Word: mounds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whom would Casey, soul of the Series, be rooting this week? "Whoever was paying him," says Creamer. "I suspect that would be the Mets, still trotting him out at 110." They would prop him up on the mound, and the Old Professor would peer in at the Yankees bench. After a dramatic pause, he would flagrantly thumb his nose...
Televised baseball, especially in big games that are the sport's full carnival, offers an individualism of faces, closeups of intense privacy (pitchers thinking, scratching themselves, anguishing, waving off the sign, spitting, trying to deliver a ball very hard from mound to plate with precision, as if a neurosurgeon were hurling darts 60 feet down a hospital corridor at a patient's neocortex). The spectacle has something in common with a bullfight - matador on the mound, bull at the plate, multitudes eating and drinking and whooping in the stands in a tableau of casual, ceremonious pageantry...
...worthwhile to have a postmortem on one moment of notable idiocy that occurred early on, when the Yankee pitcher, Roger Clemens, delivered a pitch that shattered Mike Piazza's bat, the broken barrel of which came flying out toward the mound to be fielded by Clemens. Clemens caught the jagged piece of bat and threw it toward the first base line...
...demon, Matsuzaka kept a nation enthralled throughout the tournament. The quarterfinal game went 17 innings: Matsuzaka pitched them all, hurling 250 pitches. In the semi-finals the next day, he played in the outfield, his right pitching arm wrapped in a thick layer of bandages. He took the mound in the final inning to save the game. The next day, in the championship, he pitched a no-hitter: nine innings without giving up a single hit, a feat roughly comparable to a golfing hole-in-one. "Nobody will ever forget what Daisuke did," says baseball writer Keizo Konishi...
Japan's baseball team will need three days, or more, of Matsuzaka's magic on the mound if it is to have any chance of winning an Olympic medal in Sydney. Silver medalist to Cuba's gold in Atlanta in 1996, the Japanese team will include Matsuzaka and seven other big leaguers in these first Olympics where baseball professionals are allowed. At 19, the fastballer is now the top draw of the Seibu Lions in Japan's Pacific League. When he pitches, the 35,000-seat stadium in suburban Tokorozawa tends to fill up. Other nights, the stands are often...