The Major League Baseball season gets its official start on Wednesday. Opening Day, as it’s known, is full of pomp, ceremony and promise. Tomorrow, most of the ball clubs accept the reality: a long hot summer lies ahead. Here’s an appropriately flawed A-Z guide/tribute to this eccentric game.
A: American. Very. It has been exported to places like Japan and Cuba with incredible success and even my own brother plays in Dublin (Go Spartans!) but it always retains its down-home vibe.
B: Bobby Valentine is the new manager at the Boston Red Sox. As egotistical as his name suggests, Bobby V will never be far from controversy.
C: The St Louis Cardinals won the World Series in October in historic fashion. They’re not expected to repeat that feat.
D: Those Damn Yankees. The Bronx Bombers inspire strong
emotions across the game and even a new collection of baseball writing: “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major-League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team.”
E: The error is an official statistic which sums up the cruelty of this sport. Let a ball through your glove and you’ll be named and shamed on the scorecard.
F: Fenway Park is still baseball’s greatest theatre and the Red Sox owning Fenway Sports Group, who also own Liverpool, have spent
millions maintaining its old school credentials.
G: Ozzie Guillen will be Valentine’s chief rival for dugout rabble rousing. See M, Miami Marlins.
H: Hot dogs are a scourge on the digestive tracts of baseball fans. There are a lot of misconceptions about American culture. Excessive hot dog consumption is not one.
I: Innings are the building blocks. All a pitcher needs to do is get three hitters out. Simple really.
J: If 49-year-old pitcher Jamie Moyer of the Colorado Rockies wins a game from the mound this season, he’ll be the oldest ever.
K: K is the official abbreviation for when a pitcher strikes out a hitter. I’ve never understood why.
L: The drawn-out ownership saga which threatened the future of the LA Dodgers was finally resolved last week when a Magic Johnson-led consortium took over the storied ball club for a cool $2 billion.
M: The Miami Marlins (formerly Florida) are the Manchester City of this game. They’ve spent millions over the off-season on new players as they prepare to relaunch themselves with a new fancy stadium.
N: The older, more traditional National League differs from the American League in one essential aspect: its pitchers have to hit as well. They’re generally useless.
O: “On base percentage”: the overly simplistic mantra that inspired a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie: Moneyball.
P: Albert Pujols is widely accepted as the greatest player of the last decade and switched from champions St Louis to the LA Angels of Anaheim over the off-season, lured to California by a 10-year $240m contract.
Q: The record for the quickest pitch in baseball belongs to Cincinnati’s Aroldis Chapman, 105.1mph in 2010 against San Diego.
R: Iconic New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera is still going strong at age 42, also his jersey number. He’ll be the last player to wear 42, the number retired across baseball in honour of Jackie Robinson, the first black player of the modern era.
S: They thought the steroids era was behind them and then last year’s player of the year Ryan Braun failed a urine test in October. He escaped via a dubious appeal.
T: Tommy John was the first pitcher to have his elbow repaired by the revolutionary surgery which subsequently adapted his name. Now his name strikes fear into all his successors, maxed out throwing arms forced to miss entire seasons.
U: Umpires have a thankless task, crouched slightly on old knees under heavy padding judging the success or failure of a 93mph fastball.
V: Pujols wasn’t the only beloved player for whom a bank was broken. Joey Votto, one year away from being a potentially costly free agent, committed his future on Monday to the Cincinnati Reds. 10 years as well but at the slightly more economical $225 million.
W: The owners of the New York Mets, the Wilpon family, were the highest profile victims of Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme but a court ruling saved their bacon, relatively speaking.
X: Headline writers preferred to use an ‘X’ to shorten the Chicago White Stockings and then they adapted the name officially in 1904. The Boston Red Stockings soon followed suit.
Y: Yu Darvish is the latest next-big-thing to arrive after a successful career in Japan. The new Texas Rangers pitcher follows in a long line of hyped players from the far east, not all of whom have lived up to inflated expectations.
Z: The strike zone is what it all boils down to. A virtual space which the pitcher must obsess over. One lapse and the batter will hit it out of the park.
Contact: john.w.riordan@gmail.com
Twitter: JohnWRiordan.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/hKDWuefjKPQ/post.aspx
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