No need to get uptighter
Come on, you little fighter
And get back up again....
It wasn't pretty, but the Jays will take it. As Spencer Fordin and Mark Zwolinski summarized, Miguel Batista couldn’t match the historic heroics of his former Diamondbacks rotation mate Randy Johnson, who fired a perfect game in Atlanta last night. But Batista did no-hit the Twins through five innings as the Jays held on for a 5-3 victory. Reed Johnson had 3 hits and 2 RBI for the Gray Jays.
Positive signs from the win: Batista was largely untouchable even though, by his own admission, he wasn’t in full command of his stuff last night. Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells hit the ball hard, with varying degrees of success, indicating perhaps a climb out of season-long funks. Jason Frasor continued to be the season’s most pleasant surprise, throwing two more shutout innings in relief. And Terry Adams received two gift outs from Minnesota -- one on a sacrifice bunt, the other on a swinging strikeout up around the batter’s eyes -- to get an ugly and uninspiring save.
It’s an early start today, 12:35 pm -- the Blue Jays hit the road for a series in Boston starting Friday, and they’d love to go into Fenway on a winning note. The game will be broadcast on ESPN, for those with the appropriate cable/satellite hookups.
And speaking of ESPN ... there are quite a few lawyers here at Da Box, but this article should be of interest to jurists and non-jurists alike. The Sports Network -- not the Canadian sports cable station, but the US-based official provider of minor-league baseball data -- has sued ESPN/The Sports Ticker, alleging some pretty serious stuff. TSN says ESPN has been breaking into TSN's server and unlawfully "scraping" (ugh) the information there to place on ESPN's Website and elsewhere. ESPN, owned by the cheerful evil overlords at Disney, isn't exactly clambering up onto the moral high ground. "We have not done anything wrong," the company replied, "and if necessary, we will establish that in court." That falls somewhere short of "outraged denial of these charges" and lands closer to "we found a legal loophole" territory. But the lawsuit does resuscitate the long-standing and interesting question of whether there's any proprietary right to information, and whether baseball data can be said to "belong" to anyone.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20040519085313999