Muellerstuff II

The Boys of Summer Say Good-Bye

Like watching the tearfilled ending of Puccini's masterpiece, Madame Butterfly, you keep hoping that the Billings Mustangs will do something different and maybe the ending will be different, but you know in your heart, at least for the summer of 2009, that is not how life works out.

The Mustangs lost 3-0 to the Helena Brewers. I listened to the crowd in different places tonight. Only a few were unhappy. Most people knew what the outcome was likely to be. They were accepting, almost serene. But they also knew what had happened last night. Amazingly, two walk-off home runs, something not seen this year at Dehler Park, had enabled the Mustangs to win a Pioneer League double-header.

So hope is not entirely beaten out of us. And therefore, almost everyone stayed to the end. They all gave our Italian pitcher a warm send off back to his home to play in World Cup games for Italy. He did well. Our batters have failed us all year but we are forgiving fans. We will be back next year.

Gamblers? Dealers? 21s? CardSharks?

By Ken

As you can see it only takes 4 guys to water the infield at the AAA level, whereas I think it takes about 12 to do it for a major league team at least in spring training. I have a picture of that somewhere but I can't seem to lay my hands on it right now.

The title: Those are the names I came up with in 3 seconds of not-very-serious thinking about what to name a baseball team from any city in Nevada. There are probably hundreds more and better. The name finally bestowed on the DiamondBack’s AAA Tucson franchise when it moved to Reno, which I suspect that Tucson lost rather than Reno won, was the Aces.

This very new park is fairly close to downtown Reno and seems to have plenty of enthusiastic fans this first season in the Pacific Coast League. It reminds me of Dehler Park, except that this one is bigger and has many nice luxury boxes providing shelter for those in them and under them, perhaps like Dehler Park was supposed to be originally.

The only drawbacks were the lou-mouthed cheerleading announcer and the dopey mascot. I think we should make it a rule that you must wear a short skirt without underwear and carry pom-poms on the dugout roof if you insist on announcing the home team and providing inter-inning blather in any other than a normal tone of voice.

With the addition of Reno to the Pacific Coast League you can see a lot of AAA baseball within a couple hours drive. There are the Sacramento River Cats, who used to be in Canadian Vancouver, champions of the PCL last year, and part of the Oakland farm system; and the Fresno Grizzlies, belonging to the Giants.

And then the Las Vegas 51s, now belonging to the Toronto Blue Jays as the Dodgers went back to Albuquerque where the Dukes had been for a long time, only now they call themselves the Isotopes—don’t ask why; and of course, the Reno Aces, part of the Arizona Diamondbacks system. The last used to be in Tucson but I guess that city got tired of supporting a AAA team in the manner they would like to become accustomed to.