It’s 2011 Reds Team Baseball Card Set day (presented by Thompson Plumbing, Heating and Cooling), for all your Reds commemorating enjoyment.
You can add them to your pristine collection of unopened team cards sets, or, if your family is more like mine, you can find them all around the house after they are incorporated into your son’s imaginary game where the Paul Janish card teams up with the Drew Stubbs card to defeat the diabolical Bakugan on the Lego train.
If you closely at this picture, you’ll notice that they’re lying down like that to show off the shiny foil background. There are four of these super-special cards in the pack: three gold ones for the gold-glovers and one silver one for the MVP.
Why does a gold glove get you a gold card while the MVP only gets you silver? Probably because “gold” is in the name of the “gold glove” and so it would be weird the other way. If it helps, you can think of the silver as representing diamond. And not the lab-created ones; the ones people die for. Or platinum. Platinum is probably better.
Either way, it’s much easier to get the cards than any of those other precious materials. Just be one of the first 30,000 through the door to see the Reds take on the Pirates and get yours. Edinson Volquez is supposed to be back in action.
Posted in Random Ramblings. Comments Off on Cool Baseball Cards at Today’s Game
I have so many disjointed baseball thoughts this evening, that I am going to whip out a page layout mechanism I used to use all the time–bullets. They’re even shaped like little baseballs:
Broadcast in Technicolor I *hate* watching baseball in standard definition. I want to blame DirectTV for the fact that tonight’s game looks like I’m watching it through wax paper, but FSOhio sent me an email last week talking about how HD wouldn’t be available, which I guess means it’s their fault. I had lunch with a bunch of tech geeks today, and they all seem to have gotten rid of their television service entirely in favor of streaming programming from the internet to their televisions. I wonder whether the internets has the game in HD. It would work over dial-up, right?
It Wouldn’t Matter if He Crapped Autographed Gold Ingots The Cowboy felt the need to defend Paul Janish after he popped out with the bases loaded in this game. A completely badass defensive shortstop, batting eighth no less, needs defending when he’s batting .353 in his first 34 ABs? Only in Cincy.
Wardrobe Malfunction The ump just stopped Jordan Smith to make him adjust his sleeves to show the same amount of red peeking out from both sides of the jersey. Fashion police anyone?
Call Him Sunny D Joey Votto is a concentration machine. The fresh-squeezed orange juice he drinks in the morning comes out as frozen concentrate a half hour later. If you’re going to beat this guy, you have to be better than him because he’s not going to give away anything. I think that has to be influencing the rest of the team too; I mean, you can’t boot a ball and expect everyone to be all like, “hey, it happens to everyone” in this dugout. At best, it would be like, “hey, it happens to everyone except Joey.”
Down Boy It makes me sad that no one on the TV broadcast has mentioned Chris Denorfia coming up with the Reds, let alone called him “Hearththrob.” For old time’s sake, I’ve barked like Dino whenever he’s come up to bat, but it just isn’t the same.
And a bonus bullet, not about baseball stuff, but just a real head-scratcher:
I Wish for 1,000,000 State Farm Agents When your kitchen table and/or ornamental birdbath are pulverized by the magical appearance of the crap you wished for from your own personal State Farm genie, are the damages covered by State Farm?
Apparently, when I was watching the Cincinnati Reds destroying the competition early this season, Major League Baseball’s drug policy was destroying Manny Ramirez’ attempts at cheating.
“Major League Baseball recently notified Manny Ramirez of an issue under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program,” MLB said in a statement.
“Rather than continue with the process under the program, Ramirez has informed MLB that he is retiring as an active player. If Ramirez seeks reinstatement in the future, the process under the Drug Program will be completed. MLB will not have any further comment on this matter.”
The upshot is that Ramirez faces a 100-game suspension for his second positive drug test should he ever want to return to baseball.
But that’s not what my post is about. That’s just the back story. What this post is about is one of the greatest Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references I’ve ever seen in a sports story. That link takes you to a post by Craig Calceterra talking about some ridiculous comments made by another writer, who essentially blamed Ramirez’ cheating on getting manager Bob Melvin fired from first the Seattle Mariners and then the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Those are both teams that Ramirez never played for, so how does that argument work? Because Melvin’s team didn’t make the playoffs because Ramirez cheated to get his teams to the playoffs. And that, as Calceterra quips, makes Mevin “Agrajag to Manny’s Arthur Dent, continually reincarnated as the next Casey freakin’ Stengel, only to be subsequently killed by Manny, except unlike Arthur Dent, Ramirez did it with malice aforethought.”
Just beautiful. Now, does anyone have some spare time? I’d love to have some to devote to some re-reading of Douglas Adams between Reds games.
They’re off to a 5-0 start, and the only other time they did that was 1990. They have already scored 43 runs this season, second only to the 1976 team. They brought Sean Casey into the booth, raising the general level of awesomeness to levels unseen since 2006.
The start of baseball this year lifted a weight that I hadn’t realized had settled on my spirit, and such a crazy good beginning has been sort of surreal. The minor league season hasn’t even started yet, and I’m already swept up in a tide of enthusiasm at the major league level.
I think maybe I say that every year, but this time I don’t feel the need to say, “it might all change tomorrow, but they can’t take away what’s happened so far.” That’s nice for a change.
Meanwhile, what the hell is happening to the Cards? You know the kerfluffle that comes up every year when some player actually tries to make a hit when the team is up by 8 or something and old school ballers get all pissy about how that’s not sportsmanship? It feels a little like it’s not fansmanship to root against the Cards so far this year. I’ll have to bust out some new material to poke at the Pirates, who are cruising in second place at 4-2.
But that’s cool; I’ve got to have some parrot jokes around here somewhere. In the meantime, the answer to the question is “sooooo good.”
A new season means new at-bat music for many of the player on the Cincinnati Reds (except Scott Rolen, who’s been walking up to that same Coldplay song since 2008). There’s a list of the songs each of the players requests here, but this is more a grab bag of songs I’ve mostly never heard of instead of the songs that actually come to my mind when the player comes to the plate.
If it were up to me, these would be the songs that would accompany *my* Cincinnati Reds as they took the stage.
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You can add them to your pristine collection of unopened team cards sets, or, if your family is more like mine, you can find them all around the house after they are incorporated into your son’s imaginary game where the Paul Janish card teams up with the Drew Stubbs card to defeat the diabolical Bakugan on the Lego train.
