Monthly Archives: March 2009

Baseball, Inappropriate Walkup Music 2009, Videocracy

Inappropriate Walk Up Music: 03.04.09

mlbtheshow09.jpgMy brother recently purchased MLB 09:The Show for Playstation 3 (ME WANTEE). One of the many features of this game is that you can upload your own MP3s to the hard drive and customize walk-up music for all your favorite players.

You can also record your own crowd noise. Seriously, if I had this game (or a PS3), I would spend so much time customizing the game environment, I would never actually play a game. I’d spend an entire day recording hateful taunts for Chipper Jones alone. Most of them wouldn’t be the least bit clever, either. Stuff like, “Chipper, I hope one day everyone you love abandons you and die alone and afraid!”

This revelation led to the discussion of awesome walk-up songs, and what we would pick for our own walk-up songs if we were major leaguers. Me, I’d opt for either “Right Brigade” by Bad Brains or the intro to “Little Friend” by Minor Threat. Yes, I gave this a great deal of thought.

But this also led to a parallel train of thought: What would be the worst walk-up music ever? Not necessarily the worst songs ever (although bad songs would surely have an edge here). But these tunes would have to be the exact opposite of the kind of intimidating, in-your-face songs that most hitters opt for.

Real-life example: Robin Ventura gets a lifetime pass from yours truly. He hit the grand slam single, which means I would totally bust that guy out of jail if he asked me to. But during the 2000 season, his at-bats were accompanied by various Bob Dylan songs. Most often, “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Positively 4th Street.” *

* I possess several bits of video/audio evidence that will attest to this fact, but I dare not post them for fear of MLB’s mighty lawyer-filled wrath. So you’ll have to take my word for it.

Now, far be it from me to impugn either of these classics. But they’re really not songs a major league baseball player should hear as he steps to the plate. I would pick 8 million songs I can’t stand before I picked ruminative, existential tunes like these.

So, my little project from now until Opening Day (or  for as long as I can stand it): come up with three songs a day that would be completely inappropriate as walk-up music.

Paint yourself a mental picture: You’re in the on-deck circle. Bottom of the 9th. Down by one. Man on second, two out. You hear the PA system blare, The centerfielder, number 20… The crowd roars at the sound of your name. And as you stroll to the batter’s box, you are greeted with the strains of one of these songs:

* “Poker Face,” Lady GaGa

* “Caught a Light Sneeze,” Tori Amos

* “The Loadout,” Jackson Brown

NYC, Tuneage

Give ‘Til it Hurts So Good!

goodguys.jpgThe Freeform Station of the Nation, WFMU has begun their annual marathon. So give ’em some money. Then, give ’em some more, because they’re pretty much the only radio station worth listening to in Ye Olde Tri-State.

I know I pimp The Best Show on this site all the time, but they have many, many fine programs worth your ear-time: Cherry Blossom Clinic with Terre T, Fool’s Paradise with Rex, Music to Spazz By, and much much much much more.

Last year, The Best Show had in-studio guests like Ted Leo, Ben Gibbard, and Patton Oswalt as “The Famous Flamer”. This year promises to be just as good, and the 2009 edition of The Fun Pack is face-meltingly awesome. So send ’em some change, folks. It all goes to making this area’s airwaves slightly more tolerable.

Baseball

Party Like It’s 1999

There’s a drug store a few blocks away from my house that has a mysterious Card Vending Machine. The bottom half of the machine–which would be eye level with most preteens–contains Pokemon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.

The top half has packs of old baseball cards. Some are very old, 20 years and up (although it makes me want to slit my wrists to think that I can remember collecting cards that are now more than 20 years old).

That would be weird enough. But whenever I go to this drugstore, the inventory changes. So they’re constantly restocking this machine with different vintages. Topps, Fleer, Donruss, and all the weird variants that these companies foisted on the card-buying public back when card collecting still looked like a viable investment market (haven’t spotted Sportflix yet, though).

My guess as to how this happened: There’s some guy out there who bought up thousands and thousands of packs of baseball cards back in the aforementioned Baseball Card Bull Market. He had a friend who snatched up a trading card vending machine franchise during the height of Pokemon-mania. When the bottoms dropped out of these hobbies, they joined forces in a marriage of convenience that made no one really happy, but at least it allowed them to not take a total loss on their investments.

Whatever the origin of the Mystery Machine, I always buy a pack of old cards when I’m in this drug store. Every other time I’ve gone there, I’ve purchased cards from when I was a kid and still collected them, for pure nostalgia’s sake. Not that I expect to find anything of value, because there’s very little of value in the baseball card market. And if these packs had anything of value, they wouldn’t be sitting in a weird vending machine in Queens.

But a few weeks, I went out of my comfort zone and purchased some Topps cards from 1999. That year has a special place in my heart, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. It was really the year I got back into baseball. I dipped my toe into the water the year before, but 1999 was the year I said “fuck it” and jumped right in.

What did I get? Irony, mostly.

The pack had a Future Stars card with Scott Rolen, which declared him “a cornerstone for the Phillies for years to come” (well, they were partly right). There was another card that featured first-round Mets bust Jason Tyner, and another Prospects card with three players on it, none of whom I’d ever heard of.

Of course, I saved my most jaundiced views for The Roid Brigade. It just so happened I purchased these cards just as the A-Rod Mess was reaching its apex. So it was hard to find a Juan Gonzalez card and not think about how much more innocent/stupid people were about steroids ten years ago.

Although I don’t entirely buy this line of reasoning. I feel like, more than anything, it’s a line that sportswriters throw out there so they don’t look like the blind, jock-sniffing morons they are. Fans always suspected steroids in the game; they just didn’t care until ESPN et al told us to be surprised and outraged by it.

Especially when you consider the Topps cover boy for that year. Who was it? I’ll give you three guesses.

99topps.jpgI guess McGwire and Sosa were too expensive even for Topps in 1999. But The Rocket was just as good, right? Nothing could ever taint his accomplishments!