Archive for Audio and/or Visual

Last week, my world’s collided. Let me explain: I work by day as a producer on a nightly current affairs television program up here in God’s city, Toronto, called The Agenda with Steve Paikin, producing one-on-one interviews on a myriad of topics, and moonlight as a very mediocre sports writer by night. The inimitable host of our program, veteran journalist, great Canadian, and the hardest working man in show business, Steve Paikin, is a huge baseball fan. He’s got a framed painting of Ted Williams in his office. I’m quite certain that if Steve weren’t a Boston Red Sox fan, he’d be perfect. And, so, when veteran Toronto Sun baseball scribe Bob Elliott got the call to Cooperstown, winning the 2012 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, Steve invited him into our studio for an interview. Now, Bob Elliott’s usually on the other end of this equation; he’s the one asking the questions. But when Steve Paikin invites you on The Agenda, you don’t turn him down. So Elliott sat down with Paikin, magic happened, and television was made.

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Listen, bespectacled reader, we don’t need to discuss the specific course of events that have led me to watch the above footage — from a June 2011 baseball game between the Cardinals and Giants — this footage of Maikel Cleto striking out Nate Schierholtz over and over and over again on a frigid Wisconsin night. Let’s just all agree that it’s the sort of thing that’d happen to anyone who happens to find himself with a digestif in one hand and a computer mouse in the other.

In any case, please take this opportunity to welcome both Maikel Cleto and what is probably his 92 mph two-seam fastball into your world. And your pants, too. If you’re into that sort of thing.

As noted earlier in these pages, managing editor Dave Cameron made his second — and probably final, because he’s a weirdo’s weird — appearance on MLB Network program Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by the vigorously coiffed Brian Kenny.

For the busy executives among us, a brief account of the footage above (kindly made available by MLB.com):

Coy Smile: 0:21

Nervous Swallow: 0:57, 1:29, 2:04

Frog Mouth: 2:05

Blinks: N/A*

Crack Analysis: Whole Thing

*At least so far as I can tell from a single viewing. Seriously, I’m not gonna spend my whole night watching this, people.

One imagines that having something in the vicinity of half-a-billion dollars has its advantages — like, for example, being able to send one’s children to boarding school the very minute they’re born.

We who do not own the means of production have this advantage, however: never once, while sitting in the 300-level of Miami’s American Airlines Arena, has anyone been almost concussed-or-worse by the fastest, giantest living human.

Link courtesy Juan C. Rodriguez of the Sun-Sentinel.

Wherein I continue to milk this gimmick for all it’s worth.  Today, rappers doing baseball stuff all things National League Central.

Houston Astros

Houston has a pretty good rap game going, but not a great picture-taking/uploading/archiving of rappers wearing Astros hat going, so you get Paul Wall in jorts.

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UPDATE: MLB.com has uploaded Cameron’s appearance to their site, so that all the world can remember this world-changing moment.

An enterprising member of the World Wide Web appears to have captured and uploaded to YouTube footage from managing editor Dave Cameron’s appearance yesterday (Monday) on MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential (link).

Absent from this clip — and I don’t know why, really — is the three-minute stretch during which Cameron made a series of horrible remarks about Brian Kenny’s mother, a lot of it in what I’m pretty sure was Polish.

Apropos of mostly nothing, here are three things that Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven has worn on his head before:

Cake Hat:

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I’m at work. On a Sunday. So, naturally, I’m procrastinating. Mere moments ago, I stumbled upon “Negro League Baseball,” by Natural Resource, a track I’d never heard before, on YouTube. Which makes this breaking news. Get it, “Heard this”? Oh, come on.

Anyway: Hip hop and baseball, two of my favorite things. Bless the Internet.

Baseball is not just a sport
It’s the verbal, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional level
That we are on.

Natural Resource: Baseball nerds.

Making an appearance on TV’s Conan on Wednesday, Detroit Tiger SuperAce Justin Verlander announced both to O’Brien and all of America that he will one day die either of congestive heart failure or diabetes — just not in those words.

There’s no more expedient a means for announcing to the world that one’s lovemaking is, like the mesquite plant of the Southwestern desert, both capable of puncturing a tire and delicious when combined with barbecue sauce — there’s no more expedient a means to this desirable end than the donning of a bolo tie.

That’s reason enough, of course, for celebrating this important article of decorative neckwear in these pages. However, in addition to these True Facts, there are also three baseball- and bolo-related images on the internet!

Let’s look at them, before mom finds out.

Here is a young man celebrating freedom with Hall of Famer Ted Williams:

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