Tuesday, March 01, 2005
The Big Oh-One
Welcome to Smarch. I am pysched. For baseballs flying over the Green Monster all summer long. I really love watching the Red Sox hit home runs. Home runs, people. Home runs. I guess I'm one of these people they were trying to cater to when they juiced the ball and the players, but screw home runs in general, they're only good if the Red Sox hit 'em. I never understand when people say "I like pitchers' duels," or "I love the long ball." I'll tell you what I love: The Red Sox pitchers pitching no-hitters and the Red Sox hitters walloping dongs. That sounds like an Australian Rules football team. The Walloping Dongs.
Alright, if it's a neutral game, or whiffle ball, I guess I can say I'm a hitting person. No, I take it all back, pitching's cool, too.
But still, when I'm listening to a game on the radio, and suddenly, say, the neighbor needs to borrow some Electrasol dishwasher detergent, but says it's no rush, am I gonna wait til the commercial after the Sox hit or after the other team hits? I'm gonna wait til after the Sox hit, because I want to, no, I feel I need to be there when they're up, because that's when they have a chance to score. Maybe this is my problem: Listening to the radio all my life, I've realized that pitching on the radio just isn't the same as hitting on the radio. I've never said the words, "Aw crap, I missed a fly out thrown by Bruce Hurst and caught by Dwight Evans!" But if you miss a home run by a Red Sox player, even on the radio, you feel you really missed something.
In real life news, the Supreme Court has made it illegal to execute people under 18 in the U.S. Hey, whatta ya know? We actually took a little step toward becoming a civilized nation...
Moving on, there's this thing in New York City, near the many Starbucks of Astor Place, that's, like, a 12 foot tall cube-statue. And at it's base is a flat, circular piece. If you push on the thing really hard (one person on each side works best), it starts to spin around on its base. Which looks really cool, if you didn't know it could spin, because the thing looks like a huge, immovable piece of stone. So me and Chan will always (alright, once or twice) charge at the thing when we're walking in that area, and start pushing at each side of the thing, spinning it around, and then casually walking on. I'm convinced tourists think I'm the coolest person in the world when we do this. And Chan, 2nd coolest, I guess. Well, terriblejobfully, the city has put rope around the "thing." You can't spin it anymore. Come on now. TJ. Maybe it got spun one too many times by people who thought they were the coolest person in the world. Also, I bet it has some special significance other than being "the thing that spins." But I'm not aware of what it is.
Sam, about what I was saying about Torre: I agree that they did a great job of getting to a position where they could win. My point is, doesn't going only that far go against everything the yankees stand for? At this point, they're just not gonna get any credit from me or anybody else for "almost winning."
Did the Red Sox try to take any credit for being one strike away in '86? No, and they actually could have, considering it was the closest they'd come in 68 years. Like in '75, we always did get credit for at least playing in one of the greatest Series' ever, and even Pete Rose, a member of the winning team, said that "there were no losers" in the '75 Series.
Whereas the yankees don't get any mulligans. Especially when they totally blow a series they should have won--as is their new tradition: '01, '04.
And when you say the odds are against the yanks, as in, they have a better chance to lose/blow a series because they're in the playoffs so much, well, I know what you mean, but the odds of a team blowing a 3-0 lead were about infinity to one. I wrote about this about a year ago (Torre talking about the team's great "near-win" in '01), see my post, brilliantly titled:
"Michael Puts the Kay In WeaKness." It's toward the end of the post.
Speaking of about a year ago, this blog turned 1 yesterday. You know I was 18 minutes shy of starting this blog on February 29th, 2004? Had I done that, it's first birthday would not have been until 2008. I always thought it would be cool to have your birthday be on Leap Day. The closest I've ever been to even knowing someone who had this anomaly was: I was standing in an elevator in college, and a girl in there was telling her friends, "We're taking my grandma out for her birthday, because she's turning eighteen." Nice.
So anyway, I thank all of you who have read my ridiculous writing over this past year. Me and a lot of other Red Sox blogger-types definitely picked the right year to start documenting this stuff. It's really cool how you can make friends over the internet, but I still think some of you are just figments of my imagination :) To all the other Sox bloggers, I'm glad we have this little fake, I mean "'net" community, and I'm proud to be a part of it, even though a lot of the time I feel like Brandon Fraser's character in Airheads, when he lamented about what it's like for your band to play show after show to audiences made up entirely of the other bands and their girlfriends. But, hey, I've been in that situation with my band, and those can be the coolest shows. So it's cool. And thanks to the non-Red-Sox-bloging readers who I've made friends with, all because I strted writing my thoughts on a screen: That lady who lives in my town who got proposed to on the Fenway scoreboard, that Sox fan dude who moved to Chicago ("Chicago Land"--how did that term ever catch on? "Okay, everybody, this is now Hartford Land! Just start calling it that."), that dude from Jersey who was literally the first person to contact me about this blog, the Rhode Island native who's out west, everybody. (Names withheld to protect against stalking.) And one of the smartest, weirdest, most interesting people ever to live in the same town as Hammer. Write me again someday, man! Oh right, thanks to my "real life" friends for reading, too. It's always weird when I start telling you something that I've already written on my blog, so I have to say, "I don't know if you saw this on my blog already, but..." and it's really awkward, and I feel like a big phony for sometimes skipping that disclaimer and just pretending I'm saying something I just thought of.... Okay, I'm done. Nobody gets thanked again until next year. I'm too busy trying to come up with stuff that no one could possibly care about except me.
Alright, if it's a neutral game, or whiffle ball, I guess I can say I'm a hitting person. No, I take it all back, pitching's cool, too.
But still, when I'm listening to a game on the radio, and suddenly, say, the neighbor needs to borrow some Electrasol dishwasher detergent, but says it's no rush, am I gonna wait til the commercial after the Sox hit or after the other team hits? I'm gonna wait til after the Sox hit, because I want to, no, I feel I need to be there when they're up, because that's when they have a chance to score. Maybe this is my problem: Listening to the radio all my life, I've realized that pitching on the radio just isn't the same as hitting on the radio. I've never said the words, "Aw crap, I missed a fly out thrown by Bruce Hurst and caught by Dwight Evans!" But if you miss a home run by a Red Sox player, even on the radio, you feel you really missed something.
In real life news, the Supreme Court has made it illegal to execute people under 18 in the U.S. Hey, whatta ya know? We actually took a little step toward becoming a civilized nation...
Moving on, there's this thing in New York City, near the many Starbucks of Astor Place, that's, like, a 12 foot tall cube-statue. And at it's base is a flat, circular piece. If you push on the thing really hard (one person on each side works best), it starts to spin around on its base. Which looks really cool, if you didn't know it could spin, because the thing looks like a huge, immovable piece of stone. So me and Chan will always (alright, once or twice) charge at the thing when we're walking in that area, and start pushing at each side of the thing, spinning it around, and then casually walking on. I'm convinced tourists think I'm the coolest person in the world when we do this. And Chan, 2nd coolest, I guess. Well, terriblejobfully, the city has put rope around the "thing." You can't spin it anymore. Come on now. TJ. Maybe it got spun one too many times by people who thought they were the coolest person in the world. Also, I bet it has some special significance other than being "the thing that spins." But I'm not aware of what it is.
Sam, about what I was saying about Torre: I agree that they did a great job of getting to a position where they could win. My point is, doesn't going only that far go against everything the yankees stand for? At this point, they're just not gonna get any credit from me or anybody else for "almost winning."
Did the Red Sox try to take any credit for being one strike away in '86? No, and they actually could have, considering it was the closest they'd come in 68 years. Like in '75, we always did get credit for at least playing in one of the greatest Series' ever, and even Pete Rose, a member of the winning team, said that "there were no losers" in the '75 Series.
Whereas the yankees don't get any mulligans. Especially when they totally blow a series they should have won--as is their new tradition: '01, '04.
And when you say the odds are against the yanks, as in, they have a better chance to lose/blow a series because they're in the playoffs so much, well, I know what you mean, but the odds of a team blowing a 3-0 lead were about infinity to one. I wrote about this about a year ago (Torre talking about the team's great "near-win" in '01), see my post, brilliantly titled:
"Michael Puts the Kay In WeaKness." It's toward the end of the post.
Speaking of about a year ago, this blog turned 1 yesterday. You know I was 18 minutes shy of starting this blog on February 29th, 2004? Had I done that, it's first birthday would not have been until 2008. I always thought it would be cool to have your birthday be on Leap Day. The closest I've ever been to even knowing someone who had this anomaly was: I was standing in an elevator in college, and a girl in there was telling her friends, "We're taking my grandma out for her birthday, because she's turning eighteen." Nice.
So anyway, I thank all of you who have read my ridiculous writing over this past year. Me and a lot of other Red Sox blogger-types definitely picked the right year to start documenting this stuff. It's really cool how you can make friends over the internet, but I still think some of you are just figments of my imagination :) To all the other Sox bloggers, I'm glad we have this little fake, I mean "'net" community, and I'm proud to be a part of it, even though a lot of the time I feel like Brandon Fraser's character in Airheads, when he lamented about what it's like for your band to play show after show to audiences made up entirely of the other bands and their girlfriends. But, hey, I've been in that situation with my band, and those can be the coolest shows. So it's cool. And thanks to the non-Red-Sox-bloging readers who I've made friends with, all because I strted writing my thoughts on a screen: That lady who lives in my town who got proposed to on the Fenway scoreboard, that Sox fan dude who moved to Chicago ("Chicago Land"--how did that term ever catch on? "Okay, everybody, this is now Hartford Land! Just start calling it that."), that dude from Jersey who was literally the first person to contact me about this blog, the Rhode Island native who's out west, everybody. (Names withheld to protect against stalking.) And one of the smartest, weirdest, most interesting people ever to live in the same town as Hammer. Write me again someday, man! Oh right, thanks to my "real life" friends for reading, too. It's always weird when I start telling you something that I've already written on my blog, so I have to say, "I don't know if you saw this on my blog already, but..." and it's really awkward, and I feel like a big phony for sometimes skipping that disclaimer and just pretending I'm saying something I just thought of.... Okay, I'm done. Nobody gets thanked again until next year. I'm too busy trying to come up with stuff that no one could possibly care about except me.
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