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: Twins

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. Next, the Twins.

The Twins are my favorite non-Mets team. They’re a smart organization from top to bottom that knows how to field a competitive team every year, despite being in the middle of the financial pack. I like them even more now that they’re playing ball outdoors, leaving the garbage bag-lined Metrodome behind, and also because they’re giving JI- JIM THOME one last shot at winning a World Series. If the Mets, with all their money, had half the Twins’ brains, they’d be dangerous.

But even smart organizations do embarrassing things every now and then, like the Twins did back in 1991. That year, they won a fantastic seven-game World Series against the Braves, but still found some time during this storybook season to make a “music video,” an unfortunate trend among pro teams of the era. It’s not any better or worse than its contemporaries, but it has a definite Last Years of the First Bush Presidency air to it. The notes on this video’s YouTube page label it as a “funky” music video. I respectfully disagree.

Other than baseball itself, the Twins are quite good at local commercials. Here’s one for their move into brand new Target Field. Can’t think of too many teams who’d make their outfielders wade through a box of styrofoam peanuts, or would simulate violently throwing a rival team’s fan into the back of a moving van. That was a simulation, right?

Another move-related ad handles the Twin’s mascot, TC Bear, and his difficult transition from indoor to outdoor living.

One other awesome thing about the Twins: Bert Blyleven, ex-pitcher and current broadcaster. I have an NBC baseball preview video from 1988, which is jam packed with Mr. Blyleven saying awesome things, which I can sadly not share with you without endangering my own YouTube account (because obviously NBC and/or MLB are hammering out the DVD deal for this highly valuable footage as we speak).

In its place, please enjoy Bert screwing up royally live on the air, prior to a Twins-Yankees game.

Most baseball fights are pretty pathetic affairs. Not this one. Archival news footage shows a brawl between the Twins and Orioles from 1980, in which Rick Dempsey barrels hard into John Castino. Some words are exchanged, and then the Twins treat Mr. Dempsey to a big ol’ blanket party.

Baseball

MLB Playoffs YouTubery: Phillies

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. Next, the Phillies.

To this day, when I think of the Phillies, the first person I think of is Mike Schmidt. After all, he was one of the greatest third basemen to ever play the game, and also owner of the best 80s baseball mustache this side of Keith Hernandez. Schmitty was the quintessential Reagan-era slugger. So naturally, he made a commercial for Chevy where he tries to beat the shit out of trucks with his bat.

But Mike Schmidt also cared about you. Yes, you. That’s why he did this PSA against cocaine, aka “The Big Lie”. This commercial is so harshly, angular-ly lit, I think David Fincher was involved.

Remember computers? I sure do! This ad promotes an odd Veterans Stadium promo from 1986: a computer simulation of the 1977 Phillies vs. the 1983 Phillies, sponsored by IBM. Apparently, the simulation results were aired between halves of a Phillies-Pirates doubleheader. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was something dreamed up by Philly Boy Roy as an opener to an evening of Laser Allin.

Also from 1986: this compilation of Phillies promos that look like they were directed by Tim and Eric and edited with a machete. I keep waiting for Dr. Steve Brule make an appearance.

But let’s leave a wistful note, shall we? Here’s a rare, beautiful find: color home movie footage of the first game of the 1950 World Series between the Phillies and the Yankees at Shibe Park, taken by the drummer of the band that played before the game. It’s an exquisite time capsule. You see the “Whiz Kids” playing toss, fans getting psyched for the game, and, eventually, the Yankees beginning their assault, en route to a four-game sweep.

A potentially explosive collection of verbal irritants