Cincinnati Reds – the Addison Recorder

Thoughts from the Dugout: A Day at Wrigley Field

April 16, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

The baseball season is long and arduous. It’s often compared to a marathon, which credits the enormous physical toll that 162 games can exert upon the human body. The comparison, however, serves a slight discredit to the immediacy of the individual games themselves. Careers are made and broken on a nightly basis, and a lost or blown game here or there can have a monumental impact upon the postseason race in September. Think of it as something similar to the Butterfly Effect (not the movie), where a butterfly flapping its wings in April can blow the course of a season off pace when a monsoon takes out a pitcher’s elbow, or causes a game winning home run to die on the warning track. In a game of inches, that damn butterfly can wreak untold, and often unknown, havoc.

It’s also pretty damn fun.

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Three Up, Three Down: Thoughts from the Dugout

June 17, 2014 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

We are over a third of the way through the baseball season, and I’m averaging about one baseball column every three weeks. Three might as well be a theme of the column this week, and while I apologize for leaving my dedicated baseball readership bereft of material (to all five of you — sorry guys!), I am glad to announce that we’re back this week with as much topical news as I can muster. Unfortunately, the most topical thing is tremendously sad, so I’ll save that for last.

At this point in the season, we can start to see team narratives developing, and whether certain teams are flukes or not. Rather than do an all-out power rankings (of which I have one planned for the All-Star break), we’ll take a look at just six teams. (Well, five, but again, we’ll get there.) Three of these teams are doing quite well, exceeding expectations, or have a nice story going for them. Three of them are in the doldrums, fading, or have been beset with loss. As always, the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, but we’re far enough along to take a look at some things and say “Hmm, well, that doesn’t seem so bizarre anymore”.

Enough about this. Time for a game of Three Up, Three Down.

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Kansas City Blues: Live-Blogging the 2012 MLB All-Star Game

July 11, 2012 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

As you may recall, one of my esteemed colleagues here at the Recorder wrote in one of his first essays that baseball is a boring spectacle that has been surpassed in recent years by nigh every other major professional sport short of cricket, curling, and non-Triple Crown equestrian events.

Unfortunately, the MLB All Star Game is one of the best arguments that can be made for his position.

Like most All-Star games in the other major American sports, the All-Star game is a relic of a distant past, a game where the greatest stars of the American and National league would be pitted against each other in an exhibition of their talents. (Key word being exhibition – the game did not count for anything.) In past games, there was nothing to compete for except for pride and the sheer mystery of competing against the best teams of the other league. (This was long before interleague play became a mainstay, regularly pitting the two leagues together. Remember, it once made a difference to be in either the National or the American Leagues. Although one might call the fact that the DH is still in play makes the AL still the League of the Devil…but that’s neither here nor there.)

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