The AL Wild Card Series starts Tuesday, Sept. 29 and the NL Wild Card Series starts Wednesday, Sept. 30. The Wild Card games will be played at the top four seeds’ home parks. When the Division Series begins games will shift to neutral sites in California (American League) or Texas (National League).
I’ll have an AL Wild Card games post that covers all four games each day and the same for the NL Wild Card games on Wednesday.
Giants at Dodgers, 5:00PM PT, TV: ESPN
Two undefeated pitchers face one another this afternoon on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball: Jeff Samardzija for the Giants and Kenta Maeda for the Dodgers. The Giants’ pitcher got his first win his last time out against the Rockies, going eight innings and giving up only two runs. His ERA is 3.38. Maeda has one win to go along with a gaudy 0.00 ERA, going six shutout innings in each of his first two starts.
This being Maeda’s first season in MLB, he has no record against the Giants. Samardzija is 1-2 with a 4.91 ERA in four career appearances, including two starts, against the Dodgers.
Utley 2B
Seager SS
Turner 3B
Gonzalez 1B
Puig RF
Grandal C
Kendrick LF
Pederson CF
Maeda P— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 17, 2016
Blog note: foul tip asked a question this morning in the previous post’s comments:
foul tip • 5 hours ago
“Link, what happened to the links on the right side of the page?”
Linkmeister Mod foul tip • 2 hours ago
“They’re there, but you have to scroll down. You notice that the post and comments are now centered rather than left-justified, too?
“WordPress is insistent that its customers upgrade to its new releases, so I did yesterday and poof! They mucked up something to do with the style. I’m hoping they’ll send out a fix real soon now.”
I know the comments are loading slowly. I suspect the reason is that there are now 489 posts and 26,243 comments in the SQL database for the blog. I’m not sure how to solve that unless there’s a way to archive previous years. I’m going to look for something like that.
Mets at Dodgers, 4:15PM PT, TV: Fox
Zack Greinke looks to continue his amazing season (6-2, 1.58 ERA, and he’s probably earned about four more wins) against the Mets’ Matt Harvey, who’s having a good year himself (7-5, 2.99 ERA). Harvey has allowed only two runs in his last 19 2/3 innings, and Greinke has a 20 2/3 scoreless inning streak going.
Reminds me of a song:
I updated Rule #5 to include religion, following cocktail party etiquette:
Keep conversation clean, avoiding any sexual innuendoes. Excessive flirting is not appropriate, especially at a business-related affair. Also, steer clear of taboo topics like dieting, health (yours or theirs), the cost of anything, malicious gossip (yes, you do know when it’s malicious), religion and politics. Most important, don’t leave someone hanging. Close a conversation before moving on to another person or group.
Lineup when available.
Today’s #Dodgers lineup vs. Mets:
Pederson CF
Kendrick 2B
Gonzalez 1B
Grandal C
Puig RF
Ethier LF
Callaspo 3B
Rollins SS
Greinke P
Don’t look now, but each of the first nine game threads of 2015 has more than 100 comments. Last year we didn’t break 100 comments until Game 91. We didn’t do it again till Game 112, not again till Game 140, not again till Game 147, lastly in the regular season in Game 157, and only once in the playoffs in the Ryu game, NLDS Game 3.
I’m glad to see it. It’s a lot more fun to write up a blog post if you can be confident there will be a whole bunch of responses to it.
Thanks, ladies and germs.
Be sure to read Ramona Shelburne’s long article about the Dodgers’ new front office team and their efforts to put this team together.
Hat tip to Jon, who’s got a zillion other links to interesting stories at the official Dodgers site.
I wish I knew why these things close comments automatically after a period of time that’s different from what I specify in the configuration.
Oh well. Have at it, folks.
Yesterday I upgraded WordPress (the publishing system for the blog) to version 4.0. Then I tried to access the comments and got an alarm saying the comment database needed to be upgraded, with no alternative but to click OK. I did, and Disqus (the commenting system) went sideways.
With a little bit of angst and a lot of frustration, I got it to work first thing this morning. We seem to have lost one comment on the Pooh and Piglet image post from John_from_Aus, but since that was asking about the commenting system, I think we can get along without it.
At the moment Elysian Fields doesn’t have a separate design for mobile phone users. Would that be of interest to anyone? The two most popular have not yet been tested for this latest version of WordPress, but once they are I can add one of those for the site. As I understand it the software recognizes when it’s being read on a smartphone and automatically switches, although I could be wrong. I’ll find that out before I do it, if I do it at all.
What say you?
Update: Okay, I did it. If you’ve got a smartphone, when you call up Elysian Fields in its browser you should see a list of the most recent posts. Tap the one you want to read and its text will come up on screen along with all the comments.
Jon revealed his new employment situation to me over the weekend and asked me if I wanted him to put a pointer in his post to this blog, and I said sure, after I congratulated him on what must be a dream job he never anticipated landing.
So here we all are. The winter meetings are beginning, Matt Kemp’s name may be on the trading block, the Dodgers may or may not be trying to acquire David Price from the Rays, they’ve already gotten Dan Haren on the free agency market, and looming over everything is getting Clayton Kershaw signed to a long-term deal.
Whoops. I forgot. They’ve also added Orel Hershiser and Nomar Garciaparra to their TV broadcasting team.
Chat away, Dodgers fans!