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We'll continue the season with our blog-type columns. Whenever the mood strikes, be it stats night on Monday, the middle of a West Coast game on Wednesday night, or maybe even a Friday morning before I leave for work, I'll come here and post entries. Sometimes it will be a paragraph or two, sometimes longer. I'll make sure I put a date on everything so you can easily tell what's new from what you may have already read. So feel free to come to this page often, or continue checking in once a week as the stats update, to check out and catch up on the latest entries in what I hope to be a season long blog. If anyone else has anything to contribute, I'll be more than happy to post it here, with all credit given to the author of course. And if we get one of our infamous 20+ reply e-mail threads going, I may also opt to copy that into this space as well so it's saved for all posterity. April 20th, 2009 Good day and how you be? Commish here. You there. With Eddie on the other side of the glass. Eddie Koval? No, Eddie Sczarry who do you think we're talking about?… First up, corrections from my last posting. I misspelled the name of the WFAN host I'm impersonating in this posting's opening. I spelled it Summers (as in "Eve") and it's supposed to be Somers (as in "famous Connecticut prison"). And what a crime I've committed as we all know Steve the Schmoozer is certainly no douche… Next issue with last week's column, get your rock music straight already! I opined that perhaps a great song for the Mets bullpen of 2007 would be "Gasoline" by the Stone Temple Pilots only to come to know that the song is called "Vasoline" instead! Now I'll argue that this corrected title is also apropos; especially considering what Heilman and company did to all the Mets fans last season! Speaking of taking one up, er, on the "chien", how about poor Chien Ming Wang? Or shall we call him Ming The Merciless? As in please have some mercy on the poor Yankee fans' souls! Seven or more earned runs given up in each of his first three starts? Mr. Wang meet the Stone Temple Pilots! Hey wait, there's an endorsement opportunity here isn't there? OK, please get in line behind the guy from Match Light charcoal, here was here first… What are the Yanks to do about this? We all know Hank's not a patient man so can't you just see him luring Wang across the street and out to the old Yankee Stadium under the pretense of how standing on the mound at the place of his last success would be good fung shei or something? Then next thing you know the scene turns into something out of "Miller's Crossing" with Hank playing Gabriel Byrne to Wang's John Turturro as he kneels there on the pitching rubber? "Look into your heart Hank, look into your heart!" while Wang's Yankee cap floats away in the breeze… If Hank is indeed in a whacking mood, then yours truly better lay low. For you see, the very same day that The Commish got his hard cast removed, Mark Teixeira hurt his very-same wrist! Coincidence? Could be. But let the record show that I'm an equal opportunity jinxer as the Red Sox Jed Lowrie also sustained a wrist injury that day as well, and unlike Teixeira, may not return anytime in the immediate future. But then again, no one thought Turturro's Bernie Bernbaum character would come back either. If any of you aren't getting any of this because you've never seen this great 1920's gangster movie, I'm including a YouTube link at the end featuring the original movie trailer in case you're into those kind of films and want to check it out. By the way, I'm considering making the "embedded three-minute YouTube clip" a weekly feature, let me know what you think. But don't worry, we're still a long ways away from my first podcast! Remember last week when we were discussing how naming your team after a childrens TV show may not have been the best of ideas? Well considering the turnaround that Ed's Go (San) Diego Go team had in their second week, here's a proposal that might help John W's last place squad. The pitching staff needs a boost and renaming the team after one of them might help lift the unit up out of their collective malaise; of course so would shooting Wang but I digress; so I propose the name "Yo Joba Joba"! Anyone without young children who needs to do some research on this one simply type "Nickelodeon" and "Gabba" into a Google search and enjoy the madness. For those of you who are in the know, tell me DJ Lance Rock isn't the same guy who played Roger on "What's Happening"? And yes, I've found a way to work gangster movies and Nickelodeon seamlessly into the same narrative without resorting to any "SpongeBob meets Fredo" shennanigans... So what's the deal with these Pirates in Somalia? Shouldn't they be in Pittsburgh playing baseball? Or have Captain Jack Sparrow Wilson and the Laroche brothers decided that (yo-ho! yo-ho!) a pirate's life is for them? Probably wouldn't be so bad and getting all this negative press if they didn't have Jose Tabata's wife with them. With the baby stealing and the whole thing… Let's take a quick look at Kevin's relievers shall we? Huston "Oops There Goes Another One Out To Blake" Street, Jason "I Don't Got The" Motte and Carlos Marmol? Ray's right, closers are wussies… Finally I close this entry with the information that Manny Ramirez has publicly stated that he loves the idea of finishing his career back where it all started in a Cleveland Indian uniform. Great, now I've got a visual of Manny in a pair of ruby slippers carrying a schnauzer and chanting "there's no place like home". Just Manny being Dorothy I guess? Which then makes Scott Boras which Wizard Of Oz character? "I don't find it funny, when I ask for lots of money. If I only had a soul…" "Miller's Crossing" original movie trailer April 13th, 2009 WHO WANTS TO BE A MILL-UH-NAIR?!!! Obviously the Swinedogs do (better make that a "trill-uh-nair" then, eh?) as Jim & Mark take the early lead in the 2009 Tour De Full Monty. Pacing just behind the lead swinedogs are The Legere Brothers (I know there's a "G" in "Inge" but I can't find the two "H"'s?) and Dennis' M.A.S.H. Unit Rats, currently in 3rd place despite having seven (yes 7!) draftees on their Reserve List already. No "bonus" here that's for sure. Unless you count the fact that the Rats were first in line for Emilio Bonifacio, which I believe is Italian for "don't let this hot start fool you, I'll be back below the Eckstein Line shortly"… Looking a bit lower in the standings, I'm not sure what's worse, having our defending champ in 14th or our highly touted rookie owner in 15th? Ray's a notorious slow starter so I'm not worried about him, but I fear that freshman Ed Koval (THE Eddie Koval? No, Eddie Kranepool, who do you think we're talking about? Steve Summers here and you there on the FAN!) may have sealed his fate when he named his team after the San Diego Padres and a children's cartoon. Considering the fact that he's going to be looking for some good hitters he might want to rename his team after Dora the Explorer! Or better yet, as Ed himself put it, wouldn't it be Handy to have Manny right now? Oh and Ed, when you read it was a good strategy to have a balanced team, I really don't think having 30 ˝ points in both hitting and pitching categories was what the book had in mind… OK, now that the freshman hazing is done… for this week at least… Wrobel, you're lucky the rook's having a hard time otherwise I'd be breaking out the Godzilla Meets Desenex jokes right now. You obviously have not been reading the fortune cookies lately have you? Confucious say: "Man with itchy balls is merely scratching the surface of what he can achieve"… In other sports news, Angel Cabrera has won golf's Masters. Wait, when did they start letting jockeys play on the PGA tour? Oh no, my bad, that was Angel Cordero. Or is he the guy closing for the Reds now? That's Francisco Cordero? Right. Seriously, I watched the entire World Baseball Classic and I still can't get my Cabreras, Corderos and Rodriguez's straightened out. Is there some kind of Rosetta Stone language course I can take for this? Or maybe the PC Professor guy that keeps advertising on the MLB Network has a CD for this too? Help me out here guys, this is worse than the "Mickey Stanley wasn't the Yankees shortstop in the mid 70's" confusion I had last week during the "slipping the mickey" e-mail thread… Watching the Mets the other night and admiring the brand spanking new bullpen they've got. Well almost brand new. I'm just pretending that Pedro Feliciano wasn't there last year, picturing him as Jose Feliciano instead. Although I hope he doesn't come in to games with Jose's version of "Light My Fire" playing because anything involving the "Mets bullpen" and "fire" is not a good thing. Be like having Sean Green enter to Stone Temple Pilots "Gasoline" or something. I see they've got this sidewinder now, name's O'Day. Not sure what his first name is as I didn't catch it during the game, but while I'm at it, I'll just call him Alan and we'll have him use the #1 smash from 1977, "Undercover Angel" as his entrance music. Or maybe that Cabrera guy wants to use that while he putts? Did someone say Putz? Oh never mind, this can't end well so I'm just ending it now… Speaking of endings and angels, let's finish things up this week with the sad news. One death is enough but we all know that these things tend to come in threes. Why? Well as we learned in Schoolhouse Rock, three is the magic number. Seriously though, Nick Adenhart, Harry Kalas and Mark Fidrych all are on the way up to meet St. Peter and maybe someday to emerge from a certain cornfield in Iowa. Rest in peace fellas, and don't worry, I won't allow Neil to add you to his roster like he did that Kile guy! Oh and when you get up there, do tell Darryl I apologize for that. I haven't had a decent pitching staff since and I think I know why… By the way, the week young pitcher Kile died, Cardinals announcer Jack Buck also passed away. Was there a veteran pitcher in the mix then too? Can we look that up? After all, three is the magic number…
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