1. During the day, when I'm moving around, my shoulder feels pretty good. I drove the Sube for the first time since Sunday and only experienced slight pain. I went shopping at Yoke's. On June 13th, I will ride my bike back to the park for the opening of the Silver Valley Community Market. I'll ride with vigilance.
I continue to ice my shoulder. At night, however, my shoulder suffers. I'm not moving around and it tightens up some. Charly has been wanting to eat between 4-4:30 a.m. and so after I feed her, I'm not going back to bed, but getting ice on my shoulder at that early hour and then it starts feeling better. As I wrote yesterday, there is a small area that where some pain persists and a small area in the arc of my arm's movement that hurts. But the majority of the pain is gone and I've gained a lot of function back when using my right arm.
2. Three guys with a good sized truck, a chain saw, and pruning shears worked on the lilacs in back. Brian thought major work hadn't been done on them in 15-20 years. I wondered if a tree service crew had ever worked on them. I know, when Mom was alive, that a few times I cut some deadwood out of them. I know Everett has. I am pretty sure Mom put Paul to work back there. But we all did minor surgery. Today, this crew cut these lilacs way back, freeing them of three huge truck loads of dead material, giving them a chance, essentially, to start over again. Brian will return in the early spring and help train the new growth. The lilacs might not have blooms next year. In the long run, however, these lilacs should prosper from having nutrients going to living shoots. Things look very different in the back and, for now, a once tall and spreading green and dead branches screen is all but gone. In time, though, I trust healthier growth will sprout back there. Before long, I'll start thinking about what I might do with the new empty spaces along the back fence.
3. I've been listening almost every day to the ESPN podcast, Baseball Tonight, with host Buster Olney and I've taken an interest in the surge in home runs being struck this season. I've heard some say the baseballs are wound tighter and so have more juice. Others say that pitchers are, by and large, throwing faster pitches and hitters are, by and large, taking bigger all or nothing upward swings (strikeouts are also on the rise). One consequence of this current trend is that, on the whole, fewer baseballs are in play during a game. It means that we fans experience less action -- fewer base runners, fewer stolen bases, fewer time when one of my favorite baseball moments occurs and that is when a hitter smacks a line drive into the right or left field gap with the bases loaded and his double clears the bases.
With all this said, this evening I realized ESPN was broadcasting the Astros and the Brewers and that their game had gone into extra innings, fourteen innings to be precise. The Brewers won the game and, it almost goes without saying, that the Brewers' game winning hit was a mighty parabolic home run smashed by Mike Moustakas. Much of the Brewers' performance in this game was all or nothing. The team hit four home runs, three solo shots and Moustakas's two run blast. The Brewers also struck out twenty-four times.
Did I enjoy the innings I watched?
As a matter of fact, I did.
When I was a Little Leaguer, our defense used to chatter when a batter came up. One string of chatter went something like this: "Come on big babe, he can't hit, ay ay, ay ay -- Swing!" We peppered out chatter with "hun now"s (a variant of Roger Craig's "humm baby") and we used to encourage our pitchers to "rock and fire".
I don't know a lot about pitching mechanics and approaches to pitching in the major leagues, but, last night, the Astros ran a relief pitcher out for the last two innings named Cionel Perez and he could rock and fire. His windup was built on the concept of rocking back and little and then vaulting forward, slinging the pitch with the momentum gathered by the movement from rocking back a bit to lunging forward. I loved watching him.
Cionel Perez ended up being this game's losing pitcher. He surrendered Mike Moustakas's game winning rocket. But, he epitomized for me baseball's infinite variety. Rarely do two pitchers look the same on the mound; rarely do two hitters look the same at the plate. Baseball players come in a wide variety of sizes. I've always loved this about baseball and, as I watched the last innings of this game, I enjoyed each team's variety. Players are not only various in their size, but in their temperament, their nationalities, and their age.
Yes, I know baseball goes through trends. Right now, in large part because of what statistical analysis reveals, teams don't worry about batters striking out a lot because the statistical benefits of home runs offset the damage of strikeouts. It's kind of like the three pointer in basketball. The benefits of making some three point shots offsets the damage of missing a bunch of them, so teams keep jacking them up and major league hitters keep, as old broadcasters used to say, "swinging for the downs".
Within any trend in baseball, though, is each team's variety and that variety always keeps me intrigued and coming back for more.
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