Kuzul

Opening Day came early to Wrigley Field on Sunday night, with the Chicago Cubs losing to the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-0, at the only stadium in professional baseball that could’ve really used an extra 24 hours of preparation.

Television broadcasts covered Wrigley Field’s ongoing renovation at length, but what viewers at home didn’t see was the meltdown of desperation and ammonia taking place in the stadium’s concourses and upper deck.

Simply put, the Cubs’ restroom facilities were not up to snuff, and long restroom lines led to a messy jettisoning of dignity for fans desperate to relieve themselves.

UPDATE: April 7

As promised, the Cubs are bringing in portable toilets for Tuesday night’s game against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Twitter user Wrigley Renovations posted images of the john influx. Looks like sports fans will have more options than rain gutters and beer cups for urinating this time around.

Good times in Wrigley again!

—End of Update—

Pictures of long bathroom lines snaking through the friendly confines began surfacing on social media shortly after the game began. Fans needing to unburden their recycled Old Style faced an estimated wait times of 30 minutes or more.

Lines for the bathroom became so long they spilled out of the concourse, through the gates and into the seating area.

Naturally, with necessity comes innovation, which in this case meant fans peeing into cups. In lieu of waiting 30 minutes to pee into a trough, fans started urinating into plastic cups and leaving the used articles in corners throughout the concourses.

Warning: These are pictures of pee cups, which is kind of gross.

The Cubs have since addressed the bathroom situation, according to the Chicago Tribune’s Alexandra Chachkevitch. They say a temporary issue with facilities in the upper deck led to increased traffic in the lower restrooms.

Cubs spokesperson Julian Green apologized in a statement (via Chachkevitch):

Opening Day at Wrigley Field has always brought challenges with wait times and tonight was particularly extreme…With 35,000 fans showing up in the ballpark tonight, we were simply not prepared to handle guests during peak periods. We have high standards for service and we missed the mark tonight. We want to apologize to our fans for the inconvenience.

Green added the Cubs will be bringing in portable bathrooms to supplement their existing restrooms.

To review, the Cubs are low on bathrooms, and will bring in large, portable pee cups for fans to use until the actual toilets are ready. 

But at least you won’t be at risk of kicking one over now?

Dan is on Twitter. A pee cup is a pee cup is a pee cup.

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While the Milwaukee Brewers continue to struggle through a nasty pink-eye breakout, the Toronto Blue Jays could be facing an injury bug spurred by everyday bodily functions.

ESPN reports Blue Jays outfielder Kevin Pillar will miss time after straining an oblique with a hard sneeze Saturday morning.

Pillar told reporters he felt a sharp pain in his right side after sneezing during the Blue Jays’ spring training tilt against the New York Yankees. He continued to play through the fifth inning of Saturday’s game but eventually sought treatment.

“I don’t think this is a big deal,” Pillar said. “It’s something I played with [Saturday] and something I was prepared to play with today. But they’re being very respectful about it and willing to give me a little bit of time.”

The prognosis remains day-to-day, but Pillar could reportedly miss anywhere between seven and 10 days recovering from the sneeze. Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos said he’d rather give Pillar ample time to heal than try to rush him back into service.

“Just knowing how long obliques can linger,” Anthopoulos said. “I remember when Rajai Davis said he had a small one and could play through it. He did for another two weeks and then it got worse and he was on the shelf for about three weeks. Take the week, get it out of the way and he’ll be fine.”

While a bummer for Pillar, it’s not officially baseball season until a player injures himself doing something thousands of other people manage to do safely on a daily basis. This isn’t MLB‘s first sneeze-strain (Sammy Sosa saw to that), and it won’t be its last.

Pillar seems to be handling things with a smile.

That’s all you can do in these instances—laugh at nature’s cruel humor and get back in the game when the healing is done.

Pillar is batting .269 through 26 plate appearances, with one home run and five RBI. He’s currently in contention for a starting job in the outfield, and if he can manage his sneezes more consistently, he could be a real asset to this Blue Jays team.

Godspeed and bless you, good sir.

Dan is on Twitter. He may or may not have thrown out his back sneezing before.

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Much like the zombie outbreak that will inevitably consume the globe and drive humanity onto floating colonies at sea, the spread of pinkeye can only be slowed by containment.

You isolate the infected, protect the healthy and remain vigilant for any signs of the disease spreading in the community or its pillows (NSFW language).

The Milwaukee Brewers are facing a pinkeye outbreak of their own, and according to The Associated Press (h/t ESPN), the team is employing preventative measures to fight the epidemic.

After watching catcher Jonathan Lucroy and pitching coach Rick Kranitz succumb to red, watery eyes, the team will reportedly initiate a cease-fire on all high-fives for the next several spring training games.

Judging by manager Ron Roenicke‘s comments on the spread, the scope of the pinkeye situation may be greater than initially believed.

“We’ve been going through it for a while, and it seems like a couple of more show up every day,” Roenicke said.

I’ll say this: The Brewers are recognizing the problem, unlike the gross Pittsburgh Penguins, who essentially said “Looks fine to me” when Sidney Crosby showed up with half of his face overtaken with mump mounds in December.

In any case, the Brewers will have to make do with elbow taps and flying shoulders for now. You can never be too safe when dealing with a potential pandemic.

Dan is on Twitter. He dispatches the infected with his trusty lobo shovel.

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San Francisco Giants pitcher and living American myth Madison Bumgarner continued adding to the tall tale that is his life by channeling Paul Bunyan for a photo shoot at spring training Monday.

The Giants tweeted an image of Bumgarner dressed up lumberjack style and standing next to an ox. According to the tweet, the shoot was for the Giants’ first issue of G-Mag for the 2015 season. I presume photographers asked him wear “whatever feels comfy.”

That is a large man standing next to a monstrous animal. I’m not sure what breed of ox this is, but if you look closely, Bumgarner’s face appears to be asking, “May I keep the beast?” I hope he hitches it up and rides it through town whistling the tune to “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

The best part is, this isn’t even close to the coolest thing MadBum has done involving wildlife.

Dan is on Twitter. He is unashamedly Googling ox breeds.

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Imagine if Mark Twain and Grantland Rice drank rye by a bonfire all night and attempted to come up with an American folk hero for the modern sports era. 

They could conjure up a backcountry, bull-wrangling giant capable of winning the World Series on his own, and they would still only have a fraction of the character that is Madison Bumgarner. 

I say this with confidence due to a feature profile published by Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci Tuesday, which—to put it lightly—revealed to readers the tall tale that is Bumgarner‘s life story. 

Verducci lists a number of unbelievable, but reportedly true, stories about the San Francisco Giants pitcher, ranging from wild rabbit saving to dating a woman also named “Madison Bumgarner.” We’ll start with the rabbit, which Verducci writes Bumgarner saved from the belly of a snake he killed.

This may be the best Boone-like tale about the man they call Mad Bum. One day during spring training this year in Scottsdale, Bumgarner and his wife were roping cattle when Madison was startled by a large snake he figured was a rattler. He quickly grabbed an ax and hacked it to pieces. When Ali, an expert field dresser, examined what was left of the snake, she found two baby jackrabbits inside pieces of it and extracted them. A short while later the Bumgarners noticed that one of the rabbits had moved slightly. It was alive. Ali brought the rabbit back to their apartment and for the next few days kept it warm and bottle-nursed it. The rabbit soon was healthy enough for them to release in to the wild.

Bumgarner affirmed this to Verducci.

“Think about how tough that rabbit was,” Bumgarner said. “First it gets eaten by a snake, then the snake gets chopped to pieces, then it gets picked up by people and it lives. It’s all true.” 

As for the other Madison Bumgarner, it’s as weird and simple as it sounds. Bumgarner claimed that prior to marrying his wife Ali, he dated a woman also named “Madison Bumgarner.”

“No relation,” Bumgarner told Verducci. “I’m sure of it.”

If that doesn’t do it for you, Verducci writes of the routine a homesick Bumgarner established in 2007 while playing for the Giants’ Instructional League team in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

Bumgarner would pass the downtime by walking from his room at a Days Inn to the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall. But he didn’t go inside. In a courtyard there was a statue of a bull. Bumgarner would bring a lasso and practice his roping against the inanimate animal, pretending he was home.

So we’re clear, Bumgarner honed his cow-roping skills on a fake bull outside a mall. Again, this is not a character in a Norman Mailer book.

Verducci’s story goes on to tell of Bumgarner’s first real suit (purchased this year), his days of playing coach-pitch with kids nearly double his age and his father-in-law’s one-eyed dog. It’s a great read for fiction lovers, and an even better one for baseball fans who want to know the full, surreal story of the man who practically won the Giants the 2014 World Series single-handedly.

Just try not to forget this is a real person. It’s difficult at times.

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Giancarlo Stanton is rich. You and I are not. 

Perhaps this explains why we weren’t slamming $20,000 champagne and presumably playing high-stakes ostrich polo with Stanton inside a Miami nightclub this week.

TMZ reports that the Miami Marlins outfielder celebrated his new, $325 million contract at Miami’s Delano Hotel Monday night. He schmoozed, took pictures with fans and uncorked a bottle of champagne worth roughly the tag price of a Dodge Dart. 

Stanton cracked the top on a $20,000 bottle of Moet Nectar Imperial Rose Methuselah Leopard Luxury Edition—a rare, six-liter bottle wrapped in 22-carat gold leaf. It cures shingles…or just tastes really good. 

TMZ’s report alleges that Stanton was out until 3 a.m. Tuesday morning in the company of a “well-known Miami party queen” named “Julz.” This woman supposedly purchased him the bottle of high-quality leopard wine.

So no, the new owner of the most lucrative sports contract in American history did not pick up the check. He’ll have the rest of his natural life to bear that cross. We’ll give him his final freebie.

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You might have tuned into NBC Sports last night and thought, “Damn, this is a long Derek Jeter commercial.”

And you wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. Reality twisted into fiction at Yankee Stadium on Thursday night, with real life taking on the facile shimmer of an advertising fairy tale.

Viewers watched as Derek Jeter—the Captain—saved the day with a walk-off single in his last plate appearance in the Bronx. Fans cried, his nephew tipped a “RE2PECT” cap, and somewhere, a Nike exec shed a single tear into a wheelbarrow of $100 bills.

The sap-mongers of the Jeter Farewell Tour couldn’t have written it any chunkier if they tried. The 40-year-old shortstop would’ve needed to run the bases under a hail of exploding light bulbs to tailor a more absurdly Hollywood ending. 

But it was real. It happened. And according to one keen-eyed observer, it was a complete sham.

Barstool’s Smitty brings us the news of one Barstool reader who watched the ending of Jeter’s last game and said, “Nope. Not on my watch.”

The reader in question isn’t named, but he or she went to work immediately to disprove the authenticity of Jeter’s walk-off single. And while the reader may not be the lone Jeter truther out there, he or she is the only one who created a graph citing the table of Standard Normal Distribution in the name of proving Baltimore pitcher Evan Meek grooved the shortstop a meatball in his final at-bat. 

Titled “Jeter’s Final Rigged Moment,” the reader’s research posits that the 86.1 mph fastball Meek threw to Jeter rests outside the acceptable limits of possibility. 

Being the math technician most former journalism students are, I can tell you that this research includes green and red, among other colors. I can’t tell you what “Avg speed delta of mean variance” means, but the ultimate takeaway, it would appear, is that Jeter had a .9 percent chance of getting a hit off Meek’s pitch.

Here’s the reader’s breakdown, for those of you versed in numerical hieroglyphics.

Variance: 8.909 / 7 = 1.272

Standard Deviation = Sq. Rt of 8.909 = 2.984

91.457(Average FB) – 86.1(Jeter FB) = 5.357mph

5.357mph (Delta of Avg FB and Jeter FBs) / 2.984 (Std. Dev) = 1.795 Standard Deviations from the mean

1.8 Std Deviations = .96407 %

1 – .96407 = .03593% Chance

Jeter’s BA: .255 Std. Deviation %: .03593

.255 (Jetere BA) = 1 in 3.921 .03593 (FB @ 86.1 mph %) = 1 in 27.831

Chances of Derek Jeter Getting a hit on a 86.1 mph Fastball from Evan Meek: 1/109.12 chance

Derek Jeter had a 0.9 % Chance of doing that naturally last night

Can you argue with that? No, you can’t. It’s math, and it proves that while the Orioles had all the reason in the world to win Thursday night, they likely colluded with powers unknown to intentionally drop the game. Why else would they throw to a struggling 40-year-old in the trough of his career?

I also don’t think it’s a stretch of the imagination to believe that the Yankees gave up three runs in the ninth to force a final Jeter at-bat. And I don’t believe that Nike co-founder Phil Knight is above pulling multiple levers at Buffalo Wild Wings if it means sending off his company’s golden boy in style.

We’re on to you, Jeter fixers. And we’ll prove your treachery if it takes all the Texas Instruments in the Staples store.

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Ah, yes. The old switcheroo.

The bait-and-switch is a mainstay of old ballpark cons, but one young ball boy wet his feet in the art at Yankee Stadium on Thursday night. 

The incident occurred in the bottom of the fifth when Derek Jeter, playing in the final home game of his career, pulled a foul ball down the left field line. Acting quickly, the ball boy scooped up the ricocheting article and turned to face a wall of frantic humanity. 

Hundreds of people in his immediate vicinity cried for a souvenir, and he gave it to them, after a fashion. NextImpulseSports.com’s Andrew Doughty brings us a GIF of the dubious exchange.

Keeping Jeter’s ball in his glove, the young man reached in his back pocket and grabbed a dummy ball, which he handed out to a lucky member of the crowd. 

It was an obvious (if not shameless) switch, but one can hardly blame him, given the circumstances.

Considering every person at Yankee Stadium on Thursday night would’ve given a pound of flesh for a ball graced by Jeter during his final home game, it’s difficult to blame a kid for doing what it takes to get his. 

Well done, kid. Here’s to hoping you don’t get canned.

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Marcus Stroman was nearly decapitated on Monday.

At the very least, the Blue Jays pitcher could’ve found himself picking Chiclets out of the dirt after a vicious comebacker zipped back toward the mound.

The scary moment occurred in the first inning of Monday’s game against the Chicago Cubs when left fielder Chris Coghlan smacked a line drive directly back at Stroman’s face. Somewhere in that horrifying moment between the bat crack and the ball’s trip to the mound, Stroman’s orthodontist grinned—only to be disappointed by the pitcher’s Nightcrawler reflexes.

Stroman bent his body out of the way, catching a piece of the ball with his glove and deflecting it to Jose Reyes for a simple out.

It’s difficult to overstate how poorly this could have gone. Comebackers aren’t baseballs. They are bullets, and rarely does one walk away with a net positive after bullets fly at your orbital socket.

In any case, nothing and no one at Rogers Centre on Monday night appeared capable of throwing the 23-year-old pitcher off his game. Stroman struck out eight and tallied zero walks as the Blue Jays romped to an 8-0 win over the Cubs.

Eric Koreen of the National Post reports that Blue Jays manager John Gibbons gushed over his young, blossoming pitcher’s outing after the game.

“It doesn’t get any better than that,” Gibbons said. “[Stroman]’s far ahead of his experience level. He’s a positive, upbeat guy. He’s as confident as anybody.”

I’d be confident too if I had Neo blood coursing through my veins. Stroman doesn’t get ruffled by the ball—because he knows there is no ball.

[MLB]

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UPDATE: August 29 at 8:17 p.m. ET

According to ESPN, Montero will not play again this season after this incident.

—End of Update—

UPDATE: August 29 at 3:08 p.m. ET

Mariners cross-checker Butch Baccala (the scout involved in this strange incident) denies provoking or taunting Montero on Thursday night.

Baccala told Geoff Baker of The Seattle Times on Friday that he did not attempt to anger the catcher and that the events of the evening are being portrayed incorrectly. First, he denied sending Montero an ice cream sandwich then said he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

He also told Baker to check whether they even sell ice cream sandwiches at Everett, Washington‘s Memorial Stadium (where the game was played).

“It’s not what is being portrayed,” Baccala told Baker. “Of course I wasn’t [trying to instigate Montero]. Why would I? I work for the Mariners. I’ve worked my [expletive] off for the Mariners. Why would I do anything to hurt anybody? That wasn’t even close to the intention.”

Baccala told Baker he didn’t know what the club intended to do regarding his employment and will not be able to speak further until meeting with Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik.

—End of Update—

In an incident straight out of a Seinfeld episode, Seattle Mariners catcher Jesus Montero threw an ice cream sandwich at an MLB scout after a bizarre heckling incident. 

MiLB.com’s Tyler Maun (h/t HardBallTalk’s Craig Calcaterra) brings news of the strange, ridiculous minor league run-in that occurred on Thursday night. 

According to Maun’s report, the drama occurred during a minor league game between the Everett AquaSox and the Boise Hawks.

Montero, playing with the AquaSox while rehabbing a strained oblique, heard a voice in the crowd yelling “Rapido! Rapido!” as he jogged off the field between innings.

This voice belonged to a “cross-checker,” which is a major league scout who presides over other scouts within a regional territory.

To reiterate the significance of this moment: A professional major league observer decided to put the screws to one of his team’s own players.

The screaming likely surprised Montero, who ignored the taunts and went to the dugout. A stadium employee approached the catcher with a special delivery shortly thereafter: one ice cream sandwich. 

Montero’s not-so-secret admirer? The yelling Mariners scout, who ostensibly sent the dessert over as a means of taunting the catcher’s overweight arrival at spring training in February.

Montero snapped upon receiving the sandwich.

The catcher stormed out of the dugout with a baseball bat and hurled the delicious frozen treat at his tormentor. Maun reports he was restrained by Everett pitching coach Nasusel Cabrera and returned to the dugout. Montero sat out the remainder of the game.

Zduriencik told Maun the team is assessing the situation and cannot comment. 

“I am aware of the incident in Boise,” Zduriencik said. “We are currently in the process of gathering information, but until I have all the details, I cannot comment.”

More details will certainly emerge as this story develops, but for now, it’s safe to say that the Mariners need to get their house in order. 

It’s time for Zduriencik to put on the big-boy pants and straighten out this tussle. You can’t fight ice cream sandwiches with ice cream sandwiches and expect to solve anything.

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