Baseball is Poop

Papi Sinks to a New Low
Something is wrong with David Ortiz. Without his partner in crime Manny Ramirez Ortiz has 0 home runs in 130 at bats. But in one extra inning game things got even worse for Papi when he left a small village (12 men) on base.
First inning: strikeout with a man on first (1)
Third inning: flyout with a man on second (2)
Fourth inning: strikeout out with the bases loaded (5)
Sixth inning: strikeout with a man on second (6)
Eighth inning: flyout with first and third (8)
Tenth inning: groundout with a man on first (9)
Twelfth inning: groundout with bases loaded (12)
The last five of those at bats all came with two men out.

Shut Em Out and Hit One Out
Tom Seaver used to say that before every game he'd wish the starting pitcher good luck by saying "shut 'em out and hit one out." There's no way to lose if you do that.
The Milwaukee Brewers Yovani Gallardo took Seaver's advice.
He pitched 8 shutout innings (ok, not as good as a complete game) and hit a home run, becoming the 26th pitcher to hit a homer in a 1-0 win.
Earlier in the year Gallardo became the first pitcher to hit a home runn off Randy Johnson.

If Only He Could Shut Em Out
Cincinnati Reds pitcher Micah Owings is becoming more well-known for his hitting than his pitching.
Owings has pitched poorly in 4 of his 6 starts this year (4.33 ERA isn't terrible though) but his best moment was a pinch hit home run with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th inning of a 1 run game.
The Reds lost anyway though.
For his career Owings has 6 home runs.



The Next Manny Ramirez?
Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Jason Bartlett got a lot of credit for his role in the team's reversal last season. His slick defense helped improve the team's run prevention and fuel their turnaround.
But during the 2008 season, Bartlett hit only 1 homer in 454 at abts.
Even in his best power year, 2007, he had only 5 homers in 510 at bats.
So far this season Bartlett has 5 in only 128 at bats.

Welcome Back Joe Mauer
The Minnesota Twins catcher missed all of April with an injury but he's making up for lost time in May. Mauer is batting .438, with 21 hits in 48 at bats. He also has 5 home runs and 15 RBI and an OPS of 1.347.

Welcome Back Dontrelle Willis
After getting demoted last year to try to fix his control and mental problems, things haven't gotten a whole lot better for Dontrelle Willis.
In his first start this year Willis allowed 8 hits and 4 runs in 4 2/3 innings against the Twins.

Cool Picture of the Week
Torii Hunter robbing a home run from Miguel Olivo in a one-run game in the 9th inning.



Annual Salute to Ballplayers' Pink Equipment in Honor of Mothers' Day





Tall Ball
When Randy Johnson (6'10") met up with Daniel Cabrera (6'9") they formed the tallest matchup of starting pitchers in major league history.

Paulo's Book Club: "The Complete Game"

If you ever wanted to be a Major League Baseball pitcher you should read “The Complete Game” by Ron Darling.

The book goes through a game one inning at a time, plucking one of each inning from Darling’s career – including two games he broadcast but didn’t pitch.
Each inning is selected for its ability to prove a point. His first major league inning perfectly describes his nervousness, while other innings discuss things the lefty-righty specialization in today’s game and one inning even covers Darling get rocked and throwing at a batter. That leads to several pages of discussion on pitching inside and even hitting guys when necessary.

The book doesn’t really explore each inning pitch-by-pitch, which I would have liked but I understand may have bored some. Instead the book explores the mental aspect of the game leading up those these different circumstances. And this is where Darling is refreshingly honest. Not honest in that he provided every detail of life with the mid-80s Mets, but honest in that he shares what he was feeling at the time. He was nervous for his first ever start, pumped for his World Series start after seeing his dad on the field, and he even admitted when he was scared or distracted on the mound.

It’s that honesty – and the cool stories like the one about where he was when Terry Pendleton hit that infamous home run in 1987 – that make this book a must read for any Met fan, or any baseball who wants to get a better understanding of what a major league pitcher goes through.

Don't Worry the Dog is OK

A dog gets hit by a car on the Major Deegan but her son won't let cops help her.

Poop Movie Night

Now that most of our shows are reaching their season finales Mrs. Poop and I may finally have some time to catch up on the million movies we have saved on our DVR. We have three comedies (Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and You Don't Mess With the Zohan) as potential candidates for when we actually get a night off together on Saturday.
Since I'm sure most Poopheads have seen some if not all of these movies, maybe we can get some valuable input on which one to watch.

Why I Was Late For Work

Last night right before bed Chase did his normal routine every time a train goes by. He runs to the couch, climbs on, looks out the window jumps up and down while saying "chooch! chooch!"
Then when the train leaves he says the sweetest little "bye."

Before that train got to the next station it hit 17-year old Glen Rock High School junior [corrected] Nicholas Bischoff.

An engineer saw Bischoff on the tracks, sounded the horn and tried to stop but was unable to.

Bischoff was walking home from work and it's not clear if he just pressed his luck too long, but I assume it was probably suicide.

This happened at 8:50 PM, and when I went to the station to catch my 9:42 train, I found out it was cancelled. The next train, 10:39, was delayed about half an hour (even though it was headed in the other direction). So this incident made me nearly 2 hours late for work.

Song of the Week

"You" - Lucy Pearl

Someone brought this group up to me the other day and we could never figure out why they didn't have a longer career together. Rapahel Saadiq (of Tony! Tone! Toni!) Dawn Robinson (of En Vogue) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (of Tribe Called Quest) they were like a hip-hop supergroup. And on this song they get help from Snoop and Q-Tip.

"I wonder what was on God's mind the day that he made you
I know he wrote a new Commandment after he was through"

First Streaker at CitiField

The first streaker at Citi Field showed Mets fans how to get a major league wedgie Tuesday night.
The nearly-naked doofus dashed from the first-base seats and slid into second with "Let's Go Mets" painted on his back and wearing only a stuffed animal wrapped like a thong around the middle of his strike zone for modesty.
As security guards came after the 29-year-old Queens man and more than 39,000 fans whooped and hollered, he got up with a raspberry flourishing on his right buttock, adjusted his stuffed animal and ran into center field.
The performance ended badly when he fell and the guards dragged him away through a tunnel on the third-base side.
The Braves were leading 1-0 when the streaker, identified as Craig Coakley, made his appearance in the fifth inning, but the Mets won 4-3 in 10.
Coakley was charged with interfering with a sporting event and trespassing. He is expected to be arraigned this morning.



And there's even video of the CitiField streaker:
Note: someone shouts out the N-word so be careful playing this at work



As you can tell from the video this was clearly prearranged and well thought-out, the guy may not even have been drunk.

Why Do The Rest of the Mets Hate Johan Santana?

What does this poor guy have to do?

Last year he leads the league in ERA with a 2.53, but the bullpen blows 7 games Santana left with a lead. Therefore he ended up with only 16 wins, which should have been 20 and could have been 25.

This year he's pitching even better and the bullpen has been fine, so the team is refusing to score runs for him, 15 in 7 games.

And the defense is betraying him as well. He's given up as many earned runs (4) as unearned runs.

Last night it was David Wright and Jose Reyes playing the role of saboteurs.

I won't complain because they are coming off a 7-game losing streak but you'd like to see Santana win more games, out of a general sense of fairness, but also because they need to win at least 75% of his starts in order to stay in first place in the NL East.

Face Facts

The amazing story of Connie Culp is one of the most incredible medical breakthroughs of our time. Culp was shot in the face with a shotgun by her husband. The blast shattered nearly every bone in her face.
Doctors made Culp the first receipient of a face transplant.
Doctors also did a near complete remake of her senses, she can smell and taste again but her vision is poor.
In addition to that, now Culp can smile and talk again as well.
Despite her horrible trials Culp still has her sense of humor and has become an inspiration to burn victims and other people with disfigurements.




The swelling in her face will go down and eventually she'll rebuild the muscle around her mouth so she can eat and talk more normally.

The incredible work done by these doctors makes me wish I had devoted my considerable genius to helping people instead of making boob jokes on some dumb blog.

Who Are These Guys?

Player A: 2008: 16 wins, 2.53 ERA
Player B: 2008: 15 wins, 4.77 ERA
Player A: 2009: 4 wins, 0.78 ERA
Player B: 2009: 5 wins, 7.02 ERA

Stella is Not My Mother

In his never ending quest to ruin every TV show for me Isaacs texted me immediately after “How I Met Your Mother” to tell me my mother was revealed. But we all know that Stella is not my mother so Isaacs didn’t ruin anything for me. Ted running into Stella again will evidently lead him to meet my mother, sometime soon hopefully.

Isaacs seems to think the pending reveal is a bad omen for the show but I fully expect at least two more seasons, and if they ended after that, I’d be fine with it. I’d rather they ended it on a peak, instead of dragging out the main storyline with contrived twists worthy of “24.”

But HIMYM shows no signs of slowing down, in fact, this episode was one of my favorites ever.

First of all, the entire conversation about the vagaries of the universe sounded like everything I’ve been saying on this blog for years. And the subsequent explanations (the food poisoning at Schlegel’s bagels, the dollar a day deal with the bum) were hysterical.

Ted says "a butterfly flaps its wings and it starts to rain." I've written about that too.

And Marshall’s charts (a pie chart about bars and a bar chart about pies) absolutely killed me.




And the one about Cecilia was very similar to an old Poop post.



Thanks for reading guys and keep up the good work.

Pictures on The Poop Almost Cost Another Beauty Queen

The recent controversy over Miss California has brought the heat down on another beauty pageant contestant. One of the Poop's favorite women, former Patriots Cheerleader Alysha Castonguay is the current Miss Rhode Island.

Alysha Castonguay has taken heat for this picture which has been seen by millions on The Poop.



But pageant officials saw this "topless" photo prior to the pageant and approved this, meaning Alysha won't be "stripped" of her crown (though we still hold out hope she'll be stripped of everything else).

What Do You Give Me For? Dom DiMaggio and Steve from "Sex and the City"

50 years apart and Dom DiMaggio and Steve from "Sex and the City" (real name: David Eigenberg) sure look a lot alike.

There But For The Grace of God Go I

I'm actually proud to admit that me, JLeary, Reissberg and the Conch were doing this same thing when Mike Butrym was still in short pants.

A New Jersey high school student has been suspended for organizing a contest in which boys voted on the school's best-looking girls in a bracket modeled on the NCAA basketball tournament.

Mike Butrym, of Towaco, says he was continuing a Montville High School tradition and believes his five-day suspension is too harsh.

The contest was called "May Madness." Teenage boys chose 16 female students from each grade. Each day, they paired off the girls and judged them on their appearance. Winners advanced to the next round.

The 18-year-old says many girls in the school think of the contest as a joke. He says they even started their own version judging boys.

He was suspended for "intimidation, harassment and insubordination."