More Ranting About a Dumb Kid’s Game

Bow at the feet of Dick Mountain, he of the perpetual blister and fellow jizz user.

“Baseball opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one and most of ’em stink.” — Harry Caray

Baseball “agitprop” continues as the Houston Asterisks became yesterday’s news, (bad timing for the hot new book exposé, Cheated) and the new squabble concerned pitchers using a goo/sunscreen/coca-cola/spider-tack jizz concoction on their fingers to have better control and higher spin rate. Of course, MLB was impartial until the media fired shots about baseball being “boring” due to the 3 true outcome trends, no-hitters becoming run-of-the-mill and baseball’s collective batting average dropping quicker than a high school girl’s panties on prom night. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the game’s old coots/heroes spewing nonsense about “going the other way” and “choking up” when they never had to face the otherworldly velocity and wicked breaking shit day to day that the modern-day players have to face, essentially making their points void and out of context. (Ty Cobb floated the same criticism Babe Ruth’s direction, and on and on and on…ad nauseam) 

It’s the stale old case of baseball being better “back in the day” when in reality it probably wasn’t. The strike zones in the 70’s/80’s were more horrendous than today with the zone changing arbitrarily from AL to NL, and pitchers getting called strikes a foot off the plate from East to West. Banjo-hitters were playing daily and barely batting above .220 with little power, and pitchers were also proving their “toughness” by losing games in the later innings when it was obvious to everyone in the ballpark that they were barely throwing above 90 at that point while a bullpen guy who could throw peas sat on his ass and stared at a blonde in the front row. (Tony LaRussa is now hearkened as a “genius” for being able to compute basic math and daring to challenge the norms) These same standard-bearers are also nostalgic for .300 batting averages (a stat that is not as relevant as it used to be) even though Tony Gwynn, he of multiple batting titles, didn’t score a seasonal 100 runs after his 27th birthday. Do you smell what I’m dishing here? The key to winning is runs, not hits, and being stuck in the Mesozoic Era doesn’t necessarily mean better unless you enjoy beating the shit out of a dinosaur with a bone and dragging your significant other by the hair into a dingy cave. 

In the end, organizations are trying to win, not look aesthetically pleasing to old farts who should probably take a trip to the ballet if they are looking for dainty and pleasing visual cues that remind them of their younger years–which begs the question: if baseball is a dying sport, why has attendance averaged (roughly) 30.000 asses in the seats when it barely reached 15-25 in the ’70s and ’80s? The “get off my lawn” argument just doesn’t hold water and sounds just as ridiculous, pious, and nonsensical as a wrinkled, childish, dunderhead spit-spewing while wearing a red cap that states, “Make Baseball Great Again.” These people want the facade without the meat and potatoes even though they claim to want both. They hate the numbers just because they’re not the right numbers. Didn’t we just endure a blazing hot point of discussion about moving the mound back a few months ago? Or banning the shift? Quit tinkering! Leave the goddamn game alone! This game was here long before you and your cultural heroes were enjoying their lives and the fruits of their labor and will be here long after this generation and the next are in the ground rotting aeternum. 

 

Rickey poses for Playgirl

The GOAT.

It’s 104 degrees outside as I’m typing this, and it seems like an irrefutable idea to sit around the air conditioner and watch a few horror films meant for the garbage heap while drinking copious amounts of iced tea. I’m still not comfortable being in large groups of virus puppets, and shame on the people that decided to congregate in large groups this past Memorial Day Weekend.

Ezra Pound was quoted as saying, Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace, and he was absolutely correct on that account in more ways than one. The major component in the masses of saliva exchange logic can only be seen as self-serving and uncaring; so don’t expect compassion if you are one of the revelers who just happens to acquire a healthy case of the plague. You can probably tell from the latter sentence that I am seemingly a huge proponent of retribution, and you wouldn’t be wrong. More than likely, as life is always unfair in this way, one of the “party animals” will probably give it to someone who dies (grandma or grandpa) while their own case remains dormant. Despite all this nonsense, I still have to repress the inclination to punch someone in the face who stands right next to me in the grocery store while blathering on their phone with spittle flying everywhere, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

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At any rate…the internet wormhole strikes again! I stumbled across a photo of a barely clad Rickey Henderson for Playgirl in July 1984, and I thought, “Gee, that was an interesting year in pop culture.” I was in elementary school and I absolutely adored Michael Jackson. The biggest topic on the playground was: would you bang Madonna? and what Garbage Pail Kids would you trade? Of course, we were all virgins and wouldn’t know what to do with our peckers even if Madonna was a pedophile who was attracted to small town Catholic school knuckleheads who carried aluminum lunchboxes with Luke Skywalker emblazoned on the lid. I stared at the photo of Rickey for a minute and his powerful legs seemed to stand out in the photo for, oh, about 1,406 reasons. The photo was meant for a different gender (or not?) and maybe even a different race (or not?) but it still resonated from a baseball standpoint. Is this what happens when there is no baseball? Are you relegated to watching games on MLB.TV from 2019, playing fantasy games on your phone and staring at photos of Rickey Henderson’s legs?

Sigh…I think I need to get outside. (with 6 feet of social distancing, of course)