Viva el sports blog!

Posted by Philip Barron at 9:52 AM on April 20, 2007.

While it's fairly well established that I am the worst sports fan ever, barely managing even casual interest except as an unabashed frontrunner, I do greatly admire actual sports fans, especially those who widely share their interest. Knowledge of the game in question combined with passion always makes for genuinely interesting writing. A penchant for unvarnished criticism (when warranted) of teams or individual players also helps. This is what you'll find every day in the blog of record for St. Louis' National League ballclub, Viva El Birdos. It's always most entertaining to check in on good sports blogs when a team is struggling, as made evident by this offering by VEB mainstay Larry Borowski. Yesterday's topic: bad baserunning.

unless you stayed up until about 1 a.m. or so, you missed pujols doing his glenn brummer impression, ie trying to steal home with 2 outs and 2 strikes on the hitter. that's the play that made brummer famous --- and it too happened, ironically enough, in the 12th inning of a game against the giants. the idea is as stupid today as it was when brummer invented it in 1982, because with 2 outs and 2 strikes the hitter can't take a strike; if he does so in order to let you steal the base, you've stolen it for nothing, because the batter is out and the inning is over. run doesn't count. if the pitch is close, the batter has to swing --- even if you, the runner, are 15 feet away and running toward him at full speed. he's liable to crack your helmet in half with the bat or scorch a line drive out the back of your throat, either of which would be bad for team morale.

these considerations apparently entered pujols' mind about 60 feet down the third-base line, because ---- having already committed himself fully to this foolish errand --- he suddenly stopped and made ready to head back toward 3d. which, at that point, was an even dumber impulse than the one that propelled him plateward in the first place, since it guaranteed the adventure would end in an out. this second stupid idea proved to be the fatal one, because if albert had simply seen the original stupid idea through to its conclusion, it probably would have ended up looking brilliant: the catcher bobbled the ball, and albert very likely would have scored. but he prematurely cut short his homage to glenn brummer, and embarked on a new one to jeff suppan circa october 2004. suppan's gaffe was bad, but pujols' half-dash down the line was immeasurably more retarded. i'd rank it as the most nonsensical baserunning play i've ever seen a cardinal player make.

"Foolish...even dumber...immeasurably more retarded." It's the kind of sports writing that elicits tears of joy, and considerably more interesting fare than you generally find in the daily papers. I'll be checking out VEB often this season.

Tagged as: baseball, sports blogs, viva el birdos

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.