Walkoff Walk

Bat attack roundups are two things: frequently hilarious and Kris' personal baby. He rants and raves all around the WoW offices, demanding the mentally unstable take out their frustrations with baseball implements rather than the pedestrian ice picks and pool cues of yesteryear.

Once in while, a story comes across the Walkoff Wire that — even in the absence of the Bat Attack Godfather — must be told.

Decades of trucker hats, poorly-grown mustaches, and white people's disco has my irony detector in need of calibration. Still, the story of a teenage American soccer player attacked and beaten with a baseball bat in Denmark strikes me as slightly odd. From, for the first time in WoW history, the Copenhagen Post Online:

An American teenager playing in the Dana Cup football tournament in town of Hjørring suffered a broken nose last night when he was attacked with a baseball bat by unknown assailants.

Nordjykse Media reports that the young man was with a group of other football players in the town when the unprovoked attack occurred shortly after midnight.

Aside from the health of the unfortunate victim of this senseless attack, the most pressing question from this story: where the hell in Denmark did someone find a baseball bat?

Denmark doesn't have a domestic baseball league, though they do have a softball baseball forbund. There is no Danish contingent at the ongoing World Junior Baseball Championships, though baseball powerhouses France and the Czech Republic threw down in Thunder Bay.

I'm struggling to think of a comparable stateside analogy. Rinku and Dinesh felled by cricket bats? Dysentery? Grant Balfour hitting the DL after a fan throws a boomarang out of the crowd? Landon Donovan missing time after a vicious purse-swinging incident?

Get well soon, unnamed American teenager. May your Danish assailants face the full force of the law, American-style.

Might be a slow day around these parts. For now, enjoy this clip of a little kid hitting a man with a batted ball.

This is my favorite video maybe ever. Typical Wednesday night after church!

• DID you see the Orioles hired Buck Showalter as their new manager? Guess Juan Samuel's .340 winning percentage wasn't cutting it. Showalter's first game will be Tuesday night.
• WILL you be in South Florida August 4? 96-year-old Charlie Manuel fan Hattie Gubel will sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" on the field at the Phillies-Marlins game.
• DO you think A-Rod will be able to block the sale of the Texas Rangers or whatever?
• WILL you be voting on the San Jose stadium measure in November? You won't! It's been pulled off the ballot.
• WHAT charity will the grand Giants closer Brian Wilson was fined for his orange spikes go to?

More tomorrow!

So, how excited were Phillies fans for Domonic Brown's start last night? Let's ask Jerry Reimenschneider of PhillyBurbs.com!

PHILADELPHIA - It was only Dan Baker announcing Dom Brown to the South Philly masses.

It might as well have been God introducing Moses to the Israelites.

Hmm. Didn't the Israelites already know Moses when he came down from the mount?

A Cherry Coke Zero to The 700 Level, and a few other people, I think

Sorry, I couldn't come up with a suitable synonym for Philadelphia that begins with an R. But you get your animated wholphin .gif! Jayson Stark tweets Oswalt will okay the deal. But wait! Ken Rosenthal tweets the deal is not done, yet it likely will be soon. How can we settle this? Okay, now a ton of people are saying it's done, so it's time for the wholphin .gif and random exclamations of joy/sadness/Cliff Lee's name on Twitter.

Randy Miller tweets "long-time baseball scribe Ed Price" says the three players going to Houston in the deal are pitchers J.A. Happ (lefty) and Vance Worley (righty) and outfielder Anthony Gose.

Oswalt is 6-12 with a 3.42 ERA (and a 120 ERA+) this season, a definite upgrade for the Phillies rotation. Now all Phillies fans need to do is get a fan club called The O-Faces and a third straight pennant is sure to happen!

Update: Deal's done, per MLB Network. Players going to the Astros are Happ, Gose and shortstop Jonathan Villar.

Relatively new, highly annoying politics website Politico makes its writers wake up at, like, 3 a.m. in order to "win the morning" and get all the links from Matt Drudge or whatever. (No news organization cares about interesting or factual or useful stories anymore. It's all about pageviews.)

Anyway, here's one of their important political stories today: Jim Bunning thinks Stephen Strasburg is a wimp!

Why? Well, Strasburg missed his recent start and is, indeed, going to get a little break, and by God Jim Bunning never missed any starts, in fact sometimes he'd start all three games of a tripleheader and throw 750 pitches then come back in relief the next day. (That's why he gave up over 500 homers in his career.)

"Five-hundred twenty starts, I never refused the ball," Bunning, a Kentucky senator who hurled a perfect game in 1964 and struck out 2,855 batters in his Major League career, told POLITICO. "What a joke!"

Bunning had taken an interest in Strasburg, who like the Kentucky senator is a fire-ball hurling right-hander. The senator has seen the Nationals ace four times and was at the ballpark Tuesday night, he said.

But he clearly didn't like what he saw - or rather didn't see - when the youngster didn't take the mound. "My arm!" Bunning sarcastically cried as he pretended to clutch his shoulder in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.

One missed start out of five games he's attended and suddenly he goes from the "top one percentile" to the 50th percentile. For missing a start! Geeze, it's not like Strasburg used the senators' only elevator. Now somebody find me an example of Bunning being scratched from a start, and be happy he isn't your favorite team's pitching coach.

As reported by pretty much everyone, but let's just link Jayson Stark's tweet, a deal is in place between the Phillies and Astros which would send Roy Oswalt (and maybe cash to the notoriously stingy Phils) to Philadelphia for prospects (maybe J.A. Happ, Vance Worley and a few other guys). All that Oswalt has to do is agree to it and he's a member of the Phillies.

(If you're wondering, because the deal isn't finalized, this gets a still photograph of a wholphin instead of the animated .gif. I'll update the post or do a new one if it goes through and you will get some animated goodness, okay?)

As Ken Rosenthal points out: Why, exactly, did the Phillies trade Cliff Lee? A good point, I guess, or at least a better one when it's not coming from some boorish caller on a sports talk radio show or from the annoying dude next to you at the bar. This is all anyone in Philadelphia has been able to talk about for the last few months, especially whenever a Phillies pitcher gives up more than two runs.

I'm hearing Ed Wade consummated this deal while stuck in a tree.

Big news from Cleveland! No, they didn't trade away another amazing pitcher; they only have average-to-good ones left.

What actually happened was: A fan (sadly, not our own Rob Iracane) wearing a Miami Heat Lebron James jersey was escorted from the stands after taunting Indians fans. A little confusing, but, eh, okay. When I was in Chicago plenty of Cubs fans were making Stanley Cup taunts, which I responded to with, "What the hell is the Stanley Cup?"

Anyway! FanHouse reports: "When police arrived to escort the fan out of the stands, the crowd cheered. Several Indians fans threw verbal barbs at the fan and his girlfriend, others threw a more liquid form of insult." The article doesn't contain any info regarding what the dude did to be ejected other than being obnoxious and wearing a Miami Heat jersey.

Obviously, this isn't much of a story, and the fan might've been vomiting on suburban police officers or whatever first. Or maybe the cops just moved him to another section. But maybe not. And aren't you allowed to root -- even annoyingly -- for the other team when at a baseball game? (Or, in this case, root for a basketball team who just signed a star player from a different basketball team at a baseball game.)

Plenty of people attend games as a fan of the opposing teams, act loud and obnoxious and then are shocked -- shocked! -- when they get punched or have a beer tossed at them. (At $7 each, the beer thing is kinda shocking.) Then they go home, say, "Ahh, [team] fans are the worst, look what happened to me," when in reality they brought it on themselves. That doesn't mean it's right to punch obnoxious opposing team's fans, but I understand why it happens.

Crowdsourcing is a pretty horrible trend, but not when you have a harem of talented commenters like we have here at Walkoff Walk. So I wonder: Have you ever seen fans ejected just for being a loud fan of the other team? (Not that it's what happened here, but it has to have happened, right.) And, actually, going to an Indians game and having to hear taunts about Lebron the whole game would be incredibly obnoxious. What's the worst fan you have ever sat next to? And, obviously, alcohol is involved. Isn't ending beer sales after the seventh inning just one of those stupid fake "fixes" for the problem that just make us feel better and the company maybe not quite so legally liable but doesn't actually do anything? Comment, or don't.

My favorite independent baseball team, the Camden Riversharks, are apparently in their 10th year! Somebody made this video to celebrate their 10 seasons, cleverly titled "sharks tribute video.wmv." Unfortunately, whoever made it set it to Billy Joel.

• DID you really think the Yankees were particularly snakebit against pitchers making their big league debut? Rob Neyer doesn't think so. Key part: "I mean, seriously ... We're going to draw some grand conclusions based on 66 innings? On seven innings per season? You can. I won't." You tell 'em, Rob!
• DID you know Jim Leyland was suspended? MLB says it was for an incident Monday where Leyland exhibited "inappropriate and aggressive conduct during the bottom of the third inning." From that description, it sounds like Leyland was drunk.
• WHAT is your favorite sentence in this FanHouse -- official motto: "Don't confuse us with Bleacher Report, please!" -- article about not believing the hype about the baseball trade deadline? (Yes, that's actually an article. It's also about not believing the hype about Dez Bryant not carrying Roy Williams' pads at Dallas Cowboys training camp. Go look for yourself, I'm not making this up.) Anyway, my favorite part is this sentence: "Check any baseball encyclopedia and you'll see trades dated during any month of the year."
• HAVE you read the "very important" Baseball Prospectus article on fielding today? Pfft. Who can afford a subscription? (I think Rob can. Rob, let me know if the article's any good when you get back!

I will be missing some or all of Dom Brown's major league debut tonight. Can you guess why in the comments? First person to guess correctly wins... I dunno, something baseball-related I find in my apartment. Yes, this is clearly the contest of the century!

Let the Domonic Brown Era begin! The Phillies just placed Shane Victorino on the disabled list and called up their top prospect from AAA Lehigh Valley.

Victorino strained his abdominal while making a catch last night and is the fifth Phillies position starter to head to the disabled list this year. (The others: Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Placido Polanco and Carlos Ruiz.) Dom Brown hit .327/.391/.589 for AA Reading and the IronPigs this year. If you prefer stupid stats, he had the game-winning RBI in the Futures Game this year.

It's expected Jayson Werth will move to center field and Brown will immediately be inserted in right. Brown will ear No. 9, according to something I read on Twitter. (It must be right!) If his at-bat music is not Das Racist's "Who's That? Broooooooown," someone is really dropping the ball.