Tag Archives: baseball

Articles, Baseball

Get out to the Nat

Catching a Vancouver Canadians nooner has been a summertime treat for decades. (And hey, those evening games ain’t bad, either.) The weather we’ve had for the past couple of weeks has translated into numerous sellouts at Nat Bailey Stadium, and it doesn’t hurt that the team has been pretty damned good to boot. Okay, the parent Blue Jays club hasn’t lit it up the way they’d promised to, but the Cs are playing .600 ball right now, and have won five straight series — the latest with none other than Wayne Gretzky in the building to watch his son play for the Boise Hawks.

Still need convincing? As I’m writing of this post, the Cs are in the middle of shellacking the Everett Aquasox down in WA-state. In the top of the eighth inning, it’s 11-bagel for the good guys, with LB Danzler hitting a two-run shot and a whole lot of small ball scoring nine more times. On the mound, Eric Brown has tossed seven innings of near-perfect ball, allowing just three hits while counting nine strikeouts. (Note: the final score was 13-1.)

Vancouver Canadians first baseman LB Dantzler went 1-for-4 with a double against the Tri-City Dust Devils Photo by Miles Clark Photography courtesy of Vancouver Canadians Baseball.
Vancouver Canadians first baseman LB Dantzler went 1-for-4 with a double against the Tri-City Dust Devils Photo by Miles Clark Photography courtesy of Vancouver Canadians Baseball.

First baseman / designated hitter Jordan Leyland currently holds the Single A Northwest Division batting lead, going.342 at the dish with a slugging percentage of .465. On the other side of the ball, Jeremy Gabryszwski and the aforementioned Brown are 1-2 in league ERA, and have gone a combined 6-1 in 67 innings pitched. (For the uninitiated, the technical term for those numbers is pretty durned good.)

For crying out loud, they’ve got fireworks after every Saturday game! Like, dude, they send bombs full of fancy coloured powder up into the air and they go boom all over your eye sockets. Get your tailbones out there, people.

Hit up www.canadiansbaseball.com for scheduling and ticket information.

Articles, Baseball

2013 Seattle Mariners

With the Stanley Cup Playoffs getting underway tonight, you’ll be getting your fill of hockey coverage on Pucked in the Head, don’t you worry. We’ve had a smattering of baseball coverage on the site before, but it’s all focused on the Toronto Blue Jays, and screw Toronto. Today, new PitH correspondent John Stewart takes a look at some ball a little closer to Vancouver with an update from the Emerald City.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2013 Seattle Mariners. Continue reading 2013 Seattle Mariners →

Articles

Blue Jays: contender or pretender?

The Toronto Blue Jays are no longer the also-rans in the American League East. Or at least that’s what Canadian news outlets would have you believe. The New York Yankees have been called ‘too old to win’ for a decade now, but those geezers won the AL East going away. The Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays both finished ahead of the Jays last season. But Toronto finished 16 games under .500 last year, so plenty of teams did that. 

The Jays made a few off-season splashes that will – pundits say – reel those teams in. And let’s just not talk about the train wreck in Boston. (Actually, let’s, but how about saving that for another day?)

Despite having a home run king like Jose Bautista in the lineup, the Blue Jays are building their hopes around younger players like Langley-born infielder Brett Lawrie. Photo stolen without remorse from the internet.
Despite having a home run king like Jose Bautista in the lineup, the Blue Jays are building their hopes around younger players like Langley-born infielder Brett Lawrie. Our question: is Lawrie going to live up to the hype? Photo stolen without remorse from a random site on the internet.

More, including a ridiculous picture of Matt Damon, after the jump.

Continue reading Blue Jays: contender or pretender? →

Articles, Uncategorized

Rangers win!

Much like Ichiro Suzuki and other Japanese superstars in the major leagues, pitcher Yu Darvish draws hundreds of his countrymen and women to Texas Ranger games. Photo by Jason Kurylo for Pucked in the Head.

I had the good fortune of catching a game at Ranger Stadium in Arlington, TX this week, and it was one hell of a game. Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish started well, earning four strikeouts in the first two innings, then imploded. He gave up six runs in the third and another in the fourth before more than 42,000 hometown fans.

Interesting note for those of us who have experienced the phenomenon of Ichiro Suzuki in Seattle. While Darvish is a popular young pitcher amongst Ranger fans of all nationalities, there were a considerable number of Japanese fans in the crowd, almost all of them sporting Darvish jerseys. It’s a considerable market for MLB teams to tap into, and we’ve seen it with Dice-K, Godzilla and a few other import stars. For anyone who has heard entire sections of gleeful college-aged Asian girls squeeing for Ichiro, you’ll know what I’m talking about. As an ex-ESL teacher, I’m interested in things like this.

But I digress. Back to baseball.

Continue reading Rangers win! →

Hockey

25 Oct 2011 – The Intentional Walk Rule is Ridonculous

Albert Pujols is what major league baseball is all about. He’s a pure power hitter, the kind of player who can change a game with a single swing of the bat. Or, in the case of Game Three, with three single swings of the bat – he became just the third player in history to hit a trio of longballs in the same World Series game. The final score of that game? A ridiculous 16-7 for the St Louis Cardinals, who went up 2-1 in the series and were unlucky to not be up three-bagel.

Continue reading 25 Oct 2011 – The Intentional Walk Rule is Ridonculous →