Emergency starter and recent pick-up Travis Blackley (“Aussies are the new efficiency, trust me on that”-Mr. B. Beane, Great and Powerful) did creditably against the Twins. I would not like to see him pitch against a better hitting team for 5 innings, not that he would last that long. Stick-straight and 91 is no way to go through life.

Jarrod Parker against DeVries tonight. Another good chance to end this long losing streak.

Manny watch: 0-3 yesterday. Still not taking good swings. Not expected up on Wednesday when first available.

Not much more to report except that Uncle Useless blasted out of his most recent extended ohfer (0-26) with a ringing ground ball single threaded between third and shortstop. Love waves from Buck’s blast are just now reaching the sensors at the Oolite Layer Monitoring Center in North Miami Beach. The Feesh’s parody catcher hiked his average to .164 but diving spiders are still catching all his air bubbles before they break the surface of Rio Mendoza. Of course, Chris (he lives!) Coghlan, going 0-2 with a sac, is down to .133 and makes Buck look like Paul Konerko. On the brighter side, Larry Beinfest said last year, before biting Tweeter’s tushy with a demotion to Nawlins, that “Logan Morrison is not a .248 hitter!” He was right. Tweeter is batting .241 but is slowly coming around, had a 2-4 day including a dinger, and might actually be tradeable for an impact player by the July deadline.

If you are comparing a baseball park, where almost nothing important happens, to a famous battle field….you probably need a large dose of perspective.

If all a baseball park is to you is food, bathrooms, electronic scoreboards and beer men, yeah, they are all pretty much the same. And the Gettysburg battlefield is just a lot of hills and fields, too.

With Hideki Matsui expected to be called up, I can’t help but feel some sort of move for a catcher, corner OF, or SS coming soon. Why else would an old left handed power bat be called up? They already have Pena, Scott, Joyce, Zobrist, and Brandon Allen to handle the righties. They need a right handed bat, because lefties are killing them. Jennings/Keppinger/Longoria are all on the DL. Upton, Zobrist, and Sean Rodriguez are their best RH bats, and 2 of them aren’t hitting .240. They need to get some offense.

BJ Upton is playing like an allstar, and Alex Cobb has picked up right where he left off last year. He and Matt Moore have made Jeff Niemann and Wade Davis very expendable. Matt Joyce will likely head to his second all star game, and Desmond Jennings is the future center fielder. Zobrist has too much value as a second baseman to waste him in right and continue to allow weak hitting utility men Will Rhymes, Drew Sutton, Elliot Johnson, Sean Rodriguez and Jeff Keppinger to continue trying to convince Joe Maddon they actually deserve to be major leaguers.

Luckily for the Rays, a lot of teams are in contention that aren’t supposed to be. The Nationals, Dodgers, Pirates, Mets, Cleveland and Baltimore are all teams in contention now, that haven’t been in a while. They will feel pressure from fans to improve, and that usually means buying expendable veterans. Hopefully the Rays can capitalize on this and improve the same dreadful positions us fans have seen as being dreadful since their Devil Rays days.

I think a lot of it was the pressure of the new city and new contract and the huge expectations….you can’t live up to 10 years of expectations in a single AB. That probably robbed him of some focus and got him thinking too much at the plate. Once he relaxes (which seems to have happened), he should be fine.

It took a few innings of observing the Baseball Palace on my high-definition idiot box for the right descriptor came to me. Garish. Guess that’s a good thing in South Florida.

I take back my previous description of that thing in LCF as a cheap imitation of a Carlos Santana album cover. Even calling it a cheap imitation defames a great musician. Though it certainly looks cheap.

So….here’s a challenge to those of you that believe in this phenomenon. If you believe that a lack of familiarity with the pitching in an entire league can cause (or significantly contribute to) the struggles of an all-time great. How do you explain guys like Matt Adams (who only had 152 ABs above AA before being called up) hitting .386 with a .417 OBP and .617 SLG? Or Mike Trout hitting so well at 20 yrs of age, or Bryce Harper hitting so well at 19 yrs of age….after all, these guys aren’t only unfamiliar with AL or NL pitching….they are completely unfamiliar with MLB pitching. I’d love to hear an explanation.

The Rangers never play at home on MLKJ day. It was an idea born by Gov Rick Perry while visiting “Nigger Head”, his private gun club, and later enacted by the legislature while he was winning GOP presidential polls.

I fully approve of the ball park food served there, brats, dogs, popcorn, pretzels, and other typical traditional ball park food….you know…things that can be made well at a ball park and eaten while sitting in a tiny wooden seat…..not a lot of the silly things you see done horribly attempted at other parks. There were no beer men…you had to leave your seat for one, and there was only one size of been (small)…that is probably my biggest complaint.

The fans were fine. Generally courteous and just there to happily root on the Red Sox. Lots of Tigers fans in Tigers gear, didn’t see or hear a single taunt. The crowd was so monocromatic, I half expected a hockey game to be played. The lameness that is the singing of sweet can only be fully appreciated live. Just goes to show you that making a song from the 60s a tradition in the late 90s is going to lead to something embarrassing.

There was a guy in the row in front of us with his 4 kids (ages 5-9 or so) that he was indoctrinating into the love of all things baseball and Red Sox. At one point, one kid asked how long they have been playing baseball. Answer: “A long time, since the 1920s, I think, maybe longer.” Yeah, the guy was wearing a Red Sox jersey with a “Fenway Park 100 years” patch on it. That was fun.