Monday, January 26, 2004
AMALGAM POST
Just a blitz through some articles on this Monday...
Art Thiel has a precluding piece for tonight's P-I Sports Star of the Year awards banquet, pointing out that 2003 was largely a playoff-free year for Seattle sports (he's counting the Hawks playoff game as 2004, when it actually happened). 2003 also saw UW athletics getting rocked with scandals in football and softball, and Wazzu having a former employee (Mike Price) being a man of Destiny. Thiel points out that this may be the crappy part of a cycle. He also reminds me that 1993-97 was a pretty good time to be a Seattle sports fan, and I didn't realize it. The Huskies (though I don't really root for them) went to three straight Rose Bowls, the Mariners had their 1995, the Sonics took the Bulls to Game 6 of the Finals in 1996, the Huskies went 8-4 in 1997, and also in 1997, the Mariners bullpen screwed up what debatably was their best chance to win a World Series (Jeremy will take this issue up to any takers).
Steve Kelley brings us our first in-depth Sandfrog story. Now I know they've been together for six years, trained themselves to play, and have to play around Scott's baseball career, but man, to only have ten songs they can play out over that amount of time isn't a very good time-to-output ratio, and this is coming from someone who considers himself somewhat of a musician (me). I can't really argue with Scott Spiezio's musical taste, other than Pearl Jam (if it's post-Vitalogy).
A time-tested Safeco Field dream of ours here at Sports and B's comes to mind after the reading of the following statement in the article...
[Scott's] music isn't the kind of music all Safeco habitants would love. It's heavy metal, after all, which doesn't always play well with the season-ticket holders sitting behind the dugouts.
Jeremy and I have always wanted to hijack the DJ booth over at the Safe. If I were Safeco DJ, I could promise two things: (1) that the musical output would largely reflect the sidebar links at Music and Brems, and (2) none of it would be profane. As far as I'm concerned, if it's not profane, it's family entertainment. Case in point: I've heard Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" a billion times during batting practice at the Safe and during the games. Has anyone actually listened to those lyrics? It's pretty morbid and pretty sick, though it sounds poppy as hell and happy. It's not. It doesn't curse though, and that's probably all it takes for the DJ to render it good. I think the current DJ's other criteria involve heavy overplay by either The End or the incorrigible KISS 106.1. To link this to the Spiezio article, I would play "Angel of Death" by Slayer whenever he came to the plate, Diamond Clubbers be damned. They're probably talking on their cell phones anyway, or waving into the LCF camera when they're sitting behind the plate.
People are falling for it hook, line, and sinker. This year's Mariners FanFest managed to break last year's attendance mark. It appears that the stark reality of the upcoming baseball season has not permeated much past the Mariner blogosphere and maybe one or two Seattle-area columnists. What really got me about everything surrounding FanFest this year was that it was frigging $10 to get in. I think when I went back in 2000, it was $5 at the Exhibition Center. Sure, people got to run around this year on the grass at the Safe and everything this year, but they also had to freeze their extremities off. As an addendum to the paragraph, I'll add that I got autographs from Shane Monahan and Charles Gipson that year, and when everything was being taken down, Charles Gipson fired a winner into the "throw the ball through the hole and win something" display and I high-fived him. Long live Chuck Gipson.
Lastly, we have John McGrath's article on the second year of Bob Melvin. I guess there's only a couple of small things I have to say about this article. One is that something needs to be done about all these cop-out nicknames. Any nickname involving either (1) adding the suffix -y/-ey/-ie (Shig, Boone) to the end of a first or last name or (2) involving some sort of truncation of the first and last names of a player or manager (Bo-Mel, A-Rod) should be outlawed or something. Regular readers from the site may notice that I always refer to Alex Rodriguez by his first name as opposed to the phony nickname that was tacked onto him in Seattle. The second thing I have to say about this article has to do with how Melvin really didn't make any of the hires last offseason to fill the vacancies of the coaches who left with Piniella. Melvin is tight with Mike Aldrete, so maybe he can be a confidant and all that good stuff. Why did that have to come at the expense of John Moses (perfectly good baseball man from everything I've heard) instead of our nutty Dave Myers, who singlehandedly set back Chris Snelling's career by two years (a healthy Snelling as possible trade bait in 2002 also brings up many what-if possibilities)? Other than that, nothing really surprising out of the article, or nothing that really elicits a postworthy reaction from me.
Wire/other sources time!
Kazu Sasaki is on his way to Seattle to sign the termination papers. Let's hope this goes off without a hitch. Orza's not complaining, so it shouldn't be too hard, right?
Jim Caple gets on a roll, working off the name change of Pac Bell Park to SBC Park. He wonders why the name change is catching so much heat in the Bay because they're both corporate names. I say this: an abbreviation just SCREAMS corporate. He does bring up the valid point that since the park was built privately, the owners should be able to name it whatever the hell they want to name it. Caple then calls on fans to take back the names of their publicly-funded stadiums, even going as far to suggest some prospective new names for the Safe, including Pioneer Diamond and the Nie Haus. Clever. I dig names that are either after people or places, not corporate entities. Let me point out that the Reds managed to do it perfectly in that a lot of people can hear the phrase "Great American Ball Park" and not realize that Great American is actually an insurance group.
Buster Olney has a little blip on the Expos moving to Las Vegas. Imagine that. One Las Vegas-related question: why the hell are the walls so damn high at Cashman Field? It makes the Big League Challenge every year look harder than it probably is. By the way, where have those reruns been? I have seen any BLC reruns lately on the ESPN networks. It might have something to do with all the timeslots covered up by their lame NBA coverage. For as many years as I hated NBC for showing every single Knicks/Bulls or Knicks/Heat games every frigging Sunday, at least their announcing crews were ten times better.
Lastly, if anybody didn't catch it, ESPN updated their offseason power rankings. Your Seattle Mariners are eighth and plummeting. The next sinking team is the Marlins at 15th. The Angels are number one, which I really can't argue with. Interestingly enough, the A's are all the way down at 19th. I still think that Mulder/Hudson/Zito/Redman/Harden are going to have to stand on their heads most of the time to make up for what should be a putrid offense. Making up for Giambi bolting is one thing, but making up for Tejada's production is quite another. Here's one thing that every manager should be thinking of when facing Oakland: pitch around Eric Chavez. What else is there in that lineup other than Durazo?
[edit ~2:26p -- sorry I forgot to link the Caple article for anyone who read the post within a half-hour. The link has correctly been added. Sorry to all who had to go scouring for the link.]
Art Thiel has a precluding piece for tonight's P-I Sports Star of the Year awards banquet, pointing out that 2003 was largely a playoff-free year for Seattle sports (he's counting the Hawks playoff game as 2004, when it actually happened). 2003 also saw UW athletics getting rocked with scandals in football and softball, and Wazzu having a former employee (Mike Price) being a man of Destiny. Thiel points out that this may be the crappy part of a cycle. He also reminds me that 1993-97 was a pretty good time to be a Seattle sports fan, and I didn't realize it. The Huskies (though I don't really root for them) went to three straight Rose Bowls, the Mariners had their 1995, the Sonics took the Bulls to Game 6 of the Finals in 1996, the Huskies went 8-4 in 1997, and also in 1997, the Mariners bullpen screwed up what debatably was their best chance to win a World Series (Jeremy will take this issue up to any takers).
Steve Kelley brings us our first in-depth Sandfrog story. Now I know they've been together for six years, trained themselves to play, and have to play around Scott's baseball career, but man, to only have ten songs they can play out over that amount of time isn't a very good time-to-output ratio, and this is coming from someone who considers himself somewhat of a musician (me). I can't really argue with Scott Spiezio's musical taste, other than Pearl Jam (if it's post-Vitalogy).
A time-tested Safeco Field dream of ours here at Sports and B's comes to mind after the reading of the following statement in the article...
[Scott's] music isn't the kind of music all Safeco habitants would love. It's heavy metal, after all, which doesn't always play well with the season-ticket holders sitting behind the dugouts.
Jeremy and I have always wanted to hijack the DJ booth over at the Safe. If I were Safeco DJ, I could promise two things: (1) that the musical output would largely reflect the sidebar links at Music and Brems, and (2) none of it would be profane. As far as I'm concerned, if it's not profane, it's family entertainment. Case in point: I've heard Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" a billion times during batting practice at the Safe and during the games. Has anyone actually listened to those lyrics? It's pretty morbid and pretty sick, though it sounds poppy as hell and happy. It's not. It doesn't curse though, and that's probably all it takes for the DJ to render it good. I think the current DJ's other criteria involve heavy overplay by either The End or the incorrigible KISS 106.1. To link this to the Spiezio article, I would play "Angel of Death" by Slayer whenever he came to the plate, Diamond Clubbers be damned. They're probably talking on their cell phones anyway, or waving into the LCF camera when they're sitting behind the plate.
People are falling for it hook, line, and sinker. This year's Mariners FanFest managed to break last year's attendance mark. It appears that the stark reality of the upcoming baseball season has not permeated much past the Mariner blogosphere and maybe one or two Seattle-area columnists. What really got me about everything surrounding FanFest this year was that it was frigging $10 to get in. I think when I went back in 2000, it was $5 at the Exhibition Center. Sure, people got to run around this year on the grass at the Safe and everything this year, but they also had to freeze their extremities off. As an addendum to the paragraph, I'll add that I got autographs from Shane Monahan and Charles Gipson that year, and when everything was being taken down, Charles Gipson fired a winner into the "throw the ball through the hole and win something" display and I high-fived him. Long live Chuck Gipson.
Lastly, we have John McGrath's article on the second year of Bob Melvin. I guess there's only a couple of small things I have to say about this article. One is that something needs to be done about all these cop-out nicknames. Any nickname involving either (1) adding the suffix -y/-ey/-ie (Shig, Boone) to the end of a first or last name or (2) involving some sort of truncation of the first and last names of a player or manager (Bo-Mel, A-Rod) should be outlawed or something. Regular readers from the site may notice that I always refer to Alex Rodriguez by his first name as opposed to the phony nickname that was tacked onto him in Seattle. The second thing I have to say about this article has to do with how Melvin really didn't make any of the hires last offseason to fill the vacancies of the coaches who left with Piniella. Melvin is tight with Mike Aldrete, so maybe he can be a confidant and all that good stuff. Why did that have to come at the expense of John Moses (perfectly good baseball man from everything I've heard) instead of our nutty Dave Myers, who singlehandedly set back Chris Snelling's career by two years (a healthy Snelling as possible trade bait in 2002 also brings up many what-if possibilities)? Other than that, nothing really surprising out of the article, or nothing that really elicits a postworthy reaction from me.
Wire/other sources time!
Kazu Sasaki is on his way to Seattle to sign the termination papers. Let's hope this goes off without a hitch. Orza's not complaining, so it shouldn't be too hard, right?
Jim Caple gets on a roll, working off the name change of Pac Bell Park to SBC Park. He wonders why the name change is catching so much heat in the Bay because they're both corporate names. I say this: an abbreviation just SCREAMS corporate. He does bring up the valid point that since the park was built privately, the owners should be able to name it whatever the hell they want to name it. Caple then calls on fans to take back the names of their publicly-funded stadiums, even going as far to suggest some prospective new names for the Safe, including Pioneer Diamond and the Nie Haus. Clever. I dig names that are either after people or places, not corporate entities. Let me point out that the Reds managed to do it perfectly in that a lot of people can hear the phrase "Great American Ball Park" and not realize that Great American is actually an insurance group.
Buster Olney has a little blip on the Expos moving to Las Vegas. Imagine that. One Las Vegas-related question: why the hell are the walls so damn high at Cashman Field? It makes the Big League Challenge every year look harder than it probably is. By the way, where have those reruns been? I have seen any BLC reruns lately on the ESPN networks. It might have something to do with all the timeslots covered up by their lame NBA coverage. For as many years as I hated NBC for showing every single Knicks/Bulls or Knicks/Heat games every frigging Sunday, at least their announcing crews were ten times better.
Lastly, if anybody didn't catch it, ESPN updated their offseason power rankings. Your Seattle Mariners are eighth and plummeting. The next sinking team is the Marlins at 15th. The Angels are number one, which I really can't argue with. Interestingly enough, the A's are all the way down at 19th. I still think that Mulder/Hudson/Zito/Redman/Harden are going to have to stand on their heads most of the time to make up for what should be a putrid offense. Making up for Giambi bolting is one thing, but making up for Tejada's production is quite another. Here's one thing that every manager should be thinking of when facing Oakland: pitch around Eric Chavez. What else is there in that lineup other than Durazo?
[edit ~2:26p -- sorry I forgot to link the Caple article for anyone who read the post within a half-hour. The link has correctly been added. Sorry to all who had to go scouring for the link.]
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