On June 23rd, the Brooklyn Cyclones will
become the Baracklyn Cyclones — and there are a lot of amusing elements involved in the promotion.
On June 23rd, the Brooklyn Cyclones will
become the Baracklyn Cyclones — and there are a lot of amusing elements involved in the promotion.
On this very blog, on May 25, 2004, Levi made a comment referring to a future Barack Obama presidency. As you may notice, that was several months before Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention brought him into the spotlight. See for yourself.
However, Levi assumed Obama’s election would come in 2012 (presumably, after John Kerry served two terms) — and Levi’s not so good at predicting who is and isn’t going to do something stupid to ruin his political career.
Appearing on “The Colbert Report” tonight, malady baseball statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com compared Obama to the Rays — and McCain to the Seattle Pilots.
Because I’ve been more or less obsessed with the presidential race for months now, I was thinking today about how we could do our part during our trip in getting Bush out of office. I’ve got a few ideas.
1) We could have friends and relatives and coworkers pledge money for each of several types of discrete baseball event we see. For example, people could pledge to give the Kerry campaign a quarter per single, fifty cents per double, maybe a dollar per triple, and seventy-five cents per home run. A nickel per strikeout. A penny per swear word overheard in the bleachers at Fenway. Two dollars per extra inning. We could really go nuts and have the truly flush pledge $25 per beanball, $50 per ejection, $100 per menacing confrontation around the mound, and $200 per legitimate brawl. A no-hitter would come in around $500, and a perfect game would cap the person’s legally allowable election cycle donation at $2,000. A Brewers or Tigers win would force the person to split his or her donation of $4,000 between the Kerry campaign and the Obama campaign.
And since the Bush campaign has names for people who are able to bundle huge amounts of cash (I have a name for them, too, but it’s inappropriate for a website on such an all-American topic as baseball.), maybe we should name ourselves when we hit $50,000 raised. Suggestions, Jim?
2) We could paint “Kerry for President” on our chests and take off our shirts. This tactic would be likely to get us more attention at the games which include female hangers-on. Maybe we could coax Morganna the Kissing Bandit out of retirement?
This isn’t about baseball, but I figure baseball fans can relate to Dick Grasso’s estimate of his efforts. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly noted the following:
“New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has decided to sue Richard Grasso, the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, for using various forms of chicanery to overpay himself. Spitzer listed several main bullet points to support his contention, but this is my favorite:
On a 1-to-10 performance scale used to determine compensation, Grasso at one point assigned himself a 13, Spitzer said.”
Levi: Oh, and Eliot Spitzer’s one of my heroes. He’s going to make a great Vice-President or Attorney General in the Barack Obama administration in 2012.