As Uneventful As Uneventful Gets

I’m late blogging tonight, but I doubt anyone noticed. I just hammered out my Jays piece for U of T’s paper – which should be out early next week, if I had to guess – and I’m delighted to see that my piece on the Rogers Centre has been published today, in conjunction with the stadium’s 20th anniversary this past week & current weekend.

The article, for your reading enjoyment and my self-satisfaction, is here:
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090606/SPORT/706059848/1062

The title is the editor’s, and he made my paragraphs a bit smaller than I like them, and a bit of extra stuff about the recent renovations to the RC were taken out, as was a blurb about how it hosted the WBC (I guess that’s what you get when you turn stuff in 200 words over count).

Other than that, they’re all my words, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s cool to see myself in print (well, online – a copy of the actual thing would be fabulous but unlikely) halfway around the world in a big paper with journalists from the NYT and the like. Here’s to a lot more of that in the near future, dear blogosphere :)

Tonight the Twins were thoroughly unspectacular, with the exception of Shane Cole, who I’ll get to in a second, and they dropped a game that really should have been more competitive to the Oshawa Dodgers by a count of 6-3.

There’s truthfully not too much to say about the game – the scoring details will go in my game story, which’ll be up on MississaugaTwins.ca early in the week alongside whatever I write about tomorrow. The only real angles, as far as I’m concerned – but I’m kind of narrow minded, right? – were the pitchers tonight. All three who entered the game were noteworthy for different reasons.

Greg Byron went the distance for Oshawa. His line pretty much reflects what came up in the media scrum with coach Calcagni after the game – Byron was far from overpowering, but he had good control and was unassumingly very effective. He gave up a total of three runs, only two of which were earned, in the process of scattering seven hits. Notably, he struck out two without walking any – I think that’s the most telling stat, as it shows that he both was far from overpowering and had very good control.

On the Twins side, it was a story of polar opposites – Matt Martinow only managed three and a third, allowing a total of three earned runs (four total) while giving up eight hits. He both struck out and walked two Dodgers.

Shane Cole came in in relief and shut Oshawa down – he went the rest of the game, good for a measly two earned runs over five and two thirds, striking out five. Worryingly, he also walked four – but it’s tough to complain, given the net result.

Tonight was the second time I’ve seen Cole come in and pick up a starter that turned in a mediocre effort by giving the Twins a chance. He also did it for Brian Speck in the home opener against Brantford. I’m very, very certain that you’ll be seeing Cole get a start sometime soon – infer what you will of my reasons for thinking so, but if I were a betting man I would feel fine with a lot riding on that. If Cole performs anything like he has out of the ‘pen as a starter, he could well find himself part of the eventual rotation.

That’s about all I have to say as far as the actual game goes. I was a bit surprised to learn that tomorrow’s game is at 7 – no more afternoon home games for the Twins – but that’s alright with me, I’ll watch the Jays in the afternoon!

I met some friendly people in the Boston Pizza Beer Garden – who should be commenting on here, I think – that are just Mississaugans (I hope that’s the term – MS Word says it isn’t) following the team. Cool that those people exist. We were having some fun with the fact that the Dodgers’ pen was playing some strange game involving trying to throw a ball into a glove about twenty feet away – it looked just a bit silly, but I have to think that far worse goes on in major league pens.

Speaking of that Beer Garden, tonight they were giving out coupons for a BP individual sized pizza with the purchase of a beer – with two beers at $9 and an individual pizza $8-10 or so, you can drink at a profit! Sounds good to me, and I don’t think I’ll have any problem racking up those coupons over the summer.

In the coming week, I’m going to look at writing some fresh content for the team’s weekly e-newsletters (probably a week in review/preview of the upcoming week kind of thing) and we’ll probably be doing an insert for the only-printed-once-a-season team program. I’m still not sure what’ll go there – it might well be a player feature kind of thing as well as team/organization news. I have a good feature I haven’t yet written on opening day, and that might be a cool place to show it off.

Now that I’m starting to distribute the blog URL to people around the team, if you guys have any thoughts on stuff you think should go into my coverage, please let me know in the comments section!