Archive for Audio and/or Visual

Fantasy baseball players are comfortable with the idea. We often root for a player above all else – we need those statistics, even if it means that Nick Swisher hits a home run against our beloved Sawx. But this, this group of “McCann’s Cans,” this is a horse of a different tune. This looks a little bit… crazy. Maybe something’s in the water in Atlanta, because Gary Sheffield also got the fanatic treatment.

It’s not all Atlanta’s ‘fault,’ though. Check out this lovely section dedicated to Kevin Maas, called the “Maas-tops,” highlighted in this descriptive quote from Wikipedia.

“Like Mattingly, Maas was a left-handed batter. As a result many of his home runs went into the right field stands. About halfway through the season a group of a dozen or so young ladies began wearing “Maas-tops” to Yankees home games and sitting in the right field stands. Whenever Maas hit a home run to right, the girls would get up, remove their tops and jump up and down until Maas finished circling the bases. However after a few home runs the women were banned from entering Yankee Stadium.”

Ah, stupid Yankee Stadium security guards. If only there were photographic evidence of this group. Then again, this sort of player-based fandom could actually be coming from Atlanta. Here is probably the high-water mark, the moment when wave broke and returned home to wash the makeup off.

Did Kenshin Kawakami know this group even existed? Not quite “Frenchy’s Franks,” was it? I suppose this next one counts, although they never adopted a clever moniker.

All this next group needed was a little shoe polish. Instant fun!

Who could forget the ConeHeads? All sorts of fun. Let’s humbly suggest some more fangroups, in case someone out there enjoys getting dressed up, shall we? Apologies up front, but I’ll try to get this started: Adrian Beltre‘s Bell-Trees? Eh, what is a Bell Tree anyway. Robinson Cano’s Canoes? Might be a tough costume. Shin-Soo Choo’s Choo-Choos? That’s a winner.

Photo H/Ts: McCann’s Cans Facebook Page, Atlanta Journal and Constitution (Sheffield), Talking Chop (Kawakami), Polar Bear News (Pandas), The700Level (Fasano).

Ever since “Mad Men” and, more relevantly, those Fred McGriff/Tom Emanski spots nudged their way into the Zeitgeist, I’ve been ruminating at length about baseball’s place in the culture of advertising. And by “ruminating at length about baseball’s place in the culture of advertising,” I mean, “contriving a way to post a couple of YouTube videos that I think are pretty funny.”

Anyhow, how has our beloved sport been best used in the service of selling crap? I would submit that the two spots that follow are examples of the sub-genre of baseball advertising at its most penetrating, its most hauntingly excellent. Come with me, won’t you?

First up, Mark Littell for the “Nutty Buddy” …

Money quote (among many): “You don’t feel it directly in the, uh, testi-cleez.” – Chris Sabo

And next up, Bronson Arroyo for some perhaps still-solvent Ford dealership trapped (shielded?) within the loving arms of greater Cincinnati …

Money quote: “!@#$, would you believe a double?” – Bronson Arroyo

Can these be topped? Your move, readers …

Cease your typically ceaseless toil, America, and/or put all those crying babies down: Andy Smith of Bugs and Cranks has excavated from the fossil-rich soil of the internet this YouTube Viewing Event.

What you’re watching when you watch this video is a seven-minute segment from Inside Pirates Baseball, circa 1990 — documenting the invention of the team’s official theme song, “You Gotta Believe” and a music video for the song itself.

Among the many splendors, you can expect to find:

• Men with comically Italian surnames (see: Pontieri, Ernie; Falotico, Frank and Ray).
• Men with comical other things, too (see: hair, facial and otherwise).
• A version of the world in which the Pirates are not terrible.

Furthermore, if you’re the sort of person who’s shaken and/or stirred by coincidences, then this one might appeal to you: just minutes before notice of the video came across my gold-embroidered RSS feed, I read these exact words from Bill James’ Baseball Book 1992:

The Pirates over the next decade can be seen as engaged in a war between the field level management, which is superb, and the ownership, which is out to lunch. The shortcomings of the Pirate ownership group are certain to manifest themselves in the performance of the front office, and will ultimately undermine the ballclub. So it’s kind of an interesting study, to see how long good talent management can stave off the effects of incompetent financial management.

In fact, it wasn’t that long, at all. Looking at the Pirates’ Baseball Reference page, one will notice that 1992 was, in fact, the team’s last season above .500.

H/T: WHYGAVS

Down in Arizona at the Fall League, there were some freaky things going on — and I’m not speaking about the loud lady with the flags and the one-woman chants up front. Take a look at a couple of these strange athletes.

It’s not polite to laugh at his pitching motion, or call him a “Large Lincecum,” because that’s just mean. Also, Josh Collmenter pitched five innings with eight strikeouts and no walks on November fifth – pushing his record to 3-0 – so he cares little for my tawdry jokes. But, it is a little funny. Joel Henard of Baseball Daily Digest interviewed Austin Romine at the AFL Rising Stars game (last clip of the bunch) and asked Romine about Collmenter’s delivery. According the Yankees’ catching prospect, it seems that Collmenter’s funky release point is part of the reason for his success. If I’m hearing Romine correctly in this clip, it sounds like the high release point makes his curveball harder to pick up right away, and that just reminded me of garik16’s excellent piece debunking the idea that the release point was important to a curveball’s success. Then again, as Mike Fast showed us in his recent treatise on release points, we are still learning a lot about them since they aren’t specifically tracked by the pitch f/x cameras.

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You might have caught word of this around the interweb, but it appears to be a real thing now: Peter Miller’s Jews and Baseball: An American Love Affair has opened in New York and Los Angeles — and will be doing the same in Kansas City today (Friday, the 19th). A general opening will occur sometime in the following weeks.

So far as a proper review goes, it’s with all my heart that I regret not being able to offer one. However, allow me to state with totally undeserved authority five things about the film:

• Sandy Koufax agreed to be interviewed for it. (That’s him at around the 1:53 mark.)
• There appears to be no footage of fly balls clanging off Ryan Braun’s glove. This I find terribly misleading.
• Director Peter Miller has worked pretty extensively with Ken Burns, meaning this film is almost definitely well-crafted.
• It also means that viewers should prepare to be bullied emotionally by musical cues (the hopeful “whoosh” around the 1:28 mark, for example).
• Being bullied by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones is considerably less objectionable.

H/T: Ben Platt at MLB.com

That man up there who knows all the words to 1979’s genre-defining single “Rapper’s Delight” is, in fact, not all the members of The Sugarhill Gang combined M.A.S.K.-style to form an uber-rapper, but rather Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter. The man next to him, on the ones and twos, is DJ Jazzy Jeff, who once combined with the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith) to sing the songs of our lives.

“Yes, but how’s this related to baseball?” maybe you’re asking. To which I answer: (a) the event in question was the opening of a Philadelphia-area sporting goods store known as Mitchell & Ness and (b) there’s at least two or five Phillies-related items in the background there.

Jerks.

H/T: RJ White

Taken from a blog called “A Conversation on Cool,” this picture of Willie Mays playing stickball in Harlem in 1954 is practically a coolgasm. The soft polo shirt, the believable smile, the flexed muscles and the grinning crowd combine to create a picture worth much more than a thousand words. There’s a lot going on here, and all of it is awesome.

But one cannot avoid a pang of something less grin-ful. Is it nostalgia? Not quite it – a person that wasn’t alive then cannot really miss the time. Perhaps it’s jealousy? But we see great athletes all the time. A combination of the two emotions might describe the feeling. We might be jealous of the grinning children in the back, and that jealousy may be tinged with nostalgia for own youth.

Another picture, then, of a moment from our own time.

To be clear, this is not to suggest the photographs could even be close to equal. One is almost sartorial in nature and its composition and art are there for a completely different aim than the other. One picture is a moment in time, the other more of a documentation that David Wright did, indeed, give some awards to the After School All Stars after hanging out with the children and giving them pointers. And this is not – at all – to denigrate the efforts of Wright and his foundation. His work is important, and good.

But put the two pictures near each other, and some of that nostalgia or jealousy crystallizes into something a little bit too grumpy for this correspondent. Is a moment featuring unbridled (and unplanned) access to a player like Willie Mays possible today? Is there a player today that is such a Man of the People that he could find some kids, join in their local game, and create a moment this cool? As much as we can pride ourselves in the progress we’ve made, has our culture edged out real moments such as this?

Imagine you’re a player (of any sport) driving down a busy street in autumn, 2010. You spot a pickup game, and you want to join in. Then you may think of the demands of your contract, your agent, your publicist, your team, and perhaps even your personal wealth. Would you join in?

H/T: Tommy Bennett

Former MLB GM and current crack TV personality Jim Bowden details for the unwashed the exact goings-on of the GM Meetings, taking place this very second in hell-on-earth beautiful Orlando, Florida.

If you don’t have time for — or can’t access — the video, here are some things I learned from it:

• Every GM is permitted one weapon.
• The film Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange-fame, was actually based on the sordid events of the 1978 GM Meetings.
• When he was a GM, Jim Bowden didn’t play golf during the Meetings because he was always, and I quote, “bangin’ in the rooms.”

H/T: The Real Dirty

This video is the only one on the entire internet that (a) features Met managerial candidate Wally Backman but isn’t also (b) riddled with invective.

Other videos, such as this one of Backman getting ejected from a game during his one-year stint as manager of the unaffiliated South Georgia Peanuts, appear to be some kind of amazing Dadaist experiment in filth.

Note: while all the videos are pretty excellent, they’re suitable for work if and only if you’re employed as an insult comic.

H/T: Mike Silva and Playing for Peanuts

If your household is anything like mine (read: rambunctious!), you have may disagreements from time to time. In my personal bungalow, one such discussion revolves around the San Francisco Giants closer, and whether his persona is all cynical and whatnot. I find Brian Wilson entertaining, no matter his motivation.

Well, The Beard just got a little weirder. There is now a Fear the Beard video game that features the eccentric closer battling evil monks, tomahawks and the like, all the while feeding on the energy of the crowd – personified by orange rally towels. Though game play is rudimentary, it is perhaps not the point.

“Fear the Beard: The Baseball Odyssey Game” was made on a site called GameSpark that allows amateurs like you and I to make our own 2D and 3D games. As the site proclaims, you can make “holiday games featuring friends, family and pets.” Making a game based on your family pet may sound abhorrent, but it also becomes a quick inside joke that all the family can enjoy. Rudimentary game play means your aunt can enjoy making Sparky eat all the pies in the house!

So this really isn’t about Brian Wilson. It’s about continuing to bask in the glow that is a world championship. It’s about having an inside joke with all the rest of the Giants fans. It’s about smiling just a little longer.

There will always be time to come back to earth and discuss things like Brian Wilson benefiting from wide strike zones more than any other reliever in baseball, as J-Doug at Beyond the Box Score did just this Wednesday. There will always be time for cynicism and analysis. For now, just jump on the trampoline and fire some fastballs at that monk coming from the left.