OUT LIKE A LION
At the end of April, with one-fifth of the season over:
Only three teams in the entire American Leage have a winning record.
One of those three teams is the Sacramento Athletics.
Not a single team in the National League Central has a losing record.
One of those teams with a winning record is the St. Louis Cardinals.
JJ Wetherholt, Sal Stewart, and Chase DeLauter offer hope of a brighter tomorrow as darkness encroaches elsewhere.
Aaron Judge is on pace (of course he is) to hit 60 home runs. Of course he is.
Mason Miller is on pace to give up 10 earned runs on the whole season.
If you look at Shohei Ohtani’s page on Baseball Savant – take your pick, either as a pitcher or a hitter – and, I kid you not, it just says Proof Positive We Have Been Visited By Superhuman Extraterrestrials.
And the Dodgers also have Yoshinobo Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy (but not that Max Muncy), and Tyler Glasnow playing for them. Any one of those, any single one of them, would be the biggest star in the firmament of nearly every team not named the Mew Mork Wankees.
Steve Nelson and Rick Monday have the most incredibly smoooooooooth broadcast on KLAC. What a pleasure to listen to the Big Band bumpers and the play-by-play as sharp as any rocket off The Comet Hyeseong Kim’s bat. If only there was not such an inevitability to the Chavez Ravine gang.
Suzyn Waldman and Dave Sims are a WFAN delight. It is a national tragedy they perform their magic on behalf of the Yankees. The Yankees lead the American League in wins. Of course.
The Mets broadcasters are frustrated and searching for answers on WCBS. Howie Rose at home along with roadies Keith Raad and Patrick McCarthy have no way to explain why the team is dwelling in the sub-basement of the NL East looking up at the Phillies – who are in second-to-last-place and have fired their manager.
Andy Freed and Neil Solandz are back home in The Trop with the Rays and bring the perfect tenor to the radio call on WDAE of the anomaly Rays and their freak speedster Chandler Simpson, the most exemplary Ray in a long line of found skill sets put to good use. He has 32 hits. Twenty-nine of them are singles and one is a double that didn’t leave the infield. The Rays are one of those rare AL teams with more wins than losses.
Will Flemming said fuck on the air and Will Middlebrooks said he’d go halvsies on any FCC fine that might arise (luckily Brendan Carr has been busy with important public policy involving Jimmy Kimmel). It was a just and appropriate use of profanity on Marathon Day, quoting Boston hero David Ortiz. The Red Sox led the way with the Very Early Managerial Shit Canning when Alex Cora and five of his coaching staff were unceremoniously released from further work responsibilities.
At the beginning of the season, I did not foresee spending more time than any other with the radio announcers of the Sacramento A’s, a nomadic group of cost-controlled ballers who find themselves in first place. Ken Korach and Johnny Daskow on KSTE have a fantastic on-air back and forth and put on a solid, grateful, and generous game call. Daskow was the Voice of the River Cats as a 30-year minors lifer. Now he’s in the bigs, even if back in the same park, and his team is leading the woeful AL West. There are two years to go on the banks of the Sacramento River. Wouldn’t it be great to insist postseason games be played at Sutter Health Park, where Thursday’s stands were filled with school kids, the surrounding lots packed with yellow school buses – at least that’s what Korach and Daskow let me see on the radio.
Thus far – with one out of five games of the season played – the theme is challenges.
ABS challenges fundamentally change strategy and add drama spikes.
It’s a challenge to be a fan of the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Mets, the Astros, and the Royals. Those fan bases all had high expectations with various relationships to reality. Those are being dashed at after the first full month of the season. Others, like the Angels, are challenged to remain engaged while foreboding is realized.
Moving forward, the fans of early surprise teams will be challenged to contain unrealistic hope, to bottle up dreams.
It has been fascinating to take in all the different baseball on the radio these first five weeks but I remain a Cardinals fan at heart. The team’s start is far beyond expectations. Every day of good baseball is a day St. Louis fans are ahead. The team had already secured a four-game series win on Wednesday with the third straight successive victory in Pittsburgh. I discounted the chance for a sweep with Paul Skenes on the mound for the Pirates. He had a streak going of 16 innings without allowing a run.
JJ Wetherholt had different notions. On his first swing leading off, on a 2-0 count, the rookie second baseman made the Pittsburgh radio announcers go into affectless reportage mode.
“Two balls, no strikes. Swing and a fly ball and that’s a homerun to right as Wetherholt greets Skenes with a homerun,” was Joe Block’s monotone call amid silence from the sparse crowd, with a smattering of enthusiastic support for local-ish Wehterholt.
Four-gamer
Image by @Cardinals
The Cardinals led 1-0 but were not done. Ivan Herrera got on with an error. The Cardinals most pleasant surprise of the early going stepped in, stuck on eight homers for more than two weeks.
“Here’s the set and the pitch. A swing and a deep fly ball to left right down the line. Mangum, warning track. Still going back. Still going back and he ran out of room Home run. Another home run off of Skenes, this one by Jordan Walker.”
The Cardinals won 10-5.
“Over and out for the Pirates in what has been a dispiriting series,” Block said, dispiritedly. “I don’t think anybody saw the Cardinals sweeping a four-gamer. It’s hard to do.”
Driving home I took in the first-place A’s playing the Royals. Listening around the dial I have noted broadcasters talking about other announcers. Suzyn Waldman told a story about Cooper Boardman while he was in the Red Sox big league booth. The Cubs Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer shared texts from the Dodgers Rick Monday, giving the Chicagoans wardrobe advice for an upcoming trip to LA. And Thursday, Ken Korach talked about the Royals TV team in an adjacent booth in Sacramento.
First-place A’s
Image by @Athletics.
“I met Ryan (Lefebvre) 40 years ago when was just a kid hanging out in the clubhouse with his dad who was the coach of the Phoenix Firebirds,” Korach told Daskow on KSTE.
He is a welcoming guy, not just to other professionals. He welcomes his audience to the game, again and again he expresses his thanks for listeners tuning in. Daskow and Korach have a fabulous rapport – or are extraordinarily good at faking it. Their broadcast is informative, timely, focused on the game and presenting chatter that enhances the view of the game.
“Shea Langeliers with his third (double) of the day and nine on the year,” Korach said.
The Royals elected to put Nick Kurtz on with an intentional walk.
“That extends his streak of games being walked to 19, three away from the AL record and tied with Ted Williams” for the most consecutive games earning a base on balls.
The Royals gave that one to Kurtz and he was out on a fielder’s choice to second. I saw it all unfold through Korach’s call. A subsequent single scored Langeliers to extend the A’s lead on the way to a 6-3 victory and assuring they would begin May atop the division. I could envision a great summer ahead for Sacramento fans, especially those tuning in to the radio call.
Watching baseball on the radio has opened my eyes to the wonder of this season.