The Bleacher Bums: May 30, 2006 Archive

Big baseball weekend

Posted at 10:02 AM on May 30, 2006 by Ben Tesch (1 Comments)

This weekend was a weekend filled with baseball for myself, particularly with all the different ways I took it in... I enjoy all the various ways you experience a ball game:

• I read and heard about the Friday game, a 3-1 win with an excellent pitching matchup.
  
• I attended the Saturday game, a 9-5 win on a hot summer day. The indoor air conditioning was quite nice, and I got to see the triple play and the Boof win. Solid.
  
• On Sunday, it was almost 100° outside, and terribly sunny and muggy. I, of course, did the not-so-smart thing of playing baseball with my usual rag-tag squad for about five hours, then going to the Saints game for another three. I'm sort of surprised I didn't a) die, or b) at least pass out. The buzz that day was, of course, the word spreading of the Lew walk-off homer. (The Saints pretty much stunk it up, losing 13-2 with fairly unspectacular play on both sides of the ball.)
  
• Monday, I watched the game on TV, jumping from place to place in search of air-conditioned comfort. By the 11th, I was barely keeping the corner of my eye out for the game.
  

The end of that night was two-fold for me: I barely watched at all, but still managed to see Rondell get picked off on second (argh!) in the top of 9th, and then Figgins slide into third. I didn't need to watch any more than that. Still, a fantastic weekend filled with baseball in all aspects, and a fantastic sweep of the Mariners. Hopefully they can pull one or two out in Anaheim.

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What to make of Barry.....

Posted at 12:21 PM on May 30, 2006 by David Zingler (1 Comments)

Barry passed the Babe over the weekend...yawn...and I am still trying to figure out what to make of it. I’d like to pretend it didn’t happen, but like with the George W. Bush presidency, reality’s cold hand keeps slapping me in the face.

I could take the Stuart Scott jock-sniffing approach and gush about it. The ESPN anchor even brought his kids into the mix, calling the moment a cross-generational “I remember where I was” event. Poor Stuart, you get the feeling he has no idea how foolish that sounded.

There’s always the “high horse” option where I could ran and rave about what a travesty the whole thing is and how it’s “disgraced the game”, but that’s a little too self-righteous for me and, let’s face it, this isn’t really that important.

I guess the best thing is to accept it. For the foreseeable future, the all-time homerun list will look like this:

1. Hank Aaron
2. Barry Bonds
3. Babe Ruth

And that’s just the way it is...

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Don't just think of home runs

Posted at 3:25 PM on May 30, 2006 by Ben Tesch (1 Comments)

What are baseball's top best "records"?
If numbers like 714 are going to cease to mean anything, then what do any home run records mean? And if the home run records are no longer the coolest, most celebrated records in baseball, what replaces them?

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