Tag Archives: Cardinals

The Boys, Ready to Play

So it’s on my (Apple) TV and not live in the ballpark. It’s still beautiful.

And I may or may not have started tearing up when they showed Stan Musial with his Medal of Freedom.

Spring Can Start Now—Baseball Is Back

Baseball is more to me than simply a game. It is a tradition that I share with my children, that I share with my father, and that he shared with his father. It consists of stories told from one generation to another of who is the best, who you have seen play while sitting in the stands, and the comparisons and discussions that come along with those shared experiences and memories. It is neglecting to study for finals to go to a day game at Wrigley, taking the entire family out for a day at Busch, and staying up late listening to the west coast games. It is a love of a game that connects both halves of our family, and a baseball game is the gift I’m giving my wife for our tenth anniversary.

Baseball gives a shared language, a lore of well over a century of organized play, and a history that follows the contours of the events that shaped this country. It is a profoundly personal thing that you watch along with tens of thousands of people in a stadium or millions of people on television and radio. Grown men wait for the season to start every year to sit in the stands and feel like a child or to own imaginary baseball teams and challenge each other in the field of statistics.

I love baseball. Opening Day is the day of dreams—the day where every team is in first place, if only for a couple of hours. The day where fans’ hopes are refreshed (even the Cubs fans), the future seems bright, and optimism abounds. It’s the day where the heroes of children suit up and take the field of competition, as their fans watch and wait to see what will take place for the next six months.

It is the only major professional sport in the United States where the end of the game is not dictated by a clock—and in more than one way, it is timeless.

Welcome to spring.

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Westbrook In, Ludwick Out in 3-Team Deal

The Cardinals have acquired righthanded starting pitcher Jake Westbrook and cash considerations from the Cleveland Indians in a three-team trade that sends right fielder Ryan Ludwick to the San Diego Padres. The Cardinals receive minor-league lefthander Nick Greenwood from the Padres.

I’m good with this. Jon Jay is looking like a great investment in the future of the Cardinals, which gives Ludwick less of a place with the team, and another pitcher isn’t a bad move.

Sounds like a good money deal, too.

(via St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

First Family Ballgame

Abby’s Girl Scout troop was invited to group seats at a Cards game this past weekend, which included a walk around the warning track at the park. (The group seats were, as you would expect, very high up.) This is the first time any of the children were able to go to a game, and the first time Amanda and my parents had been to the new Busch Stadium.

MLB 10: The Show: First Impressions

I haven’t bought a baseball game in a few years—not since the 2K Sports series was still on top. But this year, after reading some fantastic reviews and seeing that last year’s game was well-loved by a lot of people, I decided to take a shot and grab MLB 10. I played a couple of innings tonight and here’s what I think so far:

  • The computer is a jerk of a pitcher, which is a good thing. It pitches around you, it mixes up pitch types, and it generally does what it can to keep you behind in the count. I like this. Even though I can’t currently hit very well, it’s a good challenge.
  • The animations and the environments are pretty good-looking. Busch looks pretty much like Busch. Fredbird looks pretty much like Fredbird. The players are as always hit or miss, but I think they look good more often than not.
  • The sound is incredible.
  • Umpires call different strike zones, and the game keeps a rotation of umpires, so you can “get used” to one umpire’s zone over another’s.
  • There are so many options here that I’m sure I’ll never even touch half of them. Custom crowd chants and heckles you can record yourself, custom walk-out music editing, league and player career options… a lot of stuff.
  • The built-in movie editor, while crappy in resolution, is a pretty neat way of showing people things you’ve done in-game. It even includes sound, which is better than the EA series. You can either export a specific play, or cut together a compilation of plays for a mini-highlight reel, which you can influence by setting camera change points and everything.

I didn’t play with the movie editor for very long, but here’s a couple of Carpenter strikeouts and a Holliday base hit:

Bonus tip: don’t keep the default camera angle. The “Offset” camera is much better for viewing the zone than the “Catcher” angle.