You Can't Tell the Players...

The first big league baseball game I ever attended was Mets versus the Cardinals at the Polo Grounds in 1962. My grandfather took me as part of an outing with his volunteer fire company. Our seats were in the first or second row of the second deck, right behind first base. You could see everything from there, including the guy who operated the manual scoreboard on the third base side. Stan Musial made a sliding catch in the outfield for the Cardinals, and Gil Hodges played first for the Mets. Those are about the only specific details I remember about the game itself, although I'm pretty sure the Mets lost*.

( Knowing the score... )

* (I've been able to fill in some of the details by searching through the game logs at retrosheet.org, a very cool site with online box scores going back to the sixties. I've been able to narrow it down to one of two games, either July 6, which the Mets won 10-3, with Roger Craig beating Ray Sadecki, or August 18, with Bob Gibson(!) beating Roger MacKenzie, 10-0. I would think the August game to be more likely, but retrosheet says it was the second game of a double header, and I have no recollection of a first game. Someday I'll have to track down the actual box scores, and see if that can tell me which one it was.

That List of Mine...

Didn't do a damn thing on it today. The weather critters promised heavy rain all day, but not a drop fell, and the sun peeked out again for the second afternoon in a row. One gets tired of being lied to.

I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last night, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Will probably get the DVD when it comes out. They showed the Serenity trailer beforehand, and it looked good. This morning, I watched the DVD of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow that I picked up used from Amazon. It's not nearly as much fun on the small screen as it was in the theatre. Still sad that Polly Perkins wasn't stomped by a robot.

Thanks to the good folks at TBS, I also got to watch the Dodgers drop two of three to the Braves, and almost blow the third. They managed to drop from first to third place in a single day. Getting kind of tired of Jim Tracy's apparent mutant ability of leaving his starter in exactly one batter too long, although not to the extent that some of the posters over at DT have. The hostility by some is getting to be a bit much at times. Lighten up. It's just a game.