You might think the hero of tonight’s 6-1 victory over the Cubs was Chad Billingsley, who tossed his third consecutive excellent start since returning from the disabled list by holding the Cubs to one run over seven innings. That’s now 20.1 innings in which Billingsley has allowed just three runs with a 13/3 K/BB over those three starts, as he attempts to set the highest VORB score since Casey Blake left town, and I’m assuming I don’t have to explain what VORB stands for.
If not Billingsley, you might even think that the biggest star was A.J. Ellis, who went deep twice, his ninth & tenth blasts of the season. Ellis played in parts of nine seasons in the minors before this season, you know. Despite spending around half that time in Las Vegas & Albuquerque, he hit more than two home runs in an entire season exactly three times. When I say “more than”, that’s with the strictest definition of the word, because “three, four, and eight” are hardly breakout power seasons. While I’ll admit I don’t have the game logs for Jacksonville’s 2007 season handy, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he’s never hit multiple home runs in a game at any level of professional baseball.
Never, that is, until Vin Scully deemed it to be so.
During the sixth inning, Scully went on a fun tangent about Twitter, helpfully transcribed here by “ThtsaPaddlin”:
“You know this year, more than many years, I have a great deal of gratitude for the all the folks listening on radio and watching on television. Pitch in for a strike, 1 and 1. For instance, earlier this year I learned about a soul patch — that little bit of beard. 1 ball, one strike. That’s a strike. 1 and 2. Then of course, the great discovery. Troy Tulowitzki‘s hairdo: A mullet! Boy, that, that really put me in line. So now I know about a soul patch and a mullet. And then the other night, talked about a-a ‘tweet,’ only I called it a ‘twit,’ but I-I-I thought it was a ‘twit,’ since it’s Twitter. A drive to the gap in left-center. There’s nobody there. It will drop for a base hit, and holding with the single is Ellis. So anyway, I’m really up to date now on Twitter. But I do think for all of you folks who are tweeting out there, you gotta get something TRENDING. WHOOOOA. So maybe we ought to get something trending about AJ Ellis. And if you do that, you know what? I’m cool. I’m really cool.”
Vin Scully doesn’t even have a Twitter account, and it took all of about ten minutes for him to get Ellis (and himself) trending across both Los Angeles and the United States as a whole.
They’re trending, twittering, tweeting AJ Ellis all over the US & to be honest they told me to say that. Ah, he’s a nice boy.
…and then Ellis came to the plate in the bottom of the seventh:
Manny Corpas, a veteran reliever, will now become the fourth pitcher for Chicago, facing A.J. Ellis of Twitter fame.
Manny Corpas has certainly been around. Corpas inherited fourteen runners this year; four have scored.
Manny is from Panama City in Panama. He’ll be thirty, December the third. Big man, six-three, lean, about one seventy-five and a slider hit to right center and deep. On his horse and watching it go over the wall is DeJesus.
A.J. Ellis! He’s really got something trending!
Indeed he does, but I think A.J. would be the first to agree that he’s not the star of the night. After six decades, Vin is still finding new ways to amaze us. Is there anything he can’t do?
