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W. A football score.
I'd much rather see the Mariners win 14-11 than 6-0. That's just me. When the M's start stringing hits, I can never get enough.
Some biz pards invited us to club seats in the Mezzanine a few years ago when the Mariners scored 10 runs in a single inning; the M's next-biggest inning that whole year was 5 runs.
Do you think that the M's lack of bbbbbiiiggggg innings lately might be traceable to their low BB totals? You've usually got to let a pitcher get into trouble before you can cave his head in. (Enter the mandatory pitch for high-BB, high-pressure TTO types like Branyan and Dunn.)
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V. A fielding error occurs -- or, Any time I don't know how many bases the runner is going to get.
Baseball is surgically compartmentalized. One play at a time, one (or a sequence of) bases at a time, stop, re-set. It's the antithesis of soccer.
The suspense in baseball lasts just a fraction of a second: the pitch is on its way, the batter swings, and in about one-half-of-one-second the mystery is over. It's now going to be 2nd and 3rd one out, or whatever, and you watch the video unwind as the runners cycle.
That's fine, but then the contrast is so crunchy, when the ball winds up someplace unexpected. When the ball rolls around the LF corner in KC, or gets away from the CF in Fenway, that's fun.
That's why it's fun every time a fielder does something wild. The suspense about the new base-out situation now lasts 5-to-10-times longer than usual.
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U. A really great catch, especially one that saves an inning.
When I honestly think a ball is getting down in the gap, with runners on base, and then Guti or Ichiro come FLLLLYYYYYing over to spare me at the very last moment ...
Not only is it beautiful on every level of athletics, but it also decides a close game, right then and there. The baseball-pleasure PSI is max'ed out on this play.
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T. A deliberately blasted base hit.
As we now know, a lot of hits in baseball are hits simply because they happened to miss the fielders.
Plenty of them are deliberate hits, though. I'm talking about the hitter loading up and socking the ball deep into the power alley. Or down the line.
It's also fine if a RH hitter of the Piazza - Edgar - Tui - Boone type blasts a ball deliberately over the right-center wall.
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S. When the enemy pitcher goes past 20 pitches in an inning.
The AVG's all go up by like +100 points in this situation, so it's like the M's have a lineup full of Pujolses and Ichiros when the hurler is at pitch #24.
I'm always, always, hyper-interested when an inning's pitch count sails past 20.
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Related: home team up by 2 runs, two men on base, and the pitcher's laboring. Perfect peace and contentment and all is right with the world.
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R: A slow curve, swung on and missed. Now for something completely different, you say? This sometimes conjures images of that guy in Mortal Kombat who fires the hookshots and says "Come 'ere!"
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