BY STEPH ROGERS AND ANNE T. DONAHUE – FAN FUEL BLOGGERS
The Baltimore Orioles we all know and love – the team that hasn’t finished with a winning record since 1997 – came to the Rogers Centre for their fourth straight (season-high) loss. Led by Tommy Hunter on Monday, and Jake Arrieta Tuesday night, the O’s (29-21) looked like a shell of their first-place selves as they faced the Blue Jays (26-24) and a rebounding starting rotation.
On Monday, Drew Hutchison made everyone forget about the weekend we all wanted to forget, erasing any remaining memories of control issues from the rotation, that all began last week with Ricky Romero. Ricky has been on a Twitter break since May 24, and we were beginning to wonder what he was up to: had an acupuncturist kidnapped him? Was he trying to memorize the entire 2Pac discography (like Steph is)? A long weekend seems to have cleared his mind, freed the haters, and put his pitches back where the Ace belongs as he picked up his sixth win of 2012 last night.
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1. Jake Arrieta’s moustache came to pitch
AD: And it was a little tuckered out, and that’s why the Jays scored eight runs.
SR: The Orioles’ numero uno hasn’t looked much like a number one as of late. He’s 0-4 with a 5.28 ERA in his last four starts. But hey, Tommy Hunter pitched Monday night, and then saw himself optioned right out of Toronto, so anything will do at this point.
I have a feeling that Arrieta’s been approached about joining the cast of Anchorman 2, and then I wrote down in my planner ‘Steph had a very funny joke today.’ The Jays took Jake to Pleasure Town in a big way, and not in a good way.
2. “<3 38"
AD: As wonderful as it was to see the students of Academie Sainte Marie support their classmate (and let’s be honest here, for real, everybody – it was), it was also quite wonderful when everybody on the Jays team thought they were spelling out “<3 3B" for Brett Lawrie when it was in fact "38."
SR: Guess who doesn’t play third base? #38! Darren Oliver was busy stretching and doing the occasional juggling act, so he didn’t even notice that he was part of the Grade Four class! Mais oui!
AD: Classic “And none for Gretchen Weiners, BYE!” Thus, I will assume that Lawrie’s bottom-of-the-ninth catch was in retaliation for their collective snub. To continue with my Mean Girls references, I will also assume that catch was a Kevin G-esque proverbial shirt-tearing: “HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW? WASSUP! GET SOME!”
SR: You know what the limit of 38 is?
AD: This year, they get jackets.
SR: The limit does not exist! Brett Lawrie’s limits do not exist! Except for his overuse of hashtags on Twitter. Even Ricky Romero said that they get a little #brutal.
3. How Ricky got his groove back
AD: “They’re baaaaack!” – the little girl from Poltergeist, describing Ricky’s returned groove, but describing it in plural, incorrectly (probably because she is eight, and I guess is also terrible at grammar)
SR: I was thinking of the movie ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, which I saw when I was far too young to understand what groove was, and why Stella needed Taye Diggs so badly. Ricky’s groove comes in the form of his seventh straight win against the O’s, and from what little I remember of the film, Ricky’s night was a lot more fun. Of his 101 pitches, 66 were thrown for strikes, and his only real issues were solo home runs to Adam Jones in the second, and Baltimore’s very own Mike McCoy (with a higher average), Chris Davis in the sixth.
AD: He also did not end up getting married to someone who was only using him for a green card. (WE HOPE.)
SR: I want to make an Alexi Ogando joke so badly, but we shall never speak of Texas again.
AD: What is a Texas?
After the record-high walk incident against the Rays, Ricky walked only one Oriole and gave up just four runs on six hits. Granted, that didn’t stop him from going HAM on his glove in the dugout, but that’s why he’s our ace: he gives all of the effs.
I know he got some slack for channeling LiveJournal in his last Twitter saga, but it’d be worse if he just kind of nonchalantly sat down after each inning, took a nap and then a drink for every run he gave up. If that were the case, he’d be any Mad Men character you feel like comparing him to. (Probably Kinsey, pre-Hare Krishna, which is why Kinsey will never work at SCDP. Or succeed, as far as I’m concerned.)
SR: RicKKKKKKKy, please never start a LiveJournal, and if you do, you have to lock that up tight with the privacy settings. I learned that lesson shortly after not-watching How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Save me.
AD: Somewhere, Angela Bassett and Taye Diggs are smiling.
4. The Orioles outfield was practicing for a new (not good) circus act
AD: Everybody in a Benny Hill sketch! But particularly the Orioles outfield!
SR: Arguably one of the league’s strongest centre fielders, Adam Jones had a tricky night defensively, and Wilson Betemit continued to deserve all of the annoying chirps from the left field that toppled Xavier Avery the night before. Sure, Adam Jones earned his new contract with his two HR, three RBI, two BB kind of night, but his messy fumbles in the fifth scored Edwin Encarnacion and advanced Lawrie (who would go on to be the eighth run) to third.
AD: At home, I loved how the footage of the Adam Jones’ fumbled ball just lay on the green so gently; kind of like a very sad arthouse film.
5. Matt Wieters’s temper tantrum in the fifth
AD: “And none for Matthew Wieters, BYE!” – the ump tonight, in my dreams and reality
SR: Matt Wieters had a temper tantrum over the strike zone. Umps have agreed to only pick on teams with bird names because they saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie as a group and are TERRIFIED.
AD: If Matt Wieters was Tippi Hedren, then the ump was both Alfred Hitchcock AND the birds because he just wanted to see him suffer.
SR: Everyone can relax now because Brett Lawrie and the Toronto boys of summer aren’t the only ones that the umps are picking on. The strike zone was a little wacky tonight, and Matt Wieters is a straight-shooter. Congrats on your first ejection! Rajai Davis knocked a single up the middle to celebrate.
On the other hand, the Orioles avoided an inning-ending double play in the eighth when the third base ump said Betemit fouled the ball off his foot. It was an invisible ball on an invisible foot, and Francisco Cordero had to keep on trucking (avoiding the ravens outside of the school on the playground).
AD: Basically, the difference between this and the actual Birds was that I was allowed to watch this. (Although that didn’t stop my Grandma from putting it on when she was babysitting me once. Last week.)
6. Rajai’s third inning beauty of a bunt
SR: BAM. Rajai bunts so eloquently that Jake Arrieta gets frazzled, and suddenly Davis is at second and Lawrie scores, tying the game at 1-1 with no outs.
AD: And since we’re talking about Rajai, we might as well address the fact that Thames-Fest 2012 has been temporarily put on hiatus until he returns from the 51’s. Davis seems like the current LF go-to, so he’ll have many an opportunity to, say, bunt until his heart’s content, steal bases, score two runs in one game and run around the baseball diamond six times before catching a fly in right field because he can. Yes. Right field.
But that doesn’t mean we’re done rooting for Eric Thames, who, yes, needs to get that average back up over .250, but who still has time to improve before Twitter can feel vindicated screaming “They’re all going to laugh at you!” (And even then, why would you say that? WHO would say that? “Keyboard warriors” I am assuming, a.k.a. the worst humans/Pete Campbell, if he had the internet.)
SR: I’m going to put it out into the universe that Rajai Davis should think about taking a quick break in late July to go to the London 2012 Olympics and try to win a medal in the 100 m. I might start a campaign on Twitter, and I might ask Pete Campbell and Donovan Bailey to help.
I’m also going to put it out there that he should take David Cooper under his wing and teach the man about lighting a fire under your rear and running to first base. Key word: running. Rajai Davis turns singles into doubles, and then manages to get infielders and pitchers so confused, that he somehow ends up leaving the field to go get a quick drink of water from the dugout before returning to the bases unscathed and entirely unnoticed.
7. Bottom heavy
AD: If I were Horatio Cane, I would take a look at these stats, take a look at the sunset, put my sunglasses on and declare, “Look’s like this roster [pause] has gone [pause] bottom-up.”
The Who: “YEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
SR: But it would be Brett Lawrie as Horatio and the episode would be the next several tweets from @blawrie13 and would include a lot of #YEAHBUDDY and #FIREDDDUP to celebrate the 7-8-9 hitters (Lawrie, Cooper, Davis) in the line up going 8-for-12 with six RBIs. It was #tweetingtuesday, pardon my hashes.
Flo Rida: Is no longer Lawrie’s walk-up jam. Hey, I heard he was a wild one, but I never expected this.
AD: Tell me it’s The Who. TELL ME IT’S “WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN.”
SR: I think it’s a country version of a One Direction song.
8. Mark Reynolds strikes out for the 1,000th time in 747 career games
AD: AND YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT THIS ONE is what I bet Mark Reynolds wishes everyone would say about this, and then actually forget.
SR: I hope Buck said that.
AD: He didn’t. But I wrote it, and you all read it in Buck Martinez’s voice.
SR: I knew we were saving those extra JP Arencibia gold stars for someone. I might be able to strike out more times in fewer games, so I’ll save a few stars for myself and then embark on my journey to strike the heck out of things (Job interviews! Trips to court to fight parking tickets! Exams! The little league I joined by lying and saying I was 11!)
AD: I wonder if those kids have ever seen The Birds!
SR: Don’t you dare think I’ll rule it out as an option to show at the awards banquet when I receive my award for striking out everything.
9. The worst guy ever beside Steph finally gets ejected in the ninth and Anne ate snacks
SR: I love left field, but there are two things that really make me want to fall over the bullpen rail, all eight members of the ‘pen down below ready to help me up so that I can run far – far, far away. I haven’t watched Forrest Gump AT ALL this week.
Between calling most of the members of the bullpen “baby”, not knowing who number 24 was (it’s Ricky Romero, and it’s also Wilson Betemit), and telling the “refs” to “know the pitch zone”, I wanted to keep on running until I felt like stopping and my beard had grown long enough to make me a legend in a happy face t-shirt.
Bro got ejected for throwing Adam Jones’s second home run ball back onto the field. He caught it so beautifully in his glove too, after he pushed me out of the way and basically almost fulfilled my dream of falling over the bullpen rail. Help me, Carlos (Luis, Aaron, or Jesse, who were the remaining bullpen staff at the time of the incident).
AD: Meanwhile, I was channeling my inner Forrest Gump by finding a box of chocolates that wasn’t actually a box of chocolates, but was a chocolate bar I found on top of my printer. It was eclipsed only by the guacamole I made for dinner because I AM AN ADULT (or at least that’s what I told myself after spending the commercial breaks bookmarking Mad Men recaps so I can have closure in terms of what happened this week). This is my life, you guys.
SR: Anne, baby! (See what I mean? It sucks. Get me out. Open the bullpen gates and let me run.)
AD: Want to start watching Mad Men? I have some recaps you might like to read.
SR: Just keep sending me the GIFS that summarize entire seasons and relationships that characters have built in that time span and I’ll call that ‘watching Mad Men’.
AD: Thank you for being a friend.
Follow them on twitter @tenrowsofpearls and @annetdonahue, or listen to their podcast, Awesome Sh*tty Things. Good day to you.
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