What made baseball fun this week: Miami Marlins like no-no’s and breaking fish tanks
By John Buhler
A lot of fun things happened in baseball this week. Most of which surrounded the Miami Marlins. All the more reason that baseball was fun this past week.
There are just some places in America that are easier to have more fun than others. For the kids, it’s hard to beat Lake Buena Vista, Florida. As for the adults, there are three places more fun than anywhere else, if we being totally honest: Las Vegas, New Orleans and South Beach. All four of those places are really good at getting you to waste your money on things you think you need to be cool like wearing mouse hats, going to magic shows, eating crawfish etoufee and getting sunburnt.
What separates South Florida from the rest of the America fun capitals is obvious. Miami has an MLB team and those three do not. Technically, Lake Buena Vista is in the metro area of that Tampa baseball team that plays inside at Juice Concentrate Park in front of dozens of human beings nightly. Are we sure Orlando even knows about their “professional baseball”? Some things are just going to be a mystery until the end of time.
So if we want to have fun and talk about baseball, let’s try to focus on South Beach’s team in the Miami Marlins. While participation trophies are dumb, the Marlins participated at a very high level this week and were fun doing so.
Some times you just have to break dumb things like backstop fish tanks to prove how fun baseball can be. If that doesn’t work, you can just give that expansion team named after terrifying desert snakes none of your time, as in zero hits. There have been more fun weeks in baseball, but Miami is starting to show how fun it can be before we all know that they are going to botch that All-Star Game so badly.
Green duct tape is the only duct tape needed to fix broken fish tanks
It takes a really special breed of human beings to be really into aquariums. Like fish tastes pretty good if you cook them right, but putting them into glass cages for your enjoyment is just basically playing with your food. You should only put things in cages that can kill you with a blink of an eye, like snakes, Komodo dragons and polar bears: the terrifying trifecta of NOPE! Ask yourself, when was the last time you thought Finding Nemo was going to beat you up?
But Weird Fishes have pretty colors? That’s a bingo!, and that’s why Mr. Loria decided to put some fish in tanks as part of the Miami Marlins backstop. It helps distract South Floridians from the rancid professional baseball they see daily and to prevent them from remembering that this is where The U did amazing things in the Orange Bowl.
To keep it Realmuto, Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto decided that southpaw snake Patrick Corbin who once wore jeans to a baseball tryout wasn’t going to be all debonair on that mound that once belonged to Jose Fernandez. Who dare you try to mimic Jose up there?
So Realmuto made up his mind to make a statement, deciding that Corbin’s offering needed to go in that fish tank. He kind of halfway swung that giant toothpick of his and put a dent in that dumb fish tank’s face. Fishtanky McFishtankface.
To be fair, I was kind of shocked that the glass wasn’t made of glass, as it was PlexiGlas. Apparently baseballs can do what frozen hockey pucks can do to PlexiGlas, straight up ruin it. Since baseball had to continue that day, some genius decided dark green duct tape was the best duct tape to magically make that fish tank feel better.
It might have felt better, but it looked pretty stupid. Basically in that moment, Miami decided that their baseball park needed to balance out that fish statue in the outfield with delicious green duct tape on a PlexiGlas fish tank. If you’re not excited for all the dumb stuff that is going to happen in the All-Star Game, then you just don’t like Marlins baseball, fish tanks or duct tape.
Edinson Volquez likes zero, while Albert Pujols prefers 600
Miami really took it up a notch this week in that whole making baseball fun category. The dude with the impossible task of replacing the departed Jose Fernandez as the Marlins ace in Edinson Volquez did something that would have made Indiana Jones, Harambe and Jose proud: dominate some snakes.
Volquez threw the first no-hitter of the 2017 MLB season. It was neat, like all no-hitters. It’s been a while since we saw one, but it was like everything I can remember. Volquez didn’t care that the snakes have been pretty ferocious this year while his Phish were playing Possum. He made some people proud, reminding us that even in places that think green duct tape is see-through, greatness can still happen.
Other greatness happened in another part of the country where it’s sunny a lot. Some dude that used to play for the St. Louis Cardinals and now makes a lot of money in Los Angeles did a pretty cool thing. Albert Pujols went deep for the 600th time in his big league career. It was more glorious than any Grand Slam you could think about ordering at Denny’s. He did it playing for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at Angels Stadium. It was extreme power in a place of extreme redundancy.
Could you imagine doing something cool 600 times in your life? After about the 15th time, the two friends you’ve got left in life will tell you to stop because you’re being a buzz kill and you’re not cool enough to keep doing that. Hitting 600 home runs in a big league career is like brushing your teeth 600 times in a calendar year. You can do it if you put your back into it, but that’s at least 2,400 minutes you’re never getting back. Math and dental hygiene is power, just like hitting home runs.
Some dude named Scooter went yard…a lot
It was a glorious day to be a Cincinnatian. Coincidentally, it was also pretty good to be named Scooter that day. When you crawled out of your bed on June 6, did you ever think some dude named Scooter was going to make baseball amazing that day? Unless, you’re Scooter Gennett’s relatives, then no, no you weren’t thinking about that.
Well, fate would have it that some dude that didn’t hit a lot of home runs in his life would go yard four times before 9:30 on a Tuesday night. Just check out the late-night record shop setting performance form Gennett. Pujols may have hit 600 in his career, but Gennett did it four times in one night. If you started Gennett on your fantasy baseball team, you deserve a treat or something, so treat yo self!
Back in the day, Braves pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux taught us the only thing that matters: Chicks dig the long ball. Unfortunately, John Smoltz couldn’t be there to tell dumb dad jokes because he was too busy losing hair, playing the accordion and iron the shirt he was wearing all at the same time. Gennett channelled his inner Professor and made baseball fun with four swings of the bat.
Stop asking old baseball dudes questions, PLEASE!
If you played sports for money before there was an internet, it’s probably not a good idea to give your opinion about anything sports-related because it’s probably going to be wrong. When that dude put that microphone in front of Philadelphia Phillies legend Mike Schmidt‘s mouth, what did you think was going to happen?
He basically blamed the best player on the 2017 Phillies outfielder Odubel Herrera for not being as good as he could be because he speaks Spanish, citing it as a “language barrier.” That’s the sort of thing you’d like to hear coming out of the greatest player in Phillies history’s mouth. Then again, this is the same mouth that rocked a goofy ‘stache that easily gave a million kids in the 1980s night terrors. 80s facial hair was frightening.
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Some day people are going to realize that you can’t be progress by reaching into the past. That 1980 Phillies team was awesome, but that was almost 40 years ago. Baseball has become increasingly an international game. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, people just aren’t great communicators any way. Lots of things get lost in translation. If Herrera and his teammates can speak the language of baseball together, then they can win and that’s all that matters. It’s always something in Philadelphia.