Game 58: Twins at Pirates

Time: 5:45 Central

Weather: Sunny, 77°

Opponent’s SB site: Bucs Dugout

TV: The Apple that isn’t the Beatles’ record label. Radio: While the Twins are in Pittsburgh, Dan Gladden is romancing your grandma

Today’s Pirates starter is rightly Jared Jones, from Whittier, CA. Famous people from Whittier include Tricky Dick, Nomar Garciaparra, Tom Waits, and Bull Durham writer/director Ron Shelton (who knew Derek Shelton’s dad, also a Ron).

Jones is making his 2026 debut for the Pirates. He started 22 games for the team in 2024, doing better in the first half than the second, and missed all last season with UCL surgery/rehab. He throws mad gas, in the upper 90s, with a upper-80s slider plus a change and curve. If you’ll remember from the Liriano days (the happy ones), fast fastball with a fast slider is a nasty combo when the control is good. If the control isn’t so good… you might still throw a no-hitter with six walks, if you’re lucky.

In the Allegheny Mountains city of Altoona, PA, about two hours from Pittsburgh, there’s an unusual pizza you can get. It has tomato sauce, green pepper slices, meat and cheese. That’s not so unusual! Well, here’s what it looks like:

Yes, that’s “American” cheese (AKA slicy Velveeta) on top of salami. Invented at the Altoona Hotel, which burned down in 2013 and I swear I have an alibi for where I was that night.

Some people swear by this pizza. The Altoona Curve (the Pirates’ AA team) changed their name for a few days in 2023 to the Altoona Pizzas, featuring this logo:

Now, to my mind, that isn’t anywhere near as good as the death-metal pizza from the beginning of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. But that decision’s up to you. (Mild cussing in the clip below.)

One thing that struck me as odd in the article about the pizza was how it says that putting the toppings below the cheese makes it “Detroit style.” Huh. I suppose most restaurants put the toppings on the cheese. But we usually make pizza at home, and always put the toppings below the cheese. It helps them stay on! Whatever floats your boat. And I personally think American cheese with salami would be fine on a pizza. I’m not TOO picky about pizzas as long as you keep yer pineapple and fish bits away from me.

Ben Clemens at FanGraphs just posted an article about negotiations over the next CBA, and he analyzes the proposals from both the players’ union and the owners. It’s a very well-written article, check it out if you have any interest in this sort of thing.

What I found intriguing is that both sides are talking about changing the way TV revenue is distributed. The MLBPA wants a large chunk of local TV revenue to be shared; the MLB wants ALL of it to be shared. All the TV money, local and national, would go in a big pile and be split 30 ways.

I never would have expected that to happen. I’d have thought the Dodgers and Yankees would scream bloody murder to keep it from happening. Since this is the one thing both the league and the union basically agree on (they just disagree about percentages), you can expect that some form of it WILL happen. Whether that benefits a midmarket team like the Twins as much as it would a small-market team like Pittsburgh, I dunno. Keep in mind that the Pirates make enough from tickets/concessions alone to cover their whole payroll, and that’s before you count TV money, and they hate spending on players. So how a salary floor might operate is gonna be a big point of contention.

Also sure to be a point of contention: what counts as “revenue” for revenue-sharing purposes. Is it tickets and concessions? Or is it the free gimme gimme land teams routinely demand in new stadium deals, these days? Land they can use to be property developers? Players will want to call that part of “total revenue.” Owners will NOT.

Keep in mind I am never saying that restaurants and bars and condos and such around stadiums are bad things — what would a trip to Target Field be without explaining to your kids what a strip club is? But those things should go to the most enterprising property developers who build businesses, not ALL to one team (and often with massive tax giveaways other businesses wouldn’t get). Worth keeping an eye on this stuff.

Finally, we can’t visit Pittsburgh without remembering the time in 1974 when Dock Ellis went a little bananas on the Reds. Immortalized in this song:

The thing is, he’d let it be known a few days beforehand! Sports writer Donald Hall even asked Ellis about it at a party: “are you really going to hit every Cincinnati ballplayer Wednesday night?” Ellis replied, “how you know that?”

Well, Ellis sure meant it. He told the team in the locker room there was no need to talk about opposing players and their approaches to hitting, because “I’m just going to mow the lineup down.” Which he did, until obviously the manager had to pull him out.

You can read about it in this excerpt from Hall’s book, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball. Fun stuff.

Appropriately for a guy whose name name sounds like the letters “L-S,” there was also that time Ellis threw a Liriano-style no-no of his own. On L-S-D. With eight walks and a HBP! (This time, the HBP was not on purpose)

Being high as heck on LSD was not on purpose, either. He’d been partying pretty hard, mixing vodka and acid (don’t try this at home), and he lost track of what day it was. But he made it to the ballpark in San Diego on time, and pitched a no-hitter that hopefully nobody will ever attempt to replicate.

And, like the song says, after finishing his baseball career, Ellis eventually became a drug counselor who spoke to young people and prison inmates about the dangers of addiction. And helped some former baseball players struggling with the same problems. From this article on the HOF website by Bruce Markusen.

Oh, and we have another very funny video with some mild cusswords in it:

That’s enough post length for today, I think! For a game probably nobody here is gonna watch because nobody has dang Apple TV!