Welcome to our newest column at With Leather, the Orioles Report! In the Report, we’ll be following along with the Birds’ 2012 season and chronicling the unique, exciting things that happen when the O’s take the field! NOTE: NO BASEBALL WILL BE FEATURED

Today’s episode, wherein an elderly woman sitting in the crowd holds a bat longer than Ryan Flaherty, from Holdout Sports:

It happened in the bottom of the second inning at the Phillies’ spring training stadium in Clearwater, Florida. Ruiz’ bat slipped out of his hands as he swung, and the bat landed just to the right of the woman, who may have been the oldest woman in that section of the park, but obviously still has enough reflexes to react and grab the bat.

(video via MLB.com)

Come for the standing ovation they give a lady for touching a bat from her seat, stay for the slow motion replay where Carlos Ruiz loses control of his bat and the section behind him does an involuntary point-wave.

Next week on the Orioles Report: the Oriole Bird accidentally hits a guy in the face with a hot dog, then eats the hot dog.

Wir mussen die Nation ausrotten!

Baseball has been a bit undersold at With Leather, so I’ve decided to take a break from nonstop webcomics and professional wrestling to remedy the problem. Unfortunately nobody likes to read about baseball, because it is boring and not football, so you kinda have to coax people into clicking the link and consolidate everything into concise blurbs, preferably featuring a 65 x 90 picture of Buster Olney. That guy really knows his stuff. Did you realize how important On Base Percentage is?

Anyway, Baseball is Boring is the column to read if you want to kinow what happened this weekend, but you don’t want to know badly enough to find out at a reputable news source. Also, you don’t want to Google “Barry Bonds steroids” in quotes.

Kinsler and Cruz break every record, all at once.

The Texas Rangers’ Ian Kinsler and Nelson Cruz made history by becoming the first set of teammates to homer in each of the first three games of a season on Sunday, closing out a sweep of the Red Sox. The duo set a number of records, because we live in a society that puts things like “most copies sold on Game Boy” in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Here’s the queick list: Kinsler and Cruz came into the game as one of only six teammates to homer in each of the first two games of the season, and Kinsler became the first player to hit a lead-off homer in the first two. Cruz’s homer was the second by a right-handed batter to reach the upper deck in right field at Rangers Ballpark. ESPN set a record by mentioning Cliff Lee for no reason in 100 of their first 100 stories about the Texas Rangers, and the Red Sox became the first team to make me laugh out loud in real life in 2011.

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