Archive for Audio and/or Visual

Video essays are the best  kind of essays. And the excellent one you’ll find below is by Sportsnet’s Stephen Brunt, in my opinion the finest sports journalist the great nation of Canada can lay claim to. Enjoy.

It doesn’t happen often: A player for the ages turning up on your favorite team. In a perfect world, Roberto Alomar would have stayed a Blue Jay longer. In a perfect world, there would have been more championships to go with that magical pair. But what a great thing to have had him here, at his best. And now, to have him bring the Blue Jays to Cooperstown.

Brunt’s more than a journalist; he’s a poet. That, my friends, is how you wrap up a video essay, with those words, and Roberto Alomar’s Hall of Fame smile.

That clamor you hear is the people’s collective demand to be introduced to the 1976 AL starting All-Stars. As is the case with anything having anything to do with baseball and or matters of the heart, I’m here to satisfy.

Witness George Brett in “young man somewhat agape at the possibilities before him” mode! See Thurman Munson exchange pleasantries with a Red Sock of Boston! There’s an understandably self-serious Ron LeFlore! Toby Harrah has a puzzling coif! Rusty Staub is somewhat gigantic! And most and best of all: Gaze upon the still photograph of a certain starting pitcher and tell me all is not well …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeT4AyXUu2Q&playnext=1&list=PL1DD909EC17590A1F

Also: Kick its ass, Dave Cameron.

In case you haven’t read the relevant press release, let it be known, bespectacled reader, that the Phillies will be hosting a 1980s Retro Night this Friday at Citizens Bank. While that particular event promises to be awkward in all the ways one imagines it could be awkward, it’s had the tonic effect of directing the author (after some super-high intense web-surfing) to the above-embedded video from Game Five of the 1980 NLCS between Philadelphia and Nolan Ryan’s Houston Astros.

Please join me, reader, won’t you, as we experience this experience together?

0:13 — For the first time ever, Larry Bowa is caught on film expressly not gesticulating wildly at someone or -thing.

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If this is how it goes down on the team bus, well, I was wrong. Very wrong:

Big ups: My childhood friend @25th_Hour. He’s good people.

Yesterday, Mr. Dayn Perry shared the story of the irascible Billy Martin and his irascible love for Realistic Hone-Video Baseball.  You may have found yourself wondering as to the identity of the second gentleman that would drive such a nice guy to such an uncharacteristic furor.  That man was none other than the famous author and editor of the Paris Review, George Plimpton.

The early eighties saw a pitched battle between the Atari and the Intellivision, holding up to society a mirror for the deeper international tensions that marked the era.  As in the Cold War, Plimpton and Martin waged a war of words, seeking to win the hearts and minds of the people.  Billy Martin played the part of the folksy populist, seeking to win America’s heart.  George Plimpton, recalling a fully-coifed Adlai Stevenson, employed logic to appeal to the minds of the citizenry.

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In case you haven’t noticed, at NotGraphs we’re not into dumb things like “timeliness” or “relevance.” Hence, even though this series of outtakes from Season 1, Episode 5 of HBO’s Eastbound and Down was uploaded by YouTube user xKZ91 on September 30, 2009, it hasn’t really been seen until today — i.e. the day it was expertly embedded into a post on the present and awesome site.

The principal players in this scene are Will Ferrell as Ashley Schaeffer, Danny McBride as Kenny Powers, and Craig Robinson as Reg Mackworthy. The principal mode is transcendence. The principal feeling in your soul is completion.

I consider myself a rather feverish defender of Colby Rasmus against the mewling hordes who would trade him away for, say, Rick Honeycutt. However, my devotions to Mr. Rasmus and his flat bill, which makes him look fly, are shamefully lesser than those of this young lady …

No, I’m not going to mock impressionable teens when they undertake something with earnestness. Instead, here’s a decidedly partial listing of things that “Fire Burning in the Outfield” is better than: Creed, the poetry I wrote in college, seafood, the NFL, Broadway musicals, Rick Reilly, “Two-and-a-Half Men,” tribal-armband tattoos, Nickelback, people interested in Casey Anthony’s whereabouts, the body politic. I could go on, but I need to watch that again.

So where’s your hip-hop paean, La Russa?

(Loving ballad to reader Nick for the 411.)

Man of a Thousand Employers Billy Martin knows a thing or two about a thing or two about real baseball. As such, it should come as no surprise that Martin is profoundly impressed by the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game that is in his midst …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D54sGd7lUYQ&feature=related

Once upon a time, there was a distinct line between Actual Baseball and the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game. But then the sorcerers at Atari Video-Gaming Concern came along and blurred that line to the point of invisibility. Billy Martin told us so. Like sinners at a tent revival, we have no choice but to heed his words.

Who among us has not struggled with a gadget in the manner of a baboon straining to crack open a coconut? Who among us, I say!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Kh-tOUSWKK8

While I fear and loathe robots as much as the next man, it may, I fear, be the digital camera that is the first contraption to go “Skynet” and kill us all. As Gouverneur Morris admonished us, “When the computers take over U.S. Cellular Field, then you’ll know war — a final, determinative war — is afoot.”

(Robot hug: Blame It on the Voices)

The extemporaneous nature of broadcasting makes for many a hazard. After all, there can be only so much stagecraft involved when the events that drive the broadcasting aren’t preordained. Chip Caray turns a hit into an out, Ernie Anastos gives the weatherman a rather curious directive (NSFW!), and so on.

Now what happens when you introduce crowd shots into this volatile melange? Chaos. What happens when those crowd shots are of 20-somethings disinclined to resist their beery urges? I’ll tell you: silence — beautiful, beautiful silence, awkward in the extreme — followed by a noble yet failed effort to smother the silly-giggles …

History teaches us that Daniel Webster won the debate over protectionist tariffs only after he stuffed his paw down the bodice of an onlooking chaste maiden and thus reduced Senator Hayne, his loyal opponent, to guffaws, spit-takes and high-fives. I have no doubt that the current debt-ceiling loggerheads will be resolved only when one of the combatants makes with the groping.

Thankful boob grab: With Leather