14 August, 2010 – Knuckleballs

I love good exciting baseball games but I’m hoping for a little less of the extremes tonight – last night wore me out. Is it too much to ask for a nice start from Duensing, good fielding from the defense and some fantastic offense all to work together for a win without the head-banging dramatics? Maybe…

Oakland	@	Minnesota
Crisp, CF		Span, CF
Barton, D, 1B		Hudson, O, 2B
Suzuki, K, C		Mauer, C
Kouzmanoff, 3B		Kubel, RF
Ellis, M, 2B		Cuddyer, 1B
Davis, R, RF		Thome, DH
Cust, DH		Young, D, LF
Carter, LF		Valencia, 3B
Tolleson, SS		Casilla, A, SS
Cahill, P		Duensing, P

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
Oakland	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	3	0
Minnesota	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	x	2	8	0

Now that I’m recovered from fits of tremors and drooling, I’ll see what I can do to describe how awesome that was! A TRUE pitchers duel and BRIAN DUENSING WON!!! It was just fantstic. A complete game shutout for the young rookie and done with style too. His teammates annointed him with the traditional shaving cream pie in the face which made for an entertaining postgame interview – his general opinion was that shaving cream doesn’t taste very good. Of course, from the smile on his face after the last out – facing just 29 batters – my guess is that the taste of shaving cream will be soon forgotten. It also made choosing a BOD a very easy task today. Congratulations, Brian!

Given the closeness of the game (especially until the bottom of the 8th), the chat also awards assorted pastries to Orlando Hudson and Joe Mauer for their part in tonight’s win. Thanks guys!

I’m still constantly amazed at how much attention Carl Pavano’s mustache gets. I mean, the guy is tied for the lead in wins in the American League after notching his 15th on Friday night but if you ask 10 people what they know about him, 9 will mention the mustache before anything else. (OK, if any of the 10 people you ask are Yankee fans, they might not mention the mustache first… but I’d be too busy snickering at their answer to care).

You think I’m wrong? Then let me ask you this: We started posting on this blog in March. Which post do you suppose has been the most-read? Was it one of our early pictorial posts from our first visits to Target Field? No. Was it the rant about Why the Yankees $uck? No. (But that was quite popular.. I wonder why.) It was the post where we sought to assign “blame” for Pavano’s mustache. And it’s not even close. That post was published weeks ago and it still gets a number of new hits every week.

So just to make the point that it’s not completely unheard of for a Major League ballplayer to have some hair above his lip, we’ve come up with the following “mustache quiz”.

Below are pictures of 12 Major League ballplayers, all of whom anyone claiming to be a serious baseball fan should have at least some casual knowledge of. Some of these are tougher to identify than others but there are no obscure one-year wonders here. They all had more than just 15 minutes of fame. In fact, among the choices, there are Hall of Famers and some guys who either arguably should be Hall of Famers or likely will be some day. We’re also showing you more than just the mustache… in fact you’ve pretty much got the lower half of each player’s face to go on. Let’s see how many you can name.

(The answers will be posted in the Comments section, but no peeking until you’re finished with the quiz!)