First Game-Like Simulation of the Season!

I just finished listening to the second half of the Braves vs. Georgia Tech game on MLB radio. The game itself was pretty boring — we won 5-0 and our pitching was solid with 14 strikeouts (Harrison, Barry, and Ascanio each had two innings; Johnson, Lerew and Joey each had one). The only real surprise was Langerhans hitting a home run in the 3rd. Weird!

It was mostly just neat to hear Pete and Lemmer for the first time since last summer. There was also a commercial that featured their new slogan “Welcome to the Bigs,” which played a total of 5,032 times, seemed like. Interestingly, the actor talking about the magical experience of taking his kids to a Braves game has a rather obvious Boston accent (“bawlgame”). Are they trying to gain some nostalgic baseball cred by calling Red Sox Nation to mind?

The most hilarious line from the first commercial: “the drive to the game is almost as exciting as the game itself.” Right, sitting in rush hour traffic for two and half hours and missing the first four innings because the city can’t be bothered to build a MARTA rail out to the stadium — some of my best Braves memories! The closest I ever came to a nervous breakdown was circling the stadium looking for parking during the third inning one night, after suffering through surprise construction-related traffic on I-75. On the radio they were screaming about home runs that were being hit one hundred feet away from me, and I could hear cheering from inside the park while we were stuck in gridlock on Hank Aaron Avenue or whatever the hell that one that goes by the orange lot is called.

So I’m not too impressed with the first glimpse of their 2007 marketing campaign. I couldn’t understand the line about the bullpen in the other commercial they played — “with a new bullpen that can only be described as [something],” sounds like “nah”? When I first heard “new bullpen” it somehow called to mind improvements to the actual bullpen area inside the park, like they’d put in fancy neon lights or trampolines. Cause how great would Paronto fooling around on a trampoline be during those boring between inning mini-games? That would truly be worth advertising, but what is this “nah” concept all about?

I missed the first five innings, but it sounds like nothing much happened outside of Langerhans homering, and apparently Kelly screwed up a play at second and got Heap charged with an error. Lovely.

Two unrelated notes:

My friend brought my attention to this article about the Giles brothers this afternoon. If I could come up with a single word to describe it I would, but you just have to read it to believe it. A little preview that may very well terrify you into skipping it entirely:

Minutes later, Padres pitcher Chris Young is red-faced and out of the shower, still shaking his head.

So there’s that, and also: BREAKING NEWS! Heap wears glasses:

I knew it! All last year he was always blinking dramatically and widening his eyes awkwardly before he hit. I do the same thing when my contacts are bothering me. I finally found a clear(ish) shot of him wearing glasses, so this proves that his contacts were indeed the problem. I feel so vindicated.