Category: kc cougars

The one good thing about the stilted start of the Cubs schedule is today’s off day works perfectly around the home opener for my hometown Cougars. I’ve got a comp ticket for today’s game (I think – part of my ticket plan, though they may have it in the wrong name), but that’s sorta provided a game happens today. A rainstorm is headed this way, and I just felt the slightest of drizzles outside.

The analysts are down on the Oakland A’s system (parent of the Cougars) this year, more so because they’ve been drained to fill major league needs than anything, and I think the A’s agree that the bottom tier of the system is a little bit dry of propsects. I don’t think that neccesarly means this’ll be a bad year; the roster does seem to have a lot of guys older than you’d expect for A ball, and while that likely indicates many of them aren’t good enough to move up the system, they still may be better the those just entering this level.

The only prospect of note on the team to start the year is 19 year old Craig Italiano. Baseball America ranks him 7th in the system and says he’s got the best of the minor A’s. Baseball Prospectus says Italiano did some good work in the AFL last year, but he’s basically just a kid not even a year out of high school.

The real prospects tend to turn up in after the June draft. Travis Buck, who I thought was awesome and BPro thinks is good, was drafted last year, started here and now has already moved up. Same thing with Cliff Pennington, who Baseball America is high on (and I kinda wasn’t.) The first half of the Cougars season, at least from a orginizational standpoint, is about seeing if there’s any surprises from guys they aren’t expecting big things from.

It’s also baseball in my backyard, and that’s truly all I want.

KCC 0 – CDR 5

uh oh. well we’re still good as long as Beloit loses

BEL 9 – WIS 1

oh no. oh no. Three way tie for two spots, but the Cougars lose all the tie breakers.

see you in 2006

The relevant scores:

Quad City 1 – Southwest Michigan 4

Wisconsin 3 – Beloit 2

Kane County 8 – Cedar Rapids 5

and the up to the minute relevant standings

Team W L GB plays 1st Half Elim#
Quad Cities 36 33 --- @ SWM 3rd -
Kane County 36 33 0.0 v CRK 8th -
Beloit 35 34 1.0 v WIS 6th 1
Cedar Rapids 34 35 2.0 @ KCC 9th out

Quad Cities clinched a spot when Beloit lost; they’d take the tie breaker (assuming I’m doing tiebreakers right), and are still nominally playing for seeding. Cedar Rapids was eliminated when the Cougars beat them, and that win gives Kane County back control of it’s own destiny. A win for them or a loss by Beloit, and they’re in.

Hopefully I’m not bad luck tomorrow. Both the Beloit/Wisconsin game and the Kane/Cedar game start have Labor special Day 2pm starts, but I’m not sure either side will be able to follow the other game; Cougars don’t have an out of town scoreboard, and it doesn’t look like Wisconsin does either.

Matchup is supposed to be KCC Trent Peterson (3-2, 3.30) vs Karl Gelinas (10-8, 4.06), but you gotta figure everyone is available. Lose, and everyone goes home. Win, and there’s a game on Wednesday.

I’m hoping a quick one sided affair, so I can celebrate a playoff birth and still make it to an evening barbecue.

Remembering to right this up as I wait for Beloit and Wisconsin to finish up. This is gonna be tight and I can’t find anything about tiebreakers. Who would figure it – (the farm clubs of) the A’s and the Angels in a playoff battle.

Not much to say. It was seat cushion night but I showed up too late to get one, I guess. I didn’t really want it. It was my last game in my ‘regular’ tickets – I’m in a slightly worse place tomorrow, and I think I’m in a better spot for the playoffs.

It’s important that you go to games enough to get reality checks. The Daily Herald recap of the game (link active for only a few more hours – sorry) saw it as a good pitching performance plus two bad pitches for Tony Evans. I saw it as a bipolar outing – everything in the first inning seemed liked batting practice to the Kernels (including the out), then suddenly had five Ks in a row, then it flipped again before Sean Rodriguez hit the most impressive home run I’ve seen here. Toussant and Rodriguez were trying to take out the video screen – one flew over the top, the other hit the ad on top.

Anyway, I thought he might not make it thru the first inning, and he left after 7 with 10Ks. That’ll work. I agree that it wasn’t his fault they lost – they probably should’ve beat up a pitcher up from rookie ball a little more than they did. Cedar Rapids played some nice defense, with two different outfielders eating wall on catches (the centerfielder just did it mostly for show, but the left fielder about knocked himself out making a catch.) Pennington had nice running catch into short left center – and then dropped the ball on the same play a couple innings later. Eh.

Myron Leslie’s homerun was to straightaway centerfield. As it hit the big blue wall that serves as a hitters background, I was trying to remember if that wall was in play. (Uh no. That’d be massively unfair.)

Speaking of Myron’s, Noodleman was performing again. I didn’t want to kill him nearly as much as last time. Once I realized his between innings bits meant less people in my way on food and bathroom runs, I became much more appreciative of the man.

We have a finish, 1-0 Wisconsin. In case you’re not obsessively following Midwest League standings, let me break it down for you:

Simplified Midwest League Western Division Standings

Top two advance

Team          W  L GB plays 1st Half Elim#
Quad Cities  36 32 -  @ SWM   3rd      -
Beloit       35 33 1  v WIS   6th      -
Kane County  35 33 1  v CRK   8th      2
Cedar Rapids 34 34 2  @ KCC   9th      1

SWM is Southwest Michigan, who’ve already clinched a spot in the Eastern division and have an outside shot at changing their seeding.

Wisconsin – WIS – is ahead of all these teams, but the Midwest League uses split-season standings, and they’ve already advanced based on their first half. Clinton too, and they’ve fallen off a lot the second half.

I’m guessing the tie breaker is 1st half standing, but like I said I can’t find anything saying that. If it is, Kane County (and Cedar Rapids) need help from the leading teams, despite the tie. Beloit has to loss at least once more, or QC has to dog it and lose out – for them to have a chance.

Like I said, I got tickets for Monday, so I hope things last at least that long.

Good that your all got your complaints and questions in, so now I can completely ignore them. (OMG HEEL)

Holy crap do the Arizona Cardinals have ugly uniforms. I’m totally lost in my train of thought now. Salisbury’s facial hair is crazy as well.

As a result of being forgetful and “Exchange Unused Tickets Night (2 of 3)”, I had a couple seats to tonight’s epic Kane County Cougar/Beloit Snappers pennant race showdown, my second game this week. (Maybe I’ll scan my box score from Friday?) I was going to bring a camera and shoot pictures to entertain myself due to lack of conversation, but the person I would’ve borrowed it from wasn’t around. I was gonna ‘score the game, but I neglected to grab my template from the printer before I left, and they weren’t selling scorecards for some reason. No big deal, because at least I wasn’t stuck choosing between taking a bathroom break and missing a couple batters on my scorecard, which seemed like a dumb debate when the games have been kinda noteworthy lately.

Which means, of course, the game went into the 9th inning with a no-hitter. Even though it would’ve been a neat to have a physical record of being there, I’m not dumb enough to be picky how I get a no hitter, since I’ll be lucky to ever be there for one.

It wasn’t to be tonight; Starter Joe Scott struggled mightily early with control and upped his pitch count, so they were forced to take him out after 7 no hit innings. Trent Peterson went 1-2-3 in the 8th and got the first in the 9th, but Deacon Burns got a bloop hit to RF, and David Winfree got a legit line drive single to rub it in. It was still pretty neat to see those double zeros (Beloit gave up 2 errors, so it was 0 0 2 on the board) for as long as they lasted.

It was weird, because it didn’t feel intense like a no-hitter and I didn’t realize it was actually going on till the 6th becuase he was so off early, but then the bottom of the 7th went on forever, building the anticpation. It’s minor league ball and a family/group outing audience, so there were a lot of people off the 5000 who came who left early even before it got out of hand, either not realizing or not caring, and I’m used to it enough by now that I’m not surprised by it any more. Those that did stick around were into it in the 9th, and gave the team a “sorry you lost your no-hitter but you’re still awesome” ovation after the hit.

It being Dog Night and Clapper Night wasn’t nearly as annoying as I thought it might be. People making me get up every two minutes so they could leave the aisle and come right back did make up for it, however.

Win moves KCC to a tie for the last playoff spot, with a couple weeks ago. They’re only back in town for one more 4 game homestand, I’ve got tickets to the series opener and the season ender; hopefully at least some of my late season tickets will pan out as meaningful.

Taking Wednesday off to go to the Cubs day game against the Braves. Mike Hampton vs Mark Prior should be pretty fun.

I’ve got a mini-season ticket plan for the Kane County Cougars. It’s mini-over. Ha, I made a lame attempt at a joke.

I’ve been scoring at each game. With a pencil and paper. Sorry to let you down, by making the weakest joke possible.

You can see the boxscores, but gosh if I know why you would want to. This is here so I can find it later, I suppose.

05/08 KC 8, PEO 7 – This was the ‘crazy amount of walks to end a game’ game

First time I saw my seats.
GOOD: two rows behind the third base (visitor) dugout
BAD: there are people already in them
STRANGE: they have a ticket for the same seat as I do, totally legit.

I grabbed an usher, so he too could stare at the tickets. The woman sitting there – mother and daughter I thought, but didn’t ask – were nice enough people equally confused about how they could sell the same seat twice. They had bought their ticket day of, as it was a nice day for that sort of thing. I ended up just grabbing other seats in the row, until the people with tickets for those seats showed up. By then, they had found a substitute ticket for me, so I just tracked it down – and it happened to be behind home plate. Neato.

The one thing I did figure out, sitting a section over from the scouts and the others charting the game and trying to prevent papers from flying all over, was I really needed to act like a professional and get a clipboard to kepe everything in order. You’d think I’d learn this already from the daily allusions on Al Yellon’s blog, including the ways of using them on others. I’m guess I’m slow.

05/27 KC 1, LAN 2

I had this day off, by-product of incredible amounts of annoyance, so I spent it taking care of odds, ends, and clipboards. Got a cheap green one after I couldn’t decide about anything I wanted in a more expensive one.

I’m writing about clipboards. I am single handily killing this blog, then bringing it back to life, then killing it again. This is the point where I know no one’s reading, so I could slip in a paragraph about how I’m bored with writing, writing about everything, and never talk about it again but I’m too bored to do it. I was really set on having a see thru clipboard for whatever reason. The clip isn’t so good, but you get what you pay $4 for.

Anyway, this game sucked. It drizzled early, and made me wish I got a clipboard with a top. I tried to find ways to keep the paper from not getting wet and wrinkly, and then the moonsoon came and it didn’t really matter. The pencil markings of the first few innings are faded. The pen I switched to seemed to have a lot of bubbles, water caused and otherwise.

I really thought about bringing an umbrella to this game, but didn’t want to lug it around. Thought about a hat, and forget it. What a mistake. Even though it doesn’t seem quite possible timewise, I’m blaming the dumbness here about me getting this horrible sore throat->cold for the last week.

I don’t remember much about this game, except the hot chocolate guy coming at the right time.

ALSO

Me: [peacefully scoring the game, trying to watch what’s going on]
Myron Noodleman, wacky roving minor league mascot act, making a poor choice of people: “What’s the score!”
Me: [dumbstruck, but trying to grasp a comeback]: “Uh. [gets it!] I have no idea.”
Noodleman: [leaves to find people to play with]
Me: [thinking, rest of the game] “That line could’ve worked – with an MF attached. DARN IT”

06/05 KC 16, FTW 9

Now this was fun to watch. One of the few guys back from last year’s team (and having the kinda season that’ll keep him in low A for a while), Eddie Kim hit two long home runs. Every home run seemed liked a long one, and they were just killing Fort Wayne. It felt like an even bigger blowout than 7; Fort Wayne picked up 6 runs after fans seemed to get more into in the sun than the game. Even though I felt the need to wear a long sleeve shirt on an 90 degree day, I got a nice tan on my arms and neck.

While putting together a stat cheat sheet before the game (and who doesn’t?) and trying to remember who’s the parent club of the Wizards, I noticed a line in the roster that answered the question: SS Matt Bush. Bush was the 2004 #1 Overall Draft pick by the Padres, mostly for signability reasons. In other words, he was cheap. Padres talked about what a good high school kid they picked – and then he got into a bar fight a week later.

If he got into a bar fight while he was here, I don’t know about it. I did notice he was batting eight, which was striking. He is only 19, and so maybe much shouldn’t be expected at this point, but you sorta expect “the #1 pick” not to be batting second to last, at any age. Unfair, I guess.

Bush has a great arm, though I wasn’t sure about the accuracy. Good range. He’s earned his batting slot so far: 235/277/298 (youch), but didn’t look lost when I saw him, hitting line drives; into a double play the first time up, because of bad base running. Still, at 19, he looks more like a utility fielder than a future all-star.

just go back from Cougars game. Must share last half inning

Peoria Cubs 7, Kane County Cougars 4, bottom of the ninth)

P Campuseno enters the game
* Tritle walks (4-2)
* Long walks (4-2), Tritle to second
* Weyment pops out to catcher. 1 out.
* Chapman walks (4-0), Tritle to third, Long to second.
(back to the top of the order)
* Blasi gets an infield hit to 3B (0-2, diving stop, throw was late), Tritle scores, Long to third, Chapman to second. 7 – 5 Peoria.
* Ruiz strikes out swinging (1-2). 2 outs.
* Melillo reaches on an E6 (1-2, groundball, bad throw), Long scores, Chapman to third, Blasi to second, Melillo to first. 7 – 6 Peoria.
* Everidge walks (4-1). Chapman scores, Blasi to third, Mellio to second. 7 – 7 tie.
* Teitje walks (4-2). Blasi scores, 8-7 Cougars, game over.

Line for the half inning
2 outs
1 hit
1 error
5 walks
4 runs

Lots of walks and wild pitches for both teams all day.

more later. Oddly crazy busy.