Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

The Trump Plan for the Mets

trump.jpgAm I interested in buying the Mets? A good businessman never shows all his cards. So I’m going to say yes, I am definitely interested.

The Mets need a proven winner like me to take them to the next level. I know what it takes to build from the ground up, because I have built an empire renowned and respected the world over, and all I started with was an insane amount of inherited wealth. My face alone guarantees tens of millions in additional revenue from people who are dumb enough to buy anything with the word TRUMP on it.

Can I revive the Mets? Look what I did for Atlantic City. I turned that dump into a dump where you can lose your money! Better yet, look what I did for the USFL. Enough said.

First thing’s first: the Wilpons gotta go. They’ve proven they can’t run a business. Do you know they haven’t gone bankrupt even once? I’ve done it three times already! To me, that shows lack of initiative.

Next, we sign a big time free agent to get some fannies back in the seats. Who’s the most recognizable athlete in the world? That’s right, Tiger Woods. I am prepared to offer him a $500 million/year contract. I know he doesn’t play baseball, but people will show up to see if he can, or at least to shout really horrible things at him.

If The Apprentice has proven anything, it’s that people love to watch celebrities fight while trying to run fake businesses. So I’d kick Sandy Alderson and The Nerd Herd to the curb, and bring in my own front office: Star Jones, Danny Bonaduce, Janice Dickinson, Spencer Pratt, and one of the kids from Glee or something. We’d film them screaming at each other about trades or making pizzas or whatever, sell the footage to NBC, and make a series about it. And possibly a line of towels, too. We’re still working it out.

The team gets revenue and publicity, the people get something entertaining to watch. It’s a no-lose situation. At the box office, anyway. The team itself would probably lose a lot on the field, but that’s the price of fame, folks.

Then, I get Bloomberg to build us a brand new stadium on top of one of my luxurious condos on the West Side. CitiField is ancient history–its practically three years old! My proposed Trump Grounds at Trump Stadium will be the world’s first sports arena situated 750 feet above the ground. I’m told heavy winds might be a factor and the players will probably have to wear oxygen masks. But do you want comfortable playing conditions or glitz and glamor? Can’t have both, people.

And in any case, we’ll make up for the lack of breathable air with some Trump Ultra-Luxury Boxes. You can’t even walk past them for less than 50 grand. They’ll have all the features of my iconic Trump buildings, with gold lined everything, and one of those fountains with a naked chick in it, cuz that’s classy. This aesthetic will appeal to Russian oil billionaires and hip-hop artists living off of hit singles from 1997.

After that? I dunno, I’ll probably get bored, sell the team off for scrap, and buy a new helicopter or something.

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

My Best Laid Plans

redfoley.jpgAs a kid, I didn’t go to too many baseball games. My family lived a little too far away from the city and had just enough money to not starve, so games involved too large an investment of time and capital. We’d make it out to Shea maybe once a year, inevitably sitting in some of the stadium’s worst seats, way up at the highest reaches of the upper deck. The players looked like pinstriped ants, but I didn’t care. The experience was still special and amazing. I didn’t dream of going any more often, because that seemed so impossible to me

Whenever we went, I’d somehow scrape together enough cash to buy a program and score the game. No one taught me how to do it. I’d learned from Red Foley’s Best Baseball Book Ever, which my grampa gave me one birthday. Once upon a time, Red was the official scorer for the Mets and Yankees. I found the book really interesting, even if Red was unable to get MLB licensing, and all the stickers had bootleg team “logos”.

The last game I went to for a very long time came the day after opening day, 1993. My mom, two brothers, and grampa snuck in chicken cutlet sandwiches and sodas to avoid crushing concession prices. It would be a horrible year for the Mets–The Worst Team Money Could Buy–but we didn’t know that yet. It was also the second game ever played by the Colorado Rockies. They were shut out the day before, so I got to see the first ever Rockie run, home run, and RBI when Dante Bichette went deep against Bret Saberhagen in the seventh. I still was young and dumb enough to consider this Witnessing History. The Mets won anyway, 6-1.

Shea gave away Opening Day Weekend pins with little Mets and Rockies hats on them. I considered it a precious thing and put it with all my other precious things, in the top drawer of my dresser. It stayed there, untouched, forever. Years later, when my grandparents were both gone and I was cleaning out grampa’s dresser, I found the same pin, nestled against watches and retirement gifts.

Continue reading My Best Laid Plans →

Baseball, Cinematics

Internet Trainspotting at its Finest

ferris.jpgBy this point, nearly every artifact from the 1980s has had its bones picked completely clean by ironic vultures. Bill Simmons single-handedly ruined The Karate Kid for everyone by referencing it constantly. All conceivable angles of Back to the Future have been examined under a cultural electron microscope. The rehashings of G.I. Joe and Transformers speak for themselves, loudly and poorly. (Not that the originals were high art.)

Maybe I’m nuts (a distinct possibility), but I feel like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has largely escaped this treatment. Of course, it remains a beloved film (and righfully so), often quoted and referenced. But comparatively speaking, it did not reach nauseating levels of ubiquity and reference-itude. It even survived a weird televisual adaptation produced four years too late.

That is why I was delighted to see someone tackle a Ferris angle I had never seen addressed before: Exactly what game did Mr. Bueller and his buddies attend at Wrigley Field? Larry Granillo of Wezen-Ball (previously best known for his sabermetric study of Charlie Brown’s baseball career) did some serious detective work over the weekend at Baseball Prospectus to answer this very question.

Granillo carefully studied the video evidence–both the live footage seen in the film and the game as broadcast on TV as Mr. Rooney is in the pizza joint. Considering this, he surmised that it occurred on June 5, 1985 as the Cubs played the Braves.

As the post caught proverbial wildfire across the interwebs, there was some speculation that the date Granillo couldn’t have happened, since principal shooting for Ferris didn’t begin until September 1985. Granillo disagreed, saying that the footage shown on TV in the film was clearly from a midsummer game against the Braves. He further determined that the scenes actually featuring Ferris in the stands could have taken place late in the season when the Cubs played either the Braves or another team with similar powder blue away uniforms.

It turns out he was right, as confirmed by an assistant director who worked on the film, who said he was “pretty sure” the game in question happened on September 24, against the Expos (who had powder blue unis at the time). Mystery solved!

Perhaps it’s because I have my own dumb obsessions, or because something resembling baseball is a mere eight days away, but I found this Ferris endeavor completely charming. Of course it represents the dedication of considerable brainpower and deductive powers toward something that means absolutely nothing. But then again, once you invest that much perspiration in the effort, it means everything.

Such an effort speaks to my soul. I can not tell you how many times I’ve poured hours upon hours of mental gymnastics into completely futile gestures, just to prove I could solve them. Running this site alone, I’ve thrown away weeks trying to solve the most trivial technical minutiae, just so I could say “Yeah, I did it!” to nobody but myself.

In conclusion, I’m saluting Mr. Granillo’s effort because of my own deep personal failings.