Last night, I watched one of the worst baseball films I have ever seen.
If you have not yet seen Trouble with the Curve, I hope you will spare yourself the full-on shitsperience of it, instead consuming the following abridged version, complete with screencaps!
TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE
Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout in the Braves organization who yells at his pee.
Blu-Ray: The only way to watch a man with an enlarged prostate urinate.
According to its associated Facebook group, Boog City, which probably isn’t named after Boog Powell, “is a small press now its 20th year. It’s also an East Village community newspaper of the same name. The press has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry and various zines, featuring … theme issues on topics ranging from baseball to women’s writing, Louisville, Ky. to The Ramones…”
According a post in said Facebook group, Boog City is putting together another baseball issue; presumably anyone can submit baseball-themed poems or art.
A previous baseball issue of Boog City is available for viewing, the premise of which, in the words of editor David A. Kirschenbaum, was this: “A major league roster has 25 players on it, so I found 25 poets I dig who were willing to write an original baseball poem. I then assigned them each a position on a baseball team, from starting pitcher to backup first baseman, and everything in between. They were then told to pick anyone in the history of baseball who has ever played their position, be it in Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the minor leagues, college, a kid from the schoolyard, or anyone else and write a new poem about them.”
Recently, NotGraphs’ own Jeremy Blachman drew attention to the “best shape of their lives” cliché that’s bandied about at the onset of every spring training.
Mr. Blachman enlightens us as to what shape a player is when he’s in the best shape of his life, but for some players, their own best shapes — let’s call it their “spirit shapes” — break the mold. One of those players is Delmon Young. His best shape is…
With the hot stove cooling off, and with pitchers and catchers reporting to training camps in just two weeks, Major League skippers have begun tweaking their cliches, flushing their last few Marlboros down the toilet, and shaking the dust out of their fogey folds.
The NotGraphs Quote-Gathering Seals, an elite, highly-trained yet unpaid team of erstwhile Humanities majors is on the job, surprising managers in their foyers, cars, showers, and storage facilities to gather the most inane candid quotes possible regarding each manager’s preparations. Here are a few choice selections:
Bruce Bochy, World Champion San Francisco Giants
Bochy:
“One thing that was successful for us last year was a clean bullpen. We had a no-tobacco/no-candy wrapper policy in the bullpen last year, and Sergio [Romo] developed into a star. He’s a very tidy guy; it helped him mentally.
“This year, we want to bring that to the dugout, too. A big boy’s pants are a clean pair of pants. We want to set an example for the younger guys.
“This, ah, whole cleanliness thing, though — it doesn’t apply to the manager’s office. Now get out of my Pert-Plus!”
Yesterday, NotGraphs editor Carson Cistulli attended the Brewers On Deck event in downtown Milwaukee.
In the posts that Mr. Cistulli makes at Fan- and NotGraphs today, he might brag about how his time at said event was “behind the scenes” thanks to his new status as a member of BBWAA; he might write about a surprisingly witty comment by Ryan Braun; he might relay how very approachable some players were; he might even tell you that he couldn’t bring himself to talk to Bob Uecker for fear that the only question he could have possibly asked Mr. Uecker is, “Will you be my grandpa?”
Under less-informed circumstances, I would look forward to reading about any and all of the aforementioned topics, especially as Mr. Cistulli, who you might have noticed has a certain facility with language, might present them. What Mr. Cistulli does not have, is a sense of obligation to his readership, nor to the American public in general.
I know this because I know the following:
1. that Mr. Cistulli, yesterday, at the Brewers On Deck event in downtown Milwaukee, witnessed Dennis Haskins, AKA Mr. Belding;
2. that Mr. Cistulli did not take pains to discern why the fuck Dennis Haskins was just chillin’ with people in Milwaukee, at a Milwaukee Brewers offseason event;
3. Mr. Cistulli does not plan to even mention — in what might be an oppressive number of posts concerning Brewers On Deck — the appearance of Mr. Haskins at an event where both of them, presumably, held similarly exclusive access to things like a “meat-sandwich-only sandwich spread.”
When pressed as to why he would not even deign to mention Mr. Haskins’s mysterious presence at the event, Cistulli waved a characteristically limp and dismissive hand, saying, “It’s too easy.”
For prodigious talents such as Mr. Cistulli, talents for which entire subsidiary websites are created, it is too easy to give the public what it wants — nay: what it deserves. It is too easy to link Mr. Haskins’s connection to baseball. It is too easy to indulge in the blogability of a personality such as Dennis Haskins.
Well, I am no great talent; I am easy; I am not too good, Mr. Cistulli, to give the NotGraphs readership what they want.
And what they want is to more clearly imagine you, Mr. Cistulli, cradled in the arms of the man you dismissed so limp-wristedly.
The readership will also feel vindicated to know, Mr. Cistulli, that Dennis Haskins is a bigger man than you are — quite literally, though also figuratively. For even though you will not so much as acknowledge him, Mr. Cistulli, Dennis Haskins would like you to know that he very much supports your Twitter feed, such as it is.
And now the readership has been served properly, Mr. Cistulli. Take note. Please also take note that you left your monocle on my chaise lounge.
Pictured below, among the ephemera of my bedroom office, is a First Edition (Fifth Printing, though) copy of A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball (1967) by Leonard Koppett, lent to me by a friend. In subsequent editions the title was changed to A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball, because, well, people who aren’t “men” are baseball fans, too.
For some reason the lamp has a sticker on it that reads “Spay or Neuter”.
In the introduction, Koppett makes explicit his assumptions about his readers: Read the rest of this entry »
Jose Bautista is a bilingual gentleman. When he tweets, he tweets in full sentences that are often adequately punctuated. Significant tweets, he translates into English if first tweeted in Spanish, into Spanish if first tweeted in English). He is dapper.
Jose Bautista, surely, is not unaware of the sometimes awesome differences of expression in the two languages that he speaks. Consider especially the discrepancy in hashtags of the following tweets — the first the original tweet in English and the second Mr. Bautista’s own translation:
It was a different time, you understand. 1957, or ’58…
It was 1957. The Braves had just returned home to Milwaukee after besting the New York Yankees in the World Series. A crowd of 750,000 people — a number greater than the entire population of Milwaukee proper even at its peak in the early 1960s — met their hometown nine (and then some) in the streets to celebrate.
The Milwaukee Sentinel of the day, its front page bestamped with a large, red, racist image of a Native American…
…relished the fact that the team defeated was the Yankees, depicting them as, among other things, “bushed.”
It was a different time, you understand.
