Since I don't follow baseball I have no idea what you're yakking about here. But it seems to me that the LA Dodgers must have screwed up somehow and someone's sorry.
I don't really pay much attention to baseball anymore. The Steroids Era kind of ruined it for me. But, yeah, I was born and raised an L.A. Dodger fan. We had season seats and my Brother and I were sometimes featured in their catalogs of Dodger stuffs for children, when we were tots.
My Ma worked for the L.A. Dodgers for a number of years and I guess someone in the marketing department thought Nappy and I were cute kids and could sell little gloves and uniforms, etc.
I'm a NY Yankees Fan since my youth, and hubs likes the Toronto Blue Jays. We also have seen and like the Atlanta Braves and the Seattle Mariners. We've crossed to your side of the 49th to see a few games. Not sure what your point is here but I also like Gary Cooper. . .
Howdy, D.G. ~ The Yankees are a team I love to hate. But I won't hold that against ya. Besides, I hate the 'Frisco Giants even MORE!
The Toronto Blue Jays? Who they? ;-)
My family grew up with baseball big time. Dodger fan first and foremost, but I've also rooted hard for the Diamondbacks. (Their old, black "away" cap with the big gold "D" formed into a snake was probably the best baseball cap design I ever saw.)
I've always semi-liked a couple other teams, too: the Oakland A's and the Kansas City Royals. But mostly, I'm a National League fan.
I keep thinking the theme is cheating, or never saying you're sorry. Just a guess on my part.
LA news on players coming-going... Minor league abuse? I don't watch baseball any more... so I don't know, but the other clips you have provide similar clues.
Gary Cooper movie theme - cheating on his wife? Cheating fate too?
Beatles' song is Lennon using nursery rhymes - was it plagiarized? Lennon's personal cheating on his wife?
Elton John's expounding on the issue of saying 'you're sorry'. It never seems to happen any more. People losing values - no moral standards.
DIXIE POLKA ~ No home run for you, but you get 100 points for all the effort you put into analyzing this li'l post.
>>... or never saying you're sorry. Just a guess on my part.
Ahh, well, there IS that! Definitely a part of the whole here. (Or maybe that should have been "hole" here.)
Did Lennon in fact cheat on his wife? If so, I've never heard that before. It wouldn't surprise me though because (never mind all the "peace, love and sunshine" bullshit he spewed) he was a despicable person! My least favorite Rock star of all time.
Good effort, Dixie Polka, my friend. "Yak with you again... real soon!" (as Mickey almost used to say).
We have the Colorado Rockies here, so we don't know nuttin' about baseball. Oh, except what losing looks like. We know that really well. We certainly aren't Los Doyers. And hey, American Pharoah won the Triple Crown. Is he gonna play baseball now? Maybe he can come bat for us...
6-B ~ Who needs baseball when they have Trigger overlooking their football stadium?!
Los Doyers went through some tough times. (Frankly, I cared about them much more during the O'Malley era.) But they have recently become very competitive again. Of course, they also spend a lot more money now than most other teams do, too.
I liked Los Doyers (or Los Dieyers) back in the day when most of their talent was homegrown, coming up through their farm system. Nowadays, they pretty much attempt to buy championships (which is something I always knocked Los Yankees for).
I'll always love the game of baseball - first and foremost before all other sports - but I haven't been a fan of MLB for a number of years now. I have a very peripheral view of what the standings look like, but with no TV service, I rarely even catch a game.
POSTSCRIPT: AMERICAN PHAROAH can do any damn thing he wants, including playing baseball!
It dawned on me suddenly that I'd neglected to comment on the Triple Crown winner.
Man, I was so stoked! When I saw the way American Pharoah ran in the Kentucky Derby, I KNEW he was a helluva horse! Somehow the second race completely slipped my mind and it was Brother Nappy who told me A.P. had won again.
I went to downtown Reno yesterday to see The Belmont and to see A.P. win the first Triple Crown in racing since before you were born (or so I hoped). There had only been 11 Triple Crown winners in history, and so many times I thought I was going to see the next one but it never happened. I'd almost begun to think that it would never be done again.
But I went downtown, and although A.P. was the heavy favorite, I placed a small wager on him to win. Just in case he really did miraculously win the first Triple Crown since 1978, I didn't want to be the idiot sitting in the Circus-Circus sports book with no money on him! So I placed a small bet just to have "some action" (as my Pa would have expressed it).
When he broke out in first and stayed in that position, I was worried. That's a LONG race and he'd run in the previous two Triple Crown races. In long races like that, not many horses can go wire-to-wire, especially against the very best competition in the world.
But son-of-a-bitch if AMERICAN PHAROAH wasn't actually INCREASING the space between himself and second place down the homestretch. Un-freakin'-believable!
No, AMERICAN PHAROAH isn't SECRETARIAT, but I saw Secretariat, and American Pharoah is probably "the next best thing" (to quote Warren Zevon).
To see a horse win the Triple Crown in such a convincing fashion, it was worth the wait! Plus, my winnings - small as they were - paid for two Margaritas. Ain't nuttin' wrong with that!
I saw the most fascinating video the other day about why people aren't as interested in baseball as they used to be, and did you know that games are almost a full hour longer than they used to be? In 1950 the average game was just over 2 hours. Today, the average game is just over 3 hours.
As a great article put it (which I reworded for the sake of your team):
On August 22, 1917, Los Dieyers played the Pirates for 22 innings, which is still the ninth-longest game in history. Elmer Jacobs, poor Elmer, threw 16⅔ innings of relief, allowing one run and getting the loss. It wasn't exactly a pitcher's duel, as there were 47 combined hits in the game, with nine errors, 10 walks, and three HBP, but for whatever reason, the game was scoreless from the seventh inning until the 22nd.
Time of game: 4:15.
On April 5, 2014, Los Dieyers played the Giants for nine innings. There were 20 combined hits in the game, but nothing was too unusual about it. Just a typical game of baseball that most certainly did not go 22 innings.
Time of game: 3:42.
Basically, in today's go-go-go society, young people can't focus on a game where the players all fart around between pitching, between batting, etc. It eats up an insane amount of time. I'll admit that I find baseball pretty boring, but not boring in that I don't like the sport, boring in that it takes forever for something interesting to happen. Because of all of the shifting and tightening gloves and fixing helmets and what have you.
When I first heard about American Pharoah (only after he won the Triple Crown, of course) I immediately thought of you and wondered if you saw it. I'm glad you were able to catch it. I'm kinda bummed I didn't. And score for making some cash off of it!
True story: one time I went to Central City to eat at a buffet with a friend. While I was waiting for him to use the bathroom, I sat down at the penny machine, put in a single coin, and pulled the handle. I won the jackpot. Lights went off and everything. Grand total winnings? $42.15. I paid for my and my pal's meals and drinks, which pretty much ate up the 'jackpot', but the night was free and it was a great feeling. You can't beat free.
Believe it or not, even big baseball fans have been complaining about the games being too long for some years now. And I agree with that. All that in-'n'-out of the batter's box, the adjusting of batting gloves, pitchers manicuring the mound and going to the rosin bag constantly - a lot of that drives me nuts, too!
At the same time though, as the guy said at the end of the video, the fact that there's no clock makes baseball special. (I wouldn't object to a clock keeping the pitchers and hitters from excessive dawdling though.)
Yes, MLB, pick up the pace! But not TOO fast, because the more leisurely feel of the game is one those things making it unique.
I've been to many professional baseball and football games and I can tell you that in my opinion, baseball is much better to see live, at the ballpark, while football is better on TV. One can't FULLY appreciate a baseball game unless they're at the park.
I think another reason baseball has lost popularity is because young people have so many entertainment formats vying for their time now. When I was a kid, there were no video games and SmartPhones and all these other gadgets.
So kids played a lot of baseball, and in playing the sport, one learns all the little details of it - details that are lost on most viewers today (unless they're hardcore fans). Truthfully, baseball is PACKED with strategy and nuance but the majority of Americans are oblivious to it today.
Most folks probably think baseball is: Pitcher tries to throw three strikes; batter tries to hit ball over the fence; fielder tries to catch ball and throw it back in.
Ha! Just for starters, more times than not, the pitcher IS NOT trying to throw strikes. Usually, he's trying to throw pitches that merely "LOOK" like strikes but are really balls. Or, balls out of the strike zone that he thinks the hitter will foolishly "chase".
"Pitcher's Count", "Hitter's Count", "Sacrifice Situation", "Hit And Run", "Squeeze Play", these are just 6 baseball terms that have great strategic meaning but stop 100 people on any American street today and I'll bet no more than 3 could give accurate definitions for them.
It's kind of sad that "America's Pastime" is past its prime. However, I agree that speeding up the game a bit would be one good step toward helping the game recover.
Well I love that song from "High Noon" and I know the other songs except for the one about Willy and the Duke. I am, how should I say, pathetic when it comes to sports. My brother, on the other hand has had jobs where he wrote the backs of baseball cards and knows all the stats
Your brother wrote text for the back of baseball cards?!?! Wow! What a fantastic job! As a boy, I collected baseball cards, and the backs of some of them were highly entertaining. Of course, that would have been before your brother's time as a baseball card writer, but still...
I really LOVE that song 'WILLIE, MICKEY & THE DUKE (TALKIN' BASEBALL)'. Being an "Old School" baseball fan, I know every single name dropped in that song. Many of those guys were playing when the game first caught on with me, and I have seen some of them in person (Willie and Duke, to name two).
In fact, I have a professionally shot black and white 8"x10" photo of my Brother and I posing with Duke Snider on the Dodger baseball field. Same goes for Roy Campanella and my all time, all time favorite, SANDY KOUFAX! Hokey-Smoke! What a pitcher THAT guy was!
[The earlier portion of my life seemed unusually blessed. After 1983, however, everything seemed to fall apart and never really recovered.]
My brother has loved baseball since I can remember and he has a huge collection. When he was a kid he even kept stats books on all the players. He had a job where he wrote articles for a sports magazine plus he wrote the info that appeared on the backs of baseball cards. He was well known in this field and was once offered a job somewhere in Texas or something like that. He now works for the Minor hockey league team in Niagara Falls but it is a big deal since these players are all over North America. He knows his stuff. He would love to write a book about baseball players who only played one game in the league so they get some recognition.
BIRGIT ~ Your Brother's idea of writing a book about 'One-Hit Baseball Wonders' (hmmmm... make that 'One-Game Baseball Wonders', as most of 'em probably didn't get a "hit") is a great one. That's a totally unique idea, as far as I know.
Offhand, do you know if your Brother has any one or two favorite baseball players of all time? Famous or otherwise?
I think this has more to do with being a good sport, and a team player. Sorry it took me so long to get here, Stephen. I think you made a similar reference in an earlier post.
I think you're right. No need to apologize, my friend. It may be baseball, but I'm not keeping score. Show up when you can and when you feel like it, but there's no obligation and no test later. (Besides, this was kind of a throwaway post anyway.)
---> NOTE: COMMENT MODERATION IS ACTIVATED. <--- All submitted comments that do not transgress "Ye Olde Comment Policy" will be posted and responded to as soon as possible. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Ok, I know I haven't stopped by the BOTB lately, but I'm totally stumped here. I guess I need to go back and read some previous posts.....?
ReplyDeleteBECKY-O! ~
DeleteThat won't help. All you need to know is right here, self-contained within this blog bit. All you need is a little curiosity, that's all.
~ D-FensDogG
'Loyal American Underground'
Since I don't follow baseball I have no idea what you're yakking about here. But it seems to me that the LA Dodgers must have screwed up somehow and someone's sorry.
ReplyDeleteSorry!
GIRL WONDER ~
DeleteSomeone screwed up and, yes, SHOULD be sorry but can't seem to find the humility to say the word.
And, no, this blog bit really has nuttin' to do with baseball. That's just the "uniform" it's wearing.
~ D-FensDogG
'Loyal American Underground'
P.S. And if you ARE a Dodgers fan, I'm sorry! I'm a STL Cardinal fan. Always have been. Always will be!
ReplyDeleteI don't really pay much attention to baseball anymore. The Steroids Era kind of ruined it for me. But, yeah, I was born and raised an L.A. Dodger fan. We had season seats and my Brother and I were sometimes featured in their catalogs of Dodger stuffs for children, when we were tots.
DeleteMy Ma worked for the L.A. Dodgers for a number of years and I guess someone in the marketing department thought Nappy and I were cute kids and could sell little gloves and uniforms, etc.
~ D-FensDogG
Al Bondigas here. Can't ya just smell the freshly mowed summer grass? Are ya up for a little pickle? Hope yes is yer rulin', cause I'm in.
ReplyDeleteJUDGE AL ~
DeleteSmells like grape slush and sunflower seeds to me.
~ D-FensDogG
I'm a NY Yankees Fan since my youth, and hubs likes the Toronto Blue Jays. We also have seen and like the Atlanta Braves and the Seattle Mariners. We've crossed to your side of the 49th to see a few games. Not sure what your point is here but I also like Gary Cooper. . .
ReplyDeleteHowdy, D.G. ~
DeleteThe Yankees are a team I love to hate. But I won't hold that against ya. Besides, I hate the 'Frisco Giants even MORE!
The Toronto Blue Jays? Who they? ;-)
My family grew up with baseball big time. Dodger fan first and foremost, but I've also rooted hard for the Diamondbacks. (Their old, black "away" cap with the big gold "D" formed into a snake was probably the best baseball cap design I ever saw.)
I've always semi-liked a couple other teams, too: the Oakland A's and the Kansas City Royals. But mostly, I'm a National League fan.
Thanks for stopping by, my friend.
~ D-FensDogG
I keep thinking the theme is cheating, or never saying you're sorry. Just a guess on my part.
ReplyDeleteLA news on players coming-going... Minor league abuse?
I don't watch baseball any more... so I don't know, but the other clips you have provide similar clues.
Gary Cooper movie theme - cheating on his wife? Cheating fate too?
Beatles' song is Lennon using nursery rhymes - was it plagiarized? Lennon's personal cheating on his wife?
Elton John's expounding on the issue of saying 'you're sorry'. It never seems to happen any more. People losing values - no moral standards.
That's it. I did the best I could.
DIXIE POLKA ~
DeleteNo home run for you, but you get 100 points for all the effort you put into analyzing this li'l post.
>>... or never saying you're sorry. Just a guess on my part.
Ahh, well, there IS that! Definitely a part of the whole here. (Or maybe that should have been "hole" here.)
Did Lennon in fact cheat on his wife? If so, I've never heard that before. It wouldn't surprise me though because (never mind all the "peace, love and sunshine" bullshit he spewed) he was a despicable person! My least favorite Rock star of all time.
Good effort, Dixie Polka, my friend. "Yak with you again... real soon!" (as Mickey almost used to say).
~ D-FensDogG
We have the Colorado Rockies here, so we don't know nuttin' about baseball. Oh, except what losing looks like. We know that really well. We certainly aren't Los Doyers. And hey, American Pharoah won the Triple Crown. Is he gonna play baseball now? Maybe he can come bat for us...
ReplyDelete~6B
6-B ~
DeleteWho needs baseball when they have Trigger overlooking their football stadium?!
Los Doyers went through some tough times. (Frankly, I cared about them much more during the O'Malley era.) But they have recently become very competitive again. Of course, they also spend a lot more money now than most other teams do, too.
I liked Los Doyers (or Los Dieyers) back in the day when most of their talent was homegrown, coming up through their farm system. Nowadays, they pretty much attempt to buy championships (which is something I always knocked Los Yankees for).
I'll always love the game of baseball - first and foremost before all other sports - but I haven't been a fan of MLB for a number of years now. I have a very peripheral view of what the standings look like, but with no TV service, I rarely even catch a game.
~ D-FensDogG
POSTSCRIPT:
DeleteAMERICAN PHAROAH can do any damn thing he wants, including playing baseball!
It dawned on me suddenly that I'd neglected to comment on the Triple Crown winner.
Man, I was so stoked! When I saw the way American Pharoah ran in the Kentucky Derby, I KNEW he was a helluva horse! Somehow the second race completely slipped my mind and it was Brother Nappy who told me A.P. had won again.
I went to downtown Reno yesterday to see The Belmont and to see A.P. win the first Triple Crown in racing since before you were born (or so I hoped). There had only been 11 Triple Crown winners in history, and so many times I thought I was going to see the next one but it never happened. I'd almost begun to think that it would never be done again.
But I went downtown, and although A.P. was the heavy favorite, I placed a small wager on him to win. Just in case he really did miraculously win the first Triple Crown since 1978, I didn't want to be the idiot sitting in the Circus-Circus sports book with no money on him! So I placed a small bet just to have "some action" (as my Pa would have expressed it).
When he broke out in first and stayed in that position, I was worried. That's a LONG race and he'd run in the previous two Triple Crown races. In long races like that, not many horses can go wire-to-wire, especially against the very best competition in the world.
But son-of-a-bitch if AMERICAN PHAROAH wasn't actually INCREASING the space between himself and second place down the homestretch. Un-freakin'-believable!
No, AMERICAN PHAROAH isn't SECRETARIAT, but I saw Secretariat, and American Pharoah is probably "the next best thing" (to quote Warren Zevon).
To see a horse win the Triple Crown in such a convincing fashion, it was worth the wait! Plus, my winnings - small as they were - paid for two Margaritas. Ain't nuttin' wrong with that!
~ D-FensDogG
I saw the most fascinating video the other day about why people aren't as interested in baseball as they used to be, and did you know that games are almost a full hour longer than they used to be? In 1950 the average game was just over 2 hours. Today, the average game is just over 3 hours.
DeleteAs a great article put it (which I reworded for the sake of your team):
On August 22, 1917, Los Dieyers played the Pirates for 22 innings, which is still the ninth-longest game in history. Elmer Jacobs, poor Elmer, threw 16⅔ innings of relief, allowing one run and getting the loss. It wasn't exactly a pitcher's duel, as there were 47 combined hits in the game, with nine errors, 10 walks, and three HBP, but for whatever reason, the game was scoreless from the seventh inning until the 22nd.
Time of game: 4:15.
On April 5, 2014, Los Dieyers played the Giants for nine innings. There were 20 combined hits in the game, but nothing was too unusual about it. Just a typical game of baseball that most certainly did not go 22 innings.
Time of game: 3:42.
Basically, in today's go-go-go society, young people can't focus on a game where the players all fart around between pitching, between batting, etc. It eats up an insane amount of time. I'll admit that I find baseball pretty boring, but not boring in that I don't like the sport, boring in that it takes forever for something interesting to happen. Because of all of the shifting and tightening gloves and fixing helmets and what have you.
Baseball games are longer than ever and here's why
Plus, you know, the Rockies.
When I first heard about American Pharoah (only after he won the Triple Crown, of course) I immediately thought of you and wondered if you saw it. I'm glad you were able to catch it. I'm kinda bummed I didn't. And score for making some cash off of it!
True story: one time I went to Central City to eat at a buffet with a friend. While I was waiting for him to use the bathroom, I sat down at the penny machine, put in a single coin, and pulled the handle. I won the jackpot. Lights went off and everything. Grand total winnings? $42.15. I paid for my and my pal's meals and drinks, which pretty much ate up the 'jackpot', but the night was free and it was a great feeling. You can't beat free.
~6B
6-B ~
DeleteThat was an excellent video.
Believe it or not, even big baseball fans have been complaining about the games being too long for some years now. And I agree with that. All that in-'n'-out of the batter's box, the adjusting of batting gloves, pitchers manicuring the mound and going to the rosin bag constantly - a lot of that drives me nuts, too!
At the same time though, as the guy said at the end of the video, the fact that there's no clock makes baseball special. (I wouldn't object to a clock keeping the pitchers and hitters from excessive dawdling though.)
Yes, MLB, pick up the pace! But not TOO fast, because the more leisurely feel of the game is one those things making it unique.
I've been to many professional baseball and football games and I can tell you that in my opinion, baseball is much better to see live, at the ballpark, while football is better on TV. One can't FULLY appreciate a baseball game unless they're at the park.
I think another reason baseball has lost popularity is because young people have so many entertainment formats vying for their time now. When I was a kid, there were no video games and SmartPhones and all these other gadgets.
So kids played a lot of baseball, and in playing the sport, one learns all the little details of it - details that are lost on most viewers today (unless they're hardcore fans). Truthfully, baseball is PACKED with strategy and nuance but the majority of Americans are oblivious to it today.
Most folks probably think baseball is: Pitcher tries to throw three strikes; batter tries to hit ball over the fence; fielder tries to catch ball and throw it back in.
Ha! Just for starters, more times than not, the pitcher IS NOT trying to throw strikes. Usually, he's trying to throw pitches that merely "LOOK" like strikes but are really balls. Or, balls out of the strike zone that he thinks the hitter will foolishly "chase".
"Pitcher's Count", "Hitter's Count", "Sacrifice Situation", "Hit And Run", "Squeeze Play", these are just 6 baseball terms that have great strategic meaning but stop 100 people on any American street today and I'll bet no more than 3 could give accurate definitions for them.
It's kind of sad that "America's Pastime" is past its prime. However, I agree that speeding up the game a bit would be one good step toward helping the game recover.
~ D-FensDogG
Well I love that song from "High Noon" and I know the other songs except for the one about Willy and the Duke. I am, how should I say, pathetic when it comes to sports. My brother, on the other hand has had jobs where he wrote the backs of baseball cards and knows all the stats
ReplyDeleteBIRGIT ~
DeleteHi! Thanks for coming by to listen!
Your brother wrote text for the back of baseball cards?!?! Wow! What a fantastic job! As a boy, I collected baseball cards, and the backs of some of them were highly entertaining. Of course, that would have been before your brother's time as a baseball card writer, but still...
I really LOVE that song 'WILLIE, MICKEY & THE DUKE (TALKIN' BASEBALL)'. Being an "Old School" baseball fan, I know every single name dropped in that song. Many of those guys were playing when the game first caught on with me, and I have seen some of them in person (Willie and Duke, to name two).
In fact, I have a professionally shot black and white 8"x10" photo of my Brother and I posing with Duke Snider on the Dodger baseball field. Same goes for Roy Campanella and my all time, all time favorite, SANDY KOUFAX! Hokey-Smoke! What a pitcher THAT guy was!
[The earlier portion of my life seemed unusually blessed. After 1983, however, everything seemed to fall apart and never really recovered.]
~ D-FensDogG
My brother has loved baseball since I can remember and he has a huge collection. When he was a kid he even kept stats books on all the players. He had a job where he wrote articles for a sports magazine plus he wrote the info that appeared on the backs of baseball cards. He was well known in this field and was once offered a job somewhere in Texas or something like that. He now works for the Minor hockey league team in Niagara Falls but it is a big deal since these players are all over North America. He knows his stuff. He would love to write a book about baseball players who only played one game in the league so they get some recognition.
DeleteBIRGIT ~
DeleteYour Brother's idea of writing a book about 'One-Hit Baseball Wonders' (hmmmm... make that 'One-Game Baseball Wonders', as most of 'em probably didn't get a "hit") is a great one. That's a totally unique idea, as far as I know.
Offhand, do you know if your Brother has any one or two favorite baseball players of all time? Famous or otherwise?
~ D-FensDogG
I think this has more to do with being a good sport, and a team player. Sorry it took me so long to get here, Stephen. I think you made a similar reference in an earlier post.
ReplyDeleteJulie
I think you're right.
DeleteNo need to apologize, my friend. It may be baseball, but I'm not keeping score. Show up when you can and when you feel like it, but there's no obligation and no test later. (Besides, this was kind of a throwaway post anyway.)
~ D-FensDogG