Daily Archives: April 6, 2009

MLB, Washington Nationals

Time to unfollow already?

6 Comments

[Edited to clarify: Time to unfollow nationals fan graphs on Twitter already? (not the team!)] I have to say, this was very depressing to see with two innings still to go:

picture-4

See that? 0% chance to win (but hey, Good Face didn’t get on base for once! Did I mention he also had THREE stolen bases??). Kinda kills that hope that is so integral to being a baseball fan. When Dunn hit his homerun, I felt we were back in the game.. maybe just a little.

Plus, Twitter did not handle opening day well. The background image on my profile disappeared for hours and I’d get updates in spurts all at once. Anyone else experience that? I despise the “Fail Whale” despite the cute cartoony appearance. Twhirl often gave me “could not update” messages and after trying to resend multiple times, I’d give up and determine what I had to contribute wasn’t all that important anyway.

Gameday, MLB, Washington Nationals

Oy! My name is Emilio Bonifacio

And I’m here to save the Marlins. Ok, obviously my name is not Emilio Bonifacio. Littles, former producer of Washington Post Live on Comcast SportsNet (but now starting a sports show in San Fran) created a group on Facebook last season called “My Name is Emilio Bonifacio: I’m here to help save the Washington Nationals“. I guess I should promptly exit that group as Bonifacio did everything he could to help the Marlins keep the mass amounts of fans who finally had show up in Dolphin Stadium on opening day. He hit 4 for 5 with an inside the park home run. Basically, he single-handedly kicked the Nats tushies. It must have been the uniform number 7…

Neither Scott Olsen nor Josh Willingham, the players the Nationals acquired when they traded Bonifacio to the Marlins, played in today’s opener that epitomized Nats fans hopes for opening day — at least until the game actually began. So the jury is obviously still out on the trade, but wow, if it were judged on one game alone…

Lannan had his second off-start in a row. Shell was shelled for a grand slam in relief. Adam Dunn missed catching a fly ball. Zimmerman had a throwing error and then missed a (Bonifacio) bunt…. Let’s just hope the Nats got all the bad plays out of their system in this game.

Remember, it’s still early. The game was enough to send some opening day optimism whooshing into the ethos, but not kill it completely yet. But ouch!

Final: National 6 Marlins 12

MLB, Washington Nationals

It’s Opening Day!

(envision me jumping up and down while spinning in circles) It’s opening day! It’s opening day! I have nothing important to say.

I’m a bad poet and I know it!

It’s painful counting down to 4:00. In fact, instead I’m just counting down to the pre-game show at 3:30 — only 2 hours to go! I’ll have to catch the beginning of the game from my cubicle at work — then switch to radio for the drive home. So far I’ve killed time by walking to Subway to pick up lunch instead of eating what I brought and watching the second hand slowly sweep by on the clock. Next, I’ll get some busywork at work done. Then it’ll be – oh, 2? Heh.

If you’re a Twitterer (Tweeter?), FanGraphs has implemented a beta in-game live win-percent stream. Pretty cool – hopefully it’s up and running today! Follow @nationals_fg or @nationals_qf