Seriously...the kid's name is Cam Schlittler. It was fun saying, or trying to say...
On the evening when Corrie headed out to Texas to supervise the construction site there for the next week, I had the Yankees-Red Sox game 3 of their wild card round playing on my laptop.
And some rookie, some flame-throwing kid with an awesome name who grew up a half-hour from Boston, came in and dominated for 8 dazzling innings. His motion was fluid and kept his grip hidden all night. When Boone, the Yankees manager, sent him back out for the 8th inning, I thought back to game 1, when he took Max Fried out when it seemed like it was too early...when Boston folks are happy the pitcher's coming out? And he hasn't thrown that many pitches?
Anyway, Schlittler set a record: 8 innings of no runs and 12 strikeouts with 0 walks...that kind of tells it all. It doesn't come close to the visceral feeling of watching batter after batter flailing away at pitches in the zone, out of the zone (although there were very few of those) and walking back to the bench, befuddled. When I saw a sinker zooming and dropping in the strike zone at 98 mph I thought: tough night for the opposition bats. Fantastic that it's my team making those pitches.
Ever since we moved away from Brooklyn back in 2009 (WAIT---WE LEFT SLO 19 YEARS AGO?), my connection to baseball, and sports at large, has been more tenuous and less, eh, visceral. I've written about many different sports things for this blog, but that's because of the amount of my brain I have dedicated to sports topics rather than the emotional attention I devote to sports...I've not devoted that kind of emotional attention since...2009? When the Yanks won that World Series and we left for Texas the next month?
Watching Eli win a second Super Bowl was definitely cool, even if we watched it Honduras, and of course I was interested in my Yankees last year in the World Series (lol that post was written before Freddie's walk off grand slam), but without reading the newspaper everyday while riding the train, or just drinking a cup of coffee on the stoop, has altered my sporting-emotional-levels, needs, and desires. It's surprisingly easy to care less. Like taking Facebook off your phone.
But still! Have your young kids try to say Schlittler's name! He's freaking awesome! For a storybook night, it was a transportation. And it was great.
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