Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

Bud Selig Lays Down The Jeter Rules

1 Comment

In the wake of the tragic news that Derek Jeter has injured his calf, I declare a temporary suspension of play throughout Major League Baseball as a sign of respect and mourning, until such time as The Captain is able to play to the fullest of his gritty, gutty abilities. Without the game’s most beloved player, we at the MLB front offices figured there was just no point to playing any of these games. Everything seems kind of pointless without his bright, shining face to light the way. Why bother, really?

For those fans who want to keep track of Jeter’s medical progress–and really, what true baseball fan wouldn’t?–we have created a revolutionary Calf Cam. With the use of cutting edge nanotechnology, MLB has inserted a tiny subcutaneous HD camera in Jeter’s leg so that all fans can watch his muscles healing in real time. I’m sure it will be even more entertaining than the MLB Amateur Draft!

Once Jeter is ready to return to action, there will be a celebratory parade down Fifth Avenue, followed by a resumption of the regular season schedule at Yankee Stadium. Henceforth, all Yankee games shall be played in the Bronx until the legendary shortstop gets his eagerly anticipated 3000th hit. Opponents shall be compensated for loss of home games with complimentary “Jeter: Mr. 3000” t-shirts and a coupon for half off one order of fries at NYY Steak.

If Jeter is sitting on 2,999 hits, and a ball off of his bat is hit too close to the foul line to be called by an umpire’s naked eye, I shall allow a video review to take place. The import of such a moment would be far too great to allow human error to enter the equation. I mean, we’re not talking about a playoff game here!

All stadiums will be required to show Yankees game on an appropriately sized jumbtron visible to all patrons until this historic moment finally occurs. Failure to do so will result in serious fines and loss of draft picks.

With your help, we can get through this trying time. Huddle close with your loved ones and offer up a silent prayer that we can weather this storm. God help us all.

Studio 60 on Roosevelt Avenue

Studio 60 on Roosevelt Avenue: Episode 3

STUDIO 60 ON ROOSEVELT AVENUE
EPISODE 3
WRITTEN COMPLETELY BY AARON SORKIN TOTALLY ALONE AND UNDER GREAT DURESS
RELIVE THE EXCITING INAUGURAL SEASON! PILOT | EPISODE 2

LOGLINE: Once the nation’s best and most respected baseball GM, Sandy Alderson has been reduced to trying to revive a moribund franchise is the depths of deepest, darkest Queens. Along with his sharp-witted and adoring protégés, he fights off the seemingly endless series of controversies and crises that beset him while trying to run a sports team in the country’s most bustling metropolis, and still look fantastic while doing it. Can the pressures of such an important job crush this singularly talented and gifted individual genius?

ACT I

The owner’s booth. We hear the roar of the crowd, the unintelligible warble of the PA system, organ riffs. MACKENZIE CARLIN stands near the front, by the floor to ceiling windows, taking it all in. SANDY ALDERSON sidles up her and offers a small flute of champagne .

ALDERSON: Congratulations.

CARLIN: [waving it away] No thank you.

ALDERSON: You’re not going to celebrate your first win in the front office? Not even when the new shortstop you helped pick out just hit six home runs and 15 RBIs?

CARLIN: I don’t drink on the job.

ALDERSON: But the game’s over.

CARLIN: When the game’s over, the job begins.

ALDERSON: That sounds familiar.

CARLIN: It should–you wrote it, in your third autobiography. I wrote in all my Trapper Keepers in high school.

ALDERSON: So tonight you have succeeded in steering us to victory and making me feel horribly old. A raincheck on the champagne, then.

CARLIN politlely puts her champagne down on a coffee table and quickly exits the booth. She slips through the door just as J.P. RICCIARDI and PAUL DEPODESTA enter.

RICCIARDI: Does she ever stop?

ALDERSON: If she has, I blinked and missed it.

DEPODESTA: I guess she has to keep moving forward in order to survive. Kind of like a shark.

ALDERSON: She’s a woman in a man’s world, Paul. She has to work twice as hard to get just as far, you know that.

RICCIARDI: She’s also Einhorn’s tin can phoneline to this front office. Don’t get too chummy with her.

ALDERSON: If I ever get “chummy” with anyone, you have my permission to shoot me. Is there any other reason you two came in here, other than to tell me things I already know?

DEPODESTA: Yes, as a matter of fact. As you know, the next team coming in has star first baseman Grant Linwood, who…

ALDERSON: …Who is the conservative firebrand constantly making waves with loud pronouncements of his political viewpoints and upsetting people with his erratic, transgressive behavior. I’m very familiar with Linwood. I drafted him years ago. Broke my heart when we lost him to the Rule 7 draft. So we beef up security for a few games. By our standards, this barely qualifies as a crisis.

RICCIARDI: I take it you haven’t heard today’s news? Linwood’s done a 360 on a few issues. For one, he just declared he’s for gay marriage and says the government “should stay out of our bedrooms”. But he’s also reaffirmed his fierce anti-gun-control stance and says he plans on carrying a concealed weapon into the stadium because it’s his constitutional right. All while being the leading MVP candidate in the league.

ALDERSON: So what’s the outlook?

DEPODESTA: We’ve already received notice from no fewer than 15 organizations who plan on protesting. Eight Christian groups angry at him for the gay marriage thing, six police organizations mad about the gun thing, and one more group that says it’s not sure what to think but it’s definitely mad and plans on breaking stuff. We also got one fax that looks kind of weird. Something about time shares.

ALDERSON: Wow. We’re just one pregnant nun away from a crisis Yahtzee.

Continue reading Studio 60 on Roosevelt Avenue: Episode 3 →

Baseball, Boob Tubery

Take Me Out to the Nuthouse

As you’ve probably heard, Glenn Beck is leaving FOX News to spend more time with his tinfoil hats. There was a very interesting article in New York recently about how Beck made everyone at FOX very rich but probably cost the Republicans the next presidential election with his special brand of divisive wing-nuttery. The article basically said his conspiracy theories and apparent belief that he is a vessel for the word of Jebus got so out of hand that even Roger Ailes had enough and told Beck to hit the bricks.

In truth, Glenn Beck won’t be going anywhere. He was already a superstar on talk radio and will remain one. He was already doing sold-out, weepy live events about the fall of America and Christmas sweaters and will presumably continue to do those, too. He’ll even be expanding his empire with a new online endeavor called GBTV. (Yes, that looks very much like it should stand for gay/bi/transgender or something similar, but please, nobody tell him. Let’s just laugh about it behind his back for several years.) It sounds it will be mostly Beck doing a variation on his FOX show for a nominal fee; $4.95/month to watch just his show, $9.95 for the full array of GBTV (teehee) programming.

None of this would be remarkable to me if I didn’t know that GBTV (snicker) will be powered by MLB Advanced Media. Yup, the same outfit responsible for creating online clips of Major League Baseball games (but not responsible for allowing you to embed them anywhere) will now help make sure the special angel-monkeys in Glenn Beck’s brain have their message heard. I can’t see how this makes any sense for MLB, business- or publicity-wise, unless they just want to carry one show worse than Intentional Talk.

Granted, MLB is not the smartest outfit in the world (see: idiotic anti-replay stance, the WBC, the aforementioned refusal to make video clips of their sport embeddable). However, I think even Bud Selig and Co. have to recognize that they’re treading on thin ice here. Getting into bed with a guy like Beck–however tangentially–is virtually guaranteed to bring nothing but trouble.

I’m not saying it’s a risk because Beck is a conservative and I am not. I wouldn’t even call Beck a conservative because he’s anything but. A conservative, by definition, wants to conserve, to keep things the way they are. Beck wants to blow up everything up to and including the Magna Carta. This is not so much a right/left split as it is a crazy/not crazy split.

As I already said, he became so toxic that Roger Ailes–who cut his teeth as Richard Nixon’s media guru, and who can stomach Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity–wants nothing to do with him. As gross and disingenuous as FOX News is, the majority of programming is light years more fair and sane than Glenn Beck. Wal-Mart withdrew sponsorship from Beck’s program when he called President Obama a racist. If any business has the economic and political power to withstand public pressure over such issues, it’s Wal-Mart, and yet even they decided they’d rather not be associated with such a person.

But obviously, there is a sizable segment of the population that likes this guy. Why pass judgment on that, if you’re MLB? Fine, let’s look at this in cold, hard terms. From a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, there is virtually no way that this GBTV (chortle) venture will become lucrative.

Why? Because if the internet has proven anything…well, I guess the number one thing the internet has proven is that people like porn. But the second biggest thing it’s proven is that nobody wants to pay for something they used to get for free. The Internet Graveyard is filled with the tombs of kooky ranters who captivated audiences on YouTube, then decided to try and monetize their nuttiness and fell off the face of the earth.

Not to mention, GBTV will not be the only way people who like Glenn Beck can get Glenn Beck; he still has his radio show, which costs virtually nothing to listen to. And yet you’re asking people to plunk down as much as 10 bucks a month–more than a basic Netflix subscription–to watch him do a show you used to be able to see for a sliver of your monthly cable bill?

Put it this way: If Howard Stern couldn’t get people to buy satellite radios en masse, Glenn Beck will not get people to pay for internet TV in significant numbers. It doesn’t matter if the fee is relatively affordable; people hate subscriptions. They especially hate them for anything online. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for The New York Times or 24 uninterrupted hours of Bababooey or an internet channel dedicated to hoarding your gold.

When Beck has his inevitable on-air meltdown–not if, but when–it’s going to be carried by the same online engine that brings you clips of America’s pastime. Bud Selig will be praying for the carefree days of the Mitchell Report and failed drug tests when that happens.