Aberrate This!

"The Patriots were really lucky to win the Super Bowl, when you think about it. I mean, I congratulate them for putting together a team that could do it, but realistically they'll be lucky to win 8 games next year. Our whole sport is suffering, and unless all these teams get new stadiums we just won't have a very good sport."

You just don't hear Paul Tagliabue saying things like that over in the NFL, do you? Or Mr. Stern in the NBA for that matter.

Yet once again good ol' Bud Selig is in the news, saying that the season the Minnesota Twins are putting together is "an aberration". Those same Minnesota Twins who today won a game and opened up a 17 game lead in the American League's Central Division. 17 games! Had the Twins been contracted last winter, the Chicago White Sox would be leading the division... currently with a record 7 games under .500! By the by, the attendance today at the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis was 35,000 folks. And if memory serves, the Twins were one of the first teams (if not the first) to draw 3 million fans in a season. All this in an outdated stadium, which a lot of baseball people are still saying is a place that opposing teams do NOT want to play in come October. I won't even mention the fact that June and July would have been miserable months to watch baseball outdoors this year...

I should also point out that the Milwaukee Brewers (who are currently "in trust" to Mr. Selig's daughter) today lost to the Florida Marlins in Miami and are now 22 games out of first place in the National League Central. There were 6,000 people there to watch that game, and as far as I know there isn't going to be a new stadium built for the Marlins. How are either of these teams (or the Devil Rays... or Royals) any better off financially than the Twins? The same Twins who are selling season tickets for next year so that fans can have priority for this year's playoffs. Yet, the Twins are the team that Selig says will not be able to raise enough revenue to survive. I don't get it. I guess I need it explained to me.

And after all that... what I'm really hacked off about is the way that Bud Selig continually bad-mouths the game of baseball. It's America's oldest professional sport, steeped in tradition, grace, athleticism, and has more strategy involved than all of the other professional sports, yet remains at heart a one-on-one duel between pitcher and batter that everyone can understand. This season, there are great division races in half of the divisions in the game, and a bunch of teams in contention for both wild cards. Superstars like Bonds, Sosa, and Ichiro are having great seasons, and exciting rookies are making a splash like Mark Prior. Yet all Selig ever says is how the game is awful and it needs to be redone.

I understand that so much of this is just PR for the battle between the owners and the player's association in an attempt to work out a new CBA. Still... other sports go through this... and none of their commissioners devalue their sport to do so. If Selig would put more emphasis on the good things in baseball, then take the other owners and the players reps and get a deal done that's good for everyone, then we can all enjoy this great game for another hundred years.

Selig is a convenient scapegoat for a lot of things... but if the players strike, and baseball really is crippled, Selig should also get plenty of blame.

And as the picture says, if you want an "aberration"... I'd call buying a World Series and then selling off all the good players and subsequently the team itself a pretty big one. I don't think you'll see George Steinbrenner doing that any time soon. Well... at least not the selling part.

In other news...

I got to sit through a parade on Saturday... and found out a tidbit about my hometown that I think is very interesting. Apparently in the 4th of July parade this year in Austin, they banned politicians from being in the parade. After Saturday, I'm ready to hail this as pure brilliance (two words I don't often associate with the hometown). Which would you rather see in a parade. Marching bands? Classic Cars? Those crazy Shriners and their little cars? How about floats with people throwing candy? Or... cars with a campaign sign on them, driving slowly, while politicians and their cronies walk by pestering you with stickers, pamphlets, fridge magnets, and/or pencils? Yeah, that's what I thought. I sat way way back from the street on Saturday and I still ended up with all of the above handed to me by sweaty parade walkers. If one more person had come up to me with their crap I swear I was gonna say "No thanks, I'm communist." So it's good to hear that at least one town has banned this practice. Maybe if y'all had thrown more candy, this wouldn't have happened...

And finally... one of my co-workers reported that in Cleveland there are a chain of movie theaters called Magic Johnson Theaters. And the Magic Man himself comes on-screen to give the "turn off your cell phones" announcement. I got really excited about this concept until he made it clear that the little bit was quite scripted. The idea of a 8 minute run-on sentence from Magic Johnson about the dos and don'ts of theater etiquette sounds like the height of Unintentional Comedy to me.

Did you ever see The Magic Hour? Yeah, I thought so...

That's about it for today, folks. But stay tuned for later in the week when I break down my favorite cartoon show... and it's *not* what all y'all are thinking, I'd bet. Here's a hint:

"Shuffle off, buffalo."

8/4/02