I’m too busy today to really comment on how poorly the weekend went for the Cardinals. So all I’ll do is share with you the jack-o-lantern Stacey made Saturday. She also made a Cardinals one, but I don’t have a photo yet.
Cushie: Stacey is a genius.
Jim: My co-worker Joe at first thought the Johnny-o-Lantern was Photoshopped. Perhaps after Halloween, Stacey can mail him the desiccated husk of the pumpkin.
I think, at this point, all I can do is quote Levi’s post from way back on April 5th.
I may have a new favorite non-Cardinal player.
Last night, we had a couple of people over to watch the opener between the Red Sox and the Orioles. We settled in, started the TiVo, and the first image of the season caused everyone to gasp in sheer, unadulterated awe. Johnny Damon, over the winter, turned into a god. He grew out his already shaggy hair so that it hangs over his shoulders, trailing out of his batting helmet or cap. And he grew a beard. It was hard to concentrate on what he was doing during his first at-bat, because all anyone in the room could look at or think about was all that hair. Then, on his first play in the outfield, he was coming in for a ball, not too fast, and it looked like there was no hope of his cap falling off. Everyone was disappointed. Then, like a silent prayer being answered, the cap popped off his head and his glossy locks floated free. There was much cheering in the Rocketship.
I apologize for not having a link to a photo. I haven’t seen one today, which just tells me, once again, that the majority of sportswriters have been doing their jobs so long that they no longer really love sports. Otherwise, today’s headlines would be along the lines of: Damon’s Hair, Beard Open a Glorious Season.
You know it’s going to be a great year now.
maura: and look at that kid tonight!! looks like the trim worked!!
Steve: If I wasn’t taking another crack at joining the foreign service tomorrow I would come over and show everyone the Johnny Damon autograph on my boobs. I still liked him better with the buzz but whatever.
I stand corrected!
I feel bad that, at the best time of the year for baseball, I’ve been incommunicado. Work has just been too busy. But I couldn’t put off at least posting a few post-season thoughts.
1) I’ve always liked Jorge Posada, but I like him even more now that I learn (from Luke) that he buried Fox Sports’ absurd new “Diamond Cam” a few nights ago. The Diamond Cam answers a question that fans have been wishing they could see since before the invention of television: What would a hitter standing in the box look like if you were a zombie just about to dig his way out of his grave right by home plate? Bob deserves the credit for realizing that it was a zombie’s point of view that Fox was representing. He also deserves credit for groaning, zombie-style, every time the Zombie cam appears.
2) Last night, we had a nice little crowd at the Rocketship. Sarah brought her knitting and some fine, fine cobbler. Sandy brought his computer and some silicon chips, and Bob brought his appetite and his fine, fine zombie impression. Stacey fell asleep on the couch, but woke up for the good parts. And a couple of audience members had the confidence in our boys in red to go home before the end.
3) One point that I’m sure King Kaufmann is going to touch on in his Salon column today: one part of the three-headed cliche monster that Fox has saddled us with in this series said late in last night’s game, “One problem for the Astros is that they haven’t been able to get Brad Lidge, their best reliever, in the game.” Which, of course, is not true. The Astros have chosen not to get their best reliever in the game, because their manager, Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner, has not wanted to use Lidge except in a save situation. Only, if you bring in someone else to pitch to Pujols and Rolen in the 8th inning of a tie game, you’re not ever going to have a save situation. And suddenly you’re in a 2 games to none hole.
4) What can be said about the Red Sox? Sad, sad, sad. Here’s hoping that losing to the Yankees won’t make Johnny Damon reconsider his grooming habits.
5) Baseball Reference has the 2004 stats up. That was quick. Not that many of those links are to 2004, but you folks already know what happened in 2004.
I’m still busy busy busy at work, but I couldn’t let the first games pass with no comment, so here’s a quick post with no links, mainly designed to get other people’s impressions of yesterday’s games.
1) I know one game does not a series make, but I very much enjoyed the dazed look that Odalis Perez wore when he left the mound in yesterday’s Cards/Dodgers game. The last time a team hit five home runs in a game in a division series–wait–no team had ever done that before. It was a good start.
2) I was a bit bothered by the curtain calls at Busch Stadium yesterday, though. Curtain calls seem to me to be a bit disrespectful. I know players feel like the crowd is compelling them to come out, and they have to do it to shut up the crowd, but like a band after playing a perfunctory encore, they should just ignore the noise. Eventually it’ll go away. No matter how hard I stomped my feet at his show, Nick Lowe wasn’t going to come back out and play “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
3) The Red Sox did as expected. I expect they’ll do more of the same in games 2 and 3. And Johnny Damon’s hair seems to be even longer than before: it’s down past his shoulders.
4) I finally saw Scooter the Talking Baseball last night. Acting as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, Joe Buck said, “And now, to tell us some more about the change-up, here’s Scooter.” And there he was, unsettlingly flesh-colored, with a weird stitching mouth and backwards ball cap. Until that moment, I was still trying to make myself believe that he was a figment of Jim’s imagination. But no: Fox really does think kids are this stupid.
5) After the umpires took back the Sierra home run last night, deciding that it was foul after all, I decided that the only thing better than a Yankee making an out is a Yankee thinking he’s hit a home run, then making an out. I decided that every time a Yankee hits a foul ball–even just a grounder–the umpires should wave their fingers for a home run, make the hitter run the bases, then confer and send him back to the plate. Now that would be fun.
Levi: Oh, and how could I have forgotten the way the radar gun reading bursts into flames any time a pitch gets above about 92 mph? What a wealth of new excitement that brought to my enjoyment of the game! Thank you, Fox! Thank you!
maura: that near-hr was ruben sierra’s, actually. he promptly struck out.
Levi: Thanks, Mo. I fixed it.
Jason: When is Fox going to bring out the blue dot to follow where the ball goes? And when will we see Calista Flockhart eating a hot dog?!?!?
stacey: i was DEEPLY disappointed that sierra was not required to run the bases in reverse.
Think us seeing 11 games in 11 cities in 10 days was an accomplishment? A man named Charlie Hamilton went to all 30 major league ballparks over this season, traveling around North America by bicycle, raising money for charity, occasionally staying in motels like this one, which probably isn’t listed in the AAA book.
His web site is a little bit behind on updates, but that’s understandable, since he was traveling around North America by bicycle for much of the baseball season. I know he did finally make it to the Red Sox-Yankees game on September 26th because it was mentioned in the L.A. Times.
His journal entries are amusing, and Levi and the hangers-on who regularly ride bicycles will probably enjoy them even more than I do. But he also makes pronouncements I think we all can get behind, such as, “I got to see more of [Johnny] Damon, and he’s acting a little weird. When he signs something or other for someone, do you think he signs it ‘Johnny H. Damon’?” and “In my book, anyone who spoils the cat is fine people.”
The Fenway Park grandstands and the .406 Club (behind the glass)…
There’s a monstrous wall in left field, mostly painted green…
Home team batting order, with Johnny Damon at the top…
Johnny Damon in the field in front of us…
The right field foul pole, just kind of in the middle of the stands, which are at a very shallow angle at that point…
Moon rising over Fenway Park…
I can’t get away from Amtrak…
The final line…
I assume the headline would make more sense if I’d spent more time in Boston…
Some thoughts on Fenway Park and the 3-1 Red Sox win we saw.
1) It’s wonderful when something you’ve heard about all your life fully lives up to its billing. Fenway did. It’s a nearly perfect ballpark. Really, pharmacy there’s not a lot I could say about Fenway that’s not already been said elsewhere. Everything you’ve heard is true. It’s cozy enough that even from our seats 13 rows up in dead center, unhealthy we felt close to the action. The long rows and tight spaces discourage the sort of incessant milling around that the crowds at, say, Wrigley Field are prone to. And while the high walls and blocky upper deck block any view of the neighborhood, that means that once you’re in Fenway, everything is centered around the game. The ballpark maintains an enclosed, insular feeling such that even the drunk fans gave the impression of being at least somewhat attentive, and most fans were concentrating on every pitch. It was a wonderful place to see a ballgame.
2) The current ownership of the Red Sox, having decided that, rather than attempt to extort a replacement for Fenway from the city like the previous owners attempted to do, they would take advantage of having one of the best ballparks in baseball while still taking every chance they could to squeeze more money out of it. To that end, they’ve made some changes that I suppose might bother longtime Sox fans, but that I thought were actually pretty good. They added seats to the top of the Green Monster. They added some seats to the roof of the upper deck. They added (I think) another section of upper deck just past the end of the grandstand in right. And, to me the most surprising: they seem to have talked the city into letting them more or less take over Yawkey Way on game day. Turnstiles are set up in the middle of the street, and once you’re past them, you’re in the park. Towards the back of the outfield grandstands, it appears that they’ve actually moved the exterior walls of the park out onto what would have been the sidewalk, allowing the Sox to open up what had formerly been a cramped concourse under the stands. They’ve used the space to make navigating the park easier and to put up more of the things the contemporary fan is said to want: food stands, urinals, and more food stands. It’s a successful alteration, one that I think I wouldn’t even have noticed had I not been there on a non-game-day tour in 1993.
3) If I didn’t know that Paul Harvey is a Midwesterner, I would have thought he was working as the Red Sox public address announcer last night. The announcer had Harvey’s voice, inflections, tone, and cadences. Jim and I both expected him to end his announcements with “Good day.†Regardless, he was without a doubt the best PA announcer we’ve heard on the trip. Late in the game, with the crowd absolutely ecstatic singing along to “Sweet Caroline†between innings, he began to announce a pitching change for the Tigers. Noticing that the crowd was still shouting “Bump-ba-dah,†he paused, let the last notes of the song pass, and completed his announcement.
4) The guys behind us, four early twenty-somethings down from New York for their first Fenway game, were the sort of drunkies who tend to bug me a lot at Wrigley, in part because they’re always up and down and milling around. But these guys just didn’t bug me that much. They were loud, but a lot of their talk was about the game, and much of the time, when it was off-topic, it was fairly entertaining. Like when one guy was talking about Emeril, and another guy had never heard of Emeril, and the first guy spent ten minutes explaining who Emeril is, complete with a lot of: “You know–Bam! Bam! That guy–Bam!â€
5) I do have one suggestion for PA operators at stadiums nationwide: just because a band records a song about your team/ballpark, you shouldn’t play it unless it also doesn’t suck. The only dissonant note in the whole night was the four minutes, pre-game, we had to spend listening to a terrible country (Country? In New England? Why?) song called “Having a Ball at Fenway.†It sucked more than the Blue Jays song; the only reason it wasn’t worse overall was that it wasn’t like spreading throw-up all over the seventh-inning stretch with a butter knife the way the Blue Jays song was.
That song aside, though, the organist and PA people were solid. The organist began the game with “Selections from Jim’s iPod,†which began with “Walk Away Renee†and went on to “Eight Days a Week†and “After the Gold Rush,†among others. Later, I–who usually am not excited all that much by stadium crowd singalongs–got a big kick out of hearing the crowd sing along to “Summer Wind,†then go absolutely brains-melting crazy over “Sweet Caroline.†It’s as big as “Hey Ya!â€
It was odd for me to see Red Sox fans–who generally appear to be some of the most attentive fans in baseball–doing the wave and bouncing beach balls.
6) Everyone knows that the Red Sox are Yankee-obsessed. But Jesus, people. “Yankees suck!†chants cropped up without provocation, and anti-Yankee t-shirts were selling nearly as well as Johnny Damon shirts. It’s like the slacker kid in high school constantly writing mean things about the cool kids in his notebook. Sure, I’ve got sympathy, but at the end of the day, he keeps doing it, and he’s just using up space in his notebook he could be using to transcribe Violent Femmes lyrics.
7) The Red Sox scoreboard advertises a new service: if a fan feels his enjoyment of the game is being hindered by, say, drunk and rowdy fans nearby, he can, rather than wait for an usher to show up, call the security hotline on his phone. Not that I’m a fan of using the phone at games, but given that Wrigley Field ushers never seem to be around when drunks begin chucking peanuts at everyone in sight, I could imagine being able to phone security might be helpful. The trick would be avoiding getting a beer dumped on your head while you phoned.
8) And Johnny Damon got a couple of hits, stole a base, scored a run, made a couple of catches. And the Mike Timlin made another great appearance out of the Sox bullpen. And the Sox won, running me and Jim to 6-0 on the trip.
Johnny Damon, MVP
Johnny Damon, MVP
Who could e’er compete with thee?
Thy tresses steal the hearts of fans,
Thy beard surpasses any man’s.
Though sportswriters may disagree,
The cognoscenti are with me,
And ladies coast to coast can see:
You’re super-cute — you’re MVP!
The Hirsute Hero
Oh, Johnny Damon, when you walked,
Why did you not steal second?
And having stolen second, chalked
Up an easy steal of third–
With each advance your helmet flying
Off behind you in the dirt?
I worry that you’re just not trying,
Perhaps you fail to understand
Just why it is we show you love.
Here in this distant foreign land
We like your play, but way above
All else we love your beard and hair
Unfettered by your helm or hat,
Free-flowing, lovely, everywhere.
So, in the field, remember that
We want to see you run and dive
Your cap fly off, your hair set free
Its flowing tresses so alive.
And on the bases, don’t forget
Your fans are waiting patiently.
Whene’er the pitcher comes to set,
For you to take off instantly.
Steal second, third, and even home.
Run, run — that’s what we love you for!
We even promise not to moan,
If you’re thrown out — we’ll love you more!
stacey: levi, you’ve never written any poetry for me . . . is it because i don’t have a beard?
Johnny Damon’s Beard: Thank you very much.
Johnny Damon’s Earlobes: Hey, what about me?
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
