People wonder aloud to me about the appeal of baseball. How could I watch multiple games in the same night, or at once. They wonder what the appeal is.
You baseball fans (let’s face it, if you’re reading this you must be a baseball fan) know that there’s multiple reasons. There’s the chance to see something you’ve never seen before and most likely will never see again. There’s the culmination of a season’s worth of effort, and there are the great individual performances that you’ll remember forever. Great individual performances are a mere series of moments. Some moments get lost in the grand performance, but it doesn’t make them much less special.
Below is a series of moments from Monday’s game, courtesy of Noah Syndergaard. For the purposes of this narrative, skip to the 1:11 mark:
[mlbvideo id=”598817183″ width=”400″ height=”224″ /]It was a strikeout of Cameron Rupp in the sixth inning with two runners on. Fastball on the outside corner. It’s what you get when physical tools are refined to the point of near perfection. And it’s done with little effort. Or at least it looks effortless … a product of hours and days and weeks of effort to get to that point. And Noah Syndergaard is at that point while being on this earth just a smidge more than 22 years. He’s at the point where he’s throwing pitches that remind me of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Noah isn’t so much pitching as he’s singing the song of Hiawatha.
It was all poetry on Monday night. Syndergaard’s seven innings of brilliance. David Wright’s two home runs. Neil Walker’s oppo taco. Lucas Duda having a big night which included a late home run which, when you listen to it, has it’s own feeling of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as the heckler was followed by the crack of the bat in suck precise rhythm you would think it should be sampled on Kanye’s new album.
"Duuuudaaaa." Lucas responded to the fan by obliterating this pitch in the 5-2 win https://t.co/2inZkdMRu1 #LGMhttps://t.co/FfMDdi1GmM
— New York Mets (@Mets) April 19, 2016
Duuuudaaaa-WHACK!
Duuuudaaaa-WHACK!
Play it a few times in your head. You can dance to it.
It wasn’t all cheesesteaks and bracelets as Jeurys Familia gave up a run in the ninth and raised his WHIP to 1.86. But the Mets held on comfortably for a 5-2 Mets victory. And more good news: No Mets were hurt by flying smart phones after all those Phillies fans checked them to see how the Flyers were doing across the street.
Today’s Hate List
- Cameron Rupp
- Radko Gudas
- Freddy Galvis
- Pierre-Edouard Bellemare
- Jared Eickhoff
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