mmmmmm postgame spread.

Speaking of falling to earth, I was reading a back issue of SI this morning (imagine where) and saw in their Vault section a note from 1983 that on June 15, Rod Carew was hitting .476.  Really?  In 1983, he hit .339, which was not the year he hit .388.  Looked it up, and sure enough, at the end of June, Carew was at .402/.457/.498, and then spent the rest of the year at .280/.366/.329, which closely mirrored his numbers for the next (last) two years of his career.  Figured this was only interesting to me and the other people who visit this site.  In the pre-PED era, it’s rare to be able to pinpoint the moment a guy goes from being a superlative player to an average one, but in Rod Carew’s case, it was on June 28, 1983.  We don’t think he stopped juicing on that day, do we?

I heard that Matt Wieters hit a BP home run into the clouds the other day and burst them open and that’s why it’s been so darn rainy on the east coast. Darn you Matt Wieters, don’t you know that with great power comes great responsibility?

Bravo on the David Price good/bad recap.  One of the finest moments of television ever, applied to baseball!  Huzzah!

Just fyi: in the game story from last night’s Brewers game, JJ Hardy said “It would have been a long bus ride to Detroit if we had lost that game. This will be a lot better.”

So the bus ride cutoff is somewhere after 170 miles, it appears. I know you’ve been tracking that…

Re: HOU-TEX. This series seems to have transcended the fevered desires of each team to take possession of the coveted, ‘Silver Boot’. There was approximately 35K at Rangers Ballpark last night and this has become my absolute favorite series in Arlington. The crowds at Ranger games are an overwhelmingly fun loving and friendly lot, but the crowd for the HOU-TEX series is completely nuts. I’ll go out on a limb and say they’re downright Boisterous. Maybe because everyone is really, really drunk, but it’s great. The attendance was driven largely by an element that won’t show up in the box score: Dollar Dog Night, but still, every time the Astros show up, it’s like Opening Day all over again. There is an even balance of Astros / Rangers swag everywhere you look, fans are hanging over the rails everywhere yelling at the players, and dang - there are women everywhere. That had to have been one of the most fun games I’ve ever been to.  God, I love Baseball.

Rick Sutcliffe trotted out the line about how statistics “can’t measure the heart” of somebody. It might have been Ibanez, but I think it was Jamie Moyer.

I groaned when I heard it. It startled my cat.