Archive for the ‘baseball’ Tag
Italian lager:
It makes me think of baseball.
Beer and World War Two.
Name: Peroni Nastro Azzurro
Type: lager
Venue: house
Review/notes: Baseball may not be the first thing you think when someone mentions Italy; fair enough. When we lived in Holland we went to the World Baseball Classic and the Dutch and Italian national teams were actually very good. The game became popular during WWII and never really left, with the Italians developing a league system based on US Major League Baseball. The number of foreign nationals per team is limited to a few so it retains a national identity. Every Peroni I have here, in Italy, or anywhere else makes me long for a summer travelling to the ballfields in Rimini, Bologna, and Parma.
[DT =Daily Tipple, explained in DT #000 here]
Monthly consolidations/compilations: January
February
March
April
Finishers’ medals:
The bain of the fun runner.
What the fuck is this?
Name: Budweiser
Type: lager
Venue: house
Review/notes: My horse, Saturday (the Grand National), finished but DFL. My Lotto ticket had no matches. The Cubs lost a game that I lost my recording of. I emptied all the finishers’ medals I could find and plan to weld them into a single piece. That’s the extent of gaming and sport for me, this week, I think.
[DT =Daily Tipple, explained in DT #000 here]
Monthly consolidations/compilations: January
February
March
Star Spangled Banner,
The wave, Seventh Inning Stretch.
Check, check, check. Play Ball.
Name: Strongbow Pear Cider
Type: perry
Venue: house
Review/notes: Strongbow perry is another industrial cider but it tastes like pears and is crisp and refreshing and not too sweet. I got it for Jackie to have during the baseball game then forgot to get any beer for me, so there you have it.
It is still a week till Opening Day for Major League Baseball but the first game of the regular season was in the wee hours of Saturday morning when the Dodgers beat the Diamondbacks 3-1 in Sydney Cricket Ground, Australia. I’ve got ESPN this year so my viewing will be more frequent, timely, LEGAL, and without voiceovers in Russian. Because of the time difference, we’ll TIVO the games of interest but this removes one more thing from the list of what I miss about the States (cheap pitchers of beer and decent pizza are pretty much all that’s left and lately we’ve had remarkable luck with the pizzas).
[DT =Daily Tipple, explained in DT #000 here]
Monthly consolidations/compilations: January
February
Signage exhorting the passing reader to stay “Sober For October” began to appear on the sides of bins in the Swindon town centre and on the Penhill estates. Here are some mistakes built into that sentence:
1) Swindonians can be leaning against a bin and still toss their rubbish on the ground. Bins are invisible to them. By extension, this is the WORST place for a public service advert.
2) Baby steps, darlings: maybe “sober for breakfast” or “sober for Magistrates Court” might be a better start to the campaign.
3) Readers? In Penhill? Oh, I crack me up. (Hey, they might get insulted by this over there…so please don’t any of you lot go over there reading this to them.)
Coming off my holidays it was actually about time for us to dry out a little and we thought we’d have a go at the spirit, if not the letter, of the theme. But, we’re only human…and it’s the Major League Baseball playoffs (and soon the World Series). We’ll ease up a little but have to keep lubricated going into the “Bender For November.”
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And, before any of you lot go calling baseball “rounders,” remember that football (or soccer) is only in the States to give the girls a sport to play as a result of the Title IX rulings a few years ago.
I had already seen ‘8 Men Out’ but it sort of goes with the Chicago reference
The Cubs ownership let me down this year, and a lot of inertia has to be shifted for me to get behind the Mets (again) as my National League team (I split my AL energies, these last few years, on the Sox–White and Red). Left without a good reason to seek out baseball broadcasts this year and with the weather too shitty to hit the cricket grounds, baseball movies seemed worth a go. I watched Moneyball (you can find your own movie link, this one goes to an article) on the flights home from Germany and found it a nice start to the Baseball Film Festival…based on a former Met from my last time around supporting the club and centered around the A’s (who along with the Tigers were my childhood American League favourites). The hook was set.
Somehow I never got around to Bang The Drum Slowly, although Moriarty and De Niro are a couple of my favourites. It is a bit dated, though not as bad as M*A*S*H; not only a little too sentimental it has a lot of the anti-hero AND baseball clichés you might predict. Still, De Niro’s Georgia accent is outstanding. If you like the movie, read the book (linked above); if you read the book already you might be a bit disappointed with the film.
Batting third was Bull Durham, which somehow eluded me despite my abiding love of minor league ball and the inanity surrounding it. I think I was avoiding anything that required Kevin Costner to work hard at acting, but this wasn’t it and I should have seen it years ago. Quite a pleasant bit of fluff.
Clean-up was Pride of the Yankees, which I’ve seen before and I get annoyed that every time the “luckiest man in the world” speech comes around it isn’t as moving nor as funny as almost every impression of it I have ever heard (and EVERY American over 30-years-old has a version of it, usually vibrating their cheek or larynx with a hand to simulate the Yankee Stadium echo…ask one of ’em to do Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, if you don’t believe me, but don’t tell them why).
And pitching, of course was Dock Ellis. If you haven’t heard of him, he threw a perfect game on acid. Robin Williams tells the story well enough in two minutes here, but the better film is this little documentary, online, called Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No (and still it is only 5 minutes). I’ve done some amazing things on psychedelics under all sorts of stresses, but to perform at a top, professional level in any athletic endeavour whilst tripping your ass off is…if I need to explain it, you’ll never understand.
Short list of other good Baseball Movies worth a look:
‘Eight Men Out,’ John Sayles on the Black Sox Scandal
’61*,’ an epic journey to break one of the great records
‘Damn Yankees,’ ’cause whatever Lola wants…
‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ for the World Series scene in the day room
‘Ken Burns’ Baseball,’ as the ultimate documentary on the subject
and, the one that got away: ‘Cobb,’ because Tommy Lee Jones as The Georgia Peach has got to be worth a look.
Sunday was damp and cool out but it was sunny and a run was due and I had spotted on Google maps what appeared to be baseball diamonds on the way to Fringford just north of Bicester. All that and the fact that the Butcher’s Arms was at the turnaround point seemed reason enough to get out for a trot.
The ball fields must be due to the RAF base nearby (a lot of USAF personnel) and the neighbourhood that surrounds them has a very suburban-USA feel to it (although, so does mine to be quite honest about it). Hopefully there will be some games going on as the weather improves.
I took the road to Fringford and while there are no pedestrian pavements there was little traffic to deal with and soon I was safely in the pub enjoying a bitter and drying my sweaty back by the fire. The landlady was friendly and the place looked cozy all the way back into the dark recesses of the bar.
In old Chicago
We implored, “Let the goat in!”
As always, Cubs choked.
The Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago has too long a history and too many cool things about it for me to go into whilst trying to do a blog dedicated to life in SE England, but 1) we’re Cubs fans and it’s spring training, 2) I ate in the Goat Tavern in London my last trip down, and 3) it is sort of like a pub here. Plus, I needed to do a Haiku for the day.
Every American that has had a television anytime in the last 35 years knows the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd/Bill Murray sketches (look for “Olympia Restaurant” sorry, video only in America, apparently) about the foreigners at a diner and all you can get is cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, no-Coke-…-Pepsi!, two cheeps! That’s based on the Billy Goat, this bar down below the roads on the north side of the river below Michigan Avenue, WGN and the newspapers.
You can get quite a bit more here http://www.billygoattavern.com/history.html
The Billy Goat Tavern was purchased for $205 back in 1934, with a bad cheque by William Sialis, but he covered that cheque with the first week’s sales. A goat fell off a truck and wandered inside and became the mascot of the tavern.
Bill Sianis had this habit of taking his goat to Cubs games and got booted from a World Series match-up in 1945 when other fans complained about the smell. Declaring, “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more,” the curse was on. There was this one time in 1994 when the Cubs started the season with the longest losing streak in their history and Sam Sianis brought the (I assume another) goat to the field and was blocked at the gates…until a chant went up from the crowd: “LET THE GOAT IN! LET THE GOAT IN!” Cubs won the game
When they were eliminated by the Arizona Diamondbacks a few years ago, it was on the anniversary of the day the curse began. Spooky.
The Endless British Pub Crawl 
Signage exhorting the passing reader to stay “Sober For October” began to appear on the sides of bins in the Swindon town centre and on the Penhill estates. Here are some mistakes built into that sentence:
1) Swindonians can be leaning against a bin and still toss their rubbish on the ground. Bins are invisible to them. By extension, this is the WORST place for a public service advert.
2) Baby steps, darlings: maybe “sober for breakfast” or “sober for Magistrates Court” might be a better start to the campaign.
3) Readers? In Penhill? Oh, I crack me up. (Hey, they might get insulted by this over there…so please don’t any of you lot go over there reading this to them.)
Coming off my holidays it was actually about time for us to dry out a little and we thought we’d have a go at the spirit, if not the letter, of the theme. But, we’re only human…and it’s the Major League Baseball playoffs (and soon the World Series). We’ll ease up a little but have to keep lubricated going into the “Bender For November.”
————————-
And, before any of you lot go calling baseball “rounders,” remember that football (or soccer) is only in the States to give the girls a sport to play as a result of the Title IX rulings a few years ago.
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