Joy in Mudville

My scoresheet for Giants at Reds, March 27, 2025

I enjoyed Opening Day yesterday even more than I thought I would. My San Francisco Giants were down 3-2 to the Reds in Cincinnati, going into the top of the ninth inning, but they got two runners on base and then DH Wilmer Flores knocked a home run to put them ahead 6-3. Cincy managed a run in the bottom of the ninth, but no more, and the Giants won it, their first Opening Day ninth-inning come-from-behind win as the visiting team in franchise history!

It’s rather amazing how baseball seems to produce new statistical oddities and first-ever events with quite some regularity. I think that’s because baseball is a relatively slow-paced game and allows notice and analysis of a vast variety of details, which then get recorded on scoresheets and in ever-accumulating numerical records and databases. Today’s computational power makes it easy to synthesize new angles on old data, giving baseball broadcasters quick access to odd stats and “first-evers.”

MLB.com had a big bad glitch yesterday just minutes into the first games: its video and audio streaming service (MLB-TV) suddenly went offline, causing all kinds of moaning and gnashing of teeth among subscribers who took to X to complain. It was indeed a horrible time for a major crash: Opening Day excitement everywhere suddenly dashed and crushed. Oh, the humanity! But I had a quick backup solution. I found an SDR receiver site near Reno, where one of the Giants network’s AM stations is located, so I was able to listen to Jon Miller and Dave Flemming do the live radio broadcast. That, paired with MLB.com’s “Gameday” feature, which was still working and shows rudimentary animated graphics of the action, plus text play-by-play, enabled me to carry on keeping score in my fresh 2025 notebook.

Within a half hour or so, MLB-TV’s streaming had resumed and there was joy in Mudville again, save for a few snarls here and there on X (“cancelled my subsciption, you jerks!”).