A whole lotta baseball

Date: 6/2/2010
Watching: Reds vs. Cardinals (on ESPN!)

Ken Griffey, Jr. retired. This is what it's been to be a Reds fan: we got the one damn home run hitter in the entire game who didn't take steroids. Talk about a fucking rip off. The Cardinals got McGwire, the Cubs got Sosa, the Giants got Bonds, and they all got playoff runs out of them. And we get Ken Griffey, Jr., whose iconic image for the Reds will always be pulling up in pain running down the third base line in spring training. He had good seasons after that, but never another super-star season. I bet steroids would have fixed that right up. Son of a bitch.

(Another note, they got Aaron Boone, "ESPN Baseball Analyst" on the phone, and I can't help but think, did they get Aaron Boone on the phone, offer him a verbal contract to become an ESPN Anchor for 24 hours, put him on the phone with Baseball Tonight, and throw together that graphic? I think maybe they did. I mean, I could easily be wrong, maybe he's a real correspondent. I don't watch enough ESPN any more to be able to identify their third-string baseball correspondents. Back in the day I would have known all about him, I would have listened to him come up through the ranks, doing a segment on the radio, some remote spots for Baseball Tonight. Good Lord, what life must be like there, it's just as competitive as being a professional athlete (though your career lasts longer). Sean Salisbury was on a meteoric rise there for years, and now he's just completely gone (and rightly so, I have to say, I don't know what they ever saw in him).

Anyway, now the Reds are in first place, and being taken reasonably seriously. This is as exciting a position as they've been in in the last 5 years. A battle for first place in the division, and the series win, with the Cardinals throwing their ace up there, a guy who's owned the Reds, and who is 74-24, attempting to become only the third pitcher in history to win 75 of his first 100 decisions, joining only Cy Young and Pedro Martinez, which is awfully impressive.

Luck isn't with the Reds in the top of the first (Note: turned out that was true the whole game). I had two thoughts during the inning, one of which is that holy shit! The Reds are the best offensive team in the league! I don't think that's been true since 1990! And the other of which was that one of the keys to this Reds team is that they don't have a single slow guy on the team. No Adam Dunn, no limping Griffey, no Sean Casey. However, the Cardinals, and Carpenter in particular, neutralize that advantage, they haven't allowed a steal all year. They're going to be a tough matchup for the Reds all year. And the Reds? Sam LeCure, second major league start. He won the first one, but that was the Astros, these are the Cardinals.

I guess Six Flags' new slogan is "More Flags. More Fun." So I'm going to open a theme park called Seven Flags. They're doing my advertising for me!

Griffey said that he couldn't stay sharp coming off the bench, and so his continued presence was a distraction to his teammates. Which I think is a great way (I don't mean this sarcastically) of saying that he sucked, and the Mariners couldn't fire him because it would somehow look bad, so he didn't want to just be there bringing the team down just to get a paycheck. Which I think is nice. Not only did he not use steroids, but he didn't obsess over money. It's not that he didn't care about it, but he had the perspective to realize that whatever he did, he was going to have all the money he'd ever need, so he didn't worry too much about whether he was getting every dollar he could.

Jim Joyce made this terrible call (note: I meant to go back and add exposition here, but every one who reads this blog (i.e., nobody) already knows about it. It was mentioned on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, for God's sake), and within ten minutes the crawl on ESPN was mentioning him by name. You don't think they're powerful?

The paragraph that runs on ESPN when an athlete retires is structured exactly like an obituary. It starts with a sentence or two outlining what he's most remembered for, segues into a series of vital statistics, and ends by listing the surviving family members (with whom he'll be spending time).

(You may have noticed that I stopped writing about the Reds. Feel free to reach your own conclusions about what that says about how the game went.)