Baseball today offered the perfect case against taking too much for granted.
First, Blue Jays catcher Gregg Zaun probably expected Fielder to slide by him in the bottom of the first - not land on top of him. I mean, who wants to look up and see the Fielder freight train coming your way? But he did, and we scored. Yea.
Second, Blue Jays outfielder Alex Rios sure got his assumptions wrong when he waited for the ground rule double call on Fielder's hit in the fifth. Maybe if he'd read my blog of May 13, he could have avoided an in-the-park homer. It ain't a ground rule double unless the ump says it's so.
And talk about assumption busters - most players get just one or two in-the-park home runs in their entire career. Who'd expect a big guy like Fielder to do it two years in a row...almost to the day. (His last one was June 17, 2007 in Minneapolis.)
Then there's Dave Bush. The blogs are alive tonight with people saying that of all the Brewer pitchers to come close to a no-hitter, they wouldn't have expected it to be Bush. I'm guilty of that too. But today I say: Back off people. Quit writing about what a surprise it is and focus instead on how well he pitched. We owe him that, after taking him for granted. He deserves a lot of praise today.
Finally, going into the top of the ninth, I don't think a person in the park expected the game to turn from a near shut-out to a near disaster. But six runs later, we were all biting our nails waiting for Torres to, as usual, save the day.
Thank goodness that is the one thing we can all still take for granted.
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Other interesting points about this game:
1. Overbay, who snapped the no-hitter today, was traded by the Brewers as part of the deal that brought Bush to Milwaukee.
2. The last time Bush took a no-hitter into the eighth was during his rookie season playing for...you guessed it...the Blue Jays.
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