Monday, April 5, 2010

Random Thoughts Loosely Based Around The Twins-Angels while completely avoiding Tiger Woods and the NFC East

So today is the first day of baseball season......a rundown of how my teams have done


Razzball: Well for my Razzball team, today was a pretty epic failure...i have minus 15 points in a league where 2/3 of MLB hitters have positive value (thanks a lot Yuniesky Betancourt and Ryan Church and your combined minus 28 points) it would have been worse but Mike Jacobs did his part by going 0 for 4 and striking out twice....

Cheddarhead: Not sure exactly where we stand since we haven't figured out how to get 2 people to access the same team but Lowe won, Jiminez won (not happy at all about this one) Pujols went deep twice, Blanks went deep

Random CBSSports League that i'm in: Weekly H2H points.......Off to a nice start here....benefitted from solid starts by Halladay and Carpenter the first of several Kyle Blanks home runs and a big day by Ryan Doumit

Which brings me to right now (7:30 Pacific Time) and the current Twins-Angels game that's on my TV (On Fox Sports West)......a solid amount of fantasy implications for this one (Cuddyer starts for both Cheddarhead and Random CBS League) (Hardy starts for Random CBS League and he's a reserve for Chedderhead) and Brandon Wood is a starter in Random CBS League)...whew that's alot of information to regurgitate in a paragraph......also Brendan Harris is starting and Nick Punto is a reserve for the Razzball team

The broadcast team for the game is reminiscing about the Twins coming back against the Tigers last year and referred to the one-game playoff as a play-in game.......usually hear that phrase referred to for the play-in game 64/65 for the NCAA tournament which is about to be ruined in the name of the dollar.........The broadcast team is now talking smack about the Red Sox-Yankees game last night.....about how it's not really opening day.....did that game happen....but turn around and say you get your money's worth because you get 4 hours of baseball....not sure if they're endorsing the game or if they're hating......only the broadcasters know

Sorta spacing out on the Twins-Angels game currently.....the announcers were discussing the Twins off-season restructuring and then Delmon Young goes deep 30 seconds later........an omen that the Twins will be able to overcome not having Joe Nathan?

It's 7:46......time for J.J Hardy's first at bat as a twin....which ends with a harmless ground out to the pitcher........"bacon makes everything taste better even bacon" random Jack In The Box commercial that was on TV

7:48 time for Brandon Wood to hit......ouch Wood strikes out......fail.......why couldn't he be more like Jeff Mathis and go yard.......seriously dude has a 56 OPS+......just looked it up on Baseball-Reference.......anothe side effect of going there was looking at the 2010 standings and seeing the Yankees in last place....the person sponsoring his baseball reference page has a couple of sentences written one of them being "Scoscia says Mathis is one of the Angels most valuable players"

Looking at the data from last year's Angels team and a random sampling of players who had better years at the plate than Mathis:

Gary "got a fat contract off of one decent season and one crazy catch" Matthews
Robb Quinlan
Maicier Izturis
Erick Aybar

The game is cruising along into the 3rd inning...Orlando Hudson hit a double....they're interviewing Angels GM Tony Reagins....the interview with Reagins somehow moved to random Wikipediaing as Mauer strikes out to end the top of the 3rd.......

Random Wikipeida fun-fact of the Week of Monday of the 3rd inning of the 8'o clock hour. His GM predecessor Bill Stoneman, threw 2 no-hitters (both with the Expos) despite a pedestrian career record of 54-85

Another half of the 3rd another guest.....this time Tim Salmon who's talking about how he's able to enjoy opening day more now that he's no longer playing in the bigs....and fielding questions about his take on spring training........not every day that the 1993 AL Rookie of the Year is in tha studio......8:09 Fun Fact: Tim Salmon finished in the Top 10 in MVP voting twice but somehow never got selected to an All-Star game

4th inning....we know what this means....TRIVIA time.....tonight's question who holds the Angels record for most opening day starts.....dean chance and mike witt are the guesses given by the broadcast team.......not giving away the answer but one of those is right......

More importantly, Cuddyer is up right now.....struck out in the 2nd....they just flashed that he was the 9th pick in the 1997 draft....ground out to 3rd......fail.......what isn't a fail is that the Twins were able to get Cuddyer after the teams above them drafted future hall of famers such as Matt Anderson, Jason Grilli, and Geoff Getz.......

Going to the middle of the 4th....Wood due up 3rd in the inning...randomly checking SI.com to see how Butler-Duke is going (Butler down 1 with 5 minutes left) but in general couldn't care less about Basketball at this point....

Kendrick just grounded out to second...which means....time for Brandon Wood to step to the plate.....another strikeout for Wood........double fail

We're on Guest #3 of the night Rod Carew....just mentioned that he thinks Jeff Mathis is a great player......Counter-Point: Random Sampling of players Baseball-Reference finds similar to Mathis

Dann Bilardello
Bob Uecker
Ron Tingley
Tim Spher
Ned Yost

J.J Hardy is up......now if only "productive" outs were a fantasy baseball category.....as Hardy grounds out to second but moves the runner to third........Punto hits sac fly to tie game at 3-all

They just rolled the cameras into the crowd.......to show someone in an Angels hat and Cubs jacket.......awkward/just plain wrong......just showed some footage of Target Field......I wonder if they'll break any single-season records for Snowout Induced Double-Headers.....I could see a retractable roof stadium up in Minnesota but no protection from the weather......fail

Briefly flipped to CBS to see that the Duke Vitales won the national championship.........is anyone outside of CBS, ESPN or Tobacco Road happy about this? I highly doubt it

Things could get a bit interesting.....Hunter just walked 2 on 2 out for Hideki...came within a few feet of making this a 6-3 game.....hooks a bit too far to the right....just another foul ball....but settles for a go-ahead RBI Single...and with that Scott Baker's night is over...just did some image thing listing some of his accomplishments showing Matsui with crazy Godzilla eyes......weird

Jesse Crain is brought in to clean up what Baker left behind.....what can be said about him? He's from canada been in both World Baseball Classics and he was 8th in 2005's Rookie Of The Year voting....oh and he induced a ground ball to get the Twins out of the 5th

Morneau walks...Cuddyer's up......knocks a base hit to center 1st and 2nd 2 out......can this be the catalyst to tying up the game?

Well.....it's 9 o'clock.....as fun as it has been to give whatever thoughts/insight about tonight's Angels/Twins game....the reality is i'm getting sleepy, i'm mis-spelling words every other sentence (and correcting them of course).......

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