The TV rerun gods were in a generous mood last night, enabling me to catch a Seinfeld rerun of “The Letter,” the episode in which Elaine twice causes a ruckus at a Yankees’ game by wearing an Orioles cap while sitting in the owners’ box seats. (Sorry, I can’t figure out how to embed the TBS clip, so the link will have to do.)
“Seinfeld” was one of the best baseball-aware TV shows of all-time, especially when George went to work for the Yankees and George Steinbrenner. One of my favorite episodes is “The Hot Tub.” George is assigned to entertain visiting executives from the Houston Astros, a bunch of good ol’ boys who call each other bastards and sons-of-bitches. George soon picks up the patter.
So a tip o’ the cap to Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer and the whole Seinfeld gang for making the national pastime an integral part of the show’s enduring legacy.
A journalist by profession, I usually refrain from taking sides. I try to see the merits and disadvantages of each aspect of an issue, causing me occasionally to over-analyze a situation. I confess, I’ve been overthinking the issue of fans voting for the American and National league All-Star game rosters.
Major League Baseball is using its “Final Vote” promotion to lure fans to its Web site and vote among five players in each league for the final spots on the AL and NL teams. The traditionalist devil in pinstripes on my left shoulder keeps shouting in my ear, “It’s a crass commercial gimmick that diminishes the dignity of the game.”
The “lighten up” angel wearing Astros’ mustard stripe double-knits on my right shoulder says calmly and confidently: “Hey, it’s game. It’s for the fans. It’s fun.”
I listened to the angelic voice and have been stopping by MLB a couple times each day. I’ve cast most of my AL votes for Carlos Pena of the Tampa Bay Rays. But on every single one of my NL ballots, I’ve marked Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants, the guy under the “SF” cap above.
The Giants organization is having some fun with it. On last night’s telecast, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow were plugging Sandoval, the “Kung Fu Panda,” as they broadcast from a platform down the right field line. Behind them were “Vote Pablo” posters plastered to the brick walls of AT&T Park.
I imagine the other teams are likewise pumping the fans to vote for their players. The voting, which ends at 4 p.m. EDT Thursday, lasts only a few days. The dignity of baseball can surely survive that.
And now, back to voting, Chicago-style, early and often (and late) for Pablo.
The San Francisco Giants placed Randy Johnson on the 15-day disabled list after he hurt his left (throwing) shoulder while swinging the bat in a game against the Houston Astros. With the All-Star break on the horizon, the Giants hope the Big Unit will mend quickly and miss no more than a regularly scheduled start or two.
I’m tempted to attribute Johnson’s injury to bad fortune brought on by bad cap karma. The Giants wore the patriotic red caps in the weekend series. By itself, the cap is OK. But paired with the orange and black? Blech. The late Mr. Blackwell would surely disapprove of the color clash.
Major League Baseball caps can show up in the most unexpected places, as the hit UK show “Britain’s Got Talent” has proved.
The winner of this year’s competition was not Internet phenomenon Susan Boyle but an athletic dance troupe called Diversity.
BGT has only crept into the American consciousness on a broad scale this year, and most of the credit for that has to go to the viral appeal of Susan Boyle. I learned of the BGT results yesterday via Twitter, and I followed a link to the video below to watch Diversity’s performance. I wasn’t paying close attention at first, but eventually I was astonished to find that most of the guys blokes in the group were wearing Houston Astros’ baseball caps for their final-round routine.
I still couldn’t quite believe my eyes. But when I watched a video interview with the troupe on the ITV official BGT site, there was no more doubt about the caps.
With my limited attention span and not contradictory ability to lose myself in any deep well of data on subjects dear to me, a friend forwarding a link to a baseball uniform database tempted me severely today.
The database is part of Dressed to the Nines, a section of the Baseball Hall of Fame Web site devoted to the history of uniforms. What a treasure trove it is. The uniform history of each club – National League, American League, Federal League — is presented in graphic form. At top right is a side-by-side panel of the Detroit ballclub’s home and road uniforms from 1905, the first year the fabled gothic “D” graced the front of the Tigers’ jerseys.
Some of the styles are classic, others – shall we say? – misguided. Get a look at the crazy window-pane plaid uniforms the New York Giants wore in 1916.
If you want to find out when the Houston Astros switched to their mustard-in-a-blender-accident double-knit softball uniforms (1975), the database will let you figure it out. The database will also show you the franchise’s cool original Colt .45s uniforms, which were worn from 1962-64.
The site is also instructive on changing cap styles. The first thing I did upon entering was to trace the evolution of Cleveland’s caps, noting that the primitive Chief Wahoo first appeared on jersey sleeves in 1947. Restyled to what became his traditional look in 1951, he moved up onto the cap inside the wishbone “C” logo in 1954.
Maybe that’s what doomed the Tribe in the World Series that year.
Randy Johnson has signed a one-year contract with the San Francisco Giants, and that’s good news for baseball fans by the bay. Even at 45, The Big Unit has some good games left in that 6′10″ frame. The move to the Giants will be a bit of a homecoming for Johnson, who grew up nearby in Livermore, Calif. He’s aiming to reach 300 career victories (he needs five), and I suspect the Giants hope in between starts he’ll be able to tutor Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and the other young pitchers on staff.
Johnson is a thoroughly modern superstar in that he’s hopped from team to team in this era of free agency. He came up with the Montreal Expos and spent several years with the Seattle Mariners, although I can’t recall ever having seen him pitch in the Kingdome when I lived there. He played briefly for the Houston Astros in 1998 (a stretch of his career I can’t remember at all) before signing with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He had some great years there, jumped to the New York Yankeees for 2005-06 before returning to Phoenix.
The MLB Web site didn’t waste any time posting a picture of Johnson in his new orange-and-black threads and cap. The Giants will have an excellent pitching staff in 2009. Now if they could only add a power hitter or two, then they’d really have something.
The TV rerun gods were in a generous mood last night, enabling me to catch a Seinfeld rerun of “The Letter,” the episode in which Elaine twice causes a ruckus at a Yankees’ game by wearing an Orioles cap while sitting in the owners’ box seats. (Sorry, I can’t figure out how to embed the TBS clip, so the link will have to do.)
A journalist by profession, I usually refrain from taking sides. I try to see the merits and disadvantages of each aspect of an issue, causing me occasionally to over-analyze a situation. I confess, I’ve been overthinking the issue of fans voting for the American and National league All-Star game rosters.
The San Francisco Giants placed Randy Johnson on the 15-day disabled list after he hurt his left (throwing) shoulder while swinging the bat in a game against the Houston Astros. With the All-Star break on the horizon, the Giants hope the Big Unit will mend quickly and miss no more than a regularly scheduled start or two.
With my limited attention span and not contradictory ability to lose myself in any deep well of data on subjects dear to me, a friend forwarding a link to a baseball uniform database tempted me severely today.
Randy Johnson
