Let’s roast the fastball Rockies first baseman Mark Reynolds hit 450 feet

Welcome to Football Friday (Season Two). The wildly popular weekly column has returned for a second year of diving into the theories, analysis, and fun of baseball. Every week we here at Football Friday will use all of our integrity and other things that sound impressive to deliver the best baseball column you’ve ever seen or ever will see. We at Football Friday, Inc. are honest, truthful, and most of all we’re serious journalists. Every single one of us.

It’s the second inning and Mark Reynolds is facing a 2-1 count with Carlos Gonzalez on first. Mark’s been in a bit of a slump this Mariners series, with only one hit through the first three games, but with Yovani Gallardo on the mound the Rockies slugger is hoping to get his bat realigned.

Gallardo is going to try and paint a corner here—something low and outside that either gets Mark to ground the ball to short or watch it for a strike. It’s a sound strategy.

Carlos Ruiz, the Mariners backup catcher, sets up low and away.

Positioning his glove around Reynolds’s knees, Ruiz is hoping that even if Gallardo misses his spot a little, it stays down enough to keep Reynolds off the bases. Yovani checks Carlos at first and fires a fastball.

Yovani, uh, misses his spot.

The pitch is chest high and right down the middle. Maybe if it was 98 or an inch higher, Reynolds doesn’t catch up. But it’s 93 and right at the numbers. Folks, this pitch is so bad if you saw your sister flirting with it you’d be demanding she go home.

Mark’s swing says it all. The bat gets in right on the sweet spot and you know it before he even connects. This one isn’t landing for a bit. It’s the kinda swing that makes you question your profession if you threw the pitch that caused it.

Gallardo’s looking so high up you’d think he was looking for Sputnik. That pitch was so bad it isn’t allowed in the Seattle Mall anymore due to too many customer complaints. That pitch was so bad I thought Zack Snyder wrote and directed it. This pitch was so bad it played Staind on the way out.

The ball is almost 80 feet away from the guys who can catch it. If you took Yao Ming and laid him out he would still be 72 and a half feet away from the ball. You could have Shaq hold up Yao Ming on his shoulders to try and catch it and you’d still be 65 feet short. The outfielders are so far away they could stand halfway up the Statue of Liberty and still not reach it! The pitch is far away. The pitch is bad.

The home run is good.

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The Good Tweet of The Week

Every week I’m prowling the timeline looking for good tweets from Rockies fans, Rockies players, and Rockies minor leaguers. I will highlight my favorite tweet of each week in this section. This week, the Good Tweet (TM) comes from the Rockies themselves.

YES!

Taco’s, part of this weird Rockies Twitter culture that we’ve built, is a hilarious, pure, great meme. This meme is organic, it wasn’t forced on anyone, a couple people retweeted, a couple more people saw it, and now it’s a shirt. Memes belong to communities and this one belongs to us. And now the Rockies tweeted it.

This is the best day of my life.

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So This Happened

So, this happened in Russia (which is a weird place), an MMA undercard featured...uhh...knights in armor.

Here’s the link to the video but basically these two guys just wail on each other with swords and armor with, some rules? There are rounds, there are refs, but it’s just these two dudes going at it in silver ass armor. I know this has nothing to do with baseball but maybe this is how we bring the sport to the youth? Knights? Swords? Fights that confuse everyone? Is this working for Russia? Does anyone know?

Just imagining it now: the third inning ends, the field crew runs out to grate the field a bit, and then two dudes in knight’s armor approach from center field.

“Now ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer cries. “It’s time, for some reason, for a couple of knights to fight. Why? We don’t know but people in Russia seem to like it and MLB will try anything these days.”

Then they fight. Look, I’m not a logistics guy, I’m an ideas guy. Figure it out, I’m just saying it’s worth a shot.

★ ★ ★

Will the Rockies win the World Series?

Golly dang you freakin betcha.