Today would have been the Rangers home opener and their first official game in Globe Life Field. However, with the coronavirus delaying the start of the baseball season for months, the opening of the brand new ballpark, I am faced with the awful truth that the calendar may turn to June or July and there will be no box scores to follow, no Excel spreadsheets to update, and most critically no games to attend. What is there to do fill the void that should be occupied by baseball? Then it hit me.
A little more than a year ago I was writing 300-word summaries for each of Randy Johnson’s Major League victories - 303 in the regular season and seven in the post-season - as part of the festivities for the tenth anniversary of his 300th win. It was mind-numbingly dull and extremely repetitive, and I didn’t want to ever do anything like that again. However, with the games delayed, I might as well write 300-word summaries of each of the 136 Major League Baseball games I’ve attended (minus the one exhibition game from before the 2010 season.) I’ve written about some of the games before in celebration of the 100-game milestone, but those sure as heck weren’t 300 words long, and then I’ve got another 36 to write about.
And yes, I’ve only been to 136 games. That’s still less than the number of games a team plays in a typical season. As much as I think about baseball and talk about baseball I don’t go to very many games. Furthermore, my memories involving the actual plays are limited, so I’ve mostly reconstructed the games through Baseball Reference’s Play by Plays, which I’ll link to.