The Dodgers were the idiots this time!

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Yesterday was Opening Day across Major League Baseball and as most teams got their season started, the Rockies and Dodgers kicked off their annual series on Opening Day for the first time in their histories. Many Opening Day games are inconsequential, just the first of a 162 game marathon to the finish. However, in Denver, on April Fool’s Day, the Rockies and Dodgers engaged in what many would call a “hilarious” game.

Baseball has a lot of weird moments within a lot of weird games. It’s a game with a sole purpose of smacking a hard object around so it should not be a surprise that it is very weird. There are many weird phrases players and fans have for some of the weirdest moments. The BABIP Dragon will eat your hard hit balls and force you to look worse than your swings. The Baseball Gods will determine whether or not your luck is good or bad. Yesterday at Coors Field, the Dodgers got to feel the full brunt of both a BABIP Dragon and the wrath of the Baseball Gods and folks, it rocked.

The Dodgers, in a word, own the Rockies. In last season’s COVID shortened sprint, the Rockies and the Dodgers played 10 times. The Dodgers won 7 of them. In 2019, the Rockies and Dodgers played a full 19 times, the Dodgers won 15 of them. In 2018, the Dodgers won 13. Since 2008, the Rockies have played the Dodgers 233 times and the Dodgers have won 143 of those games, a 61% Win Percentage. The Rockies have won the season series against the Dodgers just six times in 28 years. It is not a close division rivalry with ebbs and flows, it is the Dodgers kicking the Rockies ass for almost three decades and the Rockies asking for mercy.

But not yesterday!

Throughout those 28 years of domination, the Rockies have likely won plenty of games they should’ve lost. But in the last 8 or so years of this new “Competent Dodgers” era we now live in, they really lost just about every game any way so it’s hard to say if they won any they shouldn’t have.

The Dodgers are a behemoth, an inevitability. Their roster is built with so much depth is has guys like David Price (career 124 ERA+) and Edwin Rios (149 OPS+ in 2020) in back up situations. People often make jokes like “how many starters for the Rockies would play for the Dodgers?” but hell, how many Dodgers depth pieces would be the every day starter in Denver? The Dodgers are built for success in any game, any situation, any series, any era. There is no better team.

Here’s a photo of Cody Bellinger and Justin Turner getting confused on a Bellinger home run and costing the Dodgers a run.

Hahaha, isn’t that great?

Over the course of the season, the Dodgers will probably lose a handful of games like this. They’re too good to be beaten on their best day so baseball has to have little stupid moments like this to prevent them from becoming too cocky. Cody Bellinger rocked a German Marquez pitch into the stands but nobody is going to remember the pitch or the swing, they’re just going to think about Turner’s red locks sprinting with determination into causing Bellinger to be called out.

If this had happened in July, nobody would’ve paid much attention. Would’ve just been a quirky “hey, baseball!” moment as people went on vacation. But because it was on Opening Day, where people are excited and headlines are loudest, we get to revel in the dumbassery. We get to laugh just a little bit longer.

Here’s Corey Seager absolutely whiffing on a routine 2-out ground ball that cost the Dodgers a run.

Oh man, that rules. I can’t express enough how much that rules.

This game felt cathartic, the universe giving the Dodgers of all teams the middle finger. A Nelson Muntz “HA,HA” aimed directly at the team that gives us nightmares. The Dodgers frankly should have won easily. They had 15 hits and 24 base runners. German Marquez walked six Dodgers in the first four innings and got out of it every single time. They loaded the freaking bases in the 9th and still couldn’t score a run. For those of us that have watched the Dodgers win seemingly every single one of these games in Denver in the past, this was poetry in motion. It was like doing cocaine on the first spring day of the year. I couldn’t feel my face. Here’s the Rockies scoring on a wild pitch.

It literally can’t get better than that.

The Rockies will likely lose a lot of games this season, some of them in extremely dumb fashion. But yesterday, on Opening Day, they got to tell the Dodgers to eat it. They laid down RBI bunts and smacked 11 hits that had at least nine seeing-eye singles. They punked Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw and watched the Dodgers biggest stars make the dumbest mistakes on their field for once. If humankind has better feelings than this, I haven’t experienced it.

Stuff I Liked This Week

Here’s some stuff I liked!

The NCAA getting absolutely torn to shreds by all 9 Supreme Court Justices

The NCAA is under fire due to the whole “we make billions of dollars but not a penny of it goes to kids who actually make the product we sell” thing that is going on. This week, the Supreme Court heard a case around NCAA’s amateurism model and well, it didn’t go well. All 9 (even the Three Trump justices) SCOTUS judges told the NCAA to eat shit. Even Amy Coney Barrett, who probably wouldn’t be totally opposed to Feudalism if the case was presented well, tore the NCAA lawyers a new one. This, combined with growing discontent with Head Stooge Mark Emmert, makes me think we’re going to have a reckoning with college athletics and it is well deserved. Let it burn!

This profile of White Sox resident Cool Dude Tim Anderson 

It is no secret that baseball has a “cool problem”. Years of unwritten rules and catering the sport to rich kids has taken a lot of personality out of the sport.

But here’s Tim Anderson.

The White Sox shortstop is brash, cool, and good. He won the batting title in 2019 and is a contender for it again in 2021. He’s an advocate for Chicago’s South Side and he refuses to censor himself.

Tim Anderson is the Cool Dude baseball needs.

Let’s Donate to Ryan’s family

Last week, Rockies twitter lost one of the greats. Ryan Blume unexpectedly passed away and the tragedy has left Ryan’s family behind without him. Ryan provided Rockies twitter with some hilarious posts and some great memes so let’s provide some help for his family.

You can buy Ryan’s shirt from DeCo here. Every dime of that shirt’s proceeds will go to Ryan’s family. You can also donate through Ryan’s church here and the family’s GoFundMe is here.

Online communities are an incredible connection for so many of us and Ryan’s death has rocked us all. He will be dearly missed as will his humor, his wit, and his charm. Rest in Peace.