Beloved Mascot’s Name Makes ‘the List’

In a shocking twist to the buzz surrounding today’s release of the Mitchell Report; the results of Senator George Mitchell’s 18-month investigation into performance-enhancing drug use in Major League Baseball; only one name comes as a huge shock to fans, long-time St. Louis Cardinals mute yet jovial mascot Fredbird. Cardinal center-fielder Jim Edmonds had this to say, “I don’t understand why everyone’s so shocked by this news. The warning signs were there. His head alone has been getting bigger & bigger for several seasons now & let’s face it; nobody has that much energy without some serious doping.” It’s true that while the players tend to physically wear down over the course of a game, Fred has been going full-tilt from two hours before each game until well after the last fan left the stadium day-in & day-out. However the casual fan probably wouldn’t notice because he’s rarely in one place longer than a minute or two.  

“Of course I knew he was on the juice,” long-time friend Cincinnati mascot Mr. Red said. “But what are you going to do? He wouldn’t listen to reason & I’m certainly not the kind of guy to rat-out a friend.”

Fredbird was unavailable for comment, but 19 year-old Brandi, a representative from Team Fredbird, told us that he’s anxious just to accept whatever punishment is handed down, get it over with & get on with the business of entertaining & invigorating lackadaisical fans. She then giggled & twisted a strand of peroxide blonde hair around her index finger before skipping away.

The repercussions of today’s news are yet to be determined, but the consensus at the Hot Shot’s sports bar on Manchester is that it will deeply affect the sports world in a markedly negative way. Buzzed from a liquid lunch, fan Roberto R. Robertson slurred, “It’s hard not to lose your faith in a sport that would let a guy like Fred hang himself like this just to make a bigger buck. There’s more to baseball than the bottom line. There’s also overpriced beer & foam fingers, & they can’t take that away from us! WOOOOOOOO!”

Shall I Rant? I Shall…

Okay – I’m going to make this short & sweet. Otherwise it will just sound like a teenage girl’s endless whining over not getting picked in cheerleader tryouts…

Yadier Molina was snubbed in this year’s Gold Glove voting!

What the… ?!?!

The winning catcher, LA Dodgers’ Russell Martin, isn’t a bad catcher by any gauge. But the best defensive catcher in the league? Not even close.

• Martin threw out just 29.7 percent of runners attempting to steal a base. Yadier threw out 54 percent.
• Yadier allowed only 23 stolen bases; Martin allowed 82 for the second most in the league behind San Diego’s Josh Bard.
• He also led the league with 14 errors!

Sports columnist Jeff Gordon wrote, “NL managers and coaches know if they give their runners the green light to run on Molina, bad things will happen. Runners get thrown out at second, runners get picked off first, potential big innings die . . . yes, it’s best not to run on Yadier.

And yet these same NL managers and coaches decided that Russell Martin is the best defensive catcher in the NL.

Interesting.”

Okay – I’m done ranting now. Go about your business. There’s nothing to see here.

what’s wrong with me?

I have never been very star-struck. Famous people for the most part don’t impress me. And I’ve always feared that their real life personalities would somehow ruin my perspective of them & turn me off to their professional careers. I definitely don’t want to meet any of my favorite musicians on the basis that the ones I like are most likely either really weird or just miserable bastards.

As a child I once met Ernest Tubb, “the Texas Troubadour,” on a Nashville street corner near the Country Music Hall of Fame. That’s probably the only unplanned chance meeting with fame that I’ve ever experienced.

My lovely daughter, when she had the chance to meet her idol, Jewel, could only choke out a few words through her tears. Those words? “Can I hug you?” To her, that meeting was profound; a moment that she will always remember. Sometimes I wish I had that sense of awe & wonder instead of this overpowering, sometimes crippling cynicism.

I did “meet” my favorite baseball player of all time, Ozzie Smith as well as a few other players at the Cardinals “Winter Warm-Up” a few years ago. And this weekend I met a few more. Tyler Johnson & Brad Thompson were in the card shop that I frequent (Fox Sport Cards & Collectibles on the square in Marion, IL). The two young Cardinal pitchers were there for a signing and were supposed to be joined by Chris Duncan who, to be honest, was the big draw for many people. But unfortunately he missed his flight & had other commitments to attend to (namely, his girlfriend if I understood correctly).

I suppose I could’ve taken that chance to chat, tell them how much of a fan I am, ask them who they’re rooting for in the playoffs, something – anything… but I didn’t. I simply handed them their respective cards, they signed them, I said “Thank You” & left. Not very exciting, huh? Oh well. At least I do have their autographs.

 

They seemed like genuinely nice guys when they talked to other people though!

Brain Sludge

• I have a dry erase board hanging on the cubicle wall just to my left when I’m facing my computer. I am quite certain that it is approximately 1920’s or 30’s vintage (even though they weren’t really invented until the 90’s). I found it in the old plant before we moved to our new facility five years ago. I use my dry-erase board for a very specific purpose; keeping my to-do list. Lately, my list has grown exponentially without the benefit of being able to erase or mark-out anything. So I have to keep writing smaller & at odd angles in order to fit it all in. The last item on the list? Buy a new dry-erase board.
• Speaking of lists, I never thought I would get to this stage in my life, but I am there in full force. I remember absolutely nothing without the aid of a list. I have to have to-do lists, things to pick up on my way home, places to go. I have to remind myself constantly of what needs done, or I just never do it. Then there are those times when I don’t take the time to make a list or a note, like when I’m leaving the office at the end of the day or right before I go to bed, so instead I physically place something in my way or do something out of the ordinary with the expectation that when I see it the next day, it will jog my memory & force my brain to remember whatever it was I was too lazy to write down the day before. Although it generally makes me think, “why the heck did I put that there?”
• Baseball is basically over for the year. I know the League Championship series’ haven’t even started, but my team isn’t in it – nor are the teams I root against, so what’s the point? Unfortunately I’m sure that’s what the TV networks are thinking about too. None of the four teams in the playoffs at this point are what they refer to as, “big market” teams. So they actually have a chance to break a record; the lowest rated World Series ever! Go team!
• This weekend is Carrier Mills’ “Catskin Days”, my little home-town’s annual autumn celebration. Which leads to the obvious questions, where the heck did they come up with the term “Catskin” & why should it be celebrated? I may have to conduct some research on this topic.
• As I do every Fall, I have started watching an assortment of new TV shows & have already started the process of giving up on them. The first victim after only 2 episodes; Reaper. It’s like Buffy without everything that made Buffy good. The only high point, Satan is played by Ray Wise, Laura Palmer’s creepy father in Twin Peaks. But alas, that just wasn’t enough to keep my interest. Chuck may soon suffer the same fate if the story line doesn’t pick up quickly as well. The one show I feel like I’m really going to stick with is Pushing Daisies. Which of course can only mean one thing… It will be canceled soon.
• I sure hope someone made some fresh coffee. I better go check – have a good day!

Random thoughts on last night’s game

Now there’s a professional athlete with a sense of responsibility to his fans! On the night of his very own bobblehead promotion, Yadier Molina (one of my favorite players on the current team) hit 3 singles including a seeing-eye walk-off RBI into left field to win the game in the 10th inning. Already probably the best defensive catcher in the league, he’s also starting to come around as a dangerous clutch hitter. It’s even more impressive when you put it into the context of being scratched from yesterday’s game because, according to him, he spent most of yesterday in the bathroom sick.

I’m not sure most people know how important a good catcher really is to a team. Even Cardinal fans have become a bit spoiled to great catching, going from the amazing Mike Matheny (who played 252 consecutive games without a single error) to the formidable in his own right Yadi! A catcher can control a ballgame from so many different angles to the point of making or breaking a team. And Yadi’s one of the best. If he doesn’t start getting more gold-glove votes, I’m going to… I’m going to… I’ll set the building on fire!

It was also a night where a young Adam Wainwright pitched like an ace again without getting to claim a win. He pitched eight innings, only allowed 1 run on 4 hits in addition to knocking in the only run for his team up to the point when he was taken out. It’s just a shame that a kid can pitch like that nearly every time he’s called on, and can’t get any better run support from his own team. Wagonmaker is just an awesome pitcher cut from the same cloth as Cy Young winner Chris Carpenter. I can’t wait to witness the two of them on the same team in a few years. It’ll be like the Diamondback’s Curt Schilling & Randy Johnson in 2001. (With this season’s team being compared to Monty Python’s Black Night in the Holy Grail, I have to look to the future to feel a little better about the whole mess!)

a Black Cloud over a Sea of Red

I’m not sure if it makes it easier or harder to swallow when your team drops 10 out of their last 11 games, and you know it’s NOT because they’ve given up. They’re not strolling around lackadaisically with their heads hung low. They really seem to be trying; diving into potential injury, leaving blood, sweat, tears, and sometimes eyeballs (sorry Enc) scattered all over the field. As LaRussa has been known to say, they’re playing a hard nine. It’s just that their hardest isn’t as good as their opponents’. The pieces that are left after you factor in all of the regular players that they’ve lost this year to injuries, surgeries, rehab, death… well, they just don’t seem to be enough.

They’re not eliminated mathematically, but it seems to be inevitable. The defending World Champions are likely to finish the season well under .500. And I have to be able to say, that’s okay. You just can’t be dominant EVERY year. We will always have 2006! It’s just too bad that the doors we’re leaving open this year happen to be for the Chicago Cubs.

Oh yeah, and I will happily add my Tony LaRussa bobblehead (closing day stadium promotion) to my collection, even on the cusp of his probable departure from the team. (But that’s a subject for another post!)

Baseball Limericks 2007

As the end of the season draws nigh
With slim playoff hopes on the line
Tony keeps playin’
With a patched-up rotation
Making Cards fans collectively whine

Okay – this is my first attempt at baseball poetry for this season. I wrote a few last year as well & thought it was high-time I gave it a shot again. Feel free to write & add your own – maybe we’ll get something started.

Mike Shannon Quote of the Night

I was only able to listen to about 30 minutes of last night’s game between the Cards & the Astros as I was attending “Trade Night” at Fox Sport Cards in Marion until around 9:00. But before I could even get to the highway, Lance Berkman hit a little broken bat pop-up down the first base line that landed (arguably) barely foul in the 6^th inning off of the Cardinal starter Braden Looper. Shannon described just what a close call it was by saying, “If you stuck your money clip between the foul line & the baseball, you’d be on welfare.”

A Kick in the Asterisk

Barry Bonds broke the record. As the Onion reported, “Destruction of National Pastime Given Two-Minute Standing Ovation.” I am not a Barry Bonds fan; not at all. But I am a baseball fan which is why I suppose that I’m interested in this debate whether I want to be or not. To some extent I am conflicted, like many St. Louis Cardinal fans, because I was one of the idiots jumping up & down screaming in my bedroom when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ record by poking his 62^nd homerun of the season over the left field wall of Busch Stadium in 1998. I was one of the guys defending ol’ Marco Solo when questions arose about performance enhancing drugs. I was even appalled at the low Hall of Fame vote count that he received last year. So now that similar accusations & controversies are swarming around the big B, do I defend him too? My initial reaction is, “no – I don’t like Bonds – I did like McGwire.” But how valid is that?

The truth is he broke the record. So, maybe it was done a little differently than Hank Aaron did it. It’s a different time – a different era. I don’t know that that makes is right or not, but in the homerun crazy time of Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, et al, the use of many performance enhancing drugs was NOT against the rules. It could’ve also been enhanced by differences in the balls, bats, ballparks, or a myriad of other factors. One can even argue that the big homerun record chase is what saved America’s pastime from the black cloud it had been under since the big Strike of 1994. I have also wondered what it is exactly that steroids are supposed to accomplish. The bulkiness or musculature of a man has very little to do with whether or not he can drive a 95 mph fastball out of the park. A feat like that would also take a combination of timing, focus & natural ability. The few guys that I’ve been around that I knew were shooting ‘roids had none of those qualities. They were just strong & mean.

When Takeru Kobayashi broke onto the Competitive Eating circuit, literally doubling the previously held record by devouring 50 Hotdogs & Buns in a staggering 12 minutes, he did it by using an odd new method. Instead of just eating the hotdogs by chewing and all of that nonsense, he used what was quickly dubbed the Solomon Method by his fans. He removed each dog from its respective bun, broke it in half, shoved both halves in his mouth simultaneously, his throat basically becoming a little conveyor belt, & dipping the bun in a glass of water before shoving it in too. For Kobayashi this method worked. No one has been able to master it with any success since. It clearly gave him an arguably unfair advantage. But has his record been appended with the all-powerful asterisk? Does it make the record any less valid? Wouldn’t “Mastering the Kobayashi Solomon Method” make a great rock album title?

By the same token, Cy Young who holds many of MLB’s pitching records & even has an annual award named in his honor, is thought of to be one of the sport’s greatest pitchers of all time. But when he started his career; he pitched underhanded, fouls were not counted as strikes, the mound was closer to the batter, he didn’t wear a glove for his first 5 seasons, pitchers were allowed to physically manipulate the ball with scuffs, saliva, etc, they would use the same ball until it literally started to unravel, and he pitched in what is commonly referred to as the “dead ball era.” So, what happens if his records are broken? Who gets the asterisk? Things are different now. Rules have changed. What do we do?

I’ll tell you my opinion of what we should do. We conform to our pre-defined criteria for what constitutes the record. Once the record is broken, it’s too late to change the rules. And if it’s broken – it’s broken. Give the man his award, and move on. Don’t stop in the middle of the game for the player to make some stupid speech. Clap for the guy, let him tip his cap, and get back to the game. Throw the asterisk out the window.

As for respect, well that’s a whole ‘nuther can-o-worms now, isn’t it?

Ouch! That hurt!

Okay, so when your pitching staff gives up 15 runs in the first 4 innings of a ballgame one can safely assume that something has gone horribly wrong! Right? Changes must be made! And I stand by my sincere belief that KIP WELLS HAS GOT TO GO! You gave it your best try Dave Duncan, but this time your “take a struggling pitcher & make him a contributor” experiment didn’t work. Admit defeat – get Reyes back up from Memphis – and move forward!