Category: misc

Posts that don’t quite fit into any other categories.

Tipping at the ballpark

This is a short post, because I’m busy at work and probably will be right up until Friday.

Apropos of an earlier discussion about Bud Selig’s tipping habits, here’s a commercial about George W. Bush’s tipping habits at the ballpark. They’re not so good.

Beer prices in themselves seem to more or less set the value of tips at Wrigley Field. When they end in $.50, the vendors seem to get more tips, if only because they are very good at the little “You’re not really going to ask me to pass your two quarters all the way down the row?” pantomime. I have to admit that when the quarters hit my hand on their way to their drunken owner, I’m frequently tempted to send them back the other way, just to see what would happen.

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.

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.

A stadium by any other name

The Cardinals announced today that their new stadium will not be called Monsanto Field or Post-Dispatch Park or Casino Queen Stadium or [Help me out here, Tony. I need some more St. Louis companies to put here.].

For at least the next twenty years, the ballpark being built next door to Busch Stadium will be called . . . . Busch Stadium.

I don’t think anyone’s all that surprised. And while there’s no getting around the fact that it’s yet another corporate name, Busch Stadium has a couple of things going for it. It’s not just a corporate name, for one thing. It’s also the name of a prominenet family that’s been part of St. Louis for decades, and it honors August Anheuser Busch Jr. who more or less single-handedly saved the Cardinals for St. Louis in the 1950s. And it’s the same name we’ve been using for forty years. Consistency has some value. And finally, Busch Beer isn’t even Anheuser-Busch’s most popular product. We could have had something hideous like Tequiza Park.

This does, however, leave an opening. Tony, you need to start putting the pennies away so that in twenty years you can outbid Anheuser-Busch, giving us Custom Insurance Field. By then, maybe we’ll get to meet before games at the Pujols, Rolen, or Edmonds statues.

Original comments…

Jim: Steak ‘n’ Shake has always seemed like it should be a St. Louis company, although I think it’s headquartered in Indianapolis.

But I’m going to assume the new park narrowly missed becoming Schnucks Stadium.

Dan: I’ll meet you before the game at the Tommy Herr chapel and reading room.

Jason: I think in front of the new stadium there should be a beautiful fountain from which Natural Light should spew forth.

maura: dude, david lee roth totally tried that during the ‘a little ain’t enough tour,’ except his fountains were flowing with jack daniels (and iced tea in sheds located in dry counties).

my seats were too crappy to get near them. plus i was 16 and probably would have spit the jack out.

Let’s see, if I call in sick Friday and Saturday…

I’m trying to figure out if I can get up to Fresno for the Grizzlies game Friday evening. It’s Best of the Worst Night, so people get in free if they’re wearing paraphernalia related to the New York Mets (because of their 1962 season), the Ottawa Senators (1992-93), the Philadelphia 76ers (1972-73), or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1976). I happen to have not just a Buccaneers T-shirt, but an authentic orange and white Buccaneers T-shirt, i.e., the colors they were wearing in 1976. (Authentic, unlike this jersey, which has several things wrong with it, most notably the large red stripes on the sleeves.)

Granted, that’s a long way to go solely for a free ticket to a minor-league baseball game, but where else am I going to get to show off my old Bucs shirt? (I wore it to a friend’s house to watch Super Bowl XXXV, but that get-together was filled with non-football fans who didn’t fully appreciate the significance.) Maybe if I combined it with my Devil Rays cap, the Grizzlies would actually give me money at the gate.

Original comments…

Steve: Since you are on the West Coast, would any Seattle Pilots memorabilia count? They only won 64 games and they only lasted one year. That’s pretty bad. By the way, with someone approaching their 30th birthday (me) nothing says “You’re 30” like a bright orange historically inaccurate long sleeve Doug Williams jersey in size L

Jason: Since it’s about a 3 1/2 hour drive, you’d need to leave by 3 p.m. to make it.

I’m wondering if I should figure out a way to go along. I’d be willing to wear my Northwestern Wildcats hat (whose football team lost 34 straight games in the early ’80s), but it appears they’re only concerned with professional futility.

Just in time

According to this story, officials from the Major League Baseball Players’ Union met with Montreal Expos player reps yesterday to inform them that there would be no baseball in Montreal next season. The team’s new home hasn’t been decided, but it appears that it will be either Washington, DC, or northern Virginia.

Since one of the main reasons Jim and I are taking this trip is to see the Montreal Expos, I’m glad we didn’t put the trip off a year.

But before the Expos leave us, one more thing needs to be said: Major League Baseball killed baseball in Montreal. Though baseball in Montreal was never a good bet to be as big as in baseball’s best cities, the Expos were popular in the past, and there’s no reason to think that, with a winning team and smart ownership, they couldn’t be popular in the future.

Take a look at this chart of Expos home attendance through the years. From 1979-1983, when the Expos were winning at a .543 clip (picking up their one division title along the way and finishing second (to the Pirates) twice), the Expos averaged nearly 28,000 fans per game. Attendance fell along with the Expos’ winning percentage throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, but it didn’t utterly collapse until the late 1990s, on the heels of two fire sales and the loss of the 1994 postseason, which cost the best Expos team in 15 years its chance at a World Series.

If this were any other business, some smart young rich guy would look at those figures and decide to take a crack on turning baseball around in Montreal. But in the Seligian fiefdom that is MLB, the 30 owners thought they were better off with wrangling another taxpayer-funded stadium, depressing salaries for a few years, and trying (and failing) an experiment in Puerto Rico. And as for the remaining Expos fans, well, tough merde.

So enjoy your new Senators or Swamp Rats or K Street Killers or Suburban Sluggers or whatever, [insert name of Expos new home city or region here], in the new stadium you built them. But you might want to get started drawing up the paperwork on those bonds for 2035, when Zombie Selig will reveal that the stadium is antiquated and will keep the team from ever succeeding, and if you don’t build a new one, he might just have to authorize a move to . . . . Montreal.

Ya never know

The last two Cardinals games have provided an example of one of the reasons I like baseball. Day to day, you never know what kind of game you’ll get. One day, you hit five home runs and win 11-8. The next, you get three hits–two by your pitcher–and win 1-0.

You never know what you’re going to get, that is, unless you’re Barry Bonds, in which case you at least know you’ll get walked about 1300 times per game.

Halfway there

Well, we’re more than halfway there. When I was a kid, the pedant in me (which was, like 75% of me) was regularly annoyed by the demarcation of the All-Star break as the halfway point. Now that I know what it’s like to be an adult and once in a while need some days off, I understand better why three days off in the midst of a long season should be viewed as the halfway point, regardless of its mathematical accuracy.

So at the halfway point, it’s time for a quick list of the best things about the first half for me:

1) The Cardinals, and their position in the standings relative to the Cubs, the Astros, and the rest of the Senior Circuit.

2) Johnny Damon’s first at-bat of the season. Even more than the rest of his season, the spit-out-your-beer surprise of seeing him stand in that first night has made me smile for three months.

3) Scott Rolen

4) The Unit’s perfect game.

5) The Tigers‘ win total, one less than at the end of last season. Do you think they’ll just take the rest of the year off?

I’m sure I’ve missed some. For example, there’s no way that the Tigers’ season has been one of the five best things about baseball this year, even for Tigers fans. But I am impressed with their season, and I’m working, and listing Johnny Damon twice would be wrong.

So you should add your own top five in the comments. ‘Cause yours will probably be better than mine.

Original comments…

Steve: 1) The Cubs are being the Cubs
2) The White Sox are making baseball fun (at least for me)
3) Baseball Related Program Activities
4) The NL East Race
5) Ivan Rodriguez (his stats are crazy when you consider he’s a catcher. He hit .500 for the month of June)

Levi: .500?

That’s insane.

Oh, and if I expanded my list, I might include:
6) The AL looking like it might, just might have a different order of finish for the first time since the birth of the Devil Rays. The teams have all finished in the same spots every season since then.

Dan: 1) Mets finally giving me a reason to enjoy the day-to-day pennant races again.
2) Traditionally shitty teams doing really well, in nearly every division: Tigers, Rays, Brewers, Padres, (erm, Mets), Rangers
3) Jason Marquis establishing himself as the best Jewish pitcher since Steve Stone
4) Mets sweeping the Yankees and winning the season series, both for the first time ever
5) The Astros imploding.
**6) Johnny Damon — indeed, that first game was magic, and I was sitting here watching alone

2nd half wish list:
1) Mets sneak into the playoffs, I don’t care if it’s with an 82-80 record like it was in ’73
2) Someone hits Clemens in the head (or hand)
3) Someone hits Jeter in the groin
4) Rickey Henderson returns
5) Andy Baggarly breaks open the BALCO case

Toby: 1. A Hoosier from Levi’s sister’s town leads the All-Star voting
2. Blue Jays’ new logo/uniforms
3. Astros virtually out of the race
4. The Braves NOT in first place at the break
5. D-Rays’ and PIrates’ long winning streaks

Jason: 1. Finally getting to a Visalia Oaks game.
2. Finding a A&W Restaurant before the Oaks game.
3. Visiting PETCO park for a Padres-Cubs game.
4. Taking a pleasant weekday drive through the San Gabriel mountains before a Rancho Cucamonga Quakes game.
5. Watching Cal State Fullerton win the College World Series, giving me incentive to try to attend a game there next season.

Levi: How could I have forgotten the Braves’ struggles? That really is a top-five event. Go, Mets!

Note from the Big Apple

Yes, I was at Yankee Stadium for last Thursday’s 7-1 loss by the Devil Rays. I’ll post photos and more details tomorrow (or later Monday, given what the time stamp is going to be on this post), including some perhaps sacrilegious observations regarding Yankee P.A. announcer Bob Sheppard and my ability to understand what he was saying.

Actually, here’s an observation I’ll post right now: during the seventh-inning stretch, the Yankees play “God Bless America” (a recording of Kate Smith, in this case) and then “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” A disheartening number of people sat down after “God Bless America.”

Original comments…

Levi: Though I’m with you on the “Only one song should be played during the seventh-inning stretch, and that’s ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ (although I make an exception for Wisconsin, where tradition and history demand following it up with ‘Roll Out the Barrel’), I’m willing to give Yankee fans a pass for a few weeks.

After all, maybe they were worn out from booing Cheney recently.

Dan: Yankee fans, with a handful of exceptions, are bandwagon-jumping pricks. And they have been for the better part of 80 years.

Go Mets, woo!

Dan: Oh, and kids who like the Yankees are even worse.

That’s my life

Two quick notes:

1) Reggie Sanders, in his online diary for today, says that during the break, he’ll take his family out and do some fun things. But, he admits, “I will think about baseball on the off-day. That’s my life. I would like not to think about it, but it’s what I do, you know?”

Maybe MLB’s “I live for this!” slogan isn’t too far from the truth.

2) I can’t link to it, because it’s from a video clip, but Stacey alerted me to a wonderful photo on mlb.com
of Johnny Damon, hair everywhere, scoring the winning run in last night’s Red Sox/A’s game.

Original comments…

stacey: really, that photo was amazing enough that i’ve snagged it to share with our gentle readers. you can see it (in a probably not very legal way) here: GORGEOUS

Levi: I commented earlier to a coworker regarding the post about the kid having to leave early, “I’m kind of like a right-wing radio host with a tiny audience: I know what to throw them to get them all riled up.”

That photo clearly belongs in that category, too.

Jason: Like Johnny Damon, I not too long ago had a lot of hair. And, like Johnny Damon, I have cut it. Unfortunately, I have no photographic proof to that fact, but believe me, it’s true.

Or just look at a more recent photo of Johnny Damon. We’re identical.

maura: and the headline that night? ‘it gets hairy, but red sox win in 10th’

Dan: Was I the only one who really disliked Johnny Damon when he was with the Royals? He was so damn clean cut and seemed a bit snooty, even. Now, he friggin’ rules.

I guess it could be I was the only one who paid attention to him at all.

thatbob: If I was the umpire I would call Johnny Damon safe as soon as his batting helmet leapt across home plate – a full second before Damon himself. Also, if I was his batting helmet, that would be cool!

Steve: I guess Dan can’t vouch for this but I have had a full-blown man crush on Johnny Damon since the Royals days. He just seemed like the perfect ballplayer looks-wise. Now, if it was 1973 he would still look like the perfect ballplayer. Of course, in our postmodern times, its perfectly legitimate to argue that he is still the perfect ballplayer looks wise. PS-my all time favorite ballplayer looks-wise is John Kruk but I never had a man crush on him

Levi: And John Kruk has gotten all . . . boring, now that he’s on ESPN. His suit is always clean, his tie is tied, his hair has that same mix of superglue and horse polish stuff in it that Jeff Brantley uses, and he never drinks a beer or eats a hot dog or talks about his missing ball on the air.