Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

Bud Selig, Twit

budselig2.jpgHonestly, I think MLB’s revised Twitter policy has been blown way out of proportion. I believe this so strenuously I’ve been trying to browbeat any writer who reported the story to change their tune. I even offered a free group interview with MLB Network star Mitch Williams, but no one has taken the bait yet.

The new policy is basically this: MLB.com beat writers can only tweet about baseball. They can only use 127 characters instead of 140, because all their tweets have to end with #sexybudselig. At least until I overtake Justin Bieber as a trending topic, or figure out who Justin Bieber is.

The reason for this policy is quite simple: I don’t want our beat writers using up precious MLBAM resources on non-baseball-related tweets. Especially after our staff went through the enormous trouble of setting up Twitter accounts for all these people. That takes over 17 hours per account! At least that’s the time I was billed for by our freelance IT staff. Why, that’s almost as long as they tell me it takes to perform a Google search!

Penalties for violation of this policy will be firm but fair. Any beat writer who tweets about a sandwich, salad, or any other food item will be suspended for three games. Because neither I nor anyone else could possible give less of a shit about your lunch.

Anyone who tweets about the latest Lost episode will be suspended for 50 games, because I’m Tivo’ing the whole season so I can watch it in one long chunk one it’s over. Don’t think I won’t do it, either. I came down on Manny Ramirez like a ton of bricks when he tweeted about the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy.

However, I will show leniency to any beat writer who can help me do a podcast. Does anyone know how to set that up? Because I think the world is finally ready to hear my thoughts on Battlestar Galactica.

Baseball

Next Up on The FAN: Questions of Great Thelogical Import

In the wake of another disappointing weekend for the Mets (during which they could conceivably have swept the Cardinals but only managed one win, and that one a 20-inning purgatorial nightmare), the WFAN airwaves were rife with distraught fans declaring their disgust. But while most callers employed the harshest language radio would allow, one Mike Francesa listener had loftier thoughts on her mind.

Yes, you heard right. Kathy thinks the Mets need Jesus. And not Jesus as in “Jesus Christ, can’t this team do anything right?!” No, she seems to honestly believe the Mets, as a team, need to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Why? “That team is horrible!” Because as we all know, only righteous, pious teams win championships. Just look at the Mets’ last World Series-winning team. The 1986 Mets were a collection of clean-living souls who only played baseball in between their seminary studies and mission trips to Guatemala.

Let’s give Kathy the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible she was being hyperbolic or facetious, or perhaps she’s really young and has no context on which to draw (ie, the hundreds of championship teams whose off-the-field behavior indicated they had very little use for religion). Or maybe she was actually being sincere and thinks born again-ing your team will lead to success on the field. She’s entitled to that opinion (just as I am entitled to skewer it). Regardless, Francesa’s response was more wackadoo than the question.

Granted, this is a touchy subject. If you’re behind the mic, you don’t want be overly dismissive and offend anyone, but you also don’t want to open the floodgates to start a religious discussion on a sports talk show. Basically, you want this line of inquiry to disappear ASAP. If this was me, I’d be tempted to say, “Why should Jesus give a shit about a sports team?” But the safer response would be, “I’m not touching this with a ten foot pole.”

Francesa, who has a few decades’ worth of experience on the radio, clearly wants to go this route. But in so doing, he lets loose a brief, bizarre critique of this woman’s statement. To wit: Why would Jesus choose the Mets over somebody else?

That’s a fair assessment, Mike. Clearly the heavens have not turned their attention the Mets, unless it’s some malevolent trickster god like Loki.

Baseball, Technical Nonsense

From the Scratchbomb Annals of Failure: OSS

Perhaps you’ve heard of No Mas. They’re an awesome apparel/art conglomco that focuses on the dark/weird side of sports. They first caught my eye many years ago, when an acquaintance of mine showed up at a local bar wearing this beauty. I enjoy their products because they clearly love sports, but they lack the unblinking reverence for athletes usually found in sporting media. Their favorite figures are guys like Mike Tyson and Doc Gooden, whose obvious and continued personal failings make them much more compelling than the stainless steel heroism of the Derek Jeters of the world.

Earlier this year, No Mas announced a design-a-t-shirt contest, and I immediately had what I thought was a brilliant idea. Many of No-Mas’s t-shirts play on team logos, such as this one, which combines the Padres’ horrid 1980s uni design with another horrid 80s product, Pablo Escoabar. I went a similar route, and decided to combine the cheesy White Sox logo of the mid-80s with the curious case of Moe Berg.

Moe Berg was a backup catcher with an up-and-down major league career in the 1930s. In an era when most ballplayers were nigh-illiterate farmboys, he was an Ivy League educated gentleman who knew several languages and traveled the world. But he’s still remembered nowadays because at the same time he caught in the major leagues, he also worked as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor of the CIA).

Berg even went on major league barnstorming trips to the Far East with superstars he had no business playing with, like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, as a cover for him taking covert photos and film of the Tokyo cityscape. During World War II, his footage aided in planning Pacific bombing raids. He also parachuted behind enemy lines to aid Nazi resistance groups in Yugoslavia, and traveled Europe to interview physicists and convince them to join the American effort to build the atomic bomb.

That’s a life and half right there. I find his story so fascinating that I used it for the jumping point to a novel that I SWEAR I’m going to finish some time this year (it does not actually involve Moe Berg in any way). I thought he deserved to be immortalized in t-shirt form. And he actually played for the White Sox, which made my idea vaguely appropriate.

I slaved over my design, employing all of my Photoshopping skills, and convinced myself that it HAD to win. Just like I convinced myself for every contest I ever entered as a kid. Unfortunately, I was so convinced of my victory that I never bothered to actually send in my entry. I totally forgot about it until the deadline had long since past, and only remembered when I found the files while scouring through my computer this week.

I present the design to you now, so that it may live in some form. In case you’re wondering, Berg played in an era when most players did not have numbers, so the “34” refers to 1934, the year he took his second trip to Japan for spy photography purposes. My question is, if this was an actual t-shirt, would you buy it? If there’s enough interest, I will look into making this an actual thing you can purchase and wear. Warning: The threshold for “enough interest” is probably “one dude”.

oss_crop.jpg