Game 111, Twins at Mariners
DMZ · August 8, 2005 at 7:01 pm · Filed Under Game Threads
RHP Carlos Silva v RHP Gil Meche. 7:05.
Ichiro, RF-L
Ignitor, 2B-R
Ibanez, DF-L
Sexson, 1B-R
Beltre, 3B-R
Reed, CF-L
Morse, SS-R
Snelling, LF-L
Torrealba, C-R
Doyle’s 8th? 8th? I don’t get it.
If the Mariners continue on this pace, they’ll go 69-93. This would bring their two-year mark to 132 wins. It would be the worst two year stretch (over full seasons) since 1979-1980, when they went 67-95 and then 69-103. Close stretches include 83-84, 82-83.
Even bad stretches like 86-90 were better than this.
Comments
332 Responses to “Game 111, Twins at Mariners”
Last night we got a taste of why the M’s are more reluctant than many “fantasy GM’s” to get rid of Thornton. If that kid ever learns how to repeat his delivery, which would lead to consistent command of his fastball……..he’d be a dominant left hander in the pen (think….a good Arthur Rhodes). In a season like this one, it doesn’t hurt to give Thornton a chance to continue to improve.
Snelling will hit for more power than most give him credit for. As he matures and gets stronger that short compact swing will generate some decent power. Heck, the kids still only 23.
Thank goodness y’all reined in the off-topic posts. Nearly 300 posts on this thread and there must have been, oh, nine or ten that related to the game.
Game threads frequently go wildly off-topic.
In the cold light of dawn this remains one of the funniest threads I’ve read during my short tenure at USSM. The head-on collision between sports and music whackos: priceless. And I use the word ‘whacko’ in nicest possible way.
The new compilation of Orange Juice, “The Glasgow School”, is essential if you haven’t got all their stuff already. Seminal 80s pop band, the first indiepop band by most reckoning.
Melbourne is better than Sydney. To tie two themes together, why not warm up for your trip with some Australian music? The new Go-Betweens (from Brisbane originally), “Oceans Apart”, is fantastic, almost as good as the classic old (78-90) Go-bes. And the Lucksmiths (from Melbourne) are the best pop band in the world. Their new one, “Warmer Corners”, is a damn masterpiece. Tali White is the best singer in pop, and Marty Donald the best songwriter.
For beer, I’m partial to Tooth’s Sheaf Stout, myself. In a big bottle.
Do coaches ever signal to the batter what pitch they think the pitcher will throw? This strategy could be useful, especially for rookies. Is this practice done today? Has it ever been employed?
The Barenaked Ladies just haven’t been the same since they stopped being really goofy. Their last good album was Gordon.
They’re still really goofy live, though.
That said, I’m a big fan of Uriah Heep, so take my musical comments with the appropriate scepticism.
Like most rock critics, the music review discussion took itself way too seriously, but this amounts to a mere quibble with a thread featuring a Mariner win, the celebration of a Doyle home run, and the evocation of Oly stubbies. I give this thread ***1/2 out of ****.
I haven’t read everything in this thread, but did anyone else catch the FSN Live reporter continually referring to Felix as “King Felix?”
The name is growing…
Australian music? You want You Am I. If you like melodic power pop, you won’t find anything better. “#4 Record” is classic, “Hourly, Daily” is amazing, and “Saturday Night, ‘Round Ten” is a great live record if you’re into such things.
The Melbourne/Sydney experience, to me, is two sides of a coin – Sydney’s got the most stunning natural setting of almost any city in the world, and crap architecture; Melbourne’s got really cool architecture and not much in the way of geography. But both cities have pubs, so there’s really no loser.
After the game, Grover said of Doyle:
“I felt like tonight was the first game he was really seeing the ball”
Really? The man has a .423 OBP, and you think he just started seing the ball?
296: Great, so I was sitting 5-6 rows behind myself? I *knew* something about the game reeked of a bad sci-fi movie, but I thought it was just the part where they were trying to swap Torrealba’s brain with Olivo’s, including them putting up the wrong picture during the pre-game lineups.
306: I think BNL’s Maybe You Should Drive is actually their best album, but much like the trap Moxy Fruvous fell into with an overly goofy first album and hyper live show, people expected more of the same and were disappointed by a deeper second effort. It’d be boring if all their stuff was in the same style, though, wouldn’t it?
Brent said:”I haven’t read everything in this thread, but did anyone else catch the FSN Live reporter continually referring to Felix as “King Felix?†The name is growing… ”
some on KJR have a distressing tendency towards “Felix the Cat” as a nickname, complete with the tv themesong. This is just wrong. How can you strike fear in the hearts of your opponents when accompanying everywhere by a perky little theme song?
After the game, Grover said of Doyle:
“I felt like tonight was the first game he was really seeing the ballâ€Â
Really? The man has a .423 OBP, and you think he just started seing the ball?
This makes me wonder why Bavasi hired Hargrove. I offer no explanation except that it’s probable that both saw eye-to-eye because they are “baseball men”.
Hargrove has clearly done advanced studies at the George Bush School of Manly Inarticulateness.
From someone old enough to know . . .
An Oly stubby was 11 oz. Such bottles were standard and ubiquitous. In my Wazzu days a case of Rainier stubbies was ALWAYS $7.99 at Rosauers. In an previous college stint, Ballantine (in stubbies, of course) was the quaff of economic limitation.
In my earlier, money-scrounging-kid days, the distinction for me was that stubbies were returnable (worth $.01 at a local tavern) while the “export” bottles and other pretentious screwcaps were “No Deposit, No Return.”
Full Sail is now selling “Session” premium lager in a stubby, although it’s an angled-shoulder screw-top version similar to Red Stripe rather than the round-shouldered traditional stubby. Still, the short neck and 11-oz. capacity evokes a certain nostalgia, although it is possible that the 5.1% talking.
This flashback brought to you by the memory of beers gone by . . .
Revenant Edgar said:”This makes me wonder why Bavasi hired Hargrove. I offer no explanation except that it’s probable that both saw eye-to-eye because they are “baseball menâ€Â.”
or perhaps it was a compliment for how well Doyle has hit without really ‘seeing the ball’ until now? Remember, unlike us, Hargrove knew nothing about Doyle when he came up from Tacoma– as was said this Spring, “aside from pitching coach Bryan Price, no one on Mike Hargrove’s coaching staff has even seen Snelling play. Since his eight big-league games in 2002, injuries have limited him to 65 games the past two seasons.” Since he’s been up, Hargrove has made a lot of complimentary remarks about his hitting, his patience, his eye…
#301 This has been going on for 2 seasons and cost sherrill being here half this season .A trained monkey can read a radar gun the bottom line is getting outs and not walking people and sherrill has proven since he has become a mariner in the minors all the way thru he does this and thorton had 1 season in A ball a while back he could do this.This is only 1 of the reasons we are a last place team but it is one of the reasons.Maybe a new pitching coach who can evaluate talent is needed!!
Oh, and while we’re talking about Orange Juice, let’s all which lead singer Edwyn Collins well as he continues to recover from the he suffered in February.
Oops. That last bit should say “the cerebral haemorhage he suffered in February.”
296: Great, so I was sitting 5-6 rows behind myself? I *knew* something about the game reeked of a bad sci-fi movie, but I thought it was just the part where they were trying to swap Torrealba’s brain with Olivo’s, including them putting up the wrong picture during the pre-game lineups.
What you encountered was a trans-reality echo. You were in the reality where Torrealba is catching, while another version of you was in the reality where Olivo wasn’t traded. This usually happens when there’s a fold in space-time or a weakness between the boundaries of differing realities. As a result, the two (or more) realities temporarily exist simultaneously, sometimes slightly out of sequence.
Nothing really to worry about, though it’s a good thing you didn’t encounter the other version of yourself, since that could have caused all sorts of Star-Trek-ese to come spewing out, and the only way to reverse that is to modify the Deflector Pickle to emit a sub-space polar bear that will cause the cake to be left out in the rain.
re 316
Could also mean that he wasn’t seeing it well enough to hit it, as opposed to seeing it well enough for walking; after all, it was Doyle’s best hitting game.
He’s been tearing the cover off the ball all year. No one told Grover, though.
Wow, Uriah Heep. Talk about your nostalgia.
Side note to this music thread. I don’t think anyone needs a critic to tell them what music to buy. I just listen to real music and make up my own mind what is good or not.
dw
my brain asploded reading that. I’m not so sure I like that I actually hung in there and caught it all and much of it made a wierd sort of sense.
Doyle = good. I don’t think anything else needs to be said.
Reed = nice eye. After getting rung up last week on some questionable pitches, it was awesome to watch him continue to know the strike zone. He is going to develop into someone who will make games happen, much like last night.
Uriah Heep is a great comp for Spinal Tap. After Heep’s second album, they had to replace their drummer because they COULDN’T FIND HIM.
Wow, I’m sorry I missed this game thread. I’m a huge Tom Lehrer fan.
I’m confused. Someone mentions Edwyn Collins on USSM, and it’s not me? That’s freaky.
I have the Postcard Records logo tattooed on my arm, is how damaged I am on the subject.
Edwyn is apparently recovering nicely, and has recently been able to walk again. Where they had to open his skull for the hemmorhage got infected with persistent staph and had to be opened again. Get well, Edwyn.
There’s an opportunity I never thought I’d have.
Speaking of cities with spectacular natural settings but crap architecture, we live in one. It’s easy to forget that having both the Cascades AND the Olympics, as well as the monster Rainier, is pretty unusual and startling to visitors from, say, Iowa.
If you do go to Sydney, be sure to ask as many natives as possible what it’s like in Auckland, on the other side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. They never get tired of that one. Or the one about Arnold Schwartzenegger. Gets ’em every time.
Uriah Friggin’ Heep? Couldn’t wear Humble Pie’s jockstrap.
Anyway, dw is wrong about Lauren’s trans-reality echo. It is clearly a case of quantum mechanical superpositioning not succumbing to einsteinian physics. I believe dw is freelancing off the “Many Worlds” theories, which are now espoused mostly by people wearing masks at Star Trek conventions.
320: Actually, if there was a trans-reality echo at Safeco, that could do wonders for the Mariners. Just imagine how much better Matt Thornton might be if he could always pitch in an alternate reality where there’s nobody on base. Or if Good Gil Meche could go slap around Bad Gil Meche for a while.
On the other hand, I’m not sure the time-space continuum could handle what would happen if Evil Rick Rizzs met his counterpart…
ooooh– sudden mental picture of a toupee flying through the air…
329 – That’s out of line. How often did Humble Pie have a complete woodwind section?
And, Heep’s still a great live band. I saw them some years back (1996 or so) in a quadruple bill with Wishbone Ash, the Blue Oyster Cult, and Nazareth.