Oh, those poor Devil Rays. You know it’s bad when your commercial is based on a premise (two kids being Devil Rays fans) that is so unlikely that even that Cadillac ad using Led Zeppelin seems more realistic.
But maybe that’s their idea. They want to distract viewers with the only premise less likely than the Rays winning 75 games?
Because my DirecTV introductory offer is up in a few days, I’m going to be canceling their sports channel package (turns out it’s not going to be worth $12.00 a month to be able to watch “The Best Damn Sports Show Period” on 15 different channels). However, I took advantage of it one last time today to watch some spring training baseball…Tigers vs. Devil Rays, from “Progress Energy Park, home of Al Lang Field,” as the announcers were careful to say.
During one commercial break, there was a promo for Devil Rays tickets: two kids on the beach arguing about who’s better, Aubrey Huff or Tino Martinez. “Tino’s the man!” “Aubrey’s the man!” Meanwhile, there’s sand being thrown on them; eventually, the scene widens to show that Pansy the Wuss-Wuss Fish has constructed a giant replica World Series trophy out of sand. Then one of the kids yells, “We’re trying to make sandcastles here!”
Oh, yeah, Rays 11, Tigers 3, but to be fair, it seemed like the Rays were using a lot of actual players, while the Tigers were using a lot of players with uniform numbers above 70, including some 3-digit numbers.
Entertainment Weekly, talking about Chris Rock on tour: “He travels with two iPods: one for music, one for comedy, with playlists including Buddy Hackett, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Moms Mabley, Steve Martin, and Redd Foxx, among others.”
Edited later to explain further, since this is something Levi and I discussed pre-blog: we will be traveling with two iPods, one for music (mine) and one for comedy (Levi’s), although we will probably have more Jack Benny radio shows and fewer Moms Mabley routines than Chris Rock.
I just want to point this out for posterity: right now, as I’m looking at this blog, the two related-to-the-text-of-the-page “Ads by Google” at the top are headlined “Steroids For Sale” and “Buy Steroids Online.”
And then the “Related Searches” in the small print below the ads are “minor league baseball” and “Barry Bonds.”
I may have to root for the Blue Jays solely because I really like their new logo. I might even go so far as to buy a replica Jays cap while on the trip, assuming they’re being sold at a reasonable price and they have them in Imperial measurement sizes (because my head’s not metric).
I’ve been thinking about the match-ups we’ll see on our trip, and which teams we’ll be rooting for. I think Jim would agree that the default, absent other reasons to root for (Say, that they’re the Cardinals) or against (Say, that they’re the Braves) a team, would be to root for the home team.
But mitigating factors do affect several games on this trip. So here’s my first pass at the rooting plan:
Game 1: Swing
Game 2: Cardinals
Game 3: White Sox (over the Tigers. Sorry, Detroit, but local interest comes first.)
Game 4: Red Sox (over the Blue Jays. Sorry, Toronto, but toppling the Yankees comes first.)
Game 5: Expos
Game 6: Red Sox
Game 7: Phillies
Game 8: Cardinals (over the Pirates. Sorry, Pittsburgh, but you guys had to see this one coming.)
Game 9: White Sox (over the Indians. Sorry, Cleveland, but that team name’s got to go. And take that offensive logo with it, why don’t you?).
Game 10: Ooh. This is a tough one. I want to root for the Brewers over the Pirates, because they’re the home team and I love Wisconsin. But I just don’t know that I can root for a team owned by Bud Selig. I may have to root for the Pirates, despite their being owned by Kevin McClatchy.
Add 1 to the hangers-on for Pittsburgh: Tim Anderson, pilule aka Giant Man, is joining us. “I love Pittsburgh!” says Giant Man.
I added the map to the itinerary so that future viewers of this page don’t have to scroll past lots of Julio Franco talk in order to see it.
Julio Franco just keeps getting better!
Yesterday or the day before, Andy Van Slyke, well-known for running his mouth*, accused Julio Franco of using steroids, saying, basically: Look at him–he’s like a hundred years old and still playing. He’s got to be on the juice.
To which Franco replied, “I am on the juice. The juice of Jesus of Nazareth.” What the hell he means, I have no idea, but I’ll go with it. Franco is now the first baseman on my team of entertaining goofballs. Let’s see: Doug Glanville in center, Julio Franco at first, Joaquin Andujar on the mound, Jim Bouton in the pen.
I guess my team still has some roster spots to fill. Suggestions?
*It’s amazing how much of the “Barry Bonds is an asshole teammate” line comes from Van Slyke and Jeff Kent, who, by all appearances, are assholes.
I fired up the ol’ scanner tonight, and first of all, since the other attendees have already seen their tickets:
And this is the route map as it stands now. I have a feeling some portions may not be the AAA-approved routes, such as the “back way” to get to Yardley, Pennsylvania from the north (on U.S. 202 and state route 31), which involves going through some of the less smelly parts of New Jersey.
I’m sorry that my clumsy attempts to reduce the image size, not to mention my clumsy attempts to draw a line, made Mapquest’s beautiful cartography look like crap, but I’m not exactly working with the Adobe Creative Suite here. (This is the non-online, made-from-dead-trees 2004 Mapquest “Routemaster” spiral-bound road atlas we’re looking at, just in case you’re wondering why Mapquest.com doesn’t look that good when you use it.)