2 out, Lineout to the pitcher

With one hundred and sixty two games played by 30 teams, there's a lot of baseball to watch. After a certain date, let's say September first, there are certain teams who play just as much baseball as they did in the other months, but there isn't much of a reason to watch it. When the words 'mathematically eliminated' come up all the time after the name of your favourite team, it isn't easy to know why you are watching. The twilight of the season makes us look for justifications to keep watching the also-rans.

The first reason I often hear to compel me to watch a late season game of a poor team is that they can play 'spoiler'. 'Spoiler' resembles baseball, but with the emphasis on helping out a team that isn't even in the building by beating up on their competition for them. Which is all well and good, but I don't often enjoy it. Why? Well, often the only reason my team gets to wear the coveted 'spoiler' hat and jacket, is because their lack of success has led to them having to take off their 'contender' hat and jacket and put them in the closet for next year. 'Contender' is just so much more fashionable than 'Spoiler' brand. The other thing that strikes me is that the teams that don't play well are not likely to spoil anything with any regularity. Often they get schooled by the better teams as to why they weren't on the list of better teams earlier in the year. Bad teams do not improve because the leaves change colour.



Now another reason to watch late in the season is because "You never know." Not every perfect game or 3 homer night was part of a championship season, and this could be the night. You also never know when you are going to see something you're never seen before. Like this.

.gif courtesy of my own computer

Chad Jenkins is not having a great start to his night. Curtis Granderson is looking for a two out hit up the middle. And would you look at that? Up goes the glove! And the ball! Now what? Well, I guess you could catch it and show everybody how well broken in your glove is. Possibly give a couple umpires a good, long look at the ball.

Then go re-lace the old wrist strap.

Or, if you would prefer to hear about the incident in his own words, Chad had this quote in the Toronto Star:

 "I let go of it and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s not going to be good.’ Then sure enough he smoked it back at me. I got a glove on it and then as soon as I felt it hit my glove I was like, ‘Uh, I don’t know where my glove is.’ I looked up and sure enough it was spinning. I don’t know how, but somehow I ended up with my glove and the baseball.”

What did twitter say?

First it said:

Wow!
— James G (@james_in_to) September 28, 2012

Then, upon deeper reflection, it said:

Well... that was the strangest catch I've seen all year #BlueJays
— Ryan Downer (@rdowner21) September 28, 2012

Yeah, that's about where I was at, with it too.

So, yes, you never know when you're going to see something for the first time, even in late September, it might be a brand new thing.

For all the little bits of crazy I've noticed, hit the homepage of the blog.... I've tried to keep the magic going all year.