Last night’s game.
Well I think I called it. After the 8th inning I said “he’s getting tired” about Brett Myers. His first two three ball counts on the night were to two of the three batters he had faced in the 8th, and he hadn’t had a strikeout in several innings. Plus some of the balls that were being hit were hit pretty hard. I was hoping he’d get pulled at that point, but he didn’t and things got ugly in the 9th. Given the meatball Tom Gordon threw to Jeff Francouer it might not have mattered, but still.
I was rather torn about Myers. I tend to believe in giving people second chances, not to mention waiting for the legal system to play out before rushing to judgement, but the situation here sure sounds ugly. I suspect my feelings in the long run are going to be similar to my reactions to Lenny Dykstra years ago, namely dislike of the person, but a heck of a lot of respect for the player. Contrary to reports in the paper this morning, I heard plenty of boos in the crowd although they did taper off during the course of the game. If Myers behaves himself from here on out I suspect it will blow over though.
A few oddball things I noticed while at the game. From where I was sitting at the park, I could see a monitor with ESPN’s feed of the game. Because they were bouncing it off of satellites, there was a very noticable lag, to the extent where I could watch a pitch live, then look up to watch it on tv. The radar gun ESPN used was clearly not the same one that gets used to put speeds up on the board at the park. Usually, although not always, the ESPN gun was faster. Even weirder was that there was a fairly wide range in the differences. My best guess is that the two guns were measuring the speeds at different points along the path to the plate.