Home is Where the Losses Are

Daily Ramble 219: Home is Where the Losses Are

With an 11–1 loss yesterday, the Angels fell to 5–9 in front of the home crowd and have one of the worst home records among top tier teams in the league. What’s up with disappointing the home fans? To make myself feel better I swithed off the game early and spent a bit of time in Neverwinter Online. Even going through the motions in dungeons I’ve seen many times made me feel better. At least I knew I’d end the day one level below max and headed in the right direction…rather than my baseball team who can’t seem to win a game at home…grrr!

Get a Room

I’m getting the strong feeling that the Angels need to stay in hotel rooms when they play at home. I’m not really sure what the deal is since usually teams love home cooking and the chance to spend time with loved ones, but this team…right now…can’t play ball at home. They are batting a collective .209 at home while knocking .285 on the road, outscoring themselves 77 to 52 away from home. And it’s not just any hits, their sluggin percentage is 75 points higher on the road…what’s going on here. It’s like night and day – when you look at the splits they’re on the top of the league in road stats and sit with only the 7–20 Orioles behind them in home numbers.

The pitching is the same thing. 2.99 ERA on the road and 5.29 at home where they’ve given up 29 home runs, the most of any team at home. Maybe it’s the change in the fence height in the outfield, maybe it’s that teams love coming to Southern California. Who knows? But the team really needs to snap out of it or it’ll be a long season in front of the home fans.

As for yesterday’s game, Richards was done in the 2nd though he could easily have stopped in the first and called it a day. He did not look very good and while he’s usually the stopper of these kinds of bad streaks, he flopped for the team yesterday. Defense also failed as Cozart flubbed a ground ball to short in the first which got things rolling for the Yankees. So that leaves the offense for my Player of the game…not too much to see there either. Cozart knocked a solo home run but that certainly doesn’t make up for his miscue on the field so I’ll have to give my PotG to Luis Valbuena who went 2 for 4 with a double.

The team that showed up…at home yesterday…certainly did not look like a team that has playoff intentions. Hopefully they’ll get things straightened out at home or maybe they can come down to San Diego and play their home games at Jack Murphy Stadium.

Ding 69

Nothing much to see here but I did roll into level 69 in Neverwinter Online yesterday. Things are pretty straightforward. Log in, grab my dungeon key so I can collect the goodies, then queue up for the random dungeon. 5 to 30 seconds later I’m running a dungeon and on my way to the next level. Things are set up such that every time I run through a dungeon I advance a level. Not bad for a casual player…a bit over 2 months of gameplay and you reach max level with about 5–10 minutes of effort each day.

From my understanding once I reach level 70 today, the real game starts. There’s a bunch of things to do once I reach max level and I’ll be there with the majority of the playerbase. I’ve already seen tons of stuff that my guild has been doing to keep things interesting at the end game and web sites I’ve looked at have loads of suggestions as to what to do.

Of course the main thing is to start the gear grind. I’m gonna have to push up my item level if I’m gonna get to participate in all the fun stuff.

I won’t mind…I’ll have reached max level in another game and I can check off that box.