Bark's Lounge

I stumbled into a free ticket to the Red Sox game against the Pirates on Thursday. It was a makeup game and a guy seated near me also said he'd gotten his tickets free from someone. (He also insisted that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is new, so our conversation was not illuminating for me. Only USAFChief is entitled to consider Kauffman "new".)
 
I anticipated that attendance might be sparse - April games tend to be attended in the low 30,000s rather than the high 30,000s anyway, and a makeup game had to give many people problems. Here is a view toward the rightfield bleachers minutes before 2 pm game time:
 

 
But here are those bleachers later in the game, so I guess people did finally show up on this sunny but seasonable (50 degree) April afternoon:
 

 
My seats were not in the bleachers as I had been told, but rather the first base grandstand high in the lower deck, meaning it was shady, as you can tell, and therefore cold. Here's Tessie the Green Monster, said to be the little sister of Wally the Green Monster, posing with a young fan or three:
 

 
The game itself wasn't very dramatic until the 8th - a walk and a homer in the top of the first off of starter Eduardo Rodriguez was a downer...

 
... while Pirates starter Chad Kuhl pitched mostly effectively:
 

 
The Red Sox' first run in the second was fairly routine, arising from a pair of clean doubles leading to no chance for defensive prowess - if the triple is said to be the most exciting play in baseball, doubles can be among the least interesting ways to score a run. The Pirates got an insurance run in the sixth, again started by a double but this time with a less routine end-result due to a throwing error by the catcher to third base on an ensuing strikeout-and-steal.
 
Still, it was a quiet game, one that had me wondering if I would stick it out for all 9 innings. However, for the 8th inning I finally moved over to the RF seats which were starting to empty again, to get some sun, and that coincided with Sweet Caroline and then the rally against the Pirates bullpen that erased the 3-1 deficit. I am not a big fan of Hanley Ramirez
 

 
but I have to admit the guy is money at the plate and the bases were loaded for him when he (notice a trend?) doubled. (Not on the above pitch. ) This cleared the bases, but not in the way the fans hoped, as the runner from first, Mookie Betts, almost made it home safely but was called out via replay. So the score was only tied. But that merely meant that, after an instant walk to Mitch Moreland to try to set up a double play, Bogaerts could single home Ramirez (who had advanced on the earlier throw) for the eventual game-winner. Closer Craig Kimbrel allowed a leadoff single, but a flyout, caught-stealing, and groundout snuffed that small threat, and the Fenway Faithful went home happy.
 
So, this was a game with a very slow leadup, which my non-American or non-baseball friends probably would not appreciate, to a brief but highly satisfying resolution, to which I'm sure those same friends would say "that's it???" I'm glad I got to go.

Hello Twin’s Daily Participants,
 
As the representative for the family of Bark’s Lounge, after his death, I was given the task of sorting through his personal affairs and tying them up. I guess that is why I am submitting this. I suppose it is some form of closure, but this is what I am paid to do.
 
After reading through some of the material Mr. Lounge submitted on this website, I am under the impression he was a not so well liked member of this community.
 
A big part of my job is to be objective, but after reading some of the stuff he chose to put out there and also having access to his personal journal, I reached the conclusion that he had no business being a member of a Sport’s team based internet chat site, his mindset and personal views, in my opinion, were not a missing puzzle piece for Twin’s Daily.
 
Mr. Lounge has definitely made some mistakes, and I would say this is on that list. His family requests that I send you their apologies. They have been concerned for him for a long time and unfortunately the thing they feared the most became a reality.
 
In his journal, he alluded to the fact that he was not well received on this site and seemed to be regretful. My feeling is that he enjoyed baseball quite a bit, but baseball mixed with his other interests and his mode of expression were not meant to pan out for him on this site.
 
One last note, I found this poem in Mr. Lounge’s journal. It was dated November 21, 2012. This is the note I leave upon you:
 
Twin’s Daily
 
An orgy of malcontents
In this brackish water
Too much love and hate
 
The mix is intoxicating
The hangover is consuming
Pitches, hits, errors and open wounds
 
The salt has been this past season
I sense the agony in the whole
The offseason manhandles us
 
Can we be found anew?

Everybody loves a good Yogiism. Accumulatively, I'm pretty sure I've spent hours surfing the internet for new Yogi Berra quotes during fits of boredom, and I never tire of seeing the same ones over and over again. The best thing about it is that just when you think you've seen his magnum opus, you run into another that somehow surpasses the last. One of my favorites, though I'd never call it his best or even necessarily close to holding that status (which speaks a lot for Yogiisms in general), is "You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you." The blatant obviousness is just so appealing to me - though of course it's that very perspicuity that makes a Yogiism a Yogiism.
 
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I got to thinking about it. Obviously it's true; as long as there are no ties in baseball, somebody has to win. But I wondered vaguely if it would be possible to argue the truth in that simple yet significant observation, and while I won't try to go there with this post, just for fun I decided to reverse the meaning and see how that came out. This is what I came up with: "We wouldn't have lost if you'd beaten us."
 
I was immediately intrigued by that phrase. At first glance it may seem a little silly because according to theory you either win or lose; however, there is a philosophical side to this statement. Let me paraphrase it a bit: "Even if you win, you can never beat us." Suddenly it begins to make a little more sense; if spoken truthfully, this can definitely be a perfectly correct statement. In fact, I think that it should be every teams' slogan that they live and die by. You can lose a game by numbers, but you should never lose in spirit.
 
That reminds me of another quote I've run into time and again: "I never lose; I only learn." To be honest, I am easily irritated by people telling me that I need to stop being so passionate about baseball since according to them, "It's just a game." In spite of that, I am beginning to marginally understand the word "just" in that terse, irritating remark when I look at it this way: in baseball, losses are inevitable. It's part of the game; the losses are what keep us following as much as the wins are. If a team wins 20 of 30 games, they are considered hot, even though that ultimately means 10 losses in little over a month. So just because you lose doesn't mean that you need to consider that game a failure. That would be like going 2-3 in your major league debut and thinking that you were a failure in your first at-bat, though chances are you hit a bullet that just couldn't get through the opponent's incredible defensive infield.
 
That, though, is barely scratching the surface of what I'm trying to get to. There are those games where a mistake is made. It could be an erroneous play by anyone - a bench player or a superstar contending for MVP alike. It could be a throwing error, a fielding error, a mental error. It could be a baserunning mistake, and you could either blame the player or the coach. It could be a bad pitch, or merely the wrong pitch for the given situation. Someone could have swung at a pitch in the dirt with a full count. Maybe the manager called for the hitter to bunt when any nitwit recently introduced to the game could not only tell you but explain why they should have been swinging in that situation. Or maybe they swung when it would have been better to bunt. Maybe it was a bad call by the umpire. Maybe it was a fan interference that messed up the momentum and completely changed the outcome of the game. It could even have been the general manager's fault for trading so-in-so for so-in-so and so-in-so and sending down so-in-so to make room for so-in-so on the roster. Or if we're talking about an extended period of time, maybe it was somebody's fault for refusing to play with pain and getting put on the DL for the pettiest reasons … or perhaps they were playing through an injury when they should have accepted the fact that they were hurt and stopped sacrificing the team's best interests to satisfy their own inflated ego. The possibilities are positively endless, and that's why we all know those games so well - the games when everybody from the insignificant fan in the bleachers to the obnoxious owner agree that "We should have won that game."
 
As a fan I know how devastating these losses can be, yet I rarely step back and try to assess the big picture by putting myself in the players' shoes and imagining the demoralizing effect these games must have on them. As professional athletes, they need to go out there and play game after game, and it's not just any old game, either; it is a game that involves emotions and romanticism as much as it does statistics and tenaciousness. Yet oftentimes teams bounce back and give a phenomenal performance after one of these losses. How can they possibly do this?
 
I can tell you that it isn't because they let a bad game get them down. Yes, there are players who get discouraged by having a bad game, and they find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into a slump until they have absolutely no belief in themselves as an athlete that can perform at a big league level. The effect can be calamitous, and sometimes a whole team goes down with them. This is all a result of them allowing themselves to be beaten; not intentionally, of course, for they still fight to win those games for all they are worth, yet they lose game after game numerically because they have already lost psychologically. They have lost the game before it's even started.
 
Judging from my personal experience, it takes an incredible effort at times to not let certain games get to you. If a player walked out on the field feeling the way I often do at the beginning of a game directly following an especially disheartening loss, how can I expect him to perform well? And if he doesn't perform well, how can I expect the team to win again? It's when I look at sports this way that I realize that there is much more to the game than statistics.
 
But if you have an attitude that says, "You didn't beat me. You might have won this game, but you can never beat me. Don't forget that tomorrow's another day - my day," you can never lose. You can use an especially terrible game to analyze past mistakes that have been repeated all season long like a little, ticking time bomb, yet were never obvious enough to draw your attention, and finally, after weeks of underlying presence, exploded, resulting in one of those the-world-is-coming-to-an-end (at least if you allow yourself to look at it that way) losses. The game is lost, but that is in the past. What matters now is the future, and the players and managers who never lose focus on the mistakes from the past and concentrate on eliminating them so that they perform better in upcoming games. That's why a team can lose one game 15-3 and the next day come back and slam the team 21-0. They didn't lose - they only learned.
 
A lot of people, admittedly myself included, try to stigmatize these types of players by attributing to them a word that they think is defaming or even vilifying: cockiness. Yet it is this very cockiness that leads a team to the playoffs, this very cockiness that helped them go 20-10 earlier in the season. And the very fans who would besmirch their integrity are more than happy to take those wins. I am by no means calling out any such fans or even trying to put myself on a pedestal - I am one of a kind and far too often find myself frustrated beyond words over "just a game." To let a little secret out, almost like Brad Pitt frustrated. The only thing that keeps me in control is the fact that I live on an even tighter budget than him. When you allow yourself to fall head over heels in love with your team, you sign a contract that has an often overlooked disclaimer in fine, black print at the very bottom of the tedious monotony of the document: "Love is blind." Over time you inevitably learn, but I never knew what I was getting myself into when I (rather subconsciously, I'll admit) developed a passion for baseball. Passion...there is no other word worthy of attribution to this feeling we all have for baseball.
 
Regardless of all my best intentions, though, I often find myself in yet another funk over a bad loss or a bad series or a bad week or month or year. I try to justify it by saying that it has no effect whatsoever on the team, and while in essence that is true, I rarely stop and think about how the players, coaches, managers, front office - and yes, even owners - have to deal with the same problem as I do, except on a far greater, far more significant scale. It is unfathomable to me that a team can go out on the field after being swept by a particularly terrible team who should have been on the other end of the spectrum and proceed to beat up the hottest team in baseball, all because they refused to lose. Players and teams can have all the talent in the world, but there's one crucial ingredient that is prerequisite to any winning team or MVP type player: belief in oneself and, to put it simply, the will and ability to never, ever lose. With this attitude, it doesn’t have to matter if your team doesn't have all the big names like the neighbor out east. It's this attitude that keeps baseball so unpredictable. It's this attitude that keeps baseball sentimental. In part, it is even this attitude that makes the statement, "Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything" (Toby Harrah) true. It is this attitude that keeps me following baseball.
 
I will never cease to be amazed by these players' and teams' ability to refuse to lose, defy all odds, and achieve the impossible. Most people have a hero, and as often as not, that hero is an athlete. My hero will forever be the athlete that never loses.
 
Seriously, how can you not be romantic about baseball?
 
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Read full entry here:
We Wouldn't Have Lost if You'd Beaten Us

Tyler Jay is a left-handed pitcher from the University of Illinois and was taken with the 6th overall pick of the 2015 First-Year Player Draft by the Minnesota Twins. Born on April 19th, 1994, Jay is currently 6'1" and 180 lbs. He was lightly recruited in 2012 when he pitched for Lemont High School in suburban Illinois, but he was not drafted and went on to pitch for the University of Illinois, who he committed to because they were the only school willing to let him continue to pitch; most other schools wanted him to switch to the outfield as he hit .484 with 11 doubles and 35 RBI in his senior year, but he wanted to stay on the mound.

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Image Courtesy of RantSports.com


 
As a freshman at Illinois, Jay was thrown into the bullpen mix where he made 18 appearances and went 1-3 with a 3.10 ERA while striking out 20 in 20.1 innings pitched. The following year he emerged as the team's closer, earning a perfect 10 saves out of as many opportunities and posting a 1.94 ERA with 47 strikeouts over 41.2 innings to earn second-team All-Big Ten honors.
 
Playing for the U.S. Collegiate National Team last summer, Jay was teammates with Vanderbilt's Dansby Swanson and Carson Fulmer, UC-Santa Barbara's Dillon Tate, and Louisiana State's Alex Bregman, among others. He made a team-high 15 appearances, picking up 2 wins and 1 save while striking out 21 in 16.2 scoreless innings. His performance threw him into the limelight for draft prospects and made him a potential first-round pick for 2015.
 
This season Jay went 5-2 with 14 saves and 76 strikeouts in 66.2 innings pitched, allowing only 8 earned runs for a 1.08 ERA. He made one start in the first week of the season, throwing five shutout innings against Lamar, but then moved to the bullpen and helped lead the Fighting Illini to a 27-game winning streak at one point in the season. He was named the Big Ten Pitcher of the Year and was a Louisville Slugger First-Team All-American.
 
Though Tyler Jay has been touted as a closer, it's important to not shut out the possibility of him moving back into a rotation at some point in his near future. In college he pitched 3-4 innings to close out games on several occasions, and the tools he needs to be a starter at the next level are definitely there.
 
Here is Jay's scouting report from MLB's 2015 Prospect Watch:
 
"Jay drew little attention from scouts as an Illinois high schooler in 2012, when he was a slight southpaw who topped out at 90 mph. His fastball and profile have taken off since he went to college, and he helped the Fighting Illini win 27 straight games this spring after starring with the U.S. collegiate national team last summer. Now he's a lock to become the second first-round pick ever produced by Illinois, following John Ericks in 1988, and he's the consensus best left-hander in the 2015 Draft.
 
"He is still not very physical at 6-foot-1 and 175 pounds, but Jay now works at 93-95 mph and peaks at 98 mph with his fastball, even when he works on consecutive days. He generates that heat with athleticism and a quick arm rather than an excessive amount of effort in his delivery.
 
"Jay has a deeper repertoire than most relievers. His plus slider is his second-best pitch, and he also has a curveball with power and depth and shows signs of interesting changeup. He has enough pitches and control to lead a pro team to consider trying him as a starter, though he lacks size and could speed to the Majors if he remains a reliever."
 
Twins scouting director Deron Johnson believes that Jay can be converted to a starter. In an article on Fox Sports North, author Tyler Mason included part of an interview with Johnson:
 
"We definitely believe he's got a legitimate chance to start," Johnson said. "The kid's really strong....He's got really good makeup. I'm really excited."
 
Jay has a plus-fastball that sits around 92-95 mph and a plus-slider reaching 87-89 mph, as well as a changeup at 85-88 mph. While his fastball might not have wicked speed, Tyler's curveball was arguably the best pitch in the entire draft and has been compared to Clayton Kershaw's. The continued development of his changeup will likely wind up being the determining factor in whether he ends up starting long term.
 
Deron Johnson believes that there is a chance Jay could start at Low-A Cedar Rapids. It is possible that the Twins end up rushing him into the majors to pitch from the bullpen this year and then send him back to the minors to stretch out as a starter. The Royals did this successfully last year with Brandon Finnegan, and with their surprise run in May, the Twins have placed themselves in a similar situation. While I wouldn't say I am completely in favor of this idea, if it worked out as well as it did for the Royals, that would be nothing to complain about. He has the stuff to compete at a high level, and it's going to be a lot of fun seeing what comes of it.
 
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Read full entry here:
Introducing Twins' 1st round pick: Tyler Jay