It’s the day before Opening Day, day

Now that’s a beautiful lineup. Nine out of 10 shirtless guys agree.

I was watching an A’s /Twins game from 1988 on YooToob and it was a blast from the past and a chopped-up line in the bathroom of nostalgia. Bob Welch was on the hill for the good guys and it was sort of sad to see him facing Kirby Puckett as both shuffled off this mortal coil way too soon. I was enjoying the game and settling in, but I was distracted by all the shirtless guys carrying their wax cups full of Budweiser, happily fluttering around in the crowd like social butterflies with blindingly glistened oil-soaked bodies and Tom Cruise approved knockoff Ray-Bans.

When did it become socially acceptable for guys to walk around shirtless at the ballpark in the ’80s? I’ve seen this sort of exhibitionism in many 80’s movies, (maybe it was because gay culture was influencing the mainstream on the down-low, hence the straight guy mustache trend of the era which was obviously a disco-hangover and made baseball players look like leather daddies as they shoved pounds of Hollywood Happy powder up their nostrils) but was it art imitating life or vice versa? Although the apotheosis of shirtless guy movies, Magic Mike, came out in 2012, it still didn’t inspire a vomit-inducing public movement. Guys in the 2000’s just decided it was more appropriate to leave their shirts intact. I’m not saying an individual should wear a suit and tie à la the 1920’s Babe Ruth era, but please leave the “beach bod” (which isn’t always the case) at the beach. It’s goddamn distracting as most of the time the person committing the atrocity looks less like Conan-era–Arnold and more like he was squeezed out of a tube. Is this is a California thing or an 80’s thing? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Rebel Without a Cause.

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It’s (the day before) opening day and you would like to watch your favorite team, but you can’t due to blackouts. Bummer. Here’s the biggest misconception about MLB blackouts–teams are not blacking out games to make you go to the stadium, they are doing it to ensure they don’t piss off the regional sports networks, which are established cash cows to the tune of 2.1 billion. Like most of you, I couldn’t care less about what billionaire has the biggest dick and just want to watch my local team. Here is a gift for the dedicated readers of this site: (all 10 of you) simply click on Alfred E. Newman’s face to the upper right (or at the bottom if you are reading this on a phone) and free baseball! Burn it all down! Fuck Rob Manfred! Sabotage the system! …Although you’ll probably want to *ahem* return tomorrow since there are no games today.

How did Bob Welch invade my stream of conciousness?

The most ubiquitous Welch baseball card of my childhood. I must have owned dozens of them.

If you do an impromptu internet search on Bob Welch Death, the information wave catches your surfboard and guides you to the former guitarist for Fleetwood Mac and his shocking suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot in 2012.  Remember that song, Ebony Eyes? Neither do I, but apparently Bob scored a top 20 hit with it in 1978. The song is painfully repetitive, is derivative of Fleetwood Mac’s worst songs, (and that’s being generous) and could possibly cause one to scratch their eyes out…I hope I never have to hear it again. In the zeitgeist of “good” late 70’s music, this turd should stay safely sound on a piece of old vinyl relegated to grandma’s attic or the local town dump. Believe me, I’m sighing on the inside as I write this.

The death of Bob Welch, the baseball player was just as tragic, and even more so, as poor Bobby slipped on what I’m assuming to be a tile layered with condensation in his bathroom and broke his neck. The University of York Department of Physics recently hosted a presentation titled, “5 Ways the Universe Is Trying to Kill You,” and I felt that this applied to the unfortunate and freakish situation. There are typhoons, hurricanes, asteroids, cancers, plagues, nuclear meltdowns, the sun and its inevitable enveloping of the earth, and, of course…a slippery tile.

The cosmos seemingly wants your existence as nil. And the above is just the tip of the iceberg of proposed cataclysmic events, although I suppose everything isn’t all that terrible on this planet considering 99 percent of the places in the universe would snuff out any life instantly if it had a chance to exist at all–there would be no “you” lying in bed at 4 AM in a wide-eyed cold sweat, recognizing the finite self in time and space.

I’m not even sure why Bob Welch invaded my cranium this morning as I sipped my coffee and flipped through an old Playboy from 1969 with an extended pause at the Brigitte Bardot layout. (Quick fact: both Bobs’ loved to imbibe on the Hollywood Happy Powder, but only the pitcher got to bang a member of the Go-Gos) Sometimes feelings are hard to pin down, with so many subclauses and digressions. Maybe it was because I was thinking about an ex-girlfriend and how she had dropped me off at Dodger Stadium on a perfectly lazy, brilliantly blue Los Angeles summer afternoon. Larry King pulled to the side of her car in his Mercedes and asked her if he could squeeze into the queue waiting to enter the mammoth parking lot. (I later learned that he was in a hurry because he was throwing out the first pitch, which turned out just as horrible as expected and would be scratched on a scorecard as: WP)

There was an “Old Timers Game” before the real contest, with the Dodgers facing the Yankees, and Bob Welch was on the hill for The Bums in perhaps his final outing on a big-league field with his marvelously exaggerated wind-up and leg-kick. All of these clouds coalesce, then quickly swirl and fade as there is little attention to any small fragment of detail as I pull nebulous memories from the attic of obscurity: except for my questioning and confusion of Billy Crystal playing Short Stop for the Yankees that day which now seems as if it happened many lifetimes, detours and transgressions ago.