PL+ Classic Game of the Day Schedule: 4/8 – 4/12

Here’s this week’s slate of games! As always, we’d love for you to join us and let’s watch some baseball together.

4/8 – Pittsburgh Pirates @ Washington Nationals, Stephen Strasburg‘s MLB Debut: I’ll be the first one to tell you that I don’t follow amateur and minor-league baseball as well as I should. I really don’t know where most players went to college, but one player I can tell you without even having to think about it is that Stephen Strasburg went to San Diego St. He was so hyped in college that his 17-strikeout no-hitter against Air Force made headlines everywhere. He was obviously drafted first overall by the Nationals in the 2009 draft, and it was almost one year later to the day that he made his MLB debut against the Pirates. His meteoric rise through the minors mostly had to do with the fact that he was just as dominant against every level of minor league competition as he was against the college hitters he had been facing the year before. For the last place Nationals, this was going to be the game of the year.

4/9 – Chicago White Sox @ Baltimore Orioles, No Crowd Game: Ryan Fickes picked this game in particular because of how it relates to our current situation at hand. “In 2015, the city of Baltimore found itself in the grips of protests following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Eventually, those protests would escalate into violence and the residents of Baltimore and Maryland watched all of the events unfold on live television. This led to an event so rare that it has only happened this one time in a century and a half of professional baseball in the United States: a game played in an empty stadium. Every sound that we associate with the game was amplified as they ricocheted off the empty seats, the concrete, the steel, and the brick. This is a prospect that MLB once again faces in 2020, not due to civil unrest, but due to the reality of social distancing that we live under now. We’re all wondering if baseball will be played this year to give us a brief interlude from the real world and this one game from 2015, something we never thought we’d see again, provides us with a preview of what it may look like.”

4/10 – Houston Astros @ Chicago Cubs, Kerry Wood’s 20 K Game: I’m very excited for this game, because it will be the first one hosted by a PL+ member! We’ve been having a great time with all these games, and I’m really excited to share that with our PL+ community. I asked Garrett why he wanted to do this game, and he said, “On May 6, 1998, Kerry Wood put on arguably the most dominant pitching performances of all time on a rainy day against the division-leading Houston Astros. At twenty years old and in only his fifth major league start, Wood mowed through a Houston lineup that was, at the time, the best in the franchise’s history. Come and relive Wood’s twenty-strikeout, one-hit shutout—a performance that has become a highlight of Wood’s career and one of the most unforgettable events in MLB history.” Garrett is also an Astros fan, so I’m sure he’s really going to enjoy watching his team get absolutely wrecked.

4/11 – San Diego Padres @ Milwaukee Brewers, Dinelson Lamet Strikes Out 14: It’s apparently the week of strikeouts as we follow up Wood’s legendary performance with a fantastic performance by Dinelson Lamet last season. Lamet has a lot of hype around him this year, and it’s performances like these that are driving this. As Erik van Rheenen states, “It’s just all kinds of fun watching Dinelson Lamet rack up strikeouts against a good Brewers squad!”

4/12 – USA vs. World, 2018 Futures Game: The 2019 Futures Game we did at the beginning of the season was one of our most viewed games, and people are looking for more prospect hype. So noted dynasty writer Trevor Hooth has decided to continue his Sundays of broadcasting by bringing another incredible Futures game to the table. “The 2018 Futures Game has a lot of guys who had an immediate impact in the majors. Pete Alonso and Fernando Tatis Jr. headline what was a pretty impressive group to take the field. It was a high scoring affair, with eight total homers. Frankly, there are some exciting youngsters, and with Vladimir Guerrero and David Ortiz managing, it would be an insult to baseball to not do this game.

 

Featured Image by Justin Paradis (FreshMeatComm on Twitter)