A’s pound Jays 18-2, Holliday shatters single game HR record

It’s Friday, right around quitting time, spring is kinda sorta in the air … I guess what I’m saying is that you all ought to be outside frolicking with friends and lusting after life experience rather than eating Fritos while huddled over your PC typing wry Alex Rios put downs on a blog named after a condiment.

On the other hand, mobile technology being what it is these days, I guess you could do all of the above simultaneously. In which case here is your game thread.

Lineups (barely readable print unintentional):

Outman vs Purcey

BLUE JAYS		A's
Scutaro SS        	Sweeney CF
Hill 2B      		Cabrera SS
Rios RF   		Giambi 1B
Wells CF   		Holliday LF
Lind DH       		Garciaparra DH
Rolen 3B      		Cust RF
Millar 1B  		Suzuki C
Barrett C   		Ellis 2B
Bautista LF 		Crosby 3B

Below the fold: pointless small sample fretting about Toronto’s prodigious offensive output so far in 2009; personal anecdote relating to beards and barista girls; Heidi Klum’s recipe for sauerkraut soup; various non-revelatory items concerning David Purcey; how peeing off an elevated walkway can be dangerous.

Pointless small sample fretting:

Toronto’s team OPS+ is 135. They lead the league in runs. Pretty much everyone but Rios and Barajas is hitting like .526.

On the other hand, they’ve been held in check by the likes of Edwin Jackson, Zach Minor, and Glen Perkins, Rolen is due to snap a hamstring any day now, and their middle infield stands about as a good a chance of sustaining its current pace as I do of growing a beard without unmanagable scraggliness and enormous bare patches along my jawline. Speaking of which —

Beards, barista girls:

I had a beard for awhile until shaving recently, which I did partly because I thought I should pretend to be a grownup again but mostly because I was 75-85% sure the 20 year-old barista girls at the coffee shop down the street were starting to regard me with even more derision than usual, in a “he’s old and pathetic and failing hilariously in his attempt to look young and cool and Jesus please take this coffee and vacate the premises immediately because I am so embarrassed for you that I can’t properly concentrate on making this next foamy skim double caff caramel whatever” kind of way.

So anyway, I shaved, and so far my life is precisely the same. But the year is new! (sort of), and I’m still holding out hope that TV has not been lying to me all these years, that if I adopt a (slightly) new (though actually old, in that it’s the same way I used to look before I morphed into a Chuck Klosterman clone) appearance, I will become happier, more successful, more apt to work hard and achieve and gain peer respect, etc., that cosmetic shifts do in fact catalyze soul-strengthening epiphanies and improved psychosocial adaptability, that one of these days I’ll be the proud khaki-clad holder of a suburbamansion mortgage, with a respectable job and a modestly pretty wife and a subscription to Portfolio magazine.

Perchance, to dream!

Heidi Klum:

Sauerkraut soup (Klum family recipe)

David Purcey:

Lots of walks and homers in his 76 major league innings so far, but lots of strikeouts as well. Fangraphs tells me his repertoire is almost exclusively fastball-slider, and also this:

Purcey sacrificed a little velocity on his fastball for increased command: “Purcey is capable of dialing his fastball up to 93-95 MPH, but the Blue Jays have toned him down to the low 90’s to improve his location.”

Here is a “release point corrected spin direction angle x rpm” chart from his last start. I have $10 for the first person who can explain (cogently) a) what the fuck that means, and b) why the fuck it matters.

(Hey xbhaskarx, did you know Fangraphs has these awesome, what are they called, win expected, or expectation or something graphs? Anyway, they’re really awesome!!! We should use them!! :)!!!)

Elevated walkway pissing:

If you really must do it, try to avoid the trolley wires.