All 40 Of Your Home Runs Are Belong To Bautista
For a blogger like myself who depends so heavily on the power of the written word, honestly … words almost can’t describe what happened at the Rogers Centre last night.
With the Yankees in town, it was surprisingly packed for a weeknight game with the roof closed. Nonetheless, there was a playoff atmosphere at the Rogers Centre I haven’t experienced since J.P. Arencibia’s debut.
Thanks to The Man With the Golden Arm from 1 Blue Jays Way, we had a great bird’s eye view of all the drama down on the field. Everything from Cito Gaston being tossed, to a near bench-clearing brawl, to a streaker who leapt on the field that had to be restrained by about 5-6 ushers.
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I don’t know if you guys believe in premonitions or not, but I had a feeling Jose Bautista was going to have a big night. Just take a look at this tweet from about 4 hours before game time. It’s freaky to say the least:
Apparently, Jose Bautista was obliged by my request … so thank you.
Bautista hits his 39th home run of the season off Ivan Nova in the third inning, does his best Neo impression by ducking a pitch thrown at his head in the sixth, then clubs his 40th home run … the eventually game-winner off David Robertson in the bottom of the eighth.
Check out this amazing animated GIF of the home run courtesy of Bill from Crashburn Alley, which perfectly captures the swagger Bautista had when he stepped out of the batter’s box.
As Jose Bautista single-handedly kept the Blue Jays in the game and Brandon Morrow struck out 12 batters through 6 innings, all I could think was “it can’t get any better than this”. The game continued to exceed my expectations every time, and was punctuated by that solo home run from Bautista.
There were a lot of reasons that game was memorable, and I’m just thankful I was fortunate to be in attendance to see the historic moment of Bautista’s 39th and 40th home runs.
You called it!
Were you still wondering how to make animated .gifs? I use a graphic editor called GIMP. It's open source (ie free.) It's simple, albeit a little tedious. All you have to do is save every frame as a separate layer, specify how many milliseconds you want it to display, and save it as an animated .gif. There's a good tutorial on youtube.
Best home game of the season so far in my books…
I'm enjoying seeing my photo spread to all corners of the Twitter-verse, and it has now crossed in to the Blogosphere, too.
Thank goodness for the 'pause live TV' feature on my PVR.
Nicely done, Ian.
LJ, thanks for the tip! I made a rough cut just by pausing the video and taking screencaps. Then Bill sent me the gif and gave me a few suggestions for screencap software. I'll check out GIMP in the future, though.
Gianna, no doubt – the atmosphere was amazing. It took me a good 10-15 minutes to settle down after Bautista hit that home run.
Jeff, I don't know what we'd do without PVR. Otherwise, I'd be sitting there using a digital camera to take pictures of my TV (which I actually did for Bautista's moustache pic). Thanks again!
That GIF is amazing. I'm going to watch it all day.