Marinerds, etc.

Nick Swisher would really like it if people voted for him on the all-star ballot. Or so he says. Something about his dad making fun of him for having less all-star appearances. Either way, Swisher's site is pretty fun to look through, regardless of whether you go vote for him.

(Me, I've already been just punching Ichiro-Swisher-Teahen in the AL outfield on all of my ballots anyway. Last year I used to write in Swisher. This year I've been writing in Ryan Doumit.)

I watched the second half of last night's Mariners game while I was at the gym, now that they've put in these awesome "treadmill theater" screens so you can watch whatever you want without annoying anyone else to change the channel. The good part is that I walked about 3-4 miles during the game. The bad part is that I literally could barely stand up by the time I got to the 9th inning, so I sat down on one of those inflatable workout balls to watch Ryan Rowland-Smith.

I missed the back-to-back RBI walks by Johjima and Beltre, but I did get to see the back-to-back FUNK BLASTS by Johjima and Beltre. (Is that the first time that there ever was a game where two teammates had back-to-back RBI walks AND back-to-back home runs?) And it was even back-to-back pitches on the home runs, too. Very cool.

J Lopez pitching to J Lopez was pretty neat. So was Coco Crisp's at-bat -- I didn't recognize him, and didn't have sound, so I'm thinking "who the heck is that spastic freak at the plate?" There's definitely some advantages to watching a game on TV instead of being at the park, but you miss out on things like seeing the Ortiz Shift and such on TV, I think.

I got to see a few innings of the Rakuten-Yomiuri game last night as well. It was actually the first time I'd gotten to watch Ogasawara since he went to the Giants, and it almost made me want to cry. I cheered for Masahiro Tanaka to strike him out, but I fell asleep before that was accomplished. I did see Yoshinobu Takahashi's home run in the third (strangely, I actually sort of expected it to happen), though I didn't see the one in the seventh. Naoto Watanabe continues to impress me as Rakuten's shortstop, too. Talk about a productive draft.

I'll be at tonight's Sox-Mariners game, but not Wednesday's, since between Sunday night and Monday afternoon, all of the decent tickets in the lower levels got bought up for Wednesday's game. Not sure whether it was genuinely a rush on tickets or whether scalpers think they can make a buck off of a Matsuzaka start, but whatever. I'm kind of psyched because I'll get to see Roy Halladay pitch on Saturday! Finally!