Okay, so that wasn’t the score of one game, but rather the whole weekend series. But the game I went to (Saturday afternoon) was nearly as bad — 18-1. (By comparison, Friday was 9-0, Sunday was 6-0.) At least we went to the one game where the Twins actually scored. I have pretty much nothing good to say about the game itself, so I’ll just leave you with the box score:

And with that out of the way, onto the positives…
My parents were in town to help me move and the Twins were also in town, so we drove into Detroit straight from the airport to catch the 1:05 PM game on Saturday. As it happens, this was the day of Tigers On-Field Clinic #1 before the game, and since we were there early, my mom and I wandered the field listening to various bits of advice about how to be a better ballplayer. Some key lessons learned:

• “You hold the bat like you’d hold a dove. Think about holding a dove — if you squeeze too tight, you’ll kill it. Now, if you’re holding a pigeon, go ahead and squeeze the little sucker all you want, I don’t care.” — Andy Van Slyke (Tigers First Base Coach) during the batting clinic
• “If you want to be a catcher, then I think you should try being a catcher. If you don’t, then that’s okay. Just find another position.” — Gene Lamont (Tigers Third Base Coach) during the catching clinic, which featured Vance Wilson, not Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez (which would have been cooler)
• “Parents need to let the kids be kids. Because let’s face it, when the game ends, they don’t care if they won or not. They just want pizza and ice cream.” — Unknown dude in a Tigers uniform during an unknown clinic that we caught the tail end of

Besides the clinic, we also wandered around the stadium a bit and took a ride on the Foul Ball Ferris Wheel. Have you ever ridden inside a baseball? Because now I have.
And as an added bonus on the day, my scorebook now has two signatures in it: Juan Rincon, pitcher for the Twins, and Mike Redman, back-up catcher who signed right under his name in the line-up of the August 21, 2005 game. Now here’s to hoping that at least one of them as a break-out year and becomes a star sometime soon.
And then there was that massacre of a ballgame… blech.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking… the season started yesterday and I’m blogging about Sunday’s exhibition game between the two Bay Area teams. What?

Well, thanks to the generosity of Google and Microsoft, I was in San Francisco for the weekend at the CRA-W Grad Cohort for Women. And being who I am, I stuck around an extra day to drag some people to a baseball game. As it turns out, the weather wasn’t the greatest and as such, I spent much of the game hunched over my scorebook, trying not to get it wet. (We tried to use reverse psychology on the weather — “Gee, we really love the rain” — to no avail.) But overall, the company was pleasant and the game itself was pretty good.

The game was held at AT&T Park in San Francisco (known last season as SBC Park, but then SBC got bought out — just another reason I hate stadiums named after corporations). I was there last year, but didn’t get a chance to see most of the stadium. This year we went a little early and checked out the Coca Cola slide (which was sadly under construction) and the “Little Giants Field” behind left field, as well as the outfield deck overlooking the bay. I ranked this stadium third last season — having now seen what it actually has to offer, I think it might actually be ahead of Comerica. I’ve got pictures, but unfortunately the batteries in my camera are dead, so they’re stuck there for a little while.

Being in a national league park, I was a little confused to see Barry Bonds (and Frank Thomas) playing DH — and I still don’t know why. Bonds, as was probably to be expected, got a mixed reaction from the fans. Those wearing orange (Giants fans) cheered wildly, while those wearing green (and Breath) booed and heckled him. (“You’re killing your father, Barry!” For those who haven’t seen him in a while, Breath is still a dork.) Still, he managed to get a single and an RBI sac fly during his two at bats — and apparently he got his juice from Anand’s parents’ neighbor. It’s a small world, after all.

As for the rest of the game, the A’s scored first in the 3rd and then broke away with a four run 4th to go up 5-0. After that, they only managed one hit for the rest of the game. (But it was an exhibition game, so most of the starters were gone after the sixth — scorecards get complicated with that many substitutions!) The Giants managed to “leak in” a few “points” by performing well in the “hitting box,”* but it wasn’t enough to overcome the A’s initial lead. The game ended on a 3U-6 double play, and we all went back to Breath’s place, just in time for the rain to really start coming down.

* Look, at least I managed to get these goons to the game. Can I really expect them to know the correct terminology? At least they seemed to be enjoying annoying me.

Today in my NLP/IR seminar we were discussing pagerank and I mentioned that my blog seems to have a lot of it (likely from the TTC). So, we did the Google image search for Johnny Damon and I had to explain just what the fishgina was and why it comes up for Johnny Damon.
This, of course, led to me showing them the picture of the cake. And this was when my professor decided to look up from his own laptop and see what we were all talking about.
“Is that Jesus?”