Jeff Gordon...
Story Here
Well, I saw this live last night and knew he was in trouble as soon as he said "Wrigley Stadium." The attempt at Take Me Out To the Ball Game was one of the worst I've seen. He flubbed the ENTIRE song and just nervously laughed the entire time. I have no sympathy for this him and didn't feel the least bit guilty for laughing while he made an ass of himself. "I mean, come. on." It's Take Me Out To the Ball Game...who DOESN'T know the words?!?
posted by DS @ 7:28 AM
10 comments
10 Comments:
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Nascar drivers. There should be a black hole somewhere in space to take care of the lot of them, and more importantly their fans.
We baseball fans see a cow pasture and figure out where the foul lines and bases should be. The Nacar nuts see a cow pasture and tear it up with a loud and obnoxious car.
(What this country needs is more political polarization.)
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It's true, of course, that the Cubs fans lack class. Chicago as a whole has never been known as a classy town. It's a city of broad shoulders, bustling and baudy.
Ernie Banks may have been Mister Class as a baseball player and a man, but the town is known for Al Capone, the first Mayor (I can bring in the cemetary vote) Dailey, and the Sixty-eight riots.
You guys probably don't remember the Bleacher Bums. The reason the barbed wire basket exists along the top of the outfield fence is because of the cheap seats in the outfield, where, in the good old days before the basket existed, drunks would lean over and dump beer into opposing outfielders' faces as they tried to catch fly balls.
By the way, the Cubs weren't known as the lovable losers until Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, came along. You had to love Mr. "Let's Play Two" Banks. He had the sunniest disposition of anyone who ever played the game.
Banks' abilities and personality combined with Philip K Wrigley's refusal to insall lights, even though it cost him millions of dollars in revenue, made people around the country love the team. Oh, and add to that the fact that WGN used to broadcast every game the team played over cable even when that meant a loss of ticket sales in the Chicago area made the team lovable.
Before that they were known as one of the meanest and nastiest teams to ever take the field, going all the way back to their founding in 1876 and their star player/manager Cap Anson, who had to be the meanest SOB in baseball.
Jeff Gordon is to singing as Jeff Gordon is to being a Cubs fan...
they should have forcibly removed his jacket and beaten him with Zambrano's game bat.
(Best 7th Inning Stretch Singer of All Time: Mike "Off-Key" Ditka)
Updating an ongoing discussion...
Dusty has been letting the pitchers go longer recently, and the Cubs have won a few games. This has a lot of people posting here about how great it is and how he should do more of it and we should see the pitchers going later into the games than they had been. In some ways I definitely agree, I wish our starting pitchers made it to the 7th or 8th inning every game, but I don't know if it's a good thing that they need to toss 100+ pitches. Dusty has been criticized in the past for pushing his starting pitchers too hard or allowing them to pitch too long. Some of the mysterious arm injuries our pitchers (Wood, Prior) have had can be attributed to Dusty pushing them too hard. I personally don't agree, as pitchers used to throw 100+ in every start and with less rest than MLB pitchers get these days. But at the same time, I've read that Dusty rides the starter too hard throughout a regular season in enough places that it has me a little worried.
Although it is nice to have a 3 game win streak going.... Here's to more complete games!
Also, Jim, once again, I love the old timey notes you offer in your comments. I know I've said it before, but I think most of us welcome the history you bring us, as I personally have recently learned (from you) more of what the Cubs have stood for in the past, how they have evolved over time, and how baseball as a whole has changed in some ways.
Thanks again!
Hypo, you could argue that Dusty's workhorse mentality towards his starters have caused the recent "tired shoulder" blues to longtime Giants ace Jason Schmidt, to name only one.
Given that we were working off a 4-man rotation lately (until Superman Sergio), 108 pitches a game with only about 3 days rest is definitely disturbing.
There was a time when pitchers actually pitched both ends of a double header. And Nolan Ryan once pitched a game in which he threw over 250 pitches. And he was still throwing no hitters into his forties.
But if you ever saw Nolan pitch, you know he had beautiful mechanics. That's the ticket, having a fluid easy motion.
In the good old days, pitchers were taught to throw at 90 percent of their capacity. They were told, "You gotta go nine, so save some for that last inning."
Baseball's expansion changed the game radically, and then there was free agency in the seventies, followed by the strike season in the nineties. Money changed the game, including how it was played and managed, along with how players used and abused their bodies.
A lot has been made about the conservative nature of the game, in terms of its rules and the playing field and so forth, but if you look at the history of it, the game has steadily undergone changes, most of them having to do with money. Leagues came and went during the first quarter century of play. In 1900, the American League stuck. That had very dramatic changes in the way the game was played, bringing about more competition in terms of player contracts, and bringing the World Series about. It probably did a lot to bring about the end of the dead ball era, with the Babe clouting balls into the outfield stands.
By the way, Cap Anson hit twenty-one home runs one year in the 1880's, during the dead ball era. He was 6'2" and weighed 225 pounds, near Ruthian figures. He would have been a big man even by today's standards. Think of how he would have towered over the average man of 5'5" in those days.
That makes sense about pitching so long into games, or even both ends of a doubleheader - I guess that's another thing we can "thank" steroids for ruining... now it's not uncommon to see a guy get shellacked for 8 runs before even registering an out
(Paul Wilson, the only human ever to have done this twice, and one of only 4 men to have done it at all, we salute you. Unsurprisingly for anyone, he just took a trip to the DL.)
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