In my younger days, we used to play softball in a magical place named Hoffman Park, tucked away behind the Boulevard of Death.The problem that we often faced as softball players on the hard top surface was that every once in a while, some yahoo with bread crumbs would sit on the first base bench spreading bread crumbs and attracting every single seagull in Queens to have breakfast. So here we come to play and there would be birds everywhere. Fly balls were a problem, because you would look up for the ball and would have to dodge bird excrement instead.
How did we get rid of the birds? You never really got rid of them completely, but enough running around and pings off the bat usually did the trick. The same yahoo must have been at Comerica Park (or should I say Audubon Society Park today) with his bread crumbs making playing baseball in Detroit akin to playing catch on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.
Or playing softball at Hoffman Park.
But it's ironic that a stadium with big statues of scary Tigers all around (some with baseballs in their mouths depicting what would happen if a bird would get too close) could be prone to having birds just wander in and make themselves at home all over the outfield...or in somecases, across the infield. But I guess if birds were scared by mere statues, Alfred Hitchcock would have never had a career.
Speaking of irony, during a ball game that looked like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the Mets came to the mound with a guy who looked more like Sterling Hitchcock today, as Tom Glavine waited until the fourth inning until a frame where he didn't even give up a run. I think we can safely assume that if one were to count the birds that roamed the outfield during today's ballgame, it would be a safe bet that the count would go not one higher than 295.There's no reason for Glavine to be irritated at anybody but himself today. There's been talk about Glavine getting his jock in a bunch about bad defense and the like, but this was all on Tom today. The Mets are starting to fall into that pattern where they pitch well, but they don't hit. They hit, but they don't pitch well. Glavine had no excuses today, with Magglio Ordonez on the shelf as a late scratch, and Carlos Guillen leaving the game after the third inning with an injury. Instead, he gets beaten by Placido Polanco, and a protection-less Gary Sheffield. And another weekend comeback by the bats in the late innings (with help from Carlos Gomez's first major league home run) gets laid to waste.
And although the Mets scored seven runs today, they always seem to be one hit short these days. They seem to be leaving a ton of runs on the bases...including runners on third with less than two men out. One of those hits here and there would might have made this a winnable game. Instead, it was a football score on the wrong side as the Tigers scored more today than the Detroit Lions normally do.
