Monday, June 7, 2021

A Two-Tweet Monday

TigerBlog has two tweets for you for your Monday.

The first comes from former New England Patriots Super Bowl champion linebacker Tedy Bruschi. It's a lacrosse related question:

The answer to that, at least from TigerBlog, is this: It depends who is being asked. Everyone has their sport preferences, and you can see that from all the replies.

TB, for one, remembers back to when he first started watching lacrosse in a serious way. The first goalie he ever saw play was Princeton's Scott Bacigalupo, who just happens to be one of the greatest ever to play the game and a quite deserving member of the Hall of Fame.

The memories that TB has of watching Bacigalupo are ones of being awed by how he did it. They are also of "who in the world would ever want to be a goalie?"

Well, fast-forwarding a little more than 10 years, and he found out who. His son, for one. TigerBlog Jr. started playing goalie in second grade and never looked back, playing the position all the way through his high school days and then for all four years at Sacred Heart University.

He played on summer club teams. He played box lacrosse in Philadelphia, teaming with Princeton's Michael Sowers and George Baughan to win the championship. In the first year in which he recruited Sowers to play with him, a year before Baughan joined the team, TB said this to his son that if TBJ got hurt, he'd be pissed, but if Sowers got hurt, then he'd be really, really pissed.

That is a true story. Oh, and he has another story about the time he said "pissed" on the radio. It was during a Princeton men's basketball game, back when he was part of a three-man team with David Brody and Rich Simkus. The half ended on a shaky call, and Pete Carril reacted in his usual manner. TB on the radio said: "And Coach Carril looks really pissed."

To that his partners said nothing. After a second or two of silence, TB said: "What? You can't say 'pissed' on the radio?'" To that, Simkus said, chuckling: "I guess you can since you said it twice." That was a long time ago. Nobody from the FCC came and told TB he couldn't do the second half or anything, so he figures he's good.

Anyway, his point is that 1) he still to this day has no idea how anyone can be a goalie in lacrosse, with that hard rubber ball shot at you at ridiculous speeds, 2) he has no idea how his son did it and 3) he can tell you first hand that it could be tougher being the parent of the goalie. That was always very, very stressful.

Okay, so here's the other tweet. It comes from Princeton baseball coach Scott Bradley:

That is one of the more legendary plays in Major League Baseball in the last few decades. TB has seen the throw a million times. He did not realize until he saw the tweet Saturday that Bradley was the hitter.

He also saw another tweet last week saying how Bradley had been the catcher for one of Randy Johnson's no-hitters.

TB has said this before, but if you're not following Scott Bradley on Twitter, then you're missing out. Apparently, people have gotten the word too.

Bradley only started tweeting back in January. In basically five months, he has just short of 10,000 followers. Why is that? 

It's because his tweets are a combination of funny, insightful, educational and nostalgic. He gives you a great sense of what it was like to be in the Major Leagues, who the people were he learned from the most and who were some of the biggest characters he met. 

He also talks about the current state of the game and his philosophies, as well as what it means to be a college baseball player in general and specifically at Princeton. His account continues to provide great stuff on a daily basis.

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