"A day late and a dollar short..." game thread intro. I owe y'all an apology. I got caught up tryin' to be funny in yesterday's intro, and didn't end up sharin' what i thought a somewhat portentous experience from the previous day. Thursday morning, i brought my car to the shop to figure out how come it was tending to stall in stop and go traffic. i sat in the place with a book to read, and made some progress, though i was somewhat distracted by the day time talk show. 2 hours later, they get my attention to tell me they couldn't find the problem. Seemed to be workin' fine. I paid the obligatory hour of diagnostics, and yup, presumably in the process of unconnectin'/reconnectin' things to test individual components, they'd reconnected or unstuck whatever the issue was. Works fine now. I woulda probably tried to wring a moral with regards to fixin' the team and the trade deadline out o' this story. Who knows, I mighta succeeded. But it wouldn'ta been entirely accurate as we got Jepsen, who might be the first pitcher whose acquisition caused two shortstops to return to the minors? And of course i'm too lazy to try to verify this given that i'm too lazy to be accurate, as Plouffe returning obviously has something to do with it, so i'll just satisfy myself with speculation. Speaking of all that deadline excitement, i missed an opportunity. I can think of nothing so apt to express the sheer complexity of it than a Stephen Sondheim musical first act finale inspired by a Ingmar Bergman movie:
(like the deadline, if you aren't familiar with all the ins and outs, i'm not even going to try to explain them. Though if prompted, i might point out the similarities that brought it to mind...) Two thoughts stuck in the back o' my mind from Riverbrian's thursday intro: He was lookin' at the wrong Seattle logo. The one on the hats tells it all: every direction is S. Obviously they're stuck at the north pole. The other is corollary to comparing the post all-star results to the beginning of the season. August is about to be the new May. In memory of Mr. Piper, i declare August the month the Twins run out of bubblegum.
Someday i want to get me shades like those... Oh yeah. The game. Almost late enough, perhaps i should wait a few hours and include the line ups myself. Leastwise it'd give me more to talk about on topic... But nah. As a friend is in the habit of saying "better done than done well." The Seattle Mariners summon Mike Montgomery to the mound as their Left Handed Starting Pitcher for today, and field a line up of: tba While the Minnesota Twins trot out Kyle Gibson, their Right Handed Starting Pitcher, as well as a line up of: tba on this fine evening at Target Field. (To be corrected if weather reports contradict it) I'm sure looking for Gibson to bounce back, even for some of his pitches to do so as well... into infielders' gloves, i hope. (Don't know enough of the Mariners to speculate who faces him) We usually do pretty good against left-handed pitching don't we? In which case, i'm feeling optimistic with our chances against Montgomery, even if i don't know anything more about him. Does this mean we get to see the helmet fly off Nunez head? I don't suppose Sugar Shane (now i understand the reference, i feel better about using it) will find his way into the line up, will he? Anyway, i look forward to some good baseball!