Brockett Blog

After months of being scared to fully jump aboard the Cardinals bandwagon (“What’s that behind the corner there … Corey P-p-p-patterson?!?! Zoinks!”), I have given myself fully to the cause in ways that seem just as rational as relying on Jeff Suppan and Jeff Weaver to pitch your favorite team to a title.

To get in the mood for Game 162 tonight, I watched/listened to one the finest montages set to screen: Mark Safan’s “Win in the End” rallying the Beavers to a comeback in Teen Wolf. Squint your eyes, and the faces start to resemble the last few weeks for the Cardinals …

For one of my final classes toward Web design/development certification, I needed to take a basic art/design class. I signed up for the class a couple of times in previous semesters before thinking better of sitting in a classroom for three-hour increments and trying to find my muse next to a motley assortment of fellow students. Solution? Online class!

The course served as a practical instruction to Adobe Illustrator, using projects to highlight different aspects of graphic design. My functional mind (with just a hint of flair or attempted artistry) feared assignments based on abstract concepts. But other than coming up with little graphics that represented concepts like “balance,” the class steered toward real-world applications.

For our final project, we were tasked with coming up with an 8-by-10-inch poster of our choosing. I considered multiple musical interests. (My homage to the “Judy in Disguise” album cover must wait for another day.) But then I considered what could generally be described as podcast album artwork. The real estate on an iPod touch screen begs for a visual accompaniment to all that audio, and I shudder to think how long I spent making sure my thousands of songs in iTunes carried the proper album artwork. The podcast can be considered in much the same way, and even the most basic of designs is preferrable to the emptiness of a screen adorned only by the generic, circular podcast symbol.

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“If you were a baseball closer, what would be the song that plays over the public address system when you jog to the home mound in the top of the ninth inning?”

The question takes the absurd, and gives that description a rational detail. Sure, my 60-mile-an-hour fastball (weakening with every throw) would be worse than batting practice fodder for even the Aaron Mileses of the world, but wouldn’t the sounds of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Phenomena” send the home crowd into a frenzy beforehand? Even Shawn Chacon – who had such a bad 2004 that a 1.9 WHIP should be referred to as the Chacon Line – garnered Jay Z’s “Moment of Clarity” as entrance music, according to Wikipedia.

(As an aside, that Wikipedia page provides endless entertainment. Were all the kids with “K” names not enough to stave off surprise at Roger Clemens’ hubris? How about being OK with the use of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” as walk-up music? Also, I am hesitant to believe that Chad Bradford ever willfully asked that “Yellow Submarine” play for any of his rare save opportunities.)

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The sports world gasped in delight last season when Omar Minaya, New York Mets general manager, called out Adam Rubin of the New York Daily News amid turnover and turmoil in the Mets front office. It was odd, it was random, and it was a sight seldom seen in a current baseball culture that treats teams like private businesses schooled in proper public relations.

It was nothing compared to what Charlie O. Finley could do.

On Aug. 20, 1961, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics grew tired of a local journalist’s scoops about Finley’s relocation efforts and secret trips to scout Dallas’ Cotton Bowl as a potential venue. So Finley organized Ernie Mehl Appreciation Day to “honor” said journalist. Let’s let authors Roger D. Launius and G. Michael Green explain the festivities:

“Finley ordered billboards that said ERNIE MEHL APPRECIATION DAY – POISON PEN AWARD FOR 1961, with a cartoon of Mehl sitting at a typewriter with a quill pen next to a bottle labeled ‘poison ink,’” write the authors. “He had the billboards mounted on both sides of a flatbed truck, which was driven around the playing field. As the truck circled the field the organist played ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’”

Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman takes a clear-headed, strongly researched approach to Finley’s time as owner of the Kansas City (and, eventually, Oakland) Athletics. The authors – both members of the Society for American Baseball Research – pepper the biography with similar colorful anecdotes throughout Finley’s time in baseball. But trying to capture the rationale behind the man is much like trying to win a race against Herb Washington, the track star and personification of a failed Finley brainstorm known as the professional pinch runner: near impossible, and potentially embarrassing.

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The baseball fan’s memory overlooks .500. Sure, if you’re 80-81 on the last day of the season, beating up on a September call-up will give the season the benefit of a nice, round number that squares away successes and failures. But most seasons, that means no big pennant push, no World Series dreams, and no lasting memories. Great teams provide memories by the bushel, and bad teams manage to store their stink in the deep recesses of your mind (plus, there’s probably some good seats available come September). Authors write books about the great teams, the second fiddles, and even the catastrophes clad in stirrups. (The best title in the latter genre? Probably this one, which I want to read mostly for the David Clyde debacle). But .500 and just a team filling space in the standings between first and last? There is no inherent story worth writing or reading in that.

Hovering around .500 also has a snowball effect, which means that future generations will skip right over a pre-birth time period if there’s not much to learn about a favorite team. I was born in 1980, which means I have more than enough literature to teach me about the 1960s St. Louis Cardinals and the valedictory prose from the stellar 1980s squads. To the victors go the book deals. But the 1970s? Besides pictures of Joe Torre’s mutton chops in his (first) autobiography, the Cardinals didn’t offer much reason to venture back to that decade (for the decade, the team went 800-813, which is a figure worth aspiring toward only for current-day Pirates fans).

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Pregame: I don’t want to overstate this, but I was privileged to be a part of the greatest parking coup of all time. The only thing that could have topped it would be the Yankees agreeing to reinstate the bullpen car and using our vehicle as Mariano Rivera’s chariot of choice.

We encountered expected traffic after an uneventful cruise along the New Jersey Turnpike. My previous trip to the old Yankee Stadium in 2003 involved me staying in Flushing and taking the subway to the game. Though I knew the new stadium stands close to Ruth’s rehabilitated old haunts, I had no idea what surrounded the stadium. Would there be parking garages? And how many first-born children would it cost for an afternoon game against the intracity rival?

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Pregame: So many things look good on paper. In this way, I share a lament with Omar Minaya (but at least I don’t have the Bartolo Colon trade on my resume). Planning a trip requires at least the vaguest hint of an outline, lest ye be spending quality time in Not-So-Quality Inns. Trip instigator Nick made so many wise moves, picking the right games as the right times to make travel manageable and delegating accommodations to each of the four participants. He tried to add in one non-baseball-related event to the itinerary, bisecting the trip between Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania through the fertile crescent of burgeoning quarterbacks. And this is where the trip first changed course.

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Pregame: Problem No. 343 with more than a decade of losing could very well be the lack of a strong rival. Every baseball team is happy to see you on the schedule, and every fan gives strong consideration to handing off the season tickets and taking care of that overdue oil change whenever you come to town. Anyone who has made the drive between Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania (a group we soon would join) knows that central Pennsylvania creates quite the chasm between the Phillies – owners of a pretty sorry record of their own before the last couple of years – and the Pirates.

Division rivals like Cincinnati don’t offer much, and most Cubs games result in an infestation of road warrior fans wearing Cubbie blue. But what about Cleveland? A relatively nondescript drive from Detroit to Pittsburgh revealed the relatively short distance between the two cities. It certainly isn’t considered one of the benchmark rivalries of interleague play. But maybe it should, for no reason more important that somehow there will be three wins gained between the two downtrodden teams during the series.

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Pregame: The road trip began without me. As much as there might be some romance to starting a road trip all at once, there is something to be said for sleeping the extra hour and getting picked up at 6 a.m. to hit the road. The trip consisted of Nick (a college newspaper friend who I sadly inspired to work in journalism) and two of his hometown friends, James and Elmer. I had never met the two, but after having witnessed their skill in wolfing down a few dozen Dunkin Donut holes, I knew I was dealing with professionals.

Two factors resulted in the early start time: entering a new time zone and a 1:05 p.m. first pitch. But, as on any trip, the excitement of starting a journey made the first few hours fly by as the navigator in the rented Dodge Charger switched between the Sirius/XM hip hop, Alt Nation and decade stations with the speed of a hyperactive hummingbird. We breezed by the somewhat nondescript Indiana and Michigan landscape, only stopping to pick up an assortment of beverages, a collapsable cooler, pretzel chips, a football and a frisbee. You know, the essentials.

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Full report to follow.