Welcome to the Club!

I tried to get the ball. I really did, but the ump and the Dusty Nut catcher were having none of it.

Wouldn't it have looked nice on the McKnight mantle? First Conehead hit, Patrick McKnight, Sept. 12, 2016. We coulda all signed it.

It was not to be.

On a night when the Junior Knight had a rather pedestrian (for him) 2-4, the rest of the Coneheads scored enough and the Nuts were generous enough for the Coneheads to win a rather ho-hum 14-9 no doubter.

There were quite a few Conehead hits - I had one that turned into a Conehead double - where's your hustle Patrick? You only got a single on yours. Never mind they threw mine under the fence.

But we also had some big hits - a slashed two out two run homer by Bruce, a deep gapper for a triple by Sting, and Chuck just muscled up to beat the left fielder for a double. The three of them paced us with three hits.

Larry had the Nuts by the...for most of the night. Take away the first inning and last and he allowed on run total in the middle five as we built what turned out to be an insurmountable lead.

As Reg said after the game, we are a freight train, and once we get rolling, watch out for the Coneheads! This was step one.

Milestones:
Larry            800 h (#3)
Gene            600 h (#7)

The Long and Winding Road

What do you do when you have missed a couple of months of blogging for your favorite Tuesday team?

Well, you just start up again like you never left, raving about the utter shellacking Transdyn put on the HLG Crew tonight 16-1. About Tom's near shutout, Jason's two great catches ranging into the outfield, once from short and once from second.

About Nick dropping a triple over the left fielder's head, and then just to remind everyone who the power hitter is, Bert puts it in almost the same exact spot, except over the fence. I called it, by the way, ask Mario, who was sitting next to me on the bench. That made it 7-0 and there was no comeback in sight for the last place HLG Crew.

And speaking of the Puppet King, Mario made a fabulous shoe-top catch in right to preserve the shutout to that point in the fourth.

D and Hama led the way with quiet 4-4s, and Al was matched by Heffe with team high 3 RBIs each.

But then you get to the Milestones section and you see that it extends from July 12th to now, and you smell a rat. So sorry, fellow Transdynians, if you made a great play or two, or got a clutch hit or did anything that called you out in the last two months, it will just have to live on in your mind's eye - you know what you did.

It's a long road to this season's championship and playoff cotton, with four competitive teams in the mix, and hopefully you won't have to wait until then to see your name in the light of this column.

Milestones:
7/12 (Playoff Game)
Heffe      1400 ab (#2)
D            300 rbi (#5)

8/2
Monty    1050 ab (#3)
Bert        10 bb (#25)

8/9
Jas          50 2b (#7)
Pauly      350 h (#9)
D            300 h (#11)
Rusty      50 ab (#51)

8/16
Bert        20 hr (#3)
Cage       550 h (#4)
Bert        102 h (#26)
Bert        150 ab (#28)

8/23

Mario      30 sf (#3)
Hama      200 h (#14)

Hama      300 ab (#15)

Tom        250 ab (#21)

8/30
Cage       60 sf (#1)

9/6

Cage       950 ab (#4)

Mario      50 bb (#6)
D            150 g (#12)
Hama      150 rbi (#14)

The (Un)Catch, Part II

As Jerry Seinfield said in one of the episodes of his classic show, everything always evens out.

Last night I went to the A's game against the Boston Red Sox. Two teams going in opposite directions, and I think you know which way the A's have been going for years, thank you Lew Wolff and Billy Bean.

I went with my friend and former colleague Pat, and our significant others. Pat and I have known each other for years, have had kind of parallel careers, each have two daughters, worked together, and even played a little softball together. We have our differences (politics and he's a DODGER fan despite moving to Petaluma at a fairly young age from LA), but we have much in common, including each having lived within a few blocks of Fenway Park, and worked together and separately on the Big Dig, and thus having somewhat conflicted views about the Red Sox and Boston in general.

We hadn't seen each other for quite some time, and probably to our SO's chagrin spent the game catching up. There was no drama in the game as the Sox scored 9 times by the fourth inning pretty much settling things baseball-wise. We barely noticed that Rick Porcello took a perfect game into the sixth inning, until the A's finally scored a run on a couple of hits.

One of the stories I told Pat was about the ball I caught at an A's game in 2012. You can read about it here: The Catch.

Last night however there were two balls that came down within a row of where we were sitting. How often does that happen? One was early in the game, and it was one row back and on the aisle a few seats away. They always look like they are coming right at you and then they peel off. This one faded to the aisle, and a guy who brought a glove stepped into the aisle and made it look routine. I thought of moving, but it happened so fast, and it wasn't really close enough to me to go for it.

Then in the ninth (I think), another batter hits a popup, but not too high in our direction. My baseball instincts took over; I was determined this time. The ball was going to be a few seats away again, but beyond Julia to my right there were no other fans in my way. The ball was going to land on the back of a seat in the row in front of us.

Some would say I fell. I might embellish the story and say I dove. The truth is somewhere in the middle - baseball instincts did take over - I would call it a lunge. But what happened was I landed with my chest right on the edge of the seat (ouch) and stretched out as far as I could, I just managed to get a fingertip on the ball. It bounced away, destined for someone else's trophy case.

Seinfeld would have said, "See, it all evens out."

Mike Krukow, the Giants' broadcaster would have said, "If you brought your glove, you would have extended your reach just enough to corral it, meat!"

And he'd be right...instead, all I've got is a story, and a sore man-boob, and a black and blue fingertip.