was pretty sure the entire stadium was going to get rocked off of its foundation after what normally would be a pretty mediocre run. Then the Phillies got a single-shot homer via Victorino in the 7th to tie it up, and I anticipated the game going back and forth for another 19 innings.

In the 8th, Holliday and Helton both flied out, and things started looking very dicey. Then Atkins got a single; Hawpe got a single, and Atkins got to third. The next up was pinch hitter Jeff Baker. Baker hadn’t played much this year, and then in a Cubs series, he got hit in the face by a fast pitch, which gave him a concussion and kept him out for a while. But for whatever reason, Hurdle sent him in, and the crowd went absolutely apeshit. And on the second pitch, Baker singled a grounder to right field, driving in Atkins, and riled up everyone like throwing bloody meat into a shark tank.

At the end of the 8th, at least a hundred security people came out to the field, standing at each side three feet apart. In the 9th, Manny Corpas came to the mound, and people were yelling and screaming at each pitch, more than ever. Ryan Howard – strikeout. Aaron Rowand – a dribbled ground ball right at Helton on first base. Victorino, who had the only home run of the game, came to the plate It seems like four hours between each pitch. Strike. Foul. Ball. Then a grounder to Matsui at 2nd, throw to Todd at first – and that’s that.

Everyone was going totally absolutely apeshit. Towels were everywhere. Brooms were all over. A huge barrage of fireworks were shooting out of the scoreboard. All of the Rockies charged the field. At least a dozen police motorcycles drove up onto the warning track, and there was a SWAT team truck below our section. The screen went to the cameras in the clubhouse, and there was an entire boatload of champagne being shot all over. LaTroy Hawkins was dancing like he was auditioning for a part in Breakin’ 3. We went downstairs and I took a lot of video with my camera. I looked out onto Blake street, and there were tens of thousands of people running around, yelling, with purple hair, purple face paint, brooms, signs, and spinning towels. We fought our way back downstairs, and Glen Hurdle was trying to give a speech on the monitors, but he looked like he just jumped into a swimming pool of bubbly. Outside, every car horn in a two mile radius was glued down. Every person we walked past wanted a high-five. Luckily, we were only a block away, and got inside with no worries.

Now that would be a great end to my season, right? Almost – I got us tickets to see the second home game of the NLCS, against the Diamondbacks. Should be fun! (Especially if it snows first.)

Anyway, pix here.

I went to the Rockies-Giants game yesterday, but there’s not much to mention. Barry Bonds did not play, but I did see a number of people with homemade asterisk shirts, which was cool. It was hotter than hell on earth, and I was sitting in the second row of section 106, which is on the ground, right behind the right fielder. There was no shade whatsoever, and although the view was different than usual and very close to Brad Hawpe, you can’t really see pitches or what the hitter’s doing. I did, however, have this crazy fan next to me who was yelling at the top of his lungs at each play. He was heckling the pitcher right as he slipped in the third and allowed Jeff Francis to hit a double and start off a seven-run bitch-slapping from which the Giants never recovered.

The worst part of it is that my fucking camera broke. It may have happened on the way back from Indiana, I’m not sure. It let me sporadically take a picture or two, but when you shake it, you can hear a part rattling around. I’ve hated this camera ever since I got it in 2005, but it’s taken some decent pictures. It has also been all over the place with me: Hawaii, Vegas, Berlin, Amsterdam, Alaska, and a bunch of states in between. But it’s also one of those mini-pseudo-SLR sized cameras, which doesn’t fit in a bag or a pocket well. And it is horrible as far as low-light situations. The internal battery is also dead, so if I take out the AAs for more than a minute, it forgets the date and all of my settings. So I jumped online last night and bought a Canon PowerShot A570IS. It’s a lot smaller, more pixels, also uses AAs, but uses SD, so I had to get another card. (Anyone in the market for a 1G xD card?) It also has image stabilization, which might be cool or might just be a gimmick. Anyway, I hope to have it for Friday’s game against the Padres.

If you’re wondering about the zine, it’s getting there. The cover and the interior are done; I just bought the ISBN and I have to wait 3 or 4 business days for them to get back to me with the actual number, then I order a proof. The art is all in and looks awesome – each story has a title page that has fucked up art on it, and the cover is awesome, too. Anyway, stay tuned on that.

I just finished reading Population: 485 by Michael Perry. It’s the tale of a writer who lives in a tiny farm town in Wisconsin, so it’s fitting that I bought it in Milwaukee at this weird planned community slash mall that’s designed like a tiny town, except in the EPCOT center. Anyway, Perry’s story is interlaced with his duty as a volunteer fireman for the town’s emergency services. There are two things going on here: one is the macho ER adrenaline junkie stories of fire and death, which is interesting. The other is an attempt to take the small-town mix of deer-hunting, Packers, and pickup trucks and validate it somehow.

I thought about this a lot, since I read this book right after spending some time in my old childhood home town of Edwardsburg, Michigan. Edwardsburg was maybe pushing a thousand people when I lived there in the 70s, maybe less than that. There was a lot more fishing than hunting, due to all of the lakes. And the main strip of downtown was probably bigger, although they didn’t get their first fast-food restaurant until maybe the late 90s. Edwardsburg was also close enough to Elkhart and South Bend that people could survive without a Kroger or a mall or a movie theater, since they could jump in a car and drive a few minutes south. But the village always had a certain feel to me, a place where the tallest building was an abandoned feed mill, and even if there were only a few hundred people in the high school, they still had three strings of football teams.

Perry spent a lot of time trying to justify the life of his small town to the folks on the coasts that think that the great red plain is cultureless and lifeless. I appreciate that he went this way with it, because so many books in this space tend to be demeaning, or look down at rural culture from an ivory tower and frame it in such a way that the NPR crowd can look at it and moan about how horrible red states are. Perry did an honest job of describing the small-towners, and it made for a good read. The ending got a little weird, and the death and injury angle also got a little overwhelming, but I still liked it overall.

I have a million zine-related tasks to pull together, and I just can’t get rolling. Maybe I need more caffeine.

The Rockies-Brewers game yesterday wasn’t even funny in its cruelty. This one doesn’t even deserve the bulleted list. Basically, the Rockies drove in 8 runs by the bottom of the 2nd, including a 2nd inning of 7 runs that seemed like it would never end. The bases got loaded, and then it was doubles and triples and homers, and all of these people kept running in, and it was like the beaches of Normandy for the Brewers. The third inning: three more. The fourth inning: five more. Tony Graffanino, the Brewers’ star second baseman, jumped for a catch and tore out his knee. And the Brewers went through every single pitcher they had there. Yost seriously almost had to get a position player to pitch the 8th and 9th inning, which would be interesting from the freak anomaly standpoint. The game ended at 19-4. It was funny, one of the announcers on the radio said “the Brewers are down two touchdowns now” and the other said “it’s like the score to a Broncos-Packers game”.

In other weirdness, that pitch that hit Jason Hirsch in the leg in the first inning yesterday, it turns out it BROKE his leg. And he pitched six innings. That’s pretty hardcore.

Pictures, soon, whenever I get around to captioning them. Brooms galore. I also found a new place to eat at the ballpark, there is this cluster of shops hidden behind a tavern that have a lot of non-ballpark food like deli sandwiches and gourmet pizzas that aren’t rubbery Papa John’s personal pan things. Yesterday I cheated though, and bought a bunch of sodas and water from the vending machine in my building at $1.25 each instead of $5.75 each, and then put an icepack in my bag. Worked fine, even in the 95 degree heat.

Three Cubs games this weekend, and I can’t even remember what’s going on besides baseball. I am trying to write on this book, and it is going somewhat. And the zine, it’s in stasis until I get a couple of bios and releases from people. The layout is pretty close though. And the artwork is on its way. I hope to get it to the printer in another week or two. Or three. We’ll see.

OK, on to that writing.

I didn’t plan it, but we went to the Rockies-Brewers game last night. Sarah got tickets from work, and she had to miss Monday’s game, so we went last night. Here’s the details:

• We were in section 133, row 27,seats 1+2. That’s on the floor, behind home plate, about two sections in from where the screen starts on the left, and about halfway back. Pretty damn close, and the first time I’ve sat in the infield box in a night game.
• The screen messed up my use of binoculars for the most part. And my battery charger fucked up, so my camera was non-operational.
• Remember yesterday how I said I never wanted to get a hot dog again? It was dollar hot dog night. I passed this up and got a bratwurst, but that didn’t go so well.
• Jason Hirsh was back on the mound after a very bad sprain of his left leg. So the second Brewers batter line drives it right into the same leg. Every medical professional in the state of Colorado is suddenly on the field, and I seriously thought they were going to take him off on a stretcher. But he walked it off, took a couple of test pitches, and was fine.
• Ed Bellorin is a catcher that spent nine years in the minors, and got moved up from AAA to the Rockies to play his first major-league game that night. (Ianetta got sent down, because he can’t bat for shit these days.) In the second inning, he jammed his leg and ended his ML start with a blown hamstring. That sucks.
• Slow game, but by the middle of the sixth, it was 3-0 Brewers, and it looked like they’d lock it up.
• I go to take a piss. The Rockies hit a homer and two singles before I’m able to finish. I go to buy some nachos. The stupid bitch at the register takes 45 minutes examining someone’s ID, and the guy behind the counter doesn’t understand English and I’m screaming “NACHOS NACHOS NACHOS YOU STUPID FUCK WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M TRYING TO GET MY PASSPORT RENEWED JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING NACHOS NOW!” By the time I get back to my seat, Garret Atkins singles and it’s now 3-2.
• Pitching change. Double. Intentional walk of Brad Hawpe. Single. Everyone is total apeshit. Couple of outs. Five runs in one inning, three while I’m at the urinal, and it’s 5-3.
• Todd Helton homers in the 7th. Hate the goatee, love the home runs.
• In the bottom of the 8th, the Rockies get in two runs because the ball went right through Prince Fielder’s hands; this was his second bone-headed error. To be fair, Holliday dropped the ball in a very obvious way twice that night. And as a side note, one of those resulted in a Prince Fielder triple. That dude is shorter than me and weighs about 50 pounds more, so it’s pretty amazing to see that he can walk, let alone run. It was hilarious.
• Todd Helton then hit another home run, driving in two other players, and making the score 11-3.
• Someone hit a foul back over the mesh and into the second deck, and a guy in the front row just quickly raised his bare hand and whap, caught it. It was the best fan catch I’ve ever seen, and it looked like he did it without thinking. Also, at some point, Jamie Carroll hit a foul ball very high in the third deck – it looked almost like it was going to go out. That was pretty cool.
• I believe the Brewers went through four or five pitchers, and their bullpen is already pretty fucked. Also, Jorje Julio pitched for the Rockies for the 8th, and that guy’s a demon – I think his slowest pitch was like 96 MPH.
• Before the 9th, they announced that Barry ‘Juice’ Bonds hit #756, and they showed the video on the screen. Every single person in the park was booing. I’m thinking of bringing a sign to the park today that says BARRY BONDS – 756*.
• In the top of the ninth, two doubles got the Brewers another run, but that was that. Final score: 11-4.

I have tickets a few sections over but in the same row for today’s 1:05 against the Brewers. Then tickets up in the 330s for the Cubs on Thu, Sat, and Sun. Lots of baseball. I need to invest in some better food to bring in with me, though.

Last night was the first home game in a series against the Brewers. Lazy as always, so here’s the bullet list:

• I felt slightly conflicted about the game when I bought tickets, because aside from the Rockies, I think the Brewers are my second-favorite team. And I now have a certain connection to Milwaukee, they have a great park, they are also somewhat of an underdog, and they have been doing well this year.
• The Brewers came off a brutal loss to the Phillies that burned through their entire bullpen, so their pitching was hurt. But, they have a hard-hitting offense, and at 5280 feet, that means home runs.
• No sausage race. No Bernie Brewer. No bratwurst, other than the crappy ones they sell at Coors Field. So that removes about 80% of the Brewers experience, unfortunately.
• It rained before the game, and looked pretty dreary outside, so I was fearful of even going. It was also much cooler than when I got rained on at the Phillies game, which would make it even worse. But it kept dry for the most part, aside from a sprinkle or two.
• There were only about 30,000 people there, which is probably the lowest attendance I’ve seen for a night game. Part of that was probably the rain, though.
• Every once in a while, I will smell a hot dog that someone else has, and think “damn, I need to get one too”, and when I do, it totally sucks. This happens pretty much every time I buy a hot dog at a baseball game. I will never learn.
• I was in section 332, the first row of the second part of the section. So I had a railing right in front of me, and I had to sit up to see over it. Otherwise, not bad seats.
• I bought a set of 10×50 binoculars, and those made things interesting. I didn’t mess with them during the game a lot, except to see who was warming up in the bullpen. But before the game, it was a good way to look into the dugout and how it was set up, and to see the players warming up. Like I saw Matsui’s translator with him on the field before he got started.
• Josh Fogg was the starting pitcher, and wasn’t throwing down major strikeouts, but he really had a way to keep the hits on the ground and very fieldable, which pretty much shut down the Brewers.
• Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun each had single homers, and both were pretty impressive. Fielder’s went into one of the exit ramps in right field, and this horde of people ran down the ramp, as it bounced and bounced away, which was funny to watch.
• In the first inning, Matsui almost hit a homer (hit right below the rail, then bounced out), and then Brad Hawpe hit a three-run homer. At this point, half the people there thought the game was over.
• In the second, Matt Holliday hit a two-run homer, and most of the people there thought the game was over.
• Nobody scored after Braun’s homer for the rest of the game, and it became one of those “who’s going to fuck up defensively and let the other team score nine runs” games, but it kept pretty tight.
• This Harley dealership does this stupid big-screen computer animated game with three pigs on bikes and you have to guess which one is going to win, and I swear at least half of the Brewers players were intently watching it to see which one would win.
• The “guess who said the quote” thing between innings was a Bob Eucker quote, and after they showed the answer, they showed a shot of Bob in the box, and that got more applause than anything else that night.
• The Rockies announcer always announces Matt Holliday’s name “Matt Hall-iday!” for some reason, and it always confused the fuck out of me because of Bill Hall of the Brewers, and I wondered what happened if they were both in one game. But it turns out the Brewers were keeping Hall out to give him some rest. He almost came in to pinch hit for Vargas, and was on deck, but it never happened.
• Fogg continued to pitch well all night, and had a very low pitch count. Vargas, not so much – I think he had one of the highest pitch counts of his career. He also had a fielding fuckup where someone hit a ball right at him, and he tried to catch it with his pitching hand, and it hit and went on to the shortstop. So he fucked the play, and his hand probably smarted a bit.
• In the 9th, it got really edgy. Then Troy Tulowitski had two majorly stupid errors. One, he pitched to first, but like twenty feet too high. The other, he tried to get to first instead of second on a double play and fucked it up. I am becoming more of a fan of his, because usually his fielding is excellent, but man he fucked up that inning.
• Final score: 6-2. Cubs fans rejoice, we cut down their lead for you.

Pictures, eh, eventually. Check the photo page.

One thing neat to me about Denver is we get these absolutely killer thunderstorms. I am not sure if it’s the altitude, the lack of humidity, or the rapid temp changes, but sometimes you get these wicked bursts where you swear someone is standing outside your window with a strobe gun. And to watch it at night is absolutely amazing, the way the bolts of lightning jump from the horizon and arc up to the dark clouds. We never had weather like this in Seattle, because the mountain ranges broke it up. New York sometimes had some dramatic storms, but when you’re in a brick shithouse apartment and your only view is your neighbor’s brick shithouse, it’s not as dramatic as having a full horizon view. I guess if you lucked out and were high up in a tall building, it would look cool with the lightning and the city below you, though. Probably the last place I had really good t-storms was in Bloomington.

And that reminds me of… Summer Rain. And it’s 15 years since that summer happened, which is a huge mindfuck for me, because so much of it feels like yesterday. And so much of it seems three universes ago, too. Of the many things that I recall from then, one of the strongest memories is watching these absolutely overwhelming rainstorms. There’s a scene in the book, which I probably don’t do justice to the environment, but I’m stuck at the north entrance of the IMU, and it’s pouring inches and inches of rain, to the point where the sound is overwhelming, like hearing a frying pan full of hot oil gurgle and explode at full tilt. And when a lightning strike hit, the darkness outside would suddenly get this brighter-than-day flashbulb for a split-second, and you’d see everything outside again like it was high noon. And every night I had a show at WQAX, it poured rain. If I did two shows a week, it would rain Tuesday and Thursday. If I subbed for someone on a Saturday, it poured. If I couldn’t make a show, no rain. That’s where the book title comes from.

And it’s also weird that it’s been 20 years since the summer when I got my driver’s license. I’ve gone on about this too much, the job at Taco Bell, my first CD player, my first car. It’s always weird to have a nice even number slapped on it. I mean, saying “I’ve been driving for 17 months and 12 days” is nothing like “I’ve been driving for 20 years”. And that’s a million worlds away – I’m 20 years and 1100 miles from there, and every old yuppie neighborhood is now a Mexican neighborhood, and one mall is dead and the other is dying, and my old Taco Bell is now a Mexican insurance agancy. But if I go to the Taco Bell on Colfax and order a Mexican pizza and a nachos with a Mountain Dew, it’s like a time machine back.

Anyway.

Vs. Brewers tonight at 7:05, if it doesn’t rain. And again Weds. at 1:05. Cubs on Thu, Sat, and Sun. I am not a huge fan of the Lou or anything; it just randomly ended up that way. BTW I got the 2K7 baseball game for Playstation 3, and man I have no hand-eye coordination whatsoever. It uses every button on the controller in 7 different ways, plus joystick motion. I was damn surprised when I was able to actually pull off the simplest of single plays, and I think I got a batter to make ball contact maybe three times. The neat thing about this is it has a manager mode, where you pick your franchise, draft or boot players according to budget, set ticket prices, move people up/down from minors, all of this. Then you go through the entire schedule and play a season (or a season with less games) and for each game, you pick starting pitcher, lineup, etc. Then you can either sim the game (have the computer zap through and tell you who won/lost/etc) or you can manually play it, where you’re the pitcher or batters. Or you can just manage the game, where you go through pitch-for-pitch and say what you want the batter or pitcher to do. It’s fairly fast, and you can get through a nine-inning game in like five minutes.

Anyway, like an idiot, I picked the Rockies as my franchise, and I finished a season at like .228 or something horrific. A couple of things worked OK – I traded Todd Helton for like 65 other players, and got Kenny Rogers to pitch, which is a good fit for the starter-deficient Rockies. Since everything is pegged at the pre-2007 stats though, none of the real shining stars of the team are there. Matsui is in the minors, and if you bring him up, he’s not a great hitter. You have Kim pitching, and he has like a three-digit ERA, and absolutely nobody will take him in a trade. I tried to give him away and I couldn’t. So yeah. I only have two complaints about the game. One is, I wish after you simmed or managed a game, there was a way to watch highlights ESPN-style or something, or even sit through and watch all 9 innings in the real, 3-d stadium view mode. The other complaint is I don’t have the time to fuck with this shit. I should put the game away until after the Rockies don’t make the playoffs and it’s snowing outside, then I will manage like the next ten seasons.

Man I’ve wasted too much of my abbreviated day on this – I need to start writing.

I went to the last Rockies-Padres game of the series yesterday, which wasn’t part of the six-pack or the other two loose tickets I had, but just part of a general scheme to try and see each MLB team in play at some point. I think by the end of the year, I will be about halfway there. Anyway, a quick bulleted list:

• I am running out of witty observations about Coors Field, and paying more attention to the game. Fun for me, but it means I have less to write about here.
• It was HOT yesterday, close to 100, and even though I wore SPF 60, I got sunburned. I also wore my leg brace (because it’s acting weird lately) and now I have a perfect red circle burned into my knee, where there’s a little hole in the fabric.
• My seats were in 331 again, but in the last row, so there was a wall behind me, and I got a tiny bit of shade.
• A guy sat next to me that reminded me of the George Sibley character from Six Feet Under and talked to me through the entire game. Normally, I would have beaten him down, but he was a walking baseball encyclopedia, and we talked the whole time about the game, which was great. Because of this, I didn’t listen to my radio, but I didn’t really need to.
• A ton of kids were there, from some school or maybe a church thing. There were entire blocks of seating with just kids wearing matching bright yellow or bright orange or bright red shirts. Aside from the general congestion, the kids cheered at 100% for every damn thing that happened for about three innings, then they got bored and shut up.
• Aaron Cook (Who I still think looks like a pirate) pitched the entire game in only 74 pitches, which I think ties a MLB record. He also had three hits, all non-bunts which is not bad for a pitcher. In the 8th, everyone expected him to get switched out with a pinch hitter. When he came out to the mound and basically said “look, I’m not a pussy”, there was probably the biggest round of applause I’ve heard at that stadium, and everyone stood up and cheered him.
• The Padres has some monumentally stupid fielding errors. The Rockies had a couple of all-out-dive-catches that were excellent.
• In one of those Rockies catches, someone (and I forget who) dove and dug in, but caught the ball, but then a bunch of people came out on the field. Everyone was thinking “oh shit, someone got injured”, but it turns out everyone was staring down at this divot in the outfield, and a groundskeeper put it back, and all was well.
• Matsui was on second and there was a grounder hit out, and he probably should not have run at all, but he took off like a bat out of hell and made it home. That guy can run like a motherfucker!
• Todd Helton still needs to shave off that goatee. If he really wants to get traded to Boston, he should shave off that shit so they think he’s way younger.

Next game is the Brewers – actually I’m going to a day game an a night game. I need to find some better sunscreen. I’m also thinking about bringing a small soft-side cooler with a few water bottles in it, instead of paying $27.50 for a 6-ounce bottle of lukewarm water at the park.

I’m still at work on a couple of different writing projects, and getting the zine rolling will be the big 800-pound gorilla. I have almost everything in. If you’ve promised me a story, get off your ass and finish up, before the train leaves the station. (Okay, too many metaphors for today.)

First of all, I’m wasting a lot of times writing reviews on Yelp. So go to jkonrath.yelp.com and check that out. It would also be cool if some of you joined and hooked up with me. I don’t know why, but I know a certain lawyer in the Chicago area that has an encyclopedic knowledge of dive bars and Harley joints and it would be interesting to hear about some of that. Yes, it’s another one of those “create content for us so we can make money” things. But here in Denver, I’ve found that the only types of restaurant reviews are the prefabricated ones that linkfarm sites use that are essentially useless for finding a place to eat, or the newspaper reviews from the places that are completely brown-nosing the local restaurant scene, and providing useless information. Like all reviews for Best Indian Restaurant pointed to this one place, saying “they’re really authentic! they’re really formal! It’s so great! GLGLGLGLGLGLG!” and we went and it was on par with one of the places in New York where taxi drivers buy food between shifts. So, it was good to see an alternative, and I’ve found like 19 restaurants that I want to try out here. It’s also fun to rag on places in Elkhart.

I have been working on two writing projects, so I haven’t had much time to do anything on here. There is also some weird construction project across the street, where it looks like they’re stringing a huge piece of sewer pipe underground from one block to another. There are a couple dozen pieces of heavy machinery, a water truck, what looks like a CO2 or maybe coolant tanker, a ton of guys in orange vests standing around doing nothing, and about two weeks of jackhammering, concrete sawing, and other high-decibel noise that you don’t want happening right across the street from your desk. But it looks like it will end soon. And hey, I have a laptop now! I mean I did before, but now my main machine is a laptop, so it’s very easy to unplug and go elsewhere. I did that this afternoon: I had to bring the car to the dealer for its first 3750-mile oil change and tire kick. I sat in the waiting room with the laptop, logged onto their Wifi, and basically had my entire home setup with me, minus iTunes, iPhoto, and the big main monitor. But all of my mail, all of my writing, all of my files – it was all there. Very nice.

So it turns out (tentatively) that we are going to three of four Cubs games in August. We had tickets for a night game (Thursday, I think) and the Sunday afternoon game. Turns out one of Sarah’s coworkers is a rabid Cubs fan, and they bought a block of 100 seats in one of the upper deck sections. they’re having a huge roof party so everyone can get loaded on Old Style, then march over to Coors Field and act like heathens during the game. So yeah, we’re in. Well, I don’t drink though, so no Old Style. I’m also not sure where I stand on the whole Cubs thing. I realize a certain author in the Chicagoland area has a strong allegiance to the the team (unless maybe it is at the point of the season where he’s rebuilding his Lou Piniella hate shrine in his basement) so maybe I should choose my words carefully. In choosing my alliances, there are the following facts:

• Lots of family from Chicago; reinfornces that Chicago nostalgia thing.
• Many childhood memories of Hari Cari drinking excessively and singing drunkenly on WGN.
• The first year I decided to follow baseball, I picked the Cubs as my “hometown” team, since Indiana didn’t have baseball. They finished the season 64-98. I decide not to follow baseball for about 25 more years.
• I’m struggling with the concept of being a Rockies fan, and I’m starting to really like them.
• There’s the whole “support your home team” thing, and not wanting to be a total piece of shit like Yankees fans at away games.
• The Brewers are ahead of the Cubs by 3 1/2 games right now, and if there’s any team I would rather follow aside from the Rockies, it would be the Brewers.
• I realize Sammy Sosa no longer plays for the Cubs, but he’s a bat-corking piece of shit juicer (sorry, alleged juicer.)

So yeah, tough call either way. Maybe I will just not wear any teamwear and keep my mouth shut.