Frobby

I don't have any problem with Melanie's voice, though Manfra certainly did have a good radio voice. I'm not too sure about the disctinction you're making between delivery and describing the baseball action. I will say that if I was locked in a room and had to choose between radio PBP by Fred or Melanie, I'd probably go with Fred. But in both cases, I far preferred it when they were doing color rather than PBP.

That's what I ate, and it was delicious. Any consequences didn't manifest until today, happy to say. That was probably the highlight of my night. Also, it only took me maybe 30 minutes to get home, so I could stew for an hour and calm myself down. Actually ended up watching the re-broadcast of innings 3-6 and turned it off after Gunnar's homer.

I will say this: several (not all) of Melanie's foibles were also problems for Fred Manfra, who is in the Orioles Hall of Fame and spent 25 years in the O's radio booth. He had a terrible time describing any play that was at all unusual while it was occurring, and he was awful at distinguishing which fly balls would be homers/extra base hits and which were routine fly balls. I can't count how many times I would curse him for raising his voice as though an Orioles homer had been launched and then say it was caught shy of the warning track, or act as though an opponent's ball was just an average fly ball and then say in a semi-sheepish tone that it had cleared the fence. And, he had a way of sounding a bit too happy when things were going poorly. So, Melanie isn't alone.

Everybody missed that. Ben too. He read the body language of the outfielder and while the ball was in flight said something like, "wow, I really thought that was going out." And then it did. From my upper deck seats it was hard to follow the flight of the ball and I had the exact reaction Ben did. As an aside, the Nats' broadcast booth is very high up and very far back. I was sitting in the 5th row of the upper deck and the press box was way behind and higher than where I was sitting.

As I've said numerous times, she's tolerable on TV PBP, where a timely and accurate description of the action is not essential. I wouldn't say she's good at it, but it's passable. It's the radio PBP where she's basically unacceptable.

So far, only 3 2nd rounders and 3 3rd rounders from that draft have made the majors, and only three of those have positive WAR. But, it's still early and I'm sure that several others will make the majors eventually. I don't follow other team's prospects closely enough to guess who from that group has a good shot at the majors. I'd certainly say that Rhodes is a long shot, but I guess it wouldn't shock me if he developed enough to get a cup of coffee some day. He does have some pop and pretty good plate discipline. Sorry for the digression. Back to Povich, among pitchers with at least 5 starts, Povich leads the IL in ERA, is 3rd in WHIP, and is 3rd in K/9. He's also 5th in innings pitched.

She actually contacted me and told me someone else had been using her account. Generally, I feel like there's been a recent uptick in people getting personal with other posters and being unnecessarily snarky about others' opinions. I'm glad you drew a line here. He obviously watched Povich's games closely (according to his posts, he's not related but is kind of a Nebraska Cornhusker insider who follows their prospects very closely and has sources in the program). Occasionally he'd post some useful details about why the box score didn't fully reflect Povich's outing. But the "Billy Boxscore" stuff was irritating, and he should have stopped when you told him to. Instead he just doubled down on being a jerk.

That’s not even in doubt. That was a very shallow fly ball (227 feet). McKenna took forever to get rid of it and didn’t make a strong or accurate throw. He’s capable of throwing much better than that, and Hays consistently does. I dare say that if Hays is in RF there, the 3B coach probably doesn’t send the runner.

He’s hit .701 since April 12. I don’t rule out him heating up. I do think his EV drop (from 89 to 84) is quite alarming and supports your 50 lb. bat description.

He was dominant for his first 10-11 appearances, so I don’t buy “he just doesn’t have it anymore.” He doesn’t have it right now, that’s for sure. The O’s will try to nurse him back to it. They invested too much not to try.

The point Elias made about the quality of advance scouting and game-planning made a lot of sense to me. There’s not much incentive to invest in that at the AAA level.

I routinely leave for O’s games 42 miles from my house with less time to spare than I did for this one. Honestly I think the route the map app sent me on was doomed to get worse during the time I was traveling. And another thing is just the cost of the tickets and parking compared to equivalent seats and parking at Camden Yards. Probably would have cost no more than $65-75 compared to the $112 I paid for that crappy experience.

Thanks for the sympathy. I always keep my phone on low vibrate, so calling it wouldn’t have done any good. I also hadn’t backed it up to the cloud, so I’ve lost a lot of data, including some voice mails I’d saved from my dad, who died two years ago. It just blows.

I convinced my wife that we should go to the O’s - Nats game last night. Boy, do I wish I hadn’t! I went and bought upper deck seats halfway between home and 3B, five rows back. All-in cost, $87 on VividSeats, would have been more if I’d bought direct from the Nats. And, I bought an advance parking spot at a lot several blocks from stadium, cost $25.50. I live about 16 miles from Nats Park. Game time 6:45, my map app says it will take an hour and 6 minutes. We leave at 4:45, and I figure we’ll spend 30-45 minutes looking around the stadium and finding some veggie food for my wife. Instead, we spend an hour and 53 minutes in the car. It’s bumper to bumper for most of the trip, the map app keeps pushing our ETA further and further back, and when we finally get to the address where the parking lot is supposed to be, there’s no obvious parking lot entrance, and I have to circle the block in very slow traffic, take a lucky guess that the lot entrance is off an alley between two buildings. Eventually we find it and park, and the parking attendant tells us that the lot closes 30 minutes after the game. (The website had said 60 minutes.) We walk to the main entrance, it’s now game time, and it’s a mob scene. There’s a woman with a bullhorn telling people it will be faster to walk to one of the other entrances, so we do, which takes several minutes. We get there and there’s a single-file line of a couple hundred people waiting to get in. We wait that out, which takes 10-12 minutes, and by the time we’re inside the stadium it’s 7:02 and the first inning is over. But my wife needs her veggie food, so we find the one stand that has some, and as we stand there, I see an Oriole trying to score, but there’s a pillar blocking my view of home plate and I have to guess from the roar of the crowd that the runner was thown out. My wife’s food in hand, we look for a stairway or escalator to the upper level, and finally find the longest series of ramps you have ever seen in your life. It takes eight turns of the ramp, each one several hundred feet long, to reach the top. By the time we are finally at our seats, the Nats already have scored in the second inning and the Orioles are up in the third inning and already to the last batter in the order. Meanwhile, I haven’t eaten but I want to actually watch the game for a while, so I wait until the bottom of the 6th and get in line at Ben’s Chili Bowl, figuring that will take no more than half an inning, but no, it takes a full inning and I miss the O’s scoring their third run in the process. Well, I don’t need to tell you what unfolded in the 9th through 12th innings and how excruciating it was, but let’s just say I was already in an extreme state of agitation before any of that happened and my mood got darker and darker and barely brightened when we actually won. As we leave our seats, I pick up an empty water bottle and beer can of mine and dump them in a nearby recycling bin. My wife says she needs to use the ladies’ room and while I’m waiting, I reach into my pocket for my cell phone and…it’s not there. I want to run back to our seats to look, but my wife is still in the ladies’ room, so I have to wait for what seems like an eternity. She finally emerges, I dash back to our seats, but the phone is nowhere to be found. As I come onto the concourse, I spy the recycling bin and realize I may have dumped my phone in there while dumping my empties. I fish around for a minute, don’t find it, but short of dumping out the whole bin, I’m not going to be sure it’s not in there. But I look at my watch and realize I don’t have time to do that because the effing garage closes 30 minutes after game time and 15-20 minutes have gone by already. So, I check with customer service to see if a phone has been turned in (no, of course), and dejectedly leave. I have never, ever been in such a bad mood leaving an Orioles victory. So, that’s my tale of woe. Even before the 9th to 12th innings and the cell phone fiasco, I’d told myself this was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had at a baseball game and that I’d never again be caught dead driving from my house to Nats Park. The rest was just icing on the frigging cake, and now my phone is probably at the bottom of some dumpster. At least we won the game. If not, I’d probably be in the bottom of some dumpster too.

Fell behind some hitters but you really can't complain. He was pretty overpowering