The Jays played their wildest game of the year, and must have made AA jealous sitting up there in his box and not getting in on the action. He felt the itchy trigger finger, and after the game, the club designated Merkin Valdez and Jeremy Accardo for assignment, to be replaced by Josh Roenicke and Rommie Lewis. (Via Jordan Bastian's Twitter)
So, I've been living in Colombia for the past 9 months, and as you can probably guess, it's all soccer, all the time. One time I asked a Colombian colleague of mine how popular baseball is, and his response was something like "not popular at all". Then I asked him what the second most popular sport is, and he said "um, baseball I guess". While I love the ability to follow multiple major-sport teams in Toronto, it is pretty fun to be immersed in a culture that is so focused on one sport, and especially on one team - Barranquilla Junior, the local Division 1 (or whatever it's called) team. It must be something like being a Saskatchewan Roughriders fan, except the limited nature of Spanish ability and the complete foreignness in almost every way of the culture somehow combine to give it even more of a mystical, all-for-one and one-for-all quality.
But there is one thing that bugs me about sports around here. There are no box scores. Often, there aren't even standings in the newspapers. How am I supposed to absorb information if it's not presented to me in tabular format? There's something about scanning a chunk of data and zeroing in on the important, interesting and unique numbers that is completely exhilarating, as ridiculous as that sounds, and I miss being able to do that. Or, at least I miss it for about 5 minutes until I find some internet and check the latest baseball scores.
All this was a long way of saying check out this box score. It is a great box score. I could write a recap of the game, or I could summarize the important events, feed you the relevant stats, or even create my own personal graphical data display. But no matter what I do, you probably won't get as much pleasure out of it as if you just click on the link and let the numbers come to you.
Ode to the Box Score - set to Ode to Joy (what else? Two masterful creations, completely worthy of each other)
Aaron single, John Buck double, Overbay went 3 for 5
Dana Eveland, horrid outing, Downs and Gregg kept Jays alive
Vernon Wells had
5 total bases
Jose Bautista
drove in 4
But even though they scored a dozen, one more run would not arrive
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20100426235824236