Pregame
I’ve always thought about starting a baseball diary. I never wanted to “blog” about baseball, because to be a good baseball blogger you have to be good at math. I’ve never been mathematically inclined, so my takes on baseball have always been on a more personal level.
Which isn’t bad. There are writers like Bill James already. You can read from people who know the ins and outs of the game intricately. The only thing I can provide is a personal take on things. And, with the new rules that have been added this season, maybe being the zany, wacky weatherman of the baseball writing sphere isn’t too bad.
Truth be told, there probably won’t be much room for zaniness this season. I think much too much energy will be focused on biting my nails come September, even more so than in previous seasons. The NL West, the divisional home of my pride and joy, the Los Angeles Dodgers, has a new powerhouse team taking shape down near the border. I have never been one to give the Dads their due, as I have always thought they sucked (which, newsflash, they did, for years) but it would be silly to say the same thing going into this season. What may come as a shock to Padres fans as well is that I am actually pretty happy that San Diego is going to do decent this year.
Baseball is supposed to be competitive. We need games to matter all year, not just when it comes to the fall. The problem that keeps happening is that it’s getting harder to field a decent team nowadays. There isn’t much of an incentive for owners. Most of these old fogies can just fall back into their money pit. The ones that do care aren’t even rewarded sometimes. Billy Beane had said when being interviewed for Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game that he could figure out enough to get teams into the playoffs, but when it came to winning in the postseason, he was as perplexed as the rest of us.
That’s because baseball isn’t about winning. It’s about the entire season, meaning the wins and the losses. You can zoom in to at-bats as well as full games, but the real spectacle is the entire season, and how insurmountable things felt at times. When the World Series title does finally come, it feels like a journey, more than any other sport, in my opinion. Anyway, the Padres now have a stacked team and it makes for interesting times. I now have another NL West team to watch entertaining games against. I mean, there are only so many times you can watch the Rockies get pummeled before you have to turn on something else.
The other thing I wanted to talk about during the Pregame was my genius idea for an amazing sports manga. Well, it isn’t really genius, more just, wow, how in the world is someone like this alive during my lifetime type deal?
Of course, I’m talking about my prospective new manga titled Ohtani-SAN! which will just detail the life of Shohei Ohtani, maybe one of the best baseball players I’ve ever seen play the game. Not even the Kid had as great of a swing, and Shohei can throw over 100 mph. This guy totally just stepped out of the pages of some baseball manga anyway, may as well just capitalize on that.
For those uneducated on the finer pieces of literature known as baseball manga, it’s a genre of, well, manga, which is a Japanese comic book, that is about baseball. And there’s a lot of them. I mean tons of them. I have also read a fair amount of baseball manga in my day. When I bought a Kindle years ago, I found out how to send free manga to it using a website that no longer exists. I read some killer sports manga on that thing, and baseball manga is around the top of the heap when it comes to that specific wheelhouse of comics.
I mean, Shohei and his team of samurai just walked onto the field during the World Baseball Classic and downed every team in front of them, with the semi and finals being really excellent games. It was great to watch. It’s just right now, we’re still in the first series of manga. See, sometimes these comics run so long or they go down a different art style or genre that they end up having their names changed or slightly altered. Ohtani just needs to get signed by a larger and more competitive team than the pitiful Angels and then we can kickstart Ohtani-San! Z or whatever and we can have him win the World Series in the final panel.
And by the larger and more competitive team, I definitely mean the Dodgers. I mean, we’re always in the market for a new starting pitcher, especially with Julio possibly leaving after this year for Free Agency.
Anyway, that’s probably enough ranting. This portion was written before the first pitch. The next section will be written sometime during the game, and the last will be the postgame. Let’s go stomp da sneks.
03/30/2023 0 – 0 / Arizona Diamondbacks
As a Dodgers fan growing up in Arizona, I always low-key hated the D-backs. I think the biggest reason behind this is because Diamondbacks fans HATE the Dodgers, while I believe most LA fans don’t care about the D-backs at all. It makes for some interesting dynamics, I suppose, but nothing incredibly exciting considering how Arizona has done for a stretch now.
But Opening Day is always fun because everyone is on an even level. Everything starts from here, and who knows how AZ will do this coming season. They have an amazing farm system and they went out and got some veteran players like Evan Longoria.
That’s the magic of the first part of the season. No one knows how things will eventually turn out, and we’ve seen countless teams who were projected to finish near the bottom of their division end up making the playoffs and even the Series.
But at this point in the game (bottom of the 5th) I think it’s safe to say that LA still has Arizona’s number this season. Though they were able to get to Julio Urias early in the affair, new faces J.D. Martinez and David Peralta started their production in the batter’s box early with some runs that may put this game out of reach.
I think the way this Dodgers team has been over the past 10 years or so is a testament to the management and front office of the team. It sucks not seeing much of the “homegrown” talent out there playing, but that’s baseball. Not even just baseball, but modern sports in general. The “super team” fetish has taken hold of sports long ago, and to compete at a high level, you need someone smart while holding the purse strings.
It’s going to take some smarts to figure this team out come the next offseason. There’s a lot of change on the horizon, and if people thought seeing guys like Corey Seager, Cody Bellinger, and Justin Turner was sad, just wait until next year.
But we don’t have to worry about that at this juncture. All we have to worry about at this moment is finishing out the game.
Post-game
Well, that wasn’t a bad game. It sure did have its moments. James Outman being in the lineup was exciting. James is the newbie from the farm system this year. He hit .294 last season in the minors and he also looked like a decent defender in the outfield. Will Smith being so hot to start the season is also a breath of fresh air. It’s nice to see early games where we have a team effort rather than one player willing the team to win.
Mookie going hitless wasn’t ideal, but he also started last season slow. One thing I didn’t like seeing was Max Muncy going 0 for 5 with 5 strikeouts. Yuck. I love Max, but it’s hard not to look at the past few years production-wise and wonder if we got everything we needed from him as a player. Don’t get me wrong, Max will always hold a special place in my heart due to his history with the team and the amazing story behind it. I mean, if you wanted to make a movie about Max Muncy’s life, I’d definitely buy a ticket, but I still want a decent bat in the lineup.
Overall, not a bad game. It was exciting and it was the result I was hoping for; a Dodgers win to start the season off right.
