as we may blog

(XL)

LaGrave Field is a charming little diamond located on a grassy knoll patch just outside of downtown Fort Worth. LaGrave is home to the Fort Worth Cats of the indepdendent Central League, and the city has an impressive amount of baseball history to its name. Despite the Parisian sounding name–LaGrave is French for "TheGrave"–this author and his ladyfriend found the Cats and their loyal fans to be all American.

Though there was some initial confusion as to where exactly the stadium was located (three pints and two 7th Streets are not a good combo), parking was a snap once we got to the park. We bypassed the hoity-toity $3 lot and parked for free on the street a few blocks away behind a bus that called itself the Latin Express. Caveat emptor!

Tickets can be had for as little as $4 but, patrons of the game that we are, we opted for the $9 box seats down the third base line. With a view of the Fort Worth skyline at sunset, we were treated to an electric 9-8 Cats win, a Carlos Adolfo home run, moderately priced concessions, and an impressive selection of undersized hats.

The entertainment was refreshingly minor league. They opened up the center field fence in the middle of the 2nd and some guy in a golf cart drove around the field for no apparent reason. The fans were quizzed on the Jumbotron and kids danced on the dugouts. It was Patriotic Night, which meant Dodger the Cat ran around with a giant sparkler attached to an American flag. Unfortunately Dodger’s stunt reminded patriots in attendance of the need for a flag burning amendment more than it celebrated the good old USA.

On the continuum of baseball stadiums, this author ranks LaGrave Field above Ameriquest Ballpark at Arlington and just below Veterans Memorial Stadium in Cedar Rapids: a solid 8.4.

I am honored to be a part of the new Baseball Tonight blog, Yard Work. At the end of the day, that blog is gonna inform some people.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your 2005 Diamond Anarchybots. The following is a projected starting lineup:

C – Joe Mauer
1B – Adam Dunn
2B – Chase Utley
SS – Carlos Guillen
3B – Eric Chavez
OF – Magglio Ordonez
OF – Andruw Jones
OF – Larry Walker
Util – Trot Nixon
SP – Dontrelle Willis
RP – Brad Lidge

The Anarchybots round out their lineup with fan favorites Hee Seop Choi and Wily Mo Pena, two players criminally neglected in the draft by less caring owners. Phenom B. J. Upton adds speed and panache as needed. Anarchybot management refuses to comment on the rumor that a truckload of plastic knees showed up at the spring training facility shortly after Mauer, Guillen, and Ordonez donned the hat with the scarlet A for 2005.

[06:33:23 PM] mattbot: AND WITH THE 236TH PICK IN THE FBB05 DRAFT
[06:33:30 PM] mattbot: THE DIAMOND ANARCHYBOTS GLADLY WELCOME BACK
[06:33:31 PM] mattbot: HEE
[06:33:32 PM] mattbot: SEOP
[06:33:33 PM] mattbot: CHOI
[06:33:38 PM] Dsjoo: nooooooooooooooooooo
[06:33:45 PM] Blernsball All-Stars: YOU BASRD
[06:33:48 PM] Blernsball All-Stars: ;lsejgso385p9prejgp9jdvdf

The first spring training games are almost upon us. Joe Sheehan put it perfectly:

By the end of the week, teams will begin their exhibition schedules, and we’ll all be treated to nightly clips from that camera on the roof behind home plate, the one that makes the games indistinguishable from one another.

God, I can’t wait.

(By the way, if you’re going to pay for content on the hypertext interweb, you could do much worse than Baseball Prospectus.) So it’s that time of the year again.

Kaz Matsui gets the business end of the Hooverball at the Diamond Anarchybot training complex.

It’s somewhat Baseball Tonight-ish to say, but this season is already poised to be more exciting than last year’s. The Cubs, largely free of expectations to compete for the World Series, enter 2005 with a lot of new faces that, quite frankly, will be much easier to root for win or lose. Moises Alou and Wendell Kim, God’s gifts to baserunning instructional videos, are gone. Sammy’s nosediving OBP and his busted jambox are gone. And Kerry Wood still has no comment about the umpiring in that game last year where he walked Adam Dunn.

Before we begin with our analysis of the 2005 team’s prospects, let’s take a prolonged look back at the 2004 Cubs through the lens of Blogbot 5000. It’s what Sammy would have wanted.

• April 9. The season started off well enough. I distinctly remember saying some very nice things about the Cubs in April as Tony and I watched the Cubs beat the Braves in 15. I was in the shitter when Todd Hollandsworth hit the game-tying home run in the ninth off John Smoltz. I was really drunk by the time they won. There is no extant blog entry for this game.
• April 27: Be-mulleted fireballer blanks Cubs… again. The Cubs go down meekly to Randy Johnson. The resulting blog entry rockets this site upward in Google’s index of pages related to G-Unit.
• May 3: Farnsworthless. The incendiary blog entry that many believe punched Farnsworth’s ticket out of Chicago… nine months later. The Cubs fall to the Cards, 1-0. The Cardinals commence playing like the best team in baseball.
• May 19: Pitchers duel, fans snooze. The Cubs help another struggling team turn it around, as they are one-hit by Jason Schmidt, who up to this point in the season, had his share of struggles. If I recall, the Cubs drop 2 of 3 at home to the Giants (one of those on a Neifi Perez home run? Gah.) and the Giants go on to compete for the NL West crown. Matt Clement pitches yet another Game of His Life only to find that they’ve run out of lube in the locker room. As We May Blog notes the injury list is growing large.
• May 27: Oy Rey.
• June 10: Tony LaRussa, jerkoff extraordinaire. The Cubs show some signs of regaining their September 2003 form in a 12-4 loss to the Cardinals at home. Benches clear and Derrek Lee sends a much needed f-bomb to Tony LaRussa. If I recall the Cubs slap around Danny Haren the next day and things are looking up.
• June 15 & 18. Walker propels A-Bots, Cubs and The Bounce is Back. Little did we know then, this week would be the height of the Cubs season. The season looked full of promise as the Cubs were in contention, had taken four in Houston, and had Sammy Sosa returning from the DL. The Cubs took 2 of 3 in the upcoming series with Oakland and then did what they did so often last year: shot themselves in the foot.
• June 24: Bullpen mutiny in LaRussaLand. This entry only makes brief mention of the loss, but this was the turning point in the season. After a pleasant dinner of world cuisine at Iowa City’s Atlas, Tony, the rest of the assembled company, and I went down to Dublin Underground to watch the rest of the game. I had been following on my Sprint PCS phone and felt the game in hand, though it was a back-and-forth affair. As we sat down with cool Guinness, Michael Barrett got ejected and Paul Bako allowed a passed ball. I don’t remember if that was the tying or winning run, but it sucked. The Guinness was good though.
• July 3: Board up the windows, stock the canned goods…. Rey Ordonez goes deep to help the Cubs to a win. Surely an event this improbable might spur the team to turn the season around?
• July 7: Bloggin’ Cubs baseball. Sadly, no. This turned out to be not one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
• July 9: Fire Dusty. The call goes out.
• July 23: Cub bandwagon reaches a crossroads. A Cubs boycott begins after another come-from-ahead loss to the Cardinals.
• August 1: Wow. Nomar’s a Cub, the cocktease of a season gets us hard again.
• August 4: Projecting the NL Wild Card race. To borrow a phrase, what would we be without wishful thinking? Note the Astros position. I gloat when things go wrong with that team, but they played magnificently down the stretch to get the Wild Card. Needless to say, all the Cubs had to do was play mediocre down the stretch to take the WC spot, but they couldn’t even manage that.
• August 18: Cubs continue to disappoint. Nomar’s not helping! Nobody’s getting on base!

And like a ship lost at sea, we are left to guess at the outcome of the rest of the Cubs season from that last communication. No further words were written about the 2004 Cubs until now.

So now that we realize how bad it was, and now that pitchers and catchers have reported, and now that John Kruk made his first assinine prediction of the year (30 wins for The Big Unit), and now that Peter Gammons has finally slept off that hangover from last October… let’s play two?

It’s like seeing an old friend. It’s like ordering a beer at the bar back home. It’s like any number of similes with a pleasant connotation.

Rod Smart fully endorses the Diamond Anarchybot franchise and its title defense.