Much like you, I slogged through this day encumbered by the grim assumption that, once again, I would not see the final outs of Dennis Martinez’s 1991 perfect game broadcast in French. Thankfully and mercifully, I was wrong:
The Constitution teaches us that Jesus spoke American and killed the dinosaurs. But French is okay, too.
When you survey base-and-ball enthusiasts about the World Series most recent, they’re likely to remember championship phenomena like Albert Pujols’s three home runs in Game 3 or L’Affaire Bullpen Phone or the Rangers’ nihilistic failures in Game 6 or Zooey Deschanel. Those are all noteworthy or, in Ms. Deschanel’s case, prepossessing in the extreme, but they’re not what you should cling as winter approaches and the baseball-less world turns to cold shit.
No, you should remember when Mr. Pujols, astride a motorcycle at home plate, took a moment’s respite from signing autographs to hit a home run with his fist. Then you should remember that the Rangers, in the throes of Game 6, undertook a mound celebration before the game was even over. Then you should remember that Messrs. Pujols, Freese and Trophy traveled across a fiber-optic network and emerged from your TV to party with you in your living room. And then you should remember that “party” is always a verb.
Those were the days, lads. Those were the days …
What emotion is the Cards’ skipper feeling right now?
During the first game of the world series, the booth had a chance to talk to Tony La Russa about emoting in the dugout. They pointed out that Ron Washington had a much more expressive style and asked the Cardinals manager about his emotional state.
To paraphrase the stoic response (delivered with a smirk), La Russa said that he was broiling on the inside. And that Washington’s style (“when you do something good, show your emotions“) was fine as long as it came from a genuine place.
Popular psychology has a preference for emoting. The American Pyschological Association states that anger “turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression.” Recent medical research even suggests that a single tear can help reduce allergies and reduce pain from arthritis — and maybe even help regulate the immune system.
What do our psychological cornerstones have to say on the subject? Would they want La Russa to emote more?
Thanks to the joke-cracking excesses of Sophocles, it was, for a long time, no longer funny to make puns out of people’s names. For centuries this was a reliable source of Comedy Gold and, on more than one occasion, spared the stinking human animal from extinction. Inevitably, though, fresh produce wilts, and comedy is and has always been a nutritious vegetable.
But, lo, despair not! When French industrialist Jean-Sebastien D’Internet, for whom the Internet is named, invented the moving image in 1997, puns made out of names were disinterred and revived as a thing that can be useful and even amusing. Doubt this? Take off your tight-fitting doubting pants, click, and then bear awed witness:
You see, the Cruz Missle, unlike its nefarious progenitor the (Pablo) cruise missile, does not end lives, destabilize right-wise monarchies and violate non-aggression pacts. It “merely” wins important baseball games and perhaps our hearts. Check that: especially our hearts.
It is known among the genteel that occasionally a gentleman prefers to take in a game of base and ball not with his wife and progeny, but rather with a paid Detroit whore. And for this very reason, Patrick Henry invented Craigslist. So it is not surprising that a certain well-bred, monocled spice trader recently took to the List of Craig in search of a female companion not necessarily averse to breathy sexual congress in a darkened Comerica Park utility closet:
looking for a reasonably attractive, relatively promiscuous, 23+ yo woman to accompany to ALDS game 4 tonight (10/4) at Comerica Park.
From relatively mediocre looking bald 33 yo man
Section 140, Row 8.
Face value plus sliding scale discount based on attractivenes and entertainment value.
PS – must have driver’s license, breakfast skills optional
True, the “mediocre looking bald man 33 yo man” bit is perhaps not the savviest example of targeted messaging, but, in his defense, those sound like pretty good seats. As well, kudos to this discerning patron for realizing that there is a time for the “relatively promiscuous” (e.g., at a ballgame) and a time for the “unthinkably promiscuous” (e.g., at a Dave & Buster’s in the suburbs).
(Consensual sex: SportsGrid)
The thinking man’s neo-Agrarian theorist will tell you that before industrialization, people, quite joyfully, walked around with dog heads. We know this because we know this, and not just because Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry insist it’s true. That’s why it was nice to see Braves second baseman Dan Uggla succumb to ancient ethnobiological urges and sprout a pug’s melon atop his muscled, hitting-streaky shoulders. And so, courtesy of Citizens Bankers, comes your Daguerreotype of the Evening, which is of Dan Puggla …
In other Tribe of Uggla news, Deadly Don Hammack, America’s leading Nats fan, calls the writer’s attention to one Magnus Uggla, who exists and actually has that name. As well, Mr. M. Uggla’s Wikipedia page contains this championship description:
He is a member of the Swedish nobility and a descendant of several European rulers, among which John III of Sweden and Gustav Vasa.
Forgive the clunky translation and instead regard again: “[A] member of the Swedish nobility and a descendant of several European rulers …”
That may not describe Dan Uggla, but it describes Magnus Uggla. And it absolutely describes Dan Puggla.
The year is 1987. The nation is reeling from a combination of Iran-Contra hearings and Cold War-induced deficit crisis. Toni Morrison publishes Beloved, depressing the hell out of everyone. Vince Coleman becomes baseball’s new darling, and Full House appears on television screens for the first time. Patrick Swayze has not yet recorded “She’s Like the Wind”, but he is about to do so. Clearly, American morale is foundering, and the baseball card manufacturing companies are needed to revive the spirit of America. No longer was one set per brand enough; we need more.
They fill this demand by selling small, forty-four card individually boxed sets. These cards were sold, through exclusive retailers, on the premise that if people liked to collect pictures of baseball players printed on small pieces of cardboard, they might want to collect pictures of baseball players printed on different pieces of cardboard. To increase jubilance, these cards were given red, white and/or blue borders and exciting names. They loaded these cards with as much Gershwin-esque bombast as they could scrounge.
Essentially, they lied to us. They lied to America. Read the rest of this entry »
Jim Thome mashed his first tater since rejoining the Cleveland Indians last night. There’s just something kind of special about seeing Thome back with the Indians, as he was one of the guys who has really been a part of my entire baseball watching life and this whole full-circle thing he’s done brings me back to the days of my youth. Or something like that.
Anyway, you should watch the video, and see if you feel how I feel:
For comparison’s sake, Thome’s 200th homer, also at Progressive Jacobs Field back in 2000:
I feel like these two videos could evoke very different things in very different people (such as: nothing), but I had at least a few thoughts pop in to the old skull:
Tonight’s Daguerreotype of the Evening required alarmingly little deliberation on my part. After this sentence concludes, I think you’ll understand why …
The fact that the framers were fond of drawing celebrities of the day as ducks — every time Hamilton droned on and on about this or that, Jefferson would doodle Vivaldi as a giggling mallard, for instance — to this day informs originalist interpretations of the Constitution. So in some ways, a bewinged and bebilled Jim Edmonds fulfills Madison’s fondest hopes. Stated another way, if Jim Edmonds had never been rendered as a duck, then you’d be quartering soldiers in your home under threat of the hoosegow.
But all of this is obvious, of course.
So you put it on the hogs or in the hogs?
It may sound like hogwash is meant to clean hogs, particularly right after castration. Most likely, though, the term was coined to describe a pig swill that was intended to feed our porcine friends. In the same way, we might get all up in arms about the hogwash in our national pastime, and yet we eat it up. This week in Google Baseball, we’ll tackle the dual meanings of this old-school word.
The true nature of the nuance in this word is not about feeding an appetite, though. It’s more about the cleanliness or legitimacy of the thing being described. Hogwash is ridiculous — because the word sounds laughable — and anything is therefore rendered silly by being paired with the adjective. Even when John Thorn says something serious about steroids, the use of the word brings a hint of a smile with it.
“This whole thing about McGwire simply permits sportswriters to imagine themselves to be Woodward and Bernstein, people who see themselves as guardians of a sacred portal, the last best hope for truth and justice – and it’s all hogwash and baloney.” – John Thorn, baseball historian
What do we find when we play Google Baseball with the word? We find the unwritten rules of baseball. Ridiculous! We find spray charts. Ludicrous! The derby jinx. Debunked! Weekly highlights of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Clever! Dirk Nowitzki as a pitcher? Clearly farcical. Most of these examples use the word to emphasize the absurdity of a thing.
Instead, how about Team Hogwash, a slow-pitch softball team giving up about 13 runs a game on average? Or an oyster topping called “Hog Wash” from Hog Island? Clearly these two entries into this week’s edition of Google Baseball are a step above. They show a sense of pride in the word, an enjoyment of the zany. They own it.
Clearly we’ve learned one thing from today’s game. If that thing wasn’t the true nature of the word, it was the best way to find nourishment from hogwash.
Embrace the hogwash.