Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok, I will admit it... for the past two years my number one sport has ceased to be football and has become baseball. Despite never having seen them play in the flesh (they were on the road the week I visited), I am an ardent Toronto Bluejays fan and have a major man-crush on Roy Halladay. I just love all aspects of the game, not just the home runs (in fact they are low down my list). I love watching great pitchers like Halladay, Santana, Peavy and Verlander (and this year Greinke) go to work and baffle the hitters completely. I love watching speedsters like Reyes and Crawford hare around the bases. I love watching great catchers like Yadier Molina try to throw them out. I love the boring stuff like watching hitters show great plate discipline and judgement, taking close pitches for walks and forcing the pitcher to throw the ball in their strong areas, and have resulted a bit of a crush on Joe Mauer this year as a result. And of course, you can't help but get a semi watching someone as regal as Albert Pujols at the plate.

Regular season ends on Sunday, and it's play-off time, so now seemed like a good time to ask... anyone else follow this at all? Anyone else got a horse still in the race? Looks like Yankees, Red Sox, Angels (who I have enjoyed watching a lot this season) and probably Tigers in the American League, and the Cardinals, Phillies, Dodgers and probably Rockies in the National League. If you don't follow it, pick one of those now and start watching!

what channel broadcasts it?

I'm an Astros fan.

Bugger.

Ouch. Although they look good at times... just a lack of pitching holds them back, it's hard to be consistent without a strong pitching staff.

Gill> nobody, any more Channel 5 showed two games a week, Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, from 1997 until the end of last season... then for unknown reasons, they dropped it without any warning. I now subscribe to the MLB.TV service via the official MLB.com website, so I can stream every game live (as I am doing right now with the Twins v Tigers game) or watch them all archived as live. It's a fantastic service, costs just under a tenner a month at current exchange rates, which may sound a lot but remember that baseball teams play damn near every day, so the choice and quantity you get for your money is staggeringly good. /advert

If I was already a fan I wouldn't have a problem doing something like that but for me to take up a new sport...

I went to see an Angels game, so by default I am an Angels fan. This was back when they were terrible, so I felt very lucky that they beat the Yankees.

I played Fantasy Baseball with some American friends for a couple of years and really got into the stats and players and stuff. I actually had Roy Halladay on my team, and he was nifty back then, which seems like forever ago. I also had Santana in his first season as a pro... he wasn't quite as good back then. Ah, I remember the halcyon days of having The Big Unit or whatever he was called pitching win after win after win. He must have retired by now, right?

It's on ESPN.

Are you just saying this to get into my underpants? Because it's working.

I really enjoyed playing it and watching when I was much younger, back in the years leading up to their double pennants. Then I found you entered the age of either not being bothered or being absolutely obsessed with every single stat and I chose to be not so bothered any more.

I've still got a big box of old baseball cards somewhere. I'm sure the gum would be just as brittle and unpleasant too after 20 years.

You need to get The Bigs 2, man. Turn off the 'guaranteed hit' style powerups and you're left with a very solid baseball game with a few jazzed up elements. For some reason the focus is on the 'become a legend' mode while the season mode is hidden away in a submenu but apart from that bit of lunacy I'm enjoying it a lot.

Randy Johnson has bounced around a couple of teams and is now with the Giants... his season was cut very short this year after he got a shoulder injury while batting, bizarrely, and really at 45 or so he should be retiring... but he hasn't done so officially, and may very well not do. Jamie Moyer at Philadelphia is 46 now I think and is still pitching

And yes, Roy Halladay has always been nasty... his consistency is what makes him one of the undeniable top 3 in the game, and I don't see that changing any time in the next 5 years at least, health permitting. It looks like he is throwing cannonballs sometimes, the way hitters don't seem to be able to hit the ball any harder than a weak trickle to the infielders.

Steve> I was waiting for you to chime in When you posted that picture a while back of you and the lady at the Rogers Centre, I wasn't just putting two and two together and working out where it was, I actually recognised it... I did do the stadium tour lolz, even though I didn't really understand the game at the time. FTR, I saw games at Old Yankee Stadium, Old Shea Stadium and Fenway last September when I went on my hollibops. And I'm still undecided on The Bigs... it just seems too arcade-y, and my attraction to the game is a very "purist" one. I get enough mileage out of Out Of The Park in a statty Champ Manager way to really need to baseball game, although I might give the demo another try, just for you

You will get utterly trounced at first in The Bigs because you won't know how all the special moves and tricks work, fielding especially you have to be ridiculously fast and accurate (I tend to panic and hit X instead of Y and so throw to third instead of second) and the demo doesn't teach you any of this... the main game does but the manual doesn't tell you it does (while the tutorial game teaches you some, it's in a lot of the minigame modes that you learn how to do all the ridiculous catches and hits and such).

I persevered and more and more things will start to click with you, batting recently did and I ended up demolishing the Giants at home in the way that most other teams had been demolishing me at home up until then.

There are times you'll wish you could turn all the crap off and just play straight baseball (especially the Big Slam, which can turn a game around as the computer is very good at it) but then in its primary market 2K are also trying to sell MLB2k9 so you can see why that option isn't there.

But yeah, I remember my parents and I all dancing around our rec room after watching Joe Carter smash that homer out and win us the World Series.

Shouldn't this thread be titled "Yankee rules rounders"?

It was titled to mesh with the "Yankee rules throwball" thread.

Never got on with baseball...love American Football, and can watch basketball, and would watch Ice Hockey if it was ever on, but baseball?

It doesn't help that all the stats are obtuse. RBI? ERA? Don't know what they mean... Gridiron's stats are laughably simple in comparison... well, apart from QB Rating... but thats easy enough to understand, its just the formula they use for working it out is horribly complex.

I bought a car off an ex-Blue Jays pitcher once.

BJ Ryan tried to sell me a car once... I was tempted, but he couldn't close the deal.

Everyone: that was a very funny joke.

Pundabaya> the stats themselves aren't that complicated, but they do talk entirely in acronyms that you are expected to understand, and it takes some exposure to the game for the penny to drop as to what RBI and ERA and the like stand for and therefore mean (Runs Batted In and Earned Run Average, in case anyone is wondering).

I don't have room in my life for two games involving bat and ball. The only American 'sports' I really like are IndyCar and NASCAR.

Neither do I, that's why the only cricket I pay any attention to nowadays is England Test matches.

I get free tickets to matches at Trent Bridge, so I'd rather watch live sport than follow one on the internet.

You're lying anyway... you like wrestling too

That's not a sport.

I find baseball painfully slow whenever I catch it on TV. I do, however, love the basketball, and on Tuesday I'm going to the O2 to see the Jazz vs the Bulls! Fuck yeah!

Is that an exhibition, or a regular season game? I really don't follow basketball at all, although I almost got into it in Vegas when the Lakers were playing the Magic and the owner of the Lakers joined in our private H.O.R.S.E. game

i hate watching basketball (too many points), but love watching the slowness of baseball and reading the old stories. Last month i went to see Holland v Venezuela at the baseball worldcup in Haarlem, great atmosphere (3500 men), lovely game, you could get very close.
see here for a report (in dutch, but with photo's): http://ricklindeman.nl/files/honkbal.html


In the MLB i support the mets (although i got into baseball wathcing the 92/93 blue jays), because of number of reasons..
a) new york is new amsterdam, so my natural home town for american sports (and a city i can relate a bit too, more than say kansas city), and it means NY is in our orange
b) the mets are the succesors in a way of the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers and NY giants
c) you can't support the yankees, can you

You can, but you can't look at yourself in the mirror any more.

I quite like the Mets, I have semi-adopted them as my NL team after having a great night at Shea during their last September choking fit... they lost to the Cubs in extra innings after somehow failing to get the winning run home in the bottom of the 9th despite a lead-off triple It made me weep a little for the actual Mets fans. Unfortunately they have just had too many injuries this season to be that entertaining to watch, so I have largely ignored them, which is a shame... a team with Reyes, Wright, Beltran and Delgado (and Santana on the mound) is always good to watch.

I don't know, to be honest.

Why the hate for the Yankees? Is it because chavs wear their hats?

I'll take the Yankees over the Mets any day of the week.

They're the baseball equivalent of Man U, aren't they?

Partly. That is a symptom though, not the problem itself. It is basically because they have twice as big a payroll as any other club in major league baseball, so can afford to splash out on all the star players when they are out of contract; they are essentially seen as the face of "big business" in what is a very traditional game. So they distort the game somewhat with their purchasing power (at least there are a few teams at it in the Premier League), and it doesn't help that they have a rude and generally dislikeable owner. And New Yorkers themselves can be a little pushy and disagreeable, and this "New York" attitude tends to be typified and exaggerated amongst Yankee fans (both personal and anecdotal experience back me up here).

However, while all of that is true, I will concede that the primary motivation for the Yankee hatred is simply jealousy, since they have been the most successful club of recent years... the biggest Yankee hating is found among Mets fans (local rivalry) and Red Sox fans (biggest rivals in the division), and is a lot milder elsewhere, so meh. Personally, it is the imbalance caused by the spending power that makes me hate them, in the same way I find the Premier League pretty abhorent now. But different people will have different bug bears about them.

The main problem with The Bigs 2 is that you can't give yourself a mullet. What the fuck is the point of a baseball game in which you can't have a fucking mullet?

Also: it made me start referring to myself in the third person as "Big Dog", but that's a feature not a bug.

Really it's more of a mutton chops and dodgy tash game to be honest. Pics to follow when I'm home.

If memory serves, my bloke has got one of those Fu Manchu moustaches that joins up with his muttonchops. It is SWEET. Also: bonus points for being able to have a character that's properly tubby. My lad (Buck "Big Dog" Gentley) looks like he's eaten Kevin Youkilis.

It's fitting in that respect that Prince Fielder is the one whose picture is all over the game.

Play-offs have begun!!! Yankees v Twins right now people!!! Let's play ball!

So, the angels are still in it..

A phillies v yankees world series would seem excellent to me on one hand (best clubs in baseball), but as a mets fan it is (nytimes quote) the worst possible scenario, as they are both our rivals

I have, but one thing to say.

Bring on the fuckin' Yankees.

In other news Ryan Howard is this year's MVP. And last year it was Cole Hamels.

I don't think we will beat the Yanks' but fuck that would be bollock tinglingly good if we did. Double prizes

That is at best deceptively misleading, at worst false. Cole Hamels was only the MVP of the World Series last year, not of the entire league. And I didn't think the MVP awards had been announced yet league-wide, so I can only assume you are saying Ryan Howard won the NLCS MVP award, in which case, so what? The winning team of a series almost always have the MVP for that series, so really all your brag boils down to is that the Phillies have won a few postseason series. Which is very good, obviously, but the whole MVP thing is really a very disingenuous way to be phrasing that brag.

I think the Phillies are the only team who really have the firepower to out-gun the Yankees, for the sake of a competitive World Series I am glad they are in it. I'm also getting a slight crush on Cliff Lee lately, so I am pleased to get to see him another couple of times (they WILL recognise that he is their ace, right? Right?)

Not a Phils fan eh? Bummer.

I'm a Bluejays fan, I really don't much care who wins in NL games, I just enjoy baseball, period. It's more that I'm not a John Coffey fan, if I'm honest.

Well at least you're honest

yankees in 6?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/sport ... ml?_r=1&hp

Phils played so much better last night. I actually stayed up for most of the game. However, the Yanks score well. In the last three games we have got off to a great start, taken the lead and I've headed off to bed only to wake up to find they came back and gave us a whooping

It's a tough road, but I think the Yanks could well take it tomorrow..

Being in a New York bar on Halloween with everyone in there cheering every run or out for the Yankees was something very special. I know it's unfashionable and they're the Man Utd of baseball, but I can't help but really want them to win it.

The thing about the Yankees hate is that most of it comes from their payroll making Man Utd look like Accrington Stanley, yet them not being that good. It just seems decadent spending that much money and not winning the world series every year... it makes fans of teams who have to get by on a comparative pittance (ie every team except the Red Sox) insanely jealous. Add to this their ability to buy any player they want from under other teams...

MAD Magazine had an article a year or so ago about the difference between rich and poor teams... including a rich team hiring a poor team's third baseman on a $12mil three year contract to be their batboy.

Yankees win, whoop-dee-doo.

Wonder how many of the Yankees free agents will be back next year. Could Matsui's MVP award be the last thing he does for them? I think it's likely, can't see them keeping both him AND Johnny Damon, and Matsui's knees make Damon the more versatile option. Also, will Andy Pettitte file for free agency? ZOMG cliffhangers!

Also be interested to see who picks up Pedro Martinez now he has filed after proving he could still cut it in the big leagues as a starter and find ways to win even without much in the way of velocity (relative to his younger days I mean). And what becomes of the Angels, now Guerrero and Figgins are likely to be snapped up elsewhere? I've heard talk that the Phillies would consider Figgins a very good fit for them, and on a personal note I would love to see Vlad Guerrero back in Canada... I'm not sure what state the Bluejays payroll for next season is in though, although shipping Alex Rios midway through last year will have helped a great deal. Maybe they do have one big money signing in them this time around? Mind you, if they did have enough money then they'd probably sign Frank Thomas again instead

Tim Lincecum