According to the Washington Post Natinals blog Nationals Journal our old garden gnome friend Eric Bruntlett is making strides in his quest to be a bench player for the worst team in baseball. He’s been hitting .500 this spring with a new strategy at the plate! A quote from the Nationals Journal post:
“I’m just trying to be more aggressive. I’m really thinking about driving the ball instead of just going up there and being satisfied with a bunch of balls the other way. I got into a rut trying to do that too much and actually ended up not even being able to do that anymore, just popping a lot of balls up.”
So let me get this straight Beardo, your great strategy to hitting well this year is to try and hit it hard? I guess you just weren’t trying last year and leaving it in your bearded god’s hands to guide you to the righteous basepaths? It does explain a lot about his time with the Phillies though…
Author’s Note: I swear this isn’t becoming a Nationals blog, I’ll post some Phillies stuff soon! I’m just fulfilling our duty of cheap Bruntlett jokes!
The Phield also posted our game preview last night. The awesome thing about this is that they give you short recaps of the site, that can be used by the bloggers on how to improve it.
What a novel concept: Eric Bruntlett sucks. Well, not many will argue with that
The five people who don’t hate Bruntlett make me even more sad than this guy, the only person on Earth who likes him, because I know he’s kidding.
So it makes Fire Eric Bruntlett a humorous scribe that more or less tests the funny bones of the reader.
And their mental health. Seriously, anyone who didn’t hate him as a player during his time in Philly need to have their head checked.
While estebomb and Max don’t update frequently enough to get a better seed
We really don’t, and it makes me sad. Estebomb, you need a better job!
(we’d love this blog to really take off)
I really can’t wait ’til Opening Day…
They at least deliver with unique content, such as a post about Steve Smith on “The Amazing Race.”
Not only did I write an entire post about it, I spent 1,000 words on the topic!
Or a post with Comic Sans typeface.
Wow, they really must’ve dug deep to find this one, considering I needed to use special administrator access to find it. I think that was just something that Tommy did one time, but apparently, we should use different fonts more often? Duly noted…
Another plus: The design is wicked cool.
I have to say, I really like our design myself. I don’t even remember what it’s called, I just remember it standing out, and thought it looked awesome.
Major thanks to The Phield for both putting this together and including us. Whether or not we win today, I’m really looking forward to improving the blog over the next year to get a higher seeding in the 2010 Phield.
But we really, really want to win. So stop reading, and vote!!!!!
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The unassisted triple play is easily the rarest single play in baseball, which is what made Beardo’s all the more amazing, probably the most amazing play I’ve ever seen. The funny thing is, it requires so much luck and so little skill that anyone in the right place at the right time can make one. Of course, that perfectly describes Bruntlett’s UTP. He was only in the game to give starting 2B Chase Utley a day off. Many believe that Utley should have come in to ensure the win late in the game, a belief further supported by one error, plus a mishandling of another ball that allowed a run to score, a 9-7 lead over the Mets with runners on first and second and no outs, Jeff Francoeur at the plate. Brunt’s irony came in the sense that, had he not allowed those runners to reach base, the Mets never would’ve turned on the Hit & Run, and our blog wouldn’t be nearly as epic.
While there have been 15 unassisted triple plays in Major League Baseball history, there are no records of them at lower levels of the game – say, Little League, although when a kid makes one, it’s usually far more fun to watch. Take, for example…
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Well, if admitting mediocrity doesn’t get you to vote for us, damned if I know what will!
We’ll update you when our preview is posted, as well as the gameday post to help us move on to Round 2.
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Think about the greatest ideas and inventions ever. Electricity? Sure. Television? Why not. Internet? Or else none of us would be here. Now, multiply all of those by 10,000,000, then by each other. What follows is what you would get when you attempt math with numbers, objects, and practical ideas: nothing, really, because that would be physically impossible. Nonetheless, this is still my favoritest thing ever.
Some great Philly fans — I don’t know who, but I wish I had the foresight to come up with this — started a March Madness for Phillies blogs, a “Pharch Phadness,” if you will, because in Philly, you can put a “Ph” in any word to make it better, as evidenced by some of the blog names. Anyway… we were lucky enough to be included in this awesome tournament, but only as an 11-seed. That means we will need the help of you guys — our fans, our readers, our fellow haters of all players that suck — more than ever, especially since we’re going up against Swing and a Long Drive, a very solid #6 seed, led single-handedly by Phillies Nation writer Amanda Orr.
The play-in game is tomorrow, and Thursday begins round 1. Below is the bracket, and ATJ is a look at some other dancers…
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BBA friend Jeff Polman, who recently completed his first Strat-O-Matic baseball blog, 1924 and You Are There!, is out of the Roaring Twenties and swinging into the 70′s. Play That Funky Baseball is officially underway. Let’s go straight to Jeff for the most accurate explanation of just what he’s doing here.
“Jeff Polman, who has adorned the Internet for a year with a deeply retro Strat-O-Matic replay blog called 1924 and You Are There!, is about to launch his next endeavor, a similar replay with the best 16 teams of 1977 called Play that Funky Baseball. And our nearly-phabulous Phils of Schmidt, Luzinski, Bowa, Boone and Carlton are included. The twist this time is that an array of noted baseball writer/bloggers from around the nation, including Joe Posnanski, Joe Sheehan, Jonah Keri and Rany Jazayerli, are among the “absentee managers” supplying lineups, rotations and advice for Jeff’s year-long dice-rolling adventure and “living baseball novel.” There’s even a “Wah-Wah Page,” where the skippers can post as much trash-talk as they can muster. (Readers can do that on the regular posts.) All I know is that if we lose out to the goddamn Dodgers again, I’ll be very disappointed.
Further explanations, managerial bios, and terrifying pictures ahead. Read more…
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