![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogYep, this kid is hot hot hot.
Never mind that he looks barely old enough to be my paperboy. Forget that he's hardly an imposing sight on a pitcher's mound. But put a baseball in Stephen Strasburg's hand and about a nanosecond later, you hear a really loud pop! He regularly hit 97, 98 and 99 miles an hour on the radar gun. (That's good, if you didn't know.) There was some question about whether the display in this ballpark even had three digits, since he has topped 100 in some prior starts.
Not that he was unhittable. He breezed through the Bison lineup without a scratch before walking the opposing pitcher in the bottom of the third. That, for this kid, was enough of an aberration to get the pitching coach to come out and calm him down. The no-hitter went by the boards not long after that, and he got taken to the warning track a couple of times, but in the end, Strasburg pitched five shutout innings with just three hits allowed. He also got a clean single himself, ran the bases well on a double-play ball, and wound up scoring one more run than he allowed.
I taped the whole game, partly out of vanity (I was nine rows behind the Bison dugout and am almost certainly in some of the camera shots), partly for Emily (one of her teachers is Duke McGuire, the color commentator who went national today on SNY and Versus as well as the local station), but also to see more of how those pop!-ping pitches actually looked to the batters. I'm told they looked pretty damn mean, sailing by one second at close to 100 and then dropping the entire strike zone on the next. He even showed signs of aw-shucks modesty, even with so much more fame so imminently in front of him; when he came around to score after the one time he reached base, he picked up the bat from the hitter who'd driven him in, and handed it to the batboy. Most prima donna major leaguers would never do that.
Yet even transcending all that was just being at a suddenly Major League event in a ballpark built for that level but never having the chance to host it. While not a sellout, it was nearly as big a crowd as saw an imperfect perfect game in Detroit last night. Buffalo fans are knowledgeable and a little on the mean side. They boo the kids if they miss the target on the Lotto ticket toss or lose the run-the-bases race to Buster (when it does happen, it always turns out that the mascot missed second), and we derisively cheered our own first baseman when he finally caught a pop-up after two of his errors and a third almost-error led to all five of the opponent's first runs. (Long after Strasburg departed, and I did, Syracuse wound up winning 7-1.)
Still. Being in such a crowd, and in literally the best seats I've ever had at a ballgame. When the plate umpire called a third strike, his punchout move seemed pointed directly at me. I had my first hot dog and beer of the baseball season, inside-the-park or over-the-wall, and of course ended with my obligatory eighth-inning ice cream.
It was a much-needed day of hooky, and couldn't have been better weather, atmosphere or spectacle.
Only down side to it all was the cloudiness, which while keeping my sunburn down, also kept down the quality of most of the longer-range shots I tried to take. Here's a sampling of some of the moments of the day- for some more actual discussion of the game and its meaning to the Mets, check Ye Baseball Blog tonight or tomorrow.
Just a street shot coming over from Main Street (I'd picked up my ticket earlier, and even went and filed the two leftover judgments from Fire Drill Day before getting to the park in plenty of time). Hopefully conveying a sense of the festive atmosphere out there.
----
An establishing shot from my first choice of seat (someone was in my official one and I just kept moving down as people arrived; finally, the President of M&T Bank or some similar poobah turned out to have skipped, so I got his aisle seat 9 rows from the action).
----
Buster and Chip mingling with the behind-the-plate faithful; I forget what they call the blonde-chicky mascotette, but she's out on the field in this one.
----
Standing for the anthem, along with likely future Met manager Ken Oberkfell, and almost certain soon-to-be-rotation pitchers Pat Misch and Tobi Stoner.
----
Kenny bringing out the lineup card to the umps, who I'd already greeted with a "No Blown Calls!" cry that I'm sure they heard;)
----
And there's the dude, taking his bottom-first warmups.
----
Facing the heart (or in today's case, more the heartburn) of the B-lo batting order.
----
Pitcher vs. Pitcher, Strasburg's first time up. We got him out this time.
----
Buster atop the dugout, doing his much family-friendlier version of the Earl of Bud's old Big Shoe Dance. (Sadly, Earl's been retired to pasture with the Clydesdales, and I didn't see Conehead today, either.)
One of the relatively few shots I remembered to get away from the mound, out toward the Bisons Big Board, which was actually paid for, to the benefit of this privately-owned baseball team, with New York State Economic Development grants because it created extra jobs for the scoreboard operators and the guy who runs around the stadium with the Kiss Cam. I kid you not. And it still doesn't have lineups or pitch counts. (Strasburg was scheduled to leave after six innings or 95 pitches, whichever came first; not that we knew, but the count limit must have kicked in sometime bottom five, since he came out for a pinch hitter in the sixth and we never got to cheer him and/or boo him for not tipping his cap.)
----
And finally, since I can never get through a day without at least one weird observation, this was the ad at the top of the stairs coming back up from my section:-
When I first read it, I thought it said "Whorehouse air exchange." Can't say I can think of any reason not to want to have THAT on such premises.
Never mind that he looks barely old enough to be my paperboy. Forget that he's hardly an imposing sight on a pitcher's mound. But put a baseball in Stephen Strasburg's hand and about a nanosecond later, you hear a really loud pop! He regularly hit 97, 98 and 99 miles an hour on the radar gun. (That's good, if you didn't know.) There was some question about whether the display in this ballpark even had three digits, since he has topped 100 in some prior starts.
Not that he was unhittable. He breezed through the Bison lineup without a scratch before walking the opposing pitcher in the bottom of the third. That, for this kid, was enough of an aberration to get the pitching coach to come out and calm him down. The no-hitter went by the boards not long after that, and he got taken to the warning track a couple of times, but in the end, Strasburg pitched five shutout innings with just three hits allowed. He also got a clean single himself, ran the bases well on a double-play ball, and wound up scoring one more run than he allowed.
I taped the whole game, partly out of vanity (I was nine rows behind the Bison dugout and am almost certainly in some of the camera shots), partly for Emily (one of her teachers is Duke McGuire, the color commentator who went national today on SNY and Versus as well as the local station), but also to see more of how those pop!-ping pitches actually looked to the batters. I'm told they looked pretty damn mean, sailing by one second at close to 100 and then dropping the entire strike zone on the next. He even showed signs of aw-shucks modesty, even with so much more fame so imminently in front of him; when he came around to score after the one time he reached base, he picked up the bat from the hitter who'd driven him in, and handed it to the batboy. Most prima donna major leaguers would never do that.
Yet even transcending all that was just being at a suddenly Major League event in a ballpark built for that level but never having the chance to host it. While not a sellout, it was nearly as big a crowd as saw an imperfect perfect game in Detroit last night. Buffalo fans are knowledgeable and a little on the mean side. They boo the kids if they miss the target on the Lotto ticket toss or lose the run-the-bases race to Buster (when it does happen, it always turns out that the mascot missed second), and we derisively cheered our own first baseman when he finally caught a pop-up after two of his errors and a third almost-error led to all five of the opponent's first runs. (Long after Strasburg departed, and I did, Syracuse wound up winning 7-1.)
Still. Being in such a crowd, and in literally the best seats I've ever had at a ballgame. When the plate umpire called a third strike, his punchout move seemed pointed directly at me. I had my first hot dog and beer of the baseball season, inside-the-park or over-the-wall, and of course ended with my obligatory eighth-inning ice cream.
It was a much-needed day of hooky, and couldn't have been better weather, atmosphere or spectacle.
Only down side to it all was the cloudiness, which while keeping my sunburn down, also kept down the quality of most of the longer-range shots I tried to take. Here's a sampling of some of the moments of the day- for some more actual discussion of the game and its meaning to the Mets, check Ye Baseball Blog tonight or tomorrow.
Just a street shot coming over from Main Street (I'd picked up my ticket earlier, and even went and filed the two leftover judgments from Fire Drill Day before getting to the park in plenty of time). Hopefully conveying a sense of the festive atmosphere out there.
----
An establishing shot from my first choice of seat (someone was in my official one and I just kept moving down as people arrived; finally, the President of M&T Bank or some similar poobah turned out to have skipped, so I got his aisle seat 9 rows from the action).
----
Buster and Chip mingling with the behind-the-plate faithful; I forget what they call the blonde-chicky mascotette, but she's out on the field in this one.
----
Standing for the anthem, along with likely future Met manager Ken Oberkfell, and almost certain soon-to-be-rotation pitchers Pat Misch and Tobi Stoner.
----
Kenny bringing out the lineup card to the umps, who I'd already greeted with a "No Blown Calls!" cry that I'm sure they heard;)
----
And there's the dude, taking his bottom-first warmups.
----
Facing the heart (or in today's case, more the heartburn) of the B-lo batting order.
----
Pitcher vs. Pitcher, Strasburg's first time up. We got him out this time.
----
Buster atop the dugout, doing his much family-friendlier version of the Earl of Bud's old Big Shoe Dance. (Sadly, Earl's been retired to pasture with the Clydesdales, and I didn't see Conehead today, either.)
One of the relatively few shots I remembered to get away from the mound, out toward the Bisons Big Board, which was actually paid for, to the benefit of this privately-owned baseball team, with New York State Economic Development grants because it created extra jobs for the scoreboard operators and the guy who runs around the stadium with the Kiss Cam. I kid you not. And it still doesn't have lineups or pitch counts. (Strasburg was scheduled to leave after six innings or 95 pitches, whichever came first; not that we knew, but the count limit must have kicked in sometime bottom five, since he came out for a pinch hitter in the sixth and we never got to cheer him and/or boo him for not tipping his cap.)
----
And finally, since I can never get through a day without at least one weird observation, this was the ad at the top of the stairs coming back up from my section:-
When I first read it, I thought it said "Whorehouse air exchange." Can't say I can think of any reason not to want to have THAT on such premises.