Game 2 thoughts
By Jason Wojciechowski on April 3, 2013 at 8:13 AM
Here is a list of things that happened last night:
- I fell asleep watching the game in the late innings, so I didn't see all of it, didn't podcast, etc. etc.
- MLB.tv is a raging [redacted] with its utter inability to be a stable platform on which to watch baseball. Last night's fun was NexDef crashing, I think, repeatedly, such that "Live Game DVR" would die, such that I'd be kicked from the second inning to, say, the eighth, thus revealing to me the score of the late-game situation that I'd so assiduously avoided by not being on Twitter, not reading my gchat messages, and so forth. (Hint: don't gchat me after first pitch. I will ignore it.)
- I did see the A's dominated by Hisashi friggin' Iwakuma. Sometimes a soft-tossing righty wins, of course, but it's never fun to see the offense of your team of choice put exactly two men on base in six innings against such a pitcher.
- Michael Morse is a bad man. I didn't even see the homer off of Balfour, which ESPN tells me went 446 feet, which is a mammoth shot (the second-longest "true distance" of any homer early this season behind Justin Upton's 460-foot mash against Cole Hamels; HTO claims it was not a 30-parker (i.e. the same flight path wouldn't have taken it out in all 30 parks), which makes me wonder what yard would have contained that shot—Boston maybe?), but the three-run shot against Parker to the opposite field at night in Oakland in April? That's impressive. Also he's an implausibly gigantic human being. Where did they grow him?
- Mariners reliever Carter Capps throws weird.
- For this one game, at least, I was right about Ryan Cook. I would really really really like to be wrong.
- Yoenis Cespedes's home run was nice.
- Coco Crisp has reached base just one time in eight trips in the two games so far but it seems to me he's putting good wood on the ball. He hit one to the track against Felix Hernandez and had a fly/liner nearly get over the head of Morse early in this one. Maybe most outfielders would have caught the ball because faster guys would have gotten to the spot and big lumbering meatballs like Morse can just stretch to their full 12-foot wingspan to flag it down, but either way, he put a charge in it and Morse very nearly did not get there. I still wish Crisp wouldn't hit the ball in the air so much, but at this point in his career, there's no reinventing yourself as a hitter.
- John Jaso really can't throw. Like at all.