A Few Thoughts...

While watching the Brewers/Giants game on FSN:

1. Felipe Alou looks like he has absolutely no idea where he is, what's going on or who the people around him are. He is nothing more than a confused old man.

2. Speaking of confused old men, have you looked recently at the Giants roster? The "young guy" of the team is friggin' Randy Winn. Omar Vizquel, by the way, has continued to elude the icy grasp of Death and still plays short for the Giants. Man, the Giants are old.

3. If I see another camera shot of a bunch of guys in the dugout high-fiving and congratulating a hitter after grounding out to second with a man on second base and less than two outs, I'm gonna lose it. Cut the touchy-feeley small ball bullshit and give me a God damn base hit. It reminds me of a story about David Ortiz's first spring training game with the Red Sox. He was up with nobody out and a guy on second and tried to hit the ball to the right side to move the runner over, per the instructions he'd always gotten in Minnesota. After he did it, he came back to the dugout and Grady Little looked at him and said, "Hey, next time, just bring him in."

4. Zach Jackson's delivery is way too noisy for him to have consistent success in the majors. I guarantee that at the beginning of next year, you'll hear reports of Mike Maddox making significant changes to his mechanics. He's got talent, but as examples like Dontrelle Willis (his first-second years) illustrate, violent deliveries that maintain the gimmick advantage of deception really hinder a pitcher's ability to have consistent command of the strike zone. I think it's a key reason that Jackson has struggled with walks in his last couple of outings.

5. This has nothing to do with baseball, but if you follow this link, you'll see a video of Bush saying "shit" during a conversation with Tony Blair.

6. Congratulations to Mariano Rivera getting his 400th save. However, I'm gonna leave it to Vinnie to discuss the real significance of this milestone. Yeah, 400 saves are impressive, but in general I agree with the V-man that the save is a really, really overrated statistic. I mean come on, it made Derrick "Mr. 4.70 ERA" Turnbow an All Star. Come the fuck on.

7. Situation: Nobody out, top of the 6th inning against Jason Schmidt. Carlos Lee leads off the inning with a double, Prince Fielder follows with a single and Gabe Gross follows with an RBI double to right, scoring Lee and moving Fielder to third. 1 run in, nobody out, runners at second and third. Billy Hall follows Gross with a three-run homer to left field, scoring Fielder and Gross. Surprisingly, my first thoughts were not: "Oh no, Billy Hall just killed the rally!" Eat me, old-schoolers.