Month: August 2004

Eeeeeewwwwww. Yicky yicky yicky.

Warning: Don’t click through this link if you think your hatred of the Commissioner of Baseball is sufficient unto the day, or if you like to avoid anonymous, gossipy allegations, or if you’re easily grossed out by images of this guy, well, doing stuff. Again, let me say: this is alleged behavior. Please, Mr. Commissioner, don’t contract BRPA 2004.

Now that you’ve been warned, click through. Thanks (I guess?) to Luke for passing this tidbit along. I don’t know that it’s raised the level of discourse on this site, but, well, a little yickiness never hurt a workday.

Original comments…

Charlie Comiskey: Bud Selig talking dirty? I find that kinda hot.

stacey: why, luke? why!?

Jim: I am shocked, SHOCKED to hear that an old man would talk about sex. Next we’ll find out that Bud got drunk, put $5 in the jukebox, and played “Hang On Sloopy” over and over because he found the lyrics hilarious.

Levi: My objection isn’t so much to the image it conjures up of Selig’s mouth moving and things coming out of it as it is to his apparent belief that a 20% tip is sufficiently above the norm as to entitle him to make explicit his desire that the waitress be quiet. A classy nasty rich guy would leave a C-note to speak for itself.

thatbob: Yeah, “The Chairman” would have “duked” her – on top of the 20%, which is merely standard. What an alleged jerk!

Luke, hanger-on: I believe his exact words were, “I’d sure like to have baseball relations with that woman!”

Or perhaps, “Once we’re done screwing baseball, let’s do the same to her! Awoogah! E-uh! E-uh! E-uh!”

Levi: My coworker Jim, upon hearing my complaint about this story, says, “Yeah, but no one over fifty tips adequately.”

Discuss.

Luke, hanger-on: It’s true. I often have to swing back into a restaurant to cover for my beloved father, a shade on the dark side of 50, who when in doubt will round down, usually to around 10 percent.

He’s not a lech like Selig but he does have his off-color side, and I often also have to pay the “Dad Tax,” which is a few extra dollars for a waitress who’s been subjected to his corny jokes. On his latest trip to town his favorite was to hold up two fingers in a “V” and ask, “What’s this?” (Answer: A Roman soldier’s high five.) No cab driver, valet parker or waitress was spared. It was an expensive visit for the Dad Tax.

Levi: What you need is a hanger-on to whom you can call, “Duke ‘im!” every time your dad makes the joke. The assistant would then peel off a crisp hundred and lay it on the waiter.

The baseball team that made Milwaukee slightly more famous

I’m pretty sure that when one has called to order the Mastercard Grand Slam Ticket Pack, which is supposed to only be available for purchase with a Mastercard, the Brewers ticket office should not be asking the question, “American Express, Discover, Mastercard, or Visa?” at any point. I guess Mastercard hasn’t been able to cure them of their Midwestern hospitality.

Something else to worry about, if one is the worrying type: they’re mailing the tickets and concession voucher to me, and they claim they’ll show up “within a week.” Any longer than that, and I won’t get them before I leave for the trip, so I’ll have to leave careful instructions for honorary hanger-on Jason (who has a key to my mailbox) to mail or FedEx them to Chicago.

Original comments…

Levi: It’s Wisconsin. I’m sure that if we show up and explain why we don’t have our tickets, they’ll let us in.

Jim: But it’s Bud Selig’s Wisconsin, which is different than Wisconsin as you or I understand it.

stacey: even bud selig has been unable to corrupt the goodness of the city of lovely leinie’s. we’ve gotten great seats to a sold-out game (“they just opened up a new section,” the ticket man said, while eyeing bob’s county stadium floppy hat) AND had free tickets handed to us by some sweet fellow whose friends couldn’t show up at the last minute.

golly, i love milwaukee!

Jim: I forgot to mention that, when I first tried calling the Brewers’ ticket office 800 number this morning, I got an “all circuits busy” message. Five minutes later, I got right through. Either there was a sudden run on Brewers tickets at about 8:10 Pacific time this morning, or my office is using some crappy long-distance company that doesn’t have enough circuits running between L.A. and the Midwest.

thatbob: I will wear my County Stadium floppy hat AND bring my Miller Park beer bottle cozy. Might even splurge on a Fontini Sausage Race tee, hee hee.

Parenting, revisited

Sunday night, we were watching the baseball highlights. During the highlights of the Twins’ 18-inning loss to Oakland, Stacey made me pause the TiVo. The Twins had just pulled to within one run on a two-run homer by Justin Morneau in the bottom of the 18th, and the camera panned across the crowd. In the foreground of the shot, a boy with a ball glove and a Twins cap was leaping up and down in front of his seat, pumping his arms in the air and screaming.

What had caught Stacey’s eye, though, wasn’t the cheering boy, but his mom, visible over his shoulder. She was leaning forward, chin resting on a hand, gazing a bit bleary-eyed at the field. The full weight of 18 innings of baseball and nearly five hours of stale Metrodome air was clearly visible.

But tired or not, she was there. And so was her son. She was the heroic opposite of that mom I saw at Comiskey in July. I bet if the Twins had tied the game, she would have sighed, ordered a beer, and smiled indulgently as impish little Dakota continued to scream his lungs out. I bet she wouldn’t even use her cell phone to tell her husband how long to microwave the tuna casserole, since she’d be having dinner–and maybe breakfast–at the ballpark. Or if she felt she had to call in, she’d do it discreetly, between innings.

Given that my own mother is out of the running, because that wouldn’t be fair, I hereby nominate that mom for mom of the year.

Original comments…

thatbob: Maybe you ought to write letters to the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Catholic Spirit, Prensa Minnesota, and several other area papers. Some recognition is probably just what she needs.

Keep this in mind, potential hangers-on

Monday, August 30th happens to be one of the dates on which Brewers are offering their “Mastercard Grand Slam Ticket Pack,” which is four $28 tickets and a $20 concession voucher for $75 total. So it would be nice, and money-saving, if Levi and I could find two people to join us for the 7:05 game. (It’s a little unclear whether or not you can get that deal at the stadium, or if you have to buy them in advance…”seats are limited,” they say, but how many people are going to show up for a non-pivotal Brewers vs. Pirates battle on a Monday night? Nevertheless, let us know as soon as possible if you want to go.)

If you wanted to also join us for the 1:05 game in Chicago involving the White Sox and Phillies, so much the better, although the Sox don’t seem to have any promotions happening that day to make their tickets cheaper. I think our plan as of now is to head straight to Milwaukee immediately upon the conclusion of that game; however, if you can’t make it to the Sox game but can make the Brewers, we’ll work something out.

Original comments…

Levi: I’m sure my wife, for one, will attend the second game, and a second person (especially at less than $20 for a seat and some food!) will be easy to find. So go for it!

stacey: levi’s right. i Would like to attend the second game. i probably can’t get off work for the day game, sadly.

Jim: Does it ruin the road trip magic if we take the ‘L’ to the Sox game? I guess it shouldn’t, since it’s an “extra” game anyway.

Steve: as far as special promotions, that’s a half price monday.

stacey: if you’re going to take the ‘L’ to the sox game, i could drive the rental car to work (in hyde park) and then pick you guys up after the game at comiskey and we could shoot up to the city that beer made famous. anyone else who wanted to go could either get picked up along the way or meet us at sox park.

Jim: Thanks, Steve! I missed that. Hooray for cheap tickets! Stacey: Sounds like a good plan. I won’t tell Hertz if you won’t.

thatbob: Count me in for both games. BOTH games. Levi will just have to wait a couple more weeks for that money I owe him.

Jim: Yeah, you can give your money to ME instead. I have to say, we got two hangers-on faster than I thought we would. I’ll go ahead and order the Brewers tickets.

Levi: I assume we’ll pick up Sox tickets at the window?

The only caveat is that back before they began their current stretch of Oreck XL-quality sucking, the crowds at the walkup windows were impressive enough to cost those (like me) unprepared for their size a view of the first inning.

Jim: Even for a 1:05 P.M. game on a Monday? If Lee Elia taught us anything, it’s that it’s Cubs fans who don’t go to work, not Sox fans.

Fear not, because I can already predict that one of the themes of this trip is going to be me attempting to get us to games ridiculously early.

Levi: Is that why I’m posting this from the Wireless Intenet kiosk in front of the Davenport Swing ballpark?

Luke, hanger-on: Have you ever had a post get to 12 comments?

Levi: I would leave Jim to answer that, if you hadn’t just done so.

More trip preparations

1. I used the L.A. Times web site to stop my subscription for the two weeks I’m going to be out of town. As Levi might have expected, I’m fully intending to buy a local paper every day of the trip, except perhaps when we’re at my aunt and uncle’s house (because I think they get the Philadelphia Inquirer) and when we’re at his parents’ house (because they get the Carmi Times).

2. I finally remembered to call the Hilton Pittsburgh to request a rollaway bed, so that Levi doesn’t have to sleep in the bathtub, or curled up in a dresser drawer. Up to this point, I had been a little worried about the ability of the AAA web site hotel booking interface to actually communicate successfully with the various hotels’ computer reservation systems, but the Hilton did have my reservation in their system, so I guess we’re all set. “See you August 28th,” said the woman on the phone. Maybe I should have requested a room facing PNC Park, too, but I’m not sure they even have such a thing. (I think this is the only hotel on the trip within possible sight distance of a ballpark…I think the Holiday Inn Express in Detroit is a little too far from Comerica Park, with too many tall buildings in between.)

Original comments…

Toby: That’s the first time in the history of the U.S. that The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Carmi Times have been mentioned in the same paragraph.

thatbob: Actually, Jim, there is an ordinance that allows you to burn down tall buildings in Detroit if they obstruct a view and haven’t been used for anything in 50 years, so, you know, bring some matches.

Levi: Knowing Jim, I expect him any time we travel together, to have exact change for any tolls.

I’ll be more impressed if he also has exact change for any newspaper honor boxes he needs to use along the way.

And Toby, if you can schedule the pull-out section of the Times about Baseball Related Program Activities for the Monday, August 23rd edition, that would be great.

Toby: OK, but I’m going to need you to proofread it. In my last section (on the local summer baseball and softball teams), I forgot to mention the names of two of the businesses that sponsor the 40-some-odd teams in their respective cutlines and got a call from one of the omitted businesses, during which I was reminded (in a threatening manner) how much advertising that business buys with our paper.

I’m sure the same thing’s happened a million times at The Philadelphia Inquirer, don’t you think?

Jim: What the Philadelphia Inquirer has is the CEO of Citizens Bank calling the CEO of Knight-Ridder every time they don’t use the full name of the Phillies’ ballpark, I’m sure. But then it takes a while to trickle down to the people who actually work at the newspaper.

Weddings, etc.

My brother got married last weekend in Indianapolis. Stacey and I and all the family had a great time dancing and making fun of Matt and generally enjoying welcoming a great new sister-in-law.

I had the honor of being the best man. While the groomsmen were locked away in a room in the bowels of the church away from the ladies, we got to watch the Cubs/Giants game. Despite the interest in the game displayed by most of the groomsmen, the wedding was not delayed, and I had to sneak back during picture-taking afterwards to see whether Greg Maddux had moved up a notch on this list.

The weekend was a good reminder of how useful a knowledge of sports can be in social situations. Say what you will about alcohol as a social lubricant; give me a little bit of knowledge of recent developments in sports over an Old Fashioned any day when I’m going to be hanging around a group of people I don’t know very well.

P.S. Derek Zumsteg at USS Mariner has a good post about the bizarre obstruction call on Jose Lopez that handed the Devil Rays the game. (The archive link doesn’t work, so scroll down to Saturday’s posts.) There’s also a good, if lengthy and inconclusive, discussion at Baseball Primer. My understanding of the rules on obstruction is that obstruction of a baserunner is necessarily a physical act, and that, as no one (Including the umpires!) has a right to a clear view of the field, obstructing a base runner’s view can’t be obstruction. Maura, is there an official D-Rays company position you’d like to share?

Original comments…

Jim: Thanks for the link to the Baseball Think Factory comments. Seems like a fun group there, if they can come up with both a reference to the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and the phrase “Vince Naimoli’s daughter is crying like a baby.”

Levi: Do you agree with me that, though some evidence is introduced to bolster both sides of the argument, the “That call [stunk]!” side is stronger?

Levi: Oh, and Toby, something you’ll appreciate: Sunday morning I went for a run with Thys Bax. Thys humored me by allowing me to set the pace for our 12-mile run, but I still ended up really pushing myself because, well, I didn’t want Thys to get completely bored. Then when we were mostly done, Brandon showed up on the trail and ran part of the way with us. I was, of course, way outclassed.

Toby: Thys, by the way, folks, is 59 years old. Brandon is his son (graduated a year after Matt if memory serves me correct).

thatbob: A little bit of knowledge of recent developments in sports in unfamiliar social situations is just not as likely to lead to spontaneous making out with cute girls as a few Old Fashioneds are. But I guess if it’s also less likely to lead to throwing up all over everyone, then it has its place.

Willie and Bob (not Mays and Gibson)

I didn’t realize Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan were doing shows at minor-league ballparks this summer until I read an article about it in the L.A. Times this morning. (I can’t link to that article because it’s for subscribers only.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we can fit one of their concerts into our itinerary.

Original comments…

Levi: I’ll take this chance to repeat my two favorite Willie Nelson stories.

1) This one you may all know. In the mid-90s, Willie was asleep in his car on a Texas roadside. A cop decided to roust him out and search his car for pot. Pot was discovered, Willie was booked. Later, a judge threw out the possession conviction based on lack of probable cause for the search. According to the judge, the mere fact of being Willie Nelson does not give law enforcement probable cause to search you for pot.

2) The coworker of a friend of mine is from Arkansas. On a recent visit there, he went to his usual pot dealer to get some Arkansas pot, which he claims to be the best in the world. His dealer apologetically explained that he had no pot to offer. “Willie came through last week, and he bought all the pot.” All the pot.

Maddux: CCC

I TiVoed the Cubs-Giants game today, because they’re still inconveniently scheduling baseball games for hours while I’m working. This would not have been a bad choice for a national Game of the Week, but I guess Fox and MLB are still firmly committed to the “regional” concept for the Saturday afternoon Fox coverage. Too bad it’s nearly impossible to see any Saturday afternoon game other than the one being shown in your local area (they’re not carried on the MLB Extra Innings pay-per-view package).

I am really, really tired of people in the front row leaning way over to try to get foul balls, or worse, fair balls that have rolled foul and are still in play. During this game, someone went all the way over the rail to try to get a foul ball, but jumped right back over. Fox practically made him into a folk hero, to the point of including him in the “play of the game” poll…and his play was, of course, the choice of a majority of the cell-phone-using people who bothered to vote. I contend he should have been thrown out of the stadium.

Maybe I’m slightly jealous of people who get to sit that close, but I’d still like to see the year-by-year numbers of fan interference calls…although I guess they’d have to be adjusted for the fact that most of these new stadiums have more seats closer to the action than the stadiums they replaced.

Anyway, speaking of people who get to sit close, the one celebrity Fox could find in the stands was Jim Belushi (and he was sitting in an upper deck anyway). Didn’t any Fox stars want to go to this game? If I were a cast member on a Fox show, I would have demanded tickets for me and Caroline Dhavernas, late of “Wonderfalls,” who I believe still technically counts as a Fox star. (Wait a minute, by that same logic, I could also go to the game with Paget Brewster of “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” and Sarah Silverman of “Greg the Bunny”! All right, enough of my rich fantasy life.)

In conclusion, if Levi were near a computer this weekend, he’d probably be saying something about Larry Walker.

Original comments…

Levi: Does Jim Belushi even count as a celebrity? Even for Fox?

Jim: Jim Belushi is the star of a surprisingly popular sitcom on ABC. He’s got his name in the title of the show and everything! A lot more people have heard of him than have heard of Caroline Dhavernas, that’s for sure.

Toby: Is Paget Brewster related to Punky Brewster? Or is that a whole separate family of Brewsters?

Levi: When I returned from the rehearsal dinner at midnight (Stacey had fled earlier with the niece and nephew, because she was worn out from, well, being around the niece and nephew.), I turned on the highlights and almost passed out. Larry Walker? I wanted to call my brother or bang on his hotel room door or something. But then I thought more sensibly, decided he needed a good night’s sleep on his wedding weekend, and went to bed instead.

But I did wake Stacey to tell her.

Jason: Why would Fox be pointing out an ABC ‘star’? Couldn’t they find a shot of Calista Flockhart eating a hot dog?

Preparations continue at a fever pitch

With all the excitement over the songs earlier today, I forgot to post something else that’s related to the trip. Today, I bought a rain poncho. Sorry, Levi, it’s blue, not red, so if it rains at the Cardinals game, I will stick out like a sore thumb, or perhaps I should say a bruised thumb. But I’m all set for rain at the Expos game.

I also bought a new set of luggage. My former luggage was a high school graduation present, and if you remember luggage technology from 1992, this will sound familiar to you: the two big suitcases from the old set have tiny little wheels on the bottom, and I’ve never been able to adequately roll them along when loaded because they have a tendency to tip sideways, and the attached straps you’re supposed to lead them with are way too short. So I pretty much ignored the wheels after a while.

But thanks to the great strides in luggage technology over the last 12 years, the new set is of the type with the big wheels and the telescoping handle, and from trying them out on the way to the cash register at Target, and then through the parking lot to my car, they seem to be working great. However, we’ll see what happens after American Airlines gets their grubby hands, and their grubby conveyor belts, all over them.

My only regret is that if I was going to buy a new set of luggage, I should have bought it before my trip to New York last month, where I had to schlep my possessions through such scenic locales as the stretch of 8th Avenue in Manhattan between 50th Street and 48th Street, Grand Central Terminal, and the halls of the Marriott in Trumbull, Connecticut (okay, Grand Central actually is scenic, but it’s better when you don’t have to carry two pieces of baggage from the subway station to Lower Level Track 107 via the men’s room). There’s going to be much less walking with luggage on the baseball trip, I predict, unless the car breaks down and we decide to abandon it and walk to the next baseball game, rather than waiting for Hertz to send a mechanic out.

Anyway, the new set of luggage includes one bag that’s the perfect size to hold all the materials from AAA, it turns out, although it is still to be determined what exact configuration of luggage is going to accompany me on the trip. I realize I’d better leave some room for souvenirs, for one thing.

Original comments…

Levi: Jim, you mean those old suitcases weren’t specifically designed to tip over? I can’t imagine what else they were designed for, since they must have failed perfectly in every laboratory test.

I can hear music

First of all, Maura passes along this awesome link from ESPN.com’s Page 3, in which they list the at-bat songs for many MLB players. (Page 3? How many numbered pages does ESPN.com have now, anyway?)

And to fulfill a request by Cushie, here are the songs on the “baseball” playlist on my iPod, conveniently in one list. Levi and hangers-on, don’t click on the link if you want to be surprised in the car, although many of the songs have been named on this blog in the past, in several different entries that I don’t feel like going back and looking up.

Original comments…

Cushie: Awesome!

Luke, hanger-on: Here are some songs on the BRPA 2004 playlist I’ve been assembling since becoming a hanger-on (most of which you have already, and some of which have relationships to baseball and roadtrips that are tenuous at best):

Catfish, Bob Dylan
Two Bass Hit, Dizzy Gillespie
Bang the Drum Slowly, Emmylou Harris
Mrs. Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel
Pirate Jenny, Nina Simone
Yanqui Go Home, Camper Van Beethoven
I Could Drive Forever, Smog
On the Road Again, Bob Dylan
On the Road Again, Willie Nelson
This is Not a Song About a Train, Andrew Bird

Plus a CD’s worth of Bob Edwards-Red Barber chats and Barber highlights that I’ve been saving for the trip.

Jim, you have iPodRip, right?

Jim: I don’t have iPodRip or anything similar, mainly because I’ve never had a need to get music from my iPod onto my computer. Although if iPodRip can export playlists into HTML or XML, and it looks like it can, it probably would have come in handy when I was creating the song list!

thatbob: If you’re doing spoken word pieces, you really need to find the famous Lee Elia rant against Cub fans. And if you can find Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly singing “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg” then… then… then that’ll be awesome!

Dan: And if you need the Lee Elia rant, lemme know, I’ve got it in MP3.