Cool, Cool Carrasco

My friend Mike told me that you gotta touch Bob Feller's (statue) foot when you come in to Progressive Field for good luck. I did so today, and waddaya know. Good luck!

Ok so I took care of the good luck and Carlos Carrasco took care of the good pitching and 7 other guys took care of good defense. All in all, I'm pleased with everyone's performance. Good job, all of us!

Seriously though, it was a great night for baseball. The weather was bearably warm with the wind coming off the lake. The midges have already left. We got all the rainy stuff over with early this morning. I managed to pick my friend up in Cleveland Heights without getting lost once.

I was so feelin Carrasco tonight. Probably because I got seats right up against the bullpen and was so close to the catcher that I literally was feeling Carrasco warm up. Check it:

It was some how extra-special for me that he got the W tonight and also that he went 8.1 shut-out innings. He got 6 strike outs and only gave up one walk and 3 hits. Liriano only gave up 3 hits for the Twins but it wasn't his turn today.

Perez came in for 2 outs of relief and got his 15th save. He collects those like Pokemon! His strike-out of Cuddyer to end the game was pretty epic, though. Because Cuddyer just got so mad. Lulz!

Perez walked by me like 5 times in the bullpen but he was very hard to get a picture of. I think perhaps he is part ninja. I did snag one, though:

It's him, you can tell by the beard. Turns out all the other guys are extremely hard to name because they wear nameless warm-up jerseys over their names and I still don't see them enough on TV to know who's who. This is Tony Sipp, doing some deep-knee bends. I know because later on he took off his warm-up and I saw his name:

I don't know who this guy is, but I wanted to take a picture of the top of his head so I could show you just how close I was to real baseball players all night:

Here's a shot of my view of the actual game too, just in case you were wondering if I watched anything other than the bullpen:

Nice, huh? Got that seat for $15, too, thanks to a 50% off promotion via Facebook. I was actually in the middle of purchasing tickets last week when The Indians were like "hey buy cheap tickets for next week!" on Facebook. Seren....wait for it....dipity!

Oh so back to the baseball game, which we won. Did not win due to any sort of outstanding hitting, although Orlando and Santana both got doubles (which Santana turned into a triple). It is very good that they hit something because I'm about going crazy over here with batters 4-9 doing a whole lot of nothing.

Shelley Duncan managed to get one down in the infield which scored Santana from his perch at third, and it was hella awesome. You don't expect that sort of thing from either Santana or Duncan but together they made it happen.

One was all we needed because Carrasco was on FIRE. Really in control the entire game.

What was also awesome was our infield defense today. Santana looked fantastic at first, really. Nothing got by him. Orlando and Supermanahan got their jobs done. Of course, Asdrubal was AM AZING once again, I'm sure thanks in part to my sign!

The infield looks like they were really paying close attention to how they were playing today. You could almost see them mouthing "Get ball. Set feet. Throw ball." as they carefully but confidently took care of 13 ground-ball outs. Their play really mattered a lot today, with the way they've been hitting. One error could have lost them the game.

Nooner tomorrow and I'm stoked. We really need to be winning going in to Friday in New York against the Yankees. And we need the real Slim Masterson to please stand up. It'll be against Carl Pavano, maybe we have some sort of secret old dusty book on him (he used to pitch for us). He's old, you know. Older than me and I am old.

The game's on WKYC channel 3 tomorrow, for those of you without cable. I actually don't have a TV in my office but I'll put it on the TV in the living room (I work from home) just so I can see replays, and so my dog can watch too. And maybe I'll take a long lunch.

See you tomorrow!