Maibaumaufstellung 2014

Wie schon sein großer Bruder vor drei Jahren, war Jakob dieses Jahr als Viertklässler beim Festumzug zur Maibaumaufstellung in Heidelsheim dabei. Hier ein paar Fotos von diesem schönen Frühlingstag - es ist echt super, in einem Ort zu leben, der groß genug ist, dass es solche Veranstaltungen gibt, und klein genug, dass sie so überschaubar und familiär sind.

Wie immer kann man auf die Bilder klicken um sie größer zu sehen.

Treffpunkt der Viertklässler mit ihren selbstgebastelten Stadtwappen

Die Bürgerwehr kommt zum Treffpunkt marschiert (die Fanfaren und Fahnenschwinger der Feuerwehr wurden gefahren ;)

Es geht los - Fahnenschwinger und Fanfaren vorneweg

die Viertklässler in Stadtfarben (na ja, das mit den gelben Hosen war doch etwas viel verlangt... auch Jakob hätte vermutlich keine angezogen, wenn ihm die Mama nicht eine mit einem BVB-Logo gekauft hätte)

Aufstellung am Marktplatz

Es ist geschafft, der Maibaum steht. Dieses Jahr kleiner als sonst, aber dafür ist das Aufstellen auch keine so wackelige Angelegenheit...

SOM diary: Royals sweep Indians to open their season

Royals sweep Indians 3-0 to start the season

1.5. DET@CLE 2-1: Pitchers' duel decided by homers
Bottom of the third, Chisenhall starts the scoring with a solo homerun. In the fourth, both pitchers put runners on base but manage to pitch put of the jams. Top of the fifth, Omar Infante ties the game with a solo homerun off Masterson, and in the eigth Miguel Cabrera hits the winning homer, again a solo, from reliever Albers who takes the loss.
Verlander tosses seven innings, gives up only one run on five hits, four strikeouts and three walks for the win. Putkonen pitches a scoreless eighth for the Tigers and Benoit notches up the first save of the season despite giving up a run in the ninth. In the bottom of the last of a nailbiter of a season opener, the Tigers get help from a fortunate out as Asdrubal Cabrera is cut down by Avila trying to advance to second on a botched hit and run by Brantley.

2.5. Game 2 of the DET@CLE series saw both starters struggle, Jimenez getting in deep trouble in the first, third and fourth and lucky to escape having given up only three runs. On the other side, Scherzer seemed to be cruising through the first three innings but hit a brick wall in the fourth when the tribe hit around and scored four runs. Jimenez left the game after five and two thirds, and in full synch Scherzer was chased from the game with two outs in the sixth by a solo homerun from Chisenhall.
In the last three innings the Indians bullpen gave up a total of five runs (four earned), the second error from 3rd base man Chisenholm (third error in total) didn't help matters and a solid Tigers bullpen brought home the 8:5 lead with Phil Coke getting the save.
DET 100 200 302 8 12 0 11
CLE 000 401 000 5 9 3 8

3.5. Game 3 Kazmir vs Fister 5-1
Kazmir struggles for 5.2 innings, giving up 11 hits, including three doubles, for four runs. While the Tigers clearly brought their bats to the game, the Indians didn't:  Fister dominates the Cleveland offense, limiting them to one run on two hits with nine Ks and 1 walk over 7.2 innings, and Putkonen gets the final four outs.

SOM Diary: AL Central opening series KC@MIN

The Kansas City @ Minnesota series continued with a game where batters started to make more contact than in the first game, at least for the visiting KC team.

KC@MIN game 2: 6-2
In game 2, Ervin Santana quickly recovered after giving up two runs in the first, while Kevin Correia labored through 6 innings giving up four runs. Josh Willongham showed his range limitations by conceding two triples to hits to left that younger, faster leftfielders might have had a clean play on. The Twins bullpen gave up another two runs while the Royals relief corps held up well and brought the game to tie the series safely home. Final score Royals 6, Twins 2. Santana takes the win, Correia the loss, the Royals batters contribute a HR and three (!) Triples, while the Twins manage only 5 hits out of 32 at bats and only Joe Mauer continues his work as anon base machine with two hits and a walk.

KC@MIN game 3: 8-1
Game 3 was a pretty lopsided affair. The Royals hit ten hits off Mike Pelfrey and scored seven runs off the starter who lasted only 4+ innings, while the Twins' bats remained mostly silent (the team is batting below .200 as a whole in the three first games of the season). Jeremy Guthrie cruised to an easy win, pitching seven innings and giving up one run on three hits, a walk and seven strikeouts. Billy Butler went 3-for-5 with a two run homerun to get the Kansas City scoring started in the first inning.
They paid a high price for it, though, losing both starting catcher Perez and infielder Getz to injuries. However, the Twins didn't fare any better, losing Joe Mauer in the first inning after he fouled two balls off his foot.

SOM diary: Season Opener - KC@MIN

To get the season started, and to learn how to prepare lineups and rosters in a somewhat historical way, I decided to start with teams I don't know at all (which are actually most teams outside of the AL East ;), and randomly picked KC @ MIN as the series I would play first.

BTW, as mentioned earlier, I had decided to up the Twins' chances by giving them RA Dickey as a starter. This is basically the only unhistorical player assignment I will intentionally make to my 2013 replay rosters for now (given my general penchant for knuckleballers it felt such a shame not to have Dickey play despite running only four teams per division...).

Anyway, both opening day starters went deep into the game after shaky starts: James Shields pitched seven innings, coneding runs in the first and fourth inning, and R A Dickey nearly played a complete (nine inning) game, giving up a two run homer to Billy Butler in the top of the first, adding five 1-2-3 innings and leaving only after giving up two hits in the ninth.

The game went deep into extra innings and ended on a not-so-dramatic note when Royals reliever Chen gave up back to back walks in the bottom of the 12th. Aaron Crow took the loss, Casey Fien got the win with two hitless, scoreless innings of relief.

Josh Thole (brought to Minnesota to catch R A Dickey) actually went 1 for 3. He was replaced by Joe Mauer who went 0 for 1 with a walk in extra innings.

Let's see how the season opening series continues for these two teams...

SOM Diary: Lineups and Rosters for 2013 Replay

After some experimentation I have arrived at the following format to get an overview of each team's roster and some reminders of historical use of the players (how many games played, which position, typical position in the line up). I create these via sheet.zoho.org and intend to use printouts to record the games played and some simple indicators (smilies) for performance (click on the thumbnail to see a larger version):

Initially I wanted to start building these with the SOM cards in hand, but I found that inventing my ownlineups led to very unrealistic results so I ended up using baseball-reference.com to build these sheets and only refer to the actual SOM cards to figure out which players were available at all.

I used the following data available there:

• Team Roster for number of games started per player and position
• Defensive lineups for default starting positions and position players
• Batting orders for a default batting lineup (that's the order in which position players appear on the roster above, and how I sort their SOM cards after each game)
• Lineups linked above, and pitching gamelogs to understand why some players only played few games or had few at bats - were they players brought on the team (or leaving the team) at some point during the season or were they bench players who only got to play once or twice a week all season long?

I will try to use players in their historical roles, rather than inventing my own usage patterns and trades. That's why the roster contains the inetnded number of games each player should get in each position (scaled down from the real 162 game seson to my 33 game season by a factor of 5).