If Vin Scully asked you to do something, would you refuse?  Of course you wouldn’t.  Not unless you were a God-damned Communist.  You would do whatever the golden-voiced Vincent asked of you and you would not ask questions.  It should be apparent by now that Vin Scully is our nation’s greatest treasure, and that to refuse him is to refuse America.  “Why do you hate America?” I would ask if Vin Scully asked you to run out and murder a hobo and you refused.  “Vin Scully has done so much for us, and you won’t do this one little thing for him?”  Then I’d put your name on my list and I’d drop it off at my nearest police precinct as one of literally dozens of Stalinist-sympathizers who are still, even today, in our midst.  I miss Joe McCarthy is what I’m saying.  (Note: Joe McCarthy the Senator, not the Manager.  Double Note: Of the US Senators, not the Washington Senators.  Though the US Senators also play in Washington.  You are smart people; you know who I mean.)

Anywho, Vince tests our devotion today in yet another early commercial for Gillette razors, in which you can see his magical powers of teleportation and miraculous ability to avoid commenting on Wally Moon’s eyebrow: Read the rest of this entry »

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 …

Breaking news from WPVI-TV Philadelphia’s Jeff Skversky:

As much as this just sounds like Lenny Dykstra is canceling his autograph session to have a street fight with Jose Canseco (which I imagine would go something like this), this fight is going to be something far more civilized: boxing.

Canseco has already begun a career in MMA, but it hasn’t gone well. Dykstra doesn’t have a boxing or MMA career that I can find, but he is “fighting for his good name:”

Lenny is fighting for his good name in baseball. Lenny’s life for the last two years has been upside down mainly because of snitches. Canseco is one of the many rats that have diminished Dykstra’s career.

Because, you know, that’ll help.

As far as the actual fight goes, I’ll take the 6’4″, 240 pound Canseco over the 5’10”, 167 pound Dykstra.

Although, to present a counterargument: Nails. Can’t bet against Nails.

“That the abyss is bottomless is the bad news. The good news is, it must also be topless!”
-David James Duncan, The Brothers K

I learned to enjoy feeling sorry for myself just after I hit puberty. Whenever my dad would yell at me or one of my friends would do something mean, I’d wail and storm and taste my tears and love every second of it. I remember seeing Claire Danes cry and that, of all things I could possibly envy, was what I aspired to most: to cry that hard, to mean it that much. It got worse as I got a little older and met girls with eating disorders or who took anti-depressants. Illogically, but earnestly, I put them all on tall pedestals. I read books like Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation, The Bell Jar and The Virgin Suicides. I tried making myself throw up a few times. I listened to sad songs exclusively, once making a tape for myself to fall asleep to that consisted only of Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” over an over again on both sides. (Yikes.) A lot of this weirdness wore off as I grew up. Most importantly, I stopped romanticizing mental illness. But I still love crying, and sad songs, and I think more than a little bit of that self-victimizing sap inside of me has remained. Which explains a lot about why I like baseball so much more than I like any other sports. Baseball is basically a giant stage for failure, disappointment, and sadness. And that’s exactly what makes it so goddamn beautiful.

Read the rest of this entry »

This one goes out to my main man C.C. Sabathia and his lucrative new contract. Cheers, toast to crime.

Infinite hat tips to our favorite Demon Deacon Tim for the heads up.

Readers may recall that I was quite unsparing in my ridicule of the last T-shirt I was tasked with reviewing. The shirt was so hideous that it soured me to shirts in general. For the past 4+ months I have gone topless, patiently waiting for a great T-shirt to come along and redeem the whole species for me. So, with winter fast approaching, the above shirt couldn’t arrive at a better time.

Made by Nike, this “St. Louis Cardinals World Championship King Tee” can be yours for just 20 bucks. Whereas the Cliff Lee-designed T-Shirt was an abject failure of both form and function, I am pleased to say that this shirt is a rousing success in each of these essential areas.

Form: 

What a cool looking shirt! The “card” motif (which, if you’ll forgive my momentary joke-killing, has a double meaning) is seamlessly integrated with the baseball aspect, with neither ingredient overpowering the other. For example, rather than overdoing it with Cardinals logos, “St. Louis Cardinals” appears once in the middle of the shirt in a reasonably sized font and the King (the symbol of supremacy) dons a Cardinals hat. The beauty is in the subtlety. You’ll notice also that where the suit would normally appear on the playing card is instead a home plate. Details like that are what make this shirt so cool that it almost brings me to a point of possibly maybe entertaining the notion of wishing I was a Cards fan so I could wear this shirt. Kudos are in order for the Nike design team. Simply put, the vast gulf in quality between this shirt and Cliff Lee’s atrocity illustrates why they are paid to do this and Cliff Lee is not.

Read the rest of this entry »

As we learned previously in these yellowed and courtly pages, board-certified Aqua Velva Man Vic Tayback has a proud history of Giving the Business to ballplayers. So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Tayback once put ink-dispensing stylus to cowhide orb. Clicky!

Sure, Mr. Ed — with his stupid, thumbless hooves — and Kate Hepburn — with what was surely a fetching pantsuit — are also signatories, but there’s everyone and thing else and then there’s Vic Tayback.

This is his grave:

Click to embiggen.

You are curious about things…things like quantum mechanics, birds and bees, mustaches, the funny feeling you get when a pretty girl or boy walks by, the lyric poetry of John Donne, why you have hair in new places, and the exploits of the extremely agéd… and it is in that latter vein that I present to you yet more news about Don Zimmer’s face.

Now, you’ll recall from last week that our belovéd Zim look exactly like my belovéd daughter, for his is a beautiful face.  It is also, apparently, highly average.  This information comes to us by way of the good people at Gillette.  Observe: Read the rest of this entry »

The words “It’s on like Donkey Kong” were not uttered expressly (not from Jerry Crasnick’s mouth, at least), but it is, most assuredly, on — and in a manner very similar to, if not precisely the same as, the aforementioned Donkey Kong.