Baseball

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Floating holo displays are awesome. (Photo courtesy gamesweasel)”] [/caption] Smoke alarms! They notify us about fires, but they also incessantly beep when their batteries are low. It’s tough to sleep when that happens and you don’t have 9V batteries laying around. Oh, yeah, also Mass Effect 3 came out this week and obliterated my TV watching. Movies Wanderlust - Sharing a lot of the DNA from Wet Hot American Summer, Wanderlust was appropriately strange, but also pretty darn funny. I’d put it at 3.5 or 4 stars of five. ...

There are many reasons I love baseball, but you know what my favorite little quirk is? It’s impossible for a pitcher’s performance on the mound to win a game by itself. In fact, the only active thing a pitcher can do on the mound is lose a game. Not to get too technical, but a win in baseball is determined by the pitcher on the mound when one team pulls ahead of the other. The rules are slightly more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea. ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. There was a lot of talk about the mistakes Joe Maddon was making in not bringing David Price up at the start of the year. I think last night speaks volumes about why he thought he needed more work. Price gave up ten runs to spearhead a 10-1 loss to the Phillies last night, meaning that he was embarrassed by a pitcher more or less twice his age (Jamie Moyer, age 46). ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Like all sports, baseball has its unspoken rules regarding conduct and retaliation on the field. It all more or less boils down to: you do something stupid or mean, the pitcher on the other team is going to drill you with a pitch. Everyone knows this, but the key is that it’s supposed to remain unspoken. The few times this year that idiots have brought it up, they’ve been suspended or fined. ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. I think it’s safe to say at this point in the season that things aren’t quite going as I predicted. It’s not the end of the world to be five games back in late May, but it just isn’t coming together for the Rays who are behind the Red Sox, Yankees, and Blue Jays in the AL East. Fortunately for the Rays, the Blue Jays seem to be choking against even the most trivial of AL East teams :cough: the Baltimore Orioles :cough:, but the fact of the matter is that the Rays have to start playing better to keep it alive. ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. The Rays finally managed to hit the .500 mark two days ago only to lose last night against the Athletics in a heartbreaking game that remained scoreless until the 11th. You can’t really say that the Rays have been on a tear, but they have won six of their last ten, which should continue to edge them upward in win percentage if they can continue. Two more games against the Athletics will be followed by three against the Marlins in their interleague series and we’ll see how that turns out. The Rays are three games back from the Yankees and that needs to change. Unfortunately, the Yanks are playing the Orioles, so unless the Rays start capitalizing on the fact that they’re playing a weak team in the Athletics, things are going to just get uglier for them. They’re both good teams, but I think the Rays tended to edge out the Fish last year. Interleague games: the only time I root against the Tampa Bay Rays ...

It’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. What a real bummer… The biggest news since last week, if you hadn’t heard already, was the drug test that Manny Ramirez managed to fail. This is now the biggest baseball star to fail a drug test and win himself a 50-game suspension along with a black mark on his hall of fame chances. It goes like this: Manny Ramirez saw some physician in Florida who gave him a banned substance according to MLB rules. The substance, whose name I don’t totally remember and am too depressed to look up, is a female fertility drug that is also used to mask drops in testosterone following a steroid treatment cycle. Seems pretty clear cut. ...

Too many different things to talk about! Cuba’s been eliminated from the WBC by Japan! It kind of bums me out. They’ll play a final seeding match against Korea to decide who plays Team USA and who plays Venezuela. Lost was great last night. Tune in to see Sawyer absolutely ream Jack at the end of the episode. The reveal of young Ben was kind of obvious, but the best Ben-related moment was the super-startling thump on the head that Sun gave the bug-eyed freak mid-sentence with Lapidus. ...

You’ve probably heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20 on Monday morning, so just imagine how well I can call ’em two days later on Wednesday. That’s right, it’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Tensions were running high last night as Puerto Rico was up on Team USA 5-3 at the bottom of the 9th. Team USA kept their cool and played like a team, advancing runners with steals and sacrifice flies. Team PR withered and started walking US bats, loading the bases and bringing the score up to 5-4 with disasterous cosnequences. David Wright stepped up and hit a fly ball that was not caught, allowing Team USA to plate two and win. ...

You’ve probably heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20 on Monday morning, so just imagine how well I can call ’em two days later on Wednesday. That’s right, it’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Spring approaches; the season of life, new beginnings, flowers, and, most importantly, baseball! After three years the World Baseball Classic returns to centerstage to attempt to create an event as important to the world as the World Cup. This year’s tournament does not disappoint so far. ...