This is real, from Mets.com:

Each [All-Star ticket] strip includes one ticket to each All-Star Week event at the ballpark, two MLB All-Star FanFest tickets and one Official All-Star Game program. All-Star Week begins with the FanFest at Javits Center from July 12-16. Taco Bell All-Star Sunday is July 14 and features the SiriusXM All-Star Futures Game and the Taco Bell All-Star Legends & Celebrity Softball Game. All-Star batting practice and the Home Run Derby highlight Gatorade All-Star Workout Day on July 15, and then the granddaddy of all megastar gatherings returns with the 84th All-Star Game on July 16.

The granddaddy of all megastar gatherings, eh? And can they fit any more sponsor names into this paragraph? I hate the All-Star Game.

Billy.
Someone photoshopped that helmet in
someone scribbled your name
someone who once liked your good face
now gags
when they see it.

That’s how it goes.
How did it go last night?

I thought to myself, of my last poem
to you,
that there could have been more magic
that I could have insisted
more: my A’s hat was magically
given to me by a man named Billy
on the street with a wink
and a ruddy cheek
and glasses
and a still okay head
of hair — but I didn’t —
I am so unaware of the process of poems
of magic, of bees, leaves.

Thought to myself that this time, I’ve gotta
do the magic right, so here:

Tonight, there’ll be an elfin sprite
(the same Joe West has seen)
trying to steal the Tigers’ tails
whipping them all around.
He’ll be wearing my hat, the sprite,
which he stole from me
on the same street that you gave it,

Billy.
But I did not chase him, Billy,
I let him walk away. If the A’s win
tonight, he can keep it; if they lose
he can keep it, too.

As noted minutes ago in these very same electronic pages, the author is watching the Nats-Cards game via Postseason.TV. One benefit of that sort of thing: four Pete Kozmas hitting a home run. Or, at least, four concurrent shots of the home run Pete Kozma hit, like, 10 minutes ago.

Today’s NLDS game between St. Louis and Washington (live boxscore) is available only on the MLB Network and online, using MLB’s playoff streaming-video product, Postseason.TV. Which, that means — for those of us who (a) don’t have the former but also (b) want to watch the game — that a purchase of the latter is necessary.

Below, for those interested, are two screenshots from Postseason.TV — the first an example of the “quad feed” option, which features four camera angles simultaneously; the second, of the “tight center” option by itself.

Note that, while Bob Costas’s commentary accompanies the feed, that there is no “presentation”-style editing — meaning the viewer himself controls what he sees. Also, there are no instant replays.

Here’s the aforementioned “quad feed” (click to embiggen):

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Sitting here at primanti bros. about to crush a Pitts-burgher cheese steak for you. Thank you fans, for all your support. #thisonesforyou

— Travis Snider (@Lunchboxhero45) October 3, 2012

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For Sale: Tiny, Dancing Ichiro

– Great for parties

– Housetrained (tiny toilet not included)

– May need to put towel over cage to get him to sleep

– A tiny, national treasure

– Eats Powerbars and cigarettes

Will accept all reasonable offers.

The nomination process, which involved furious denunciations and copious amounts of the dirty-dirty, is complete. Now you may select from the 10 names that follow. The desperate question before us: Who, because he is a rank maroon, should be nicknamed “I Denounce This Man”?

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):

Billy! — I say it with my Rosie Perez voice
like you are Woody Harrelson, but
you are not Woody Harrelson, let’s face it —
you are too much a lover
of soccer —
Billy, who should laud you
when your shit doesn’t work — for real
it’s like your shit is a time release fertilizer
that ends in October —
when you’re shit.

You’re not shit. I love you.
I hate you.
I love you.

I love that it is boring to you,
this game of bases and balls, this
menagerie of melancholy and silly
torture, this spectacle from which you hide
cinematically
on your exercise bicycle or
secretly behind your PB smoothie
(that’s right, I know you love them) —
I love your growing preference for piebald
balls.

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When Endy Chávez was signed by the Texas Rangers in 2011, the Rangers had just become the parent team of Austin’s suburban Round Rock Express (taking over what had been a Houston Astros franchise). Although I was, as an Astros fan, disappointed that the closest ball club to be was now Rangers territory, I tried to make the best of it by getting extremely drunk with my friends at a game during the first week of their season. Endy Chávez was the token journeyman / former major leaguer toiling in the minors, and we briefly entertained the idea of becoming Endy super-fans, making handmade shirts and signs to support what had to have been a tough journey from Mets defensive superstar to bleak Texas suburbia.

“The strength to be there,” indeed.

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