I got tickets to see San Diego play San Francisco last week, via my wife’s work. It was a last-second, unplanned thing, but my first game of the year, so I went to eat, take a few pictures, and eat.

Here’s a quick bulleted list update of the game:

• I took BART from West Oakland to SF, which itself was pretty fast, but I always underestimate the walk from the subway to the stadium, which took about 30 minutes.
• I brought my full-sized DSLR, with the usual kit lens and zoom, plus a new 10-18mm wide. I also brought my EOS-M mirrorless with a 50mm prime.
• I shot a touch of video with the EOS-M. The wide-angle lens didn’t work out. I feel like I keep taking the same pictures of AT&T park over and over again with the zoom. The 50mm and the mirrorless was great.
• We had a box suite, but went downstairs to the club level to eat. I ended up getting a trio of sliders that were corned beef and briscuit, and a bratwurst. The corned beef was exceptionally good. The bratwurst was a bratwurst.
• I’m still (allegedly) a Rockies fan, so I don’t like the Giants or the Padres. I won’t say anything bad, except that I think it’s chickenshit when a World Series champion’s fans boo every player’s at-bat, especially when you’re outspending all but three teams in the game.
• I actually like the Padres’ dark uniforms. I think they remind me of the Brewers’ uniforms, minus the cool caps.
• The game itself was eh. The Giants jumped ahead fast, and the Padres never scored.
• It was Cinco De Mayo, and some dude proposed on the kiss-cam.
• I saw a huge dude with a giant Bud Lite logo tattooed on his hand.
• The Rockies game that I was going to passively follow was rained out.
• We left after the 7th inning.

A bit boring, but I do like going to AT&T for the food.

Pictures are up on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/sets/72157652540439541

I haven’t been writing any posts about baseball this year.  Reason being, the wheels fell off the Rockies pretty early in the year, and then things just went from bad to worse.  I think I got a few weeks into April before I decided to stop watching, and things got exponentially worse after that.

I don’t know why I still follow the Rockies.  If I had any sense, I’d just jump on the Giants bandwagon, spend twice as much on tickets, and coast into the postseason with no problems.  But I started on this baseball kick when I lived a block from Coors Field, in that magic 2007 season, and now the curse of the whole thing is that I was programmed to like Colorado and hate the Giants and the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks and so on.

Okay, so 2011 ended in a shitstorm, a strong April start for the first damn time, and then the train completely derailed.  In 2009 and 2010, I had the ritual of counting wins and losses and magic numbers, coming out of a movie on a Saturday night and frantically starting up the MLB At Bat app on the iPhone to see if they managed to whittle away another half-game in the standings.  In 2009, they made the wild card; in 2010, there was hope, but they fettered it away.  In 2011, not even close.

Then you enter that period from October to February, where you hope the owners make some changes, dangle some big money out there for the free agents, hunt down some good roster moves with other teams.  Or, in the case of the Rockies’ ownership, it’s more like shopping for used tires in the five-dollar rack behind a shady gas station, picking through the leftovers for a mismatched set with almost enough tread to last you a month or two.  The Rockies almost never spend money on anything big, and this offseason was no different.  They did grab Marco Scutaro to fill in at second base, which seemed like an okay signing.  But the big need was pitching, and they got… Jamie Moyer, who is older than dirt; Jeremy Guthrie, a pop-fly pitcher, which never works out at Coors; and resigned to the fact the rest of the pitching staff would be the various minor-league parts and back-of-rotation pieces they had left over from 2011.

The 2012 injuries have been phenomenal. Here’s a partial list:

• Jorge De La Rosa tore his arm apart in 2011 and had surgery.  There was talk that he’d be back early in the season; it’s August and after a couple of rough starts and setbacks, he’s just now starting to throw.
• Juan Nicasio broke his neck last year after he got hit by a comebacker, and miraculously was throwing by spring training and started the season.  He’s now out with a leg injury requiring surgery.
• Jeremy Guthrie, the #1 pitcher in the rotation, fell off his damn bike on the way to the park and screwed his shoulder.  He came back, had a complete meltdown, and was then pulled out of the rotation and later traded.
• Jhoulys Chacin hasn’t pitched since May with some nerve inflammation issue.
• Chris Nelson ended up in the hospital in July with an irregular heartbeat.
• Jonathan Herrera went on the DL at the same time as Nelson because his arm got infected from his watch.  (Did he buy one of those Ro1ex watches in Chinatown?)
• Troy Tulowitzki left with a groin injury in May that required season-ending surgery.
• Christian Friedrich just got shut down for the season with a stress fracture in his back.
• Jason Giambi’s been out since mid-July with the flu.
• Todd Helton just had season-ending (and maybe career-ending) surgery on his hip.
• Add to that a dozen and a half or more trips to the DL for various strains, sprains, and minor problems.

What’s even more laughable is how the ownership and management have treated the problem.  First, the plan going into this year was stupid, this “veteran movement” where a bunch of late-30s/early-40s players got slated for everyday positions.  That alone should have gotten the GM Dan O’Dowd fired and manager Jim Tracy demoted to equipment manager for the way he handled things day-to-day.  But instead, Tracy got an “indefinite contract extension”, and O’Dowd went on and on about how he was the greatest GM in the game.

So, the pitching rotation fell apart.  Only one pitcher (Drew Pomeranz) in the five-man rotation remains.  When everyone got gangrene or anthrax or hoof-and-mouth disease or traded to a minor-league team in Mexico, the powers that be thought it would be awesome to switch to a four-man rotation with a strict pitch count.  That essentially means none of Colorado’s starters will pitch more than 100 innings this year; none of them will be out of the single-digit win range, and what’s left of the bullpen will be majorly overtaxed.  This caused pitching coach Bob Apodaca to cry uncle and quit; he was replaced by “co-coaches”.

The Rockies were neither buyer or sellers at the trade deadline, which was odd.  I didn’t expect them to go hunting for new talent, which they did need, but wouldn’t do much good when you’re 20-some games out of first in your division.  But I also expected them to offload more of their long-term liabilities to get some younger prospects to start rebuilding.  They did trade Scutaro, and inexplicably added Jonathan Sanchez (who then lost three games and… wait for it… moved to the DL.)  But the inaction on O’Dowd’s part was a clear indicator that he thinks everything’s a-ok.

Everyone wants O’Dowd to quit.  And it looked like he would, but then he pulled some half-assed “co-managing” stunt, where he named his assistant the part-time GM or some lame bullshit like that, with him still “overseeing” everything.  It reminds me of when I worked for the university, and there would be these endless re-orgs, but with the same idiots in charge of the same flunkies, just with fancy new acronyms.

And I know running a baseball team’s probably hard work, and probably involves a certain amount of luck and momentum and blah blah blah.  I realize that if you can spend a quarter-billion dollars on salary, everything will be golden, and if you are in a small market, you’ve got to scrape and beg and borrow.  And I know that Coors is hell on pitchers.  But when you have a bunch of Jesus-freaks pushing their “everyone’s a winner” crap and never having the balls to just fire someone or maybe spend a few bucks on some outside talent, this is what you get.

And yet, I’m strangely nostalgic for the bastards.  It’s no fun to watch, and I will only occasionally check a score just to make sure they’re not getting no-hit.  I’m definitely not paying a couple grand to fly out to Denver and watch them drop two or three games to the Cubs or Padres.  And I’m not paying the now-hyperinflated AT&T Park ticket prices to sit in a sea of orange and watch the Rockies lose 16-2 to the Giants.  The season was over in April for me, and I do miss it, but it’s hard to grin and bear it at this point.

I’m so depressed about the baseball season right now.  The Rockies have catastrophically failed in almost every aspect, and I don’t foresee it getting much better any time soon.  And if they had a bad start, and continued a slump through May, that would be one thing.  But they were leading the division — they were leading all of baseball for a while.  And now I think they’d have serious problems taking on most AAA baseball teams.

Some facts and numbers:

• The “ace” pitcher, Ubaldo Jimenez, does not have a single win.  Since he started the all-star game last year, he is 4-12.
• Jorge De La Rosa, arguably the team’s best pitcher, tore his UCL completely and will be out for the rest of the season.
• The ace of 2008 and 2009, Aaron Cook, hasn’t thrown a single pitch this year in the major leagues.  He fell apart last year (6-8) and then broke a toe, then messed up his shoulder, then slammed his hand in a door and broke his finger during spring training.
• Closer Huston Street has given up 5 home runs in his last 8 outings.
• There’s essentially nobody at 3rd base, and they just fired 2nd baseman Jose Lopez.
• There are no longer any left-handed pitchers starting.  They have only one lefty in the bullpen.
• They’ve gone from first to third in the division.  Depending on how the Dodgers do this weekend and how they do against the Dodgers in their upcoming series, they could very easily drop to 4th.
• Tonight they are starting a pitcher who has never pitched about the AA level in the minors against the team that has the most run production in all of baseball, in a hitter’s park.
• The team is 7-18 in May, and will most likely finish the month with 20 losses.
• There are a million other statistics you can look at to make this even more depressing.  (Stolen bases?  0 for 3 in 11 games?)
• Oh yeah, and the other day, a fan trying to slide down the railing in a stairway out by center field fell 20 feet and smashed his head in, and died the next day in the hospital.  Not only is this horrible for the fan and his family, but I’m sure it’s not helping a) the sagging attendance figures; b) the funk over the team; and c) the team’s finances, because I’m sure the guy’s family will sue the hell out of them because the safety rail didn’t have a safety rail.

It’s gotten so bad that I finally, after last night’s total clusterfuck of a 10-3 loss, deleted the MLB At Bat app from my phone.  Half of me thinks that they will eventually have to come back and start winning games again.  Half of me thinks it will only get worse, and it’s only a matter of time before Todd Helton gets his annual back injury and Tulo gets his yearly leg pull and Aaron Cook comes back from the DL and starts pitching like a batter’s high school coach at the home run derby.  I haven’t gone to any games this year, and I have no desire to drop a thousand dollars on a long weekend to Denver to watch them lose two or three games to the Nationals, or pay $100 for tickets to watch them get demolished in a sea of orange over at AT&T Park.

And it’s still May.  There’s still four months of this.

It’s so hard for me to give up on this, it has become so intertwined with my life.  I mean, I think about the time I spent in Denver and how much I liked it there, and how I loved going to games there.  Granted, I was not 100% happy there; I didn’t have a job for a good chunk of that summer, and I didn’t get much writing done during that era.  But I only remember the good stuff, and it’s odd how memory works that way, how I can smell a certain kind of suntan lotion and immediately think of the times I would slather on that SPF-80 and roast out in the 331 section during a day game.  I sit in my car that I bought back in Colorado and think of all of the times I listened to 850 KOA while driving up and down I-25, trying to keep up with the end of that 2007 season.  Even my iPhone - I think about all of the games I’ve watched on that stupid little app in the last couple of seasons, all of the time I’ve spent trying to follow this team while I was thousands of miles away.

We go to the movies almost every weekend, and it’s become this ritual, how I would get out of a show and flip on the phone and check the score.  And that’s the gotcha to all of this, the way those different disparate sensory inputs all twist themselves together: the wood trim on the mall we go to, the theater’s bright red carpets, the smell of the popcorn, the taste of the same Reese’s Pieces I always get, the design of the little icons on the screen, the feel of the phone in my hand, the look of the uniforms on the pictures in the news recap of the game.  It all fits together in such a perfect storm of pieces, that just taking out my phone now and looking at the hole in the icon screen where the app used to be makes me depressed.

I should channel all of this energy into writing.  And I’m trying to write, but I’m thinking about it too much right now.  And that’s the problem with both writing and baseball: thinking about it is your worst enemy.  If you’re standing 60 feet and six inches from a batter up on a pitcher’s mound, and all you can think about is the number of losses behind you and the ability of that batter and his stats versus your kind of pitching, you have lost.  If you stare at a blank page and think about how much you need to write and what you need to get done and how you need to get that next winning book out there, you will lock up completely.

Could be worse.  I could also be a football fan, and staring down that huge disaster of a lawsuit that’s probably going to derail their next season.  The more I think about sports, the more I miss the days when I hated all of them.

1. PNC Park, home to the Pittsburgh Pirates, was built on what was later identified as an American Indian burial ground belonging to the Shelmikedmus nation. Since its construction, the Pirates have not had a winning season.

2. No player in history at the major league level has had the middle name Xavier.

3. During the filming of his PBS documentary about Baseball, Ken Burns pitched 12 games under the assumed name of George Johnson for the High-A Myrtle Beach Penguins. In 22 innings, he gave up 67 runs and pitched only seven strikes.

4. Hunter S. Thompson worked as an assistant machine operator at the Louisville Slugger factory when he was a teenager.

5. Manny Ramirez did a series of Rolls Royce ads in Japan between the 2007 and 2008 seasons, which can be found on youtube.

6. Under the current MLB Player’s Association Collective Bargaining Agreement, any position player on the 25-man roster of any team is allowed unlimited access to any American Airlines Admiral’s Club lounge in the continental United States.

7. The size of a regulation baseball (between 5” and 5.25”) was originally set because it was the diameter of an average cow’s kidney.

8. Johnny Damon’s great-grandfather was the first person to buy a Model T Ford in Thailand.

9. Originally proposed names for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays included the Tampa Oranges, St. Petersburg Piers, Florida Mickey Mice, and Pinellas County Sunshines.

10. The Colorado Rockies have an alternate home jersey specifically designed for playing in snow. It has a pullover hood, full-height boots, and a parka top. It’s rarely used because it impedes pitching motion, but they were most famously worn in game 4 of the 2007 NLDS, in which it snowed over 27 inches during 9 innings of play.

11. The MLBPA blocked negotiations in 2004 that aimed at moving the Montreal Expos to Havana, Cuba. The biggest issue was complications with obtaining work visas for players who had previously fled Cuba for the US.

12. Pitcher Randy Johnson is an avid collector of Strawberry Shortcake figurines and memorabilia. In 1998, he paid $650,000 for a rare 1985 Berrykins Strawberry Shortcake doll that once belonged to Kim Jong Il.

13. There is no specific rule banning the use of human-animal hybrids as baseball players, although it’s rumored that the owners collectively came to a gentleman’s agreement limiting their use during the 2006 off-season owners’ meeting.

14. The 2010 version of the MLB At Bat app for the iPhone contains a number of hidden easter eggs, including a hardcore porn viewer available during the 7th inning stretch.

15. Cracker Jack purchased at Giants games at AT&T Park does not contain any peanuts and is manufactured at an alternate facility that does not process peanuts, in accordance to San Francisco peanut allergy laws.  Also, when singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the 7th inning stretch, they change the line “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack” to “Buy me some tofu and Cracker Jack.”

16. In 1986, George Steinbrenner explored the possibility of a ban on facial hair for all fans attending games at Yankees Stadium, but his legal staff eventually convinced him this would not be feasible.

17. Janis Joplin’s younger brother Mike was the bullpen catcher for the Houston Astros from 1971-1973.

18. Billy Martin was the celebrity endorser for Excalibur crossbows in 1981.

19. There have only been two times in baseball history where a position player who was pitching was hit by a pitch during an at-bat, had the game interrupted before they took first base, and then appeared pitching for the opposing team during the makeup game due to a trade in the time between games.  This is the only situation in which a player other than a pitcher can have their own walk credited against them.

20. After becoming a vegetarian, Prince Fielder killed a goose with a line drive at a road game against the Florida Marlins, and refused to eat the dead bird.  This was the first time a player has killed a bird during play and not eaten the carcass, which is a secret tradition held among most omnivorous players.  This dates back to an infamous incident at Bennett Park in 1911 when Ty Cobb killed a homeless man with a baseball bat and ate his left arm during the intermission between two games of a doubleheader against the White Sox.

1. Hit a single.
2. Reach on an error.
3. Walk on four balls.
4. Get hit by a pitch.
5. Catcher drops the ball after the third strike.
6. Fan interference.
7. Catcher interference.
8. A pitching infraction that results in a 4th ball.
9. A pitched ball lodges in the catcher or umpire’s mask on the third strike or fourth ball.
10. Replacing another player that just reached first base.
11. Purchase failing MLB franchise, build new stadium, create a ground rule stating that a player with your exact name is awarded first base at each at bat regardless of the strike/ball count, add yourself to the 25-man roster.
12. Star in a stupid movie based on a British book written about a different sport, run on field to chase romantic interest Jimmy Fallon.
13. Take a 25% dose of the steroids normally used to hit home runs.
14. Take 4 train from East Side or B/D train from West Side, stop at 161st St, enter at gate 6.
15. Hire Uri Geller, learn secrets of hypnosis, hypnotize all defensive players and umpires.
16. Jet pack.
17. Time at-bat with zombie apocalypse, wait until all players are infected, have co-conspiritor drop large pile of human brains on the warning track by center field.
18. Build time machine, send cyborg back in time to kill pitcher’s parents; repeat until you get a really bad pitcher you can easily hit.
19. If you play first base, you will always reach first base nine times, provided you don’t leave the game early.  (Why isn’t this ever on any of these lists?)
20. Have fans throw batteries at the head of the pitcher.  (Works best if you play for the Phillies and are at a home game.)
21. Scout a pitcher born with phenylketonuria; feed him large amounts of aspartame prior to his start.
22. After strikeout by a pitcher born outside of the United States, petition the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law for arbitration, arguing the pitcher’s work status is in dispute due to paragraph 9 of General Assembly resolution 2205 (XXI) of 17 December 1966.
23. Up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-A-B-Start.
24. Either build a second moon, or move an asteroid into Earth orbit, with enough mass to change tidal patterns and conversely change barometric pressure to alter the pitcher’s ability to locate the ball correctly.
25. Do not give the pitcher LSD (especially if it is Doc Ellis.)
26. Start a facebook petition to put you on first base.
27. Travel to bizarro alternate reality where you get to advance to first base after you swing at nothing three times.
28. Send a photo of a gun to the pitcher’s cell phone. (This probably works best if you are Elijah Dukes.)
29. Be the daughter of Bud Selig when he is on first base and suddenly needs it to look like he doesn’t own first base because he took a new job.
30. Practice.