LOAD “*” ,8,1

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I’m 31, which means I’m likely older than about half the people reading this blog, old enough to remember life before the Internet, and just barely old enough to remember life before Nintendos became ubiquitous in households around the country.

A couple families on our block had Ataris. We had a Commodore 64. For me that meant countless hours in the basement spent pouring over stats and simulating games on Micro League Baseball. My baseball nerdery runs deep. For my older brother Chris, it meant a whole world of other things that failed to impress me at the time but now seem pretty damn amazing in retrospect.

At school, Chris was a two-sport athlete and a very good one, but at home he was kind of a a prototype 80s nerd, right down to the mesh-backed hat and the glasses with the double bar between the frames — both of which have come back into fashion ironically now. With his friends he played some the same games I did, but while alone he passed more time programming for the Commodore 64, staring at the glowing blue monitor, mastering its rudimentary operating system, making his own games.

I remember he wrote a program that turned the computer keyboard into a piano, learned to play the beginning of “Hey Jude” on it, then moved on. I think he made a couple of lemonade-stand type games too. It never seemed special at the time because I was 7 and never had any other older brother, so I just assumed programming computers was something older brothers did. He taught me a few basic operations, but it never really took.

Chris loved the Commodore 64 enough that he made 64 his football number and part of his email address and AIM name and probably his ATM pin — the number was some odd part of his identity. And he parlayed his interest in computers and science into a degree from M.I.T. and eventually a robotics fellowship at Texas A&M that he never got to enter.

OK, that took a turn for the sad that I never intended. I brought it up because Jack Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor and the inventor of the Commodore 64, died on Sunday at age 84.

And while I guess guys like Chris suspected this would happen back in the late 80s, so many of us now work and bank and learn and meet friends and lovers everyday through computers. We take it for granted, but that all started with nerds plugging away at lines of code in basements somewhere.

So give it up for the geeks, I guess.

Oof

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Everything about that game — especially the news about David Wright that came down during the middle of it — sucked hardcore. The good news is that it’s one game. The bad news is that Wright’s out for longer than that.

We should get a sense of how long soon, but for now we should probably prep for a few weeks of people who are not David Wright at third base and hope to be pleasantly surprised if he shows up before then. I really have no idea. How long do fractured pinkies take to heal?

Also, did you catch the replay of the slide-back-to-first in question? Guy broke his finger and didn’t even wince.

And then there’s this. Not the best night for the Mets’ defense. Neither of these men has the baseball or appears to know where it is:

Ruben Tejada is sweet, at least. I’ll be back here in the morning, rested and regrouped. Santana and Strasburg tomorrow. The best thing about baseball season is there’s always more baseball tomorrow.

Unless there’s a travel day or the season’s over, but you know what I’m saying. Back off bro.

 

Sandwiches of Citi Field: Buffalo Dog

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Box Frites is no longer just frites in boxes. They’ve got hot dogs now. They’re also in boxes. (Also: Fried pies.)

One such dog is the Buffalo Dog, an innovation so stunning I’m shocking neither I nor Perkins came up with it first. It’s what it sounds like, unless it sounds to you like either a hot dog made from buffalo meat or a buffalo-dog hybrid, because it’s not those things. It’s a hot dog covered in Buffalo-wing sauce and sides:


The sauce is a mix of wing sauce and blue-cheese dressing, so it’s pink instead of bright red. The carrots and celery on top are pickled.

I really can’t say enough about the concept here: It’s football flavor on a ballpark-friendly (and baseball-appropriate) delivery method. And it’s delicious. The sauce is spicy and flavorful enough that you never forget you’re eating something Buffalo-flavored, but it doesn’t overpower the hot dog itself. And the bun — a potato bun — is sweet, and the pickled vegetables have a nice acidity to them, plus crunch. All the stuff you need.

I should say though that the above-photographed Buffalo dog was the third I’ve had and also the third-best. It was purchased about an hour before game time, so perhaps it wasn’t as fresh as those produced in the high-turnover middle innings, or maybe the Box Frites staff weren’t fully warmed up yet. It had a little too much sauce, for one thing, which got messy — though not enough to trivialize the concept. And it just didn’t taste as awesome as the first two. Maybe the novelty’s wearing off?

Until I had tonight’s Buffalo dog I was ready to call this my new Citi Field go-to, given its strong length-of-line:price:tastiness ratio. Now, after this evening’s lackluster performance, I’m not prepared to say that. Instead I’ll say it’s a worthy regular that could perhaps bloom into a superstar.

And it continues

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If you’re playing at home — and I know you are — that’s Pascucci’s third in six games for the Bisons.

I meant to have more happening here this afternoon, but I had some meetings this morning and some video responsibilities to take care of, and now I’m heading to Citi Field. More once I’m set up and rolling there.

Good reading

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At the age of 29, and as he is left out of the industry trend of teams locking up franchise players, New York Mets third baseman David Wright has begun already a third act to his career. It is the comeback phase. After a career-worst season in 2011, when it appeared that a canyon of a ballpark was extracting the greatness from his career, Wright went back to his roots. He hit last winter at a high school batting cage with Nick Boothe, the baseball coach at Virginia Wesleyan who had worked with Wright as a teenager.

“He was like, ‘What is this?'” Wright said. “He said, ‘You’ve gotten away from what made you successful.’ I had tinkered with things so much over the last few years that I got further and further away from what worked for me.”

– Tom Verducci, SI.com.

Click through and read the whole thing. Nothing mind-blowing, but a good and fair summation of David Wright’s struggles the last few years and his pending contract situation. It even notes Wright’s option situation and calls the possibility of a trade “remote,” which a) is true, and b) seems like a solid litmus test for accuracy and thoroughness in sports reporting. If you’re propagating David Wright trade rumors without noting that his 2013 option only belongs to the Mets, you’re either not paying attention, misunderstanding the situation, or misleading the reader.

Classic 2:30 a.m. Taco Bell parking lot stuff

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Police were called to check a suspicious woman in a van on the Taco Bell parking lot at 7237 Watson Rd. An Affton woman was arrested for having a methamphetamine laboratory inside her Ford van at 2:30 a.m. Felony drug distribution and manufacturing charges were issued by the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

– Andrew Dana Hudson, Affton-Shrewsbury Patch.

It’s like: Meth cooks, when will they learn? Have you never seen Breaking Bad? If you’re going to want Taco Bell in the wee hours of the morning — which is understandable regardless of your sobriety and vice of choice — you need to keep two distinct vehicles, one for making and distributing drugs, the other for acquiring Fourthmeal. You arouse enough suspicion just rolling into a Taco Bell parking lot at 2:30 a.m. Do it in an obvious meth lab and you’re headed for the big house.

Pelf not Pelfing?

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Of all the weird and awesome things that transpired in last night’s Mets walk-off win over Washington, perhaps nothing was stranger than Mike Pelfrey’s 5 2/3 inning performance. Big Pelf, he of the fastballs and the stubborn 1.62 K:BB ratio, struck out eight Nationals and walked only one.

What’s more, after relying mostly on his sinker in the early innings, he threw tons of sliders late, and induced an atypical amount of swinging strikes with it.

This is almost certainly an odd Pelfrey blip isolated because it’s his first start of the season, classic small sample size stuff. But the differences in his PitchFX pages from this year and last year on the great TexasLeaguers.com are hilariously stark. FF is for four-seam fastballs, SI is sinkers, SL is sliders, FS is split-fingers, CU is curveballs and CH is changeups.

Here’s Pelfrey last year:

And last night:

But wait, it gets stranger!

I was surprised to learn that Pelfrey threw 35.3% offspeed stuff in 2011, given what I had in my head about Pelfrey and his fastballs. So I checked back through the archive there. Look at this:

In 2008, Mike Pelfrey threw 18.6% offspeed pitches. In 2009, he threw 22.2% offspeed pitches. In 2010, he threw 30.9% offspeed stuff. In 2011, he threw 35.3% offspeed stuff. Then last night, he threw 39.4% offspeed stuff.

Last night’s swinging strikes may be atypical, but the increase in pitches that aren’t fastballs (or sinkers) could just reflect the continuation of a remarkably steady career trend. And even more remarkably, the results for Pelfrey — at least the defense-independent ones — have stayed pretty consistent. The pitcher has evolved and the results have not.

Which is to say: Pelf be Pelfing.

All of which are American dreams! All of which are American dreams! All of which are American dreams!

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This year, the Web videos formerly known as The Baseball Show will be called various different things depending on their content. The out-of-town scouting reports are now known as “Know Your Enemy,” which means our video producers will have to stomach a season’s worth of me trying to make Tom Morello guitar noises before and after we film every single time we film, because I’m like that.

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Also: Nothing pays tribute to Rage Against the Machine like a dude in a business-casual button-down talking about pitching matchups in an upcoming baseball game on a regional sports network’s website. Trust me on this one. I mean, look at how angry I am. That’s the D, the E, the F, the I, the A, the N, the C, the E.