Tag Archives: youtubery

Baseball

MLB Playoffs YouTubery: Braves

To celebrate the advent of this year’s MLB playoffs, which I am looking forward to with rapt anticipation (no, really), I’d like to do a few posts featuring YouTube finds representing each team that’s made their way to October. Next, the Braves.

Atlanta did not enjoy too much success before Bobby Cox came along, but they did manage to win the NL West in 1982 (even more impressive when you consider they’re located nowhere near the west!). Here’s some footage from when the Braves clinched the division on the last day of the season (thanks to a Dodgers loss). The clip starts out pretty low key, as the announcer fills us in on the particulars.

Then it cuts to the locker room, where the jubilant Braves make merry. Ted Turner is soaked in what I hope is champagne, while a blonde sticks to his side. One guy chugs Jack Daniels straight from the bottle, and I’m almost positive he’s not a player, just some dude who weaseled his way into the clubhouse.

Apart from this revelry, the 1980s were not kind to the Braves. But at least they were broadcast coast-to-coast on TBS, thus earning themselves the moniker of America’s Team (more for ubiquity than for performance). If you subjected yourself to Braves baseball at this time, you would’ve been treated to the opening credits seen here–which for some odd reason features as many non-Braves as Braves. Stick around to the end to see Skip Caray bitch about the horrible, horrible team he has to cover each night.

Earlier this year, at a game in Philadelphia, some idiot fan ran on the field in a red version of the Green Man outfit. Slow footed security personnel were unable to stop his romp through the outfield, so left fielder Matt Diaz took the law into his own hands. Be glad you just got tripped, buddy. At Citizen’s Bank Park, miscreants get tased.

Technically, this does not involve a major leaguer, but it happened in the Braves’ organization, so I will allow it. Mississippi Braves manager Phil Wellman disagrees with an umpires call and expresses his opinion with the China Syndrome of managerial meltdowns. On the Shit Fit Scale, this is at Winnebago Man levels.

He had to have been planning this in his head for weeks. Not even the most skilled comic improviser could have performed these shenanigans off the top of the dome.

Baseball

MLB Playoffs YouTubery: Reds

To celebrate the advent of this year’s MLB playoffs, which I am looking forward to with rapt anticipation (no, really), I’d like to do a few posts featuring YouTube finds representing each team that’s made their way to October. Next, the Reds.

How long ago were the 1970s? Back then, Johnny Bench was considered handsome. Really! According to Joe Posnanski’s excellent book, he was quite the eligible bachelor in the hotbed of sensuality known as Cincinnati. He also parlayed his good looks into several hundred endorsement deals.

Here’s the most horrifying of them all: Hall of Famer Johnny Bench schilling for something called Bubble Fudge. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about a chocolaty bubble gum product makes my skin crawl. And if that didn’t, then I’d still be creeped out by the tons of unappealing close ups of the best catcher of all time failing to blow bubbles in this ad. See you in my nightmares, Bubble Fudge!

Johnny also hosted a kids’ show in the early 80s, The Baseball Bunch, which taught children fundamentals and sportsmanship and all that other crap. As a kid, I knew this existed, but somehow never got a chance to see it and always wondered what I missed. Now I know: Pete Rose screaming at children. YOU MISSED THE BAG!

Rose did his fair share of commercial work, too. (Couldn’t keep the knuckle-breakers away from your door on a ballplayer’s salary in those days.) He did a bunch of ads for Aqua Velva, but this one is my favorite, because it has a unique combination of bad acting, poor dialogue, and singing.

Rose slides steals second base headfirst, and Joe Morgan says, “Hey, it’s Pete Rose of the Philadelphia Phillies,” as if Pete stopped by his house and wasn’t playing a game against him. Then Pete Rose sings the Aqua Velva jingle in a voice that sounds like someone’s got a gun to his back.

I have an enormous mental bank of hideous ads from the 1980s, but I have absolutely no memory of this one for Kool-Aid. Little kids play baseball in weird pleather uniforms, while the Kool-Aid Man destroys a stadium and takes away a sure double from Pete Rose. The set looks vaguely like the landscape that appeared when Homer Simpson at a Guatemalan Insanity Pepper.

Finally, no survey of Reds YouTubery would be complete without the stellar acting chops of one Bronson Arroyo. Watch the high-kicking righty do a spot for a local Ford dealer and get all potty mouth on us. You’ll never play the big rooms working blue, Bronson!

Baseball

MLB Playoffs YouTubery: Yankees

To celebrate the advent this year’s MLB playoffs, which I am looking forward to with rapt anticipation (no, really), I’d like to do a few posts featuring YouTube finds representing each team that’s made their way to October. First up, the Yankees.

When I was a kid, Phil Rizzuto was still the voice of the Bronx Bombers, and it was awesome. It’s too bad there’s a whole generation of fans who only know Michael Kay and John Sterling, because Scooter was a delight. Sure, he was goofy as hell and would occasionally seem to get tired of actually calling the game. (I remember once Jackie Mason joined him in the booth–seriously–and they spent two innings talking about their favorite delis.) And his lengthy digressions and inattentiveness drove poor Bill White, his broadcasting partner, up the wall.

For all of that, Rizzuto’s goofiness was natural and endearing, not the studied, monstrous eccentricity of Sterling. Plus, he wasn’t one-tenth the homer that Sterling is. I can’t imagine him doing something so undignified as Sterling’s unbearable THUUUUUUUUUUUH YANKEES WIN!

Of course, I can’t show you any footage of Scooter actually calling a game, because that would bring MLBAM’s fiery wrath upon me. So I’ll have to settle for another touchstone of my youth: Phil Rizzuto’s commercials for The Money Store. As a child watching these commercials, I was quite confused; why would you buy money? If you needed money, you wouldn’t be able to buy money, would you? If Phil was just as confused, he didn’t show it (hardly).

Sadly, Phil was replaced in these commercials by pretty boy Jim Palmer, right around the same time he was unceremoniously removed from the Yankees broadcast booth. The world is a cruel place.

If you were watching Phil circa 1987, you might have seen a promo like this for Yankees baseball on WPIX, the local channel that carried their games for approximately 937 years. You also would have seen a terrifying teaser for the evening news like the one that opens this video, which is fairly typical of New York news during this era (with anchor Donna Hanover, aka The Future Mrs. Giuliani).

Or you might have seen these promo ads, also from 1987. I have no memory of these at all, but they’re pretty slick for the era. Also, Rickey Henderson walks down a Yankee Stadium tunnel with some kind of wild jungle cat because of course he did.

If we take the Wayback Machine even further, we find Phil Rizzuto the mystery guest on an episode of What’s My Line circa 1970. Soupy Sales seems to be a big fan. Amazingly, Phil points to the recent worst-to-first story of the Mets as a reason why the Yankees could do well in the coming season. (Spoiler: They actually won 93 games that year, but finished well back of the steamrolling Baltimore Orioles.)