Saturday, May 01, 2004
Since I've got the May 01 dateline to myself, I'll post a few quick comments about the first game I attended this season. Actually, the game, a 1-0 (which should be read as "one-nil" since the Twins generated about as much offense as a soccer team playing it close to the vest) win by the Angels, was pure anticlimax compared to what happened in the pre-game activities, at least in my view.
Tuesday is the 20th anniversary of the game in which Dave Kingman hit a ball into one of the vents in the Metrodome roof. He participated in a homerun hitting contest before the game tonight. The idea is that some randomly chosen fan goes up against a celebrity hitter and the Twins' mascot. If John Q. Public wins the derby, he gets two roundtrip airfares to anywhere in the continental US. Each guy gets seven hacks, and most homers win. Home plate is placed about 20-30 feet from second base, so it's roughly 250 feet to straightaway center field.
The way the derby unfolded, JQP went 0-for-7. Then Kingman steps up and needs one swing to get warmed up before putting the next three pitches into the seats. He then gets one of the last three to go, with the two that stayed in the park coming off of pitches that an ump probably calls as balls. Kingman steps out of the box with 4 dingers, then.
The mascot steps up to the plate wearing his costume. He also needs one swing to get going before putting three straight out of the park. Then he looks at a couple of pitches mixed in with his last three swings. The pitches taken were similar to the ones Kingman hacked at in the end of his run. Mr. Mascot hits two more out in his last three tries to pull out a 5-4 win over Kingman.
That's right, a guy in a mascot suit beat Dave Kingman and his 442 career major league homeruns in a homer derby on the strength of laying off of two bad pitches where Kingman took his hacks at similar offerings. Just one more example of how proper pitch selection = heady goodness. It's also Exhibit Z as to why Kingman will never make the Hall of Fame.
posted by Tom Renbarger 11:24 PM
