Game 160, Athletics at Mariners
Hisashi Iwakuma vs. Aaron Brooks, 7:10pm
In the last series, we got to see the Astros, a team that’s notoriously collapsed in September, coughing up a division that they seemingly had well in hand by mid-August. Wouldn’t that sting? Glad we side-stepped THAT unpleasantness, eh? In the spirit of finding common ground through schadenfreude, the M’s now face the Oakland A’s, a team whose collapse in the 2nd half has been breathtakingly thorough. In the 2nd half, the A’s have the 2nd-worst team ERA in baseball (behind Colorado), and their offense has gone from top-third in baseball in the first half to bottom-third now. It’s all produced an ugly 25-43 record and performances like the other night’s when Nick Tropeano (!) struck out 13 sleepwalking A’s. They’ve been bad, their in-game performances look as inspired as a Marshawn Lynch press conference, and the big trade that was going to spur them to sustained greatness produced a likely MVP…for Toronto. Compared to that, the M’s have been, what, disappointing? They were too consistently mediocre versus horrifically unlucky, beset by bullpen collapses, and then, through a combination of sell-off trades and disinterest, unwatchably bad. Ha.
Uh, so, Aaron Brooks. Saw him a little while back. Still bad? Check.
1: Marte, SS
2: Seager, 3B
3: Cruz, DH
4: Cano, 2B
5: Trumbo, RF
6: Smith, LF
7: Morrison, 1B
8: Miller, CF
9: Sucre, C
SP: Iwakuma
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9 Responses to “Game 160, Athletics at Mariners”
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Hmm… I’m trying to decide if this is worth watching. I suppose seeing Kuma mow down A after A is something.
Bad baseball is better than no baseball. Or maybe its like sex, even when it’s bad it’s good. Maybe we could have Kings Court tonight.
K K K K K K K K K K K K K K K K K K K OLE!
Marc and Longgeorge1 have been rather prescient so far.
Maybe bad baseball isn’t all that great
Well, there are the Mariners I’ve come to know so well…
Hahaha LG
Rad Miller!
Plus with a home run there’s no chance of following the hit with a TOOTBLAN. 🙂
Mariners! Defense!
The A’s feel a little better about themselves now.
Warming up my hotstove musings. New GM and all, wild speculation has relevance, and I feel like indulging it before realities hit.
Things like: something’s so wrong with development, and been that way for so long, I’d almost prefer they went wide on it, turn things completely upside down and inside out, go so far as to (for example) disconnect from Schlegel and swap Tacoma for somewhere far, far away (the hell with the “marine layer” compatibility argument), just to underline that going down or going up, means something … and no, you can’t locate your house in Normandy Park for going either way. And who knows what they’d get in bonuses. And, going with developing my indulgence, whatever benefits they got from the link in 1995, other than being able to run people up and down I-5 on the same day, aren’t there.
Stopping. It’s not really an idea worth typing this much about. And, I know. Radical, silly, and frankly cruel and abusive for the elevator players, and especially those with families. But baseball’s also a business. Going just a bit further with my indulgence, I looked it up. It goes: the current average distance is 360 miles between parent and AAA affiliate. The shortest distance is 25.6 miles between Seattle and Tacoma; the longest distance is a [ridiculous] 2240 miles between the Mets and Las Vegas.
Never mind. Just some residual end-of-year irritation, which I’m also going to indulge because I’ve pretty much managed to stay away from snark most of the season. Yo yo….. Go M’s.