Tuesday, March 30, 2004
...AND THEY'RE OFF
I fell asleep for maybe an hour with the Conan show on the TV last night and I woke up to my alarm at 1:55am. I'd never set my alarm for that time unless I was cat-napping inbetween working on a project (procrastination), but by gum, baseball was on TV and it counted this time.
Basically tearing a page out of the NHL book for this year, the Yankees wore their pinstripes as the road team and the Devil Rays wore their green tops on gray pants as the home team. I was only about half-awake for this, but the whole atmosphere seemed surreal. I was awake for Hideki Matsui's hit and Jason Giambi's homer (with the odd quick zoom by the camera when the ball went into the stands), but the real weird thing about this was knowing that the ESPN announcers weren't actually at the stadium. It's a detached feeling I'm really not used to, though I'm sure a good portion of soccer fans in the world are used to the "gooooooooooooooal" guy from Univision World Cup coverage doing a bunch of the games on tape but not at the stadium. There was just something weird about hearing Karl Ravech and Harold Reynolds doing the game, but what magnified it for me was that the crowd microphone wasn't cranked up too high, adding to the detached feeling. But enough overanalysis of this.
I only spotted two quotes of any worth today, both from the same P-I article. The first quote was covered by Peter and the more esteemed David.
The other quote I saw was...
[Willie] Bloomquist has in his favor the fact his manager, coaches and teammates know what he can do. They don't need to see big numbers in the spring.
And the simple response here is that unfortunately what Bloomquist does isn't much and that not only do the managers, coaches, and Bloom's teammates not need to see big numbers in the spring, they evidently don't need to see them at all.
I guess I have one quote that I want to use for my outlook on the upcoming season. Basically, there's optimists out there that are uppity on the season, and it seems there's quite a lot of them, and this quote I'm about to use somewhat sums up my feelings on the season to come...
"Oh yeah, he's nice now. But don't come looking for me when he's burying your bodies out in the desert."
-- Master Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force (vol 2 on DVD comes out in mid-June, while I'm in field camp)
Basically the effect I'm looking for from the quote is along the lines of "don't come crying to me if and when it all goes to crap." Shake also has a great quote about Highlander being a documentary and its events happening in real time. All of this was happening as he was pondering whether throwing a talking doll off a cliff would give it immortality.
One last thing about the ballgame from last night --
Thuhhh Yankees lose!! Thuhhh Yankees lose!! Thuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh (Sterling's shaking voice) Yankees lose!!
See, I'm a guy that pronounces the word "the" as "thee" instead of with a schwa sound (or I find it less cumbersome speechwise next to the word Yankee), so it's kind of hard for me to accurately convey the way John Sterling closes out every Yankee win. Something also of note is that before I heard Sterling interviewed once on KJR, all I'd heard from him was that call. When I heard his non-exclamatory voice, I was amazed because Sterling's "Yankees win" voice sounded to me like it was from a person that was 25 years older than the one I was hearing in the interview.
Okay, this is really the end of it this time. Happy trails, Eric Owens.
[Edit ~11:18a -- and hooray for John Kruk on Baseball Tonight. He looks weird as hell in a suit, but he'll be fine. I wondered who would fill the spot on the panel left by Bobby Valentine, who was pretty solid with the BBTN crew, but John Kruk more than fills the hole. Great pickup by ESPN. BBTN will be fun once again!! Of course, try not to think about the timeline of the Best Damn Sports Show Period, which now sucks and has seen both Michael Irvin and John Kruk eventually bolt to ESPN.]
Basically tearing a page out of the NHL book for this year, the Yankees wore their pinstripes as the road team and the Devil Rays wore their green tops on gray pants as the home team. I was only about half-awake for this, but the whole atmosphere seemed surreal. I was awake for Hideki Matsui's hit and Jason Giambi's homer (with the odd quick zoom by the camera when the ball went into the stands), but the real weird thing about this was knowing that the ESPN announcers weren't actually at the stadium. It's a detached feeling I'm really not used to, though I'm sure a good portion of soccer fans in the world are used to the "gooooooooooooooal" guy from Univision World Cup coverage doing a bunch of the games on tape but not at the stadium. There was just something weird about hearing Karl Ravech and Harold Reynolds doing the game, but what magnified it for me was that the crowd microphone wasn't cranked up too high, adding to the detached feeling. But enough overanalysis of this.
I only spotted two quotes of any worth today, both from the same P-I article. The first quote was covered by Peter and the more esteemed David.
The other quote I saw was...
[Willie] Bloomquist has in his favor the fact his manager, coaches and teammates know what he can do. They don't need to see big numbers in the spring.
And the simple response here is that unfortunately what Bloomquist does isn't much and that not only do the managers, coaches, and Bloom's teammates not need to see big numbers in the spring, they evidently don't need to see them at all.
I guess I have one quote that I want to use for my outlook on the upcoming season. Basically, there's optimists out there that are uppity on the season, and it seems there's quite a lot of them, and this quote I'm about to use somewhat sums up my feelings on the season to come...
"Oh yeah, he's nice now. But don't come looking for me when he's burying your bodies out in the desert."
-- Master Shake, Aqua Teen Hunger Force (vol 2 on DVD comes out in mid-June, while I'm in field camp)
Basically the effect I'm looking for from the quote is along the lines of "don't come crying to me if and when it all goes to crap." Shake also has a great quote about Highlander being a documentary and its events happening in real time. All of this was happening as he was pondering whether throwing a talking doll off a cliff would give it immortality.
One last thing about the ballgame from last night --
Thuhhh Yankees lose!! Thuhhh Yankees lose!! Thuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh (Sterling's shaking voice) Yankees lose!!
See, I'm a guy that pronounces the word "the" as "thee" instead of with a schwa sound (or I find it less cumbersome speechwise next to the word Yankee), so it's kind of hard for me to accurately convey the way John Sterling closes out every Yankee win. Something also of note is that before I heard Sterling interviewed once on KJR, all I'd heard from him was that call. When I heard his non-exclamatory voice, I was amazed because Sterling's "Yankees win" voice sounded to me like it was from a person that was 25 years older than the one I was hearing in the interview.
Okay, this is really the end of it this time. Happy trails, Eric Owens.
[Edit ~11:18a -- and hooray for John Kruk on Baseball Tonight. He looks weird as hell in a suit, but he'll be fine. I wondered who would fill the spot on the panel left by Bobby Valentine, who was pretty solid with the BBTN crew, but John Kruk more than fills the hole. Great pickup by ESPN. BBTN will be fun once again!! Of course, try not to think about the timeline of the Best Damn Sports Show Period, which now sucks and has seen both Michael Irvin and John Kruk eventually bolt to ESPN.]
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