Your Shirt Has Pizza On It
In case you couldn't tell I'm pretty excited about this softball season you guys. When I get excited I make t-shirts.
Quick refresher on The Pizza Rules:
Single: Roll out the dough.
Double: Sprinkle the cheese.
Triple: Rain pepperonis
Home run: Surrounded by a circle of cheese-sprinkling chefs she "CHOMP" eats the pizza.
(Also comes in cheese-colored)
At first I was all “those are some oddly placed pepperoni" then I was all "I’m dumb, it’s a slice of softball diamond"
Checked the softball tag, searched pizza, found the wide shot of the stadium in this gif basically resembles the stadium:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8782/17610915654_e3600ec7db_o.gif
But whoosh, right over my head on this one.
Here in lies the rabbit hole that is mgoblog. Softball may just be my uncany valley when it comes to Michigan sports. This should probably be a 'dear diary' question: at what point does it get weird caring about university sports teams that you have little affiliation with?
The answer is likely stop reading a sports blog dedicated to U of M sports, but I like my mgoherion.
By the by, as a never-poster-always-lurker, you guys do great work on this blog. My knowledge of the game of football has increased 1000 fold thanks to your analysis.
This softball team has some remarkable parallels with 1920s MLB teams. The players are informal--they jeer at each other and stuff and interact with the crowds. Superstars really shine because of a smaller pool of athletes but they also live among the people. The beginnings of all the major sport followings were a lot like this. The allure isn't just a rabbit hole; it's pure sport.
I think what held softball back for awhile is between about 2002 and maybe last year it was such a pitching-dominated game that there were seldom lead changes or baserunners even to get excited about. Games would just coast 7 innnings and be done and you'd talk about the tan you got. Teams with a dominant pitcher would win 1-0 all the time.
I theorize that sports get less interesting the more competitive the leagues are. People say they want to be surprised but really they far more enjoy having their preconceptions justified. Rank the popularity of sports in the US and you'll have a ranking of how likely the better team is to win.
That's why I'm such a Sierra Romero fan. She's like a Babe Ruth for the sport. She generates ridiculous bat speed--like MLB hitter bat speed--and can dominate pitchers who don't have a lot of late movement. Such pitchers are still going to roll through lineups (when Betsa's stuff is going she's unhittable, and Florida's pitcher is like that all the time). But I think hitting has come far enough now that it's just excellent sport. She's so good that you can go to a game expecting her to do something amazing and most of the time she will.
If you're a sports fan, especially a college sports fan, getting into softball should be easy right now, because it ticks all the fan boxes.
I stood there and watched for a couple mins and a Cal assistant walked over and asked if she could help me with something. I looked her dead in the eyes and asked "yeah, how in the hell do these girls throw like that and hit this?" She laughed and noticed I was just standing there in amazement and that's it.
We had pizza. It was crazy?
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I wonder, could a case of these find its way to the locker room when the team wins the WCWS?
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I didn't say you would provide it, I just wondered if one could get there by a shipping mistake, like in Dodgeball.
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Denard and Odom's "eating"
Beilein's subs
And now Softball's pizza.
What's next?
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Please not kale.
about the MGoBlog store is why aren't there more Denard shirts? Few ideas....
Something about "shoelace"
A picture of Denard smiling...possibly with the word, "Whaaaat?"
A picture of Denard kneeling after scoring...
Great store, just would like some more Denard gear...
We've reached out to him on several occasions but that never got anywhere. The guy Denard has doing this stuff hasn't been interested and we get permission for everything we do, from that person if it applies to a specific person.
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