In which I write Haiku-style poetry about a potpourri of baseball cards I found in a value pack. Because, well, it’s my blog.
2003 Topps Brad Voyles
I have to admit
I don’t know how many sounds
Are in Brad’s last name
In which I write Haiku-style poetry about a potpourri of baseball cards I found in a value pack. Because, well, it’s my blog.
1997 Bowman Todd Hollandsworth
Todd Hollandsworth’s card
Red-and-black border has he
Swing, Batter, Batter
In which I write Haiku-style poetry about a potpourri of baseball cards I found in a value pack. Because, well, it’s my blog.
1990 Topps Jeff Kunkel
Jeff Kunkel, cool name
What a awesome name to say
This was his last year
In which I write Haiku-style poetry about a potpourri of baseball cards I found in a value pack. Because, well, it’s my blog.
1992 Score Ellis Burks
Ellis Burks played for
the Red Sox in Nineteen Nine-
–ty two. Centerfield.
In 1997, Wade Boggs threw a scoreless inning against the Angels:
This is something that could just as easily be a Bizarre Baseball Culture. It’s the Sammy Sosa-starring slow-pitch softball, uhm… “classic”: Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.
I would have reinstalled this game to do a review, but I decided not to… because I can remember how much it sucked. I have played many horrible games in my day: I flew through freaking hoops in Superman 64 (how can you make a Superman game where the main activity is FLYING THROUGH FREAKING HOOPS!?!?!), I played a horrible Pokemon knock-off masquerading as an adaptation of Animorphs, I think I even played ET The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 once in a museum somewhere.
Sammy Sosa Softball Slam is in that category of horrible. It was, for one thing, hilariously bad an idea. Let’s make a softball game… BUT WITH SAMMY SOSA! Even admitting this was the year 2000, I have to think some type of hallucinogens were involved for such a bizarre idea to happen.
The game itself wasn’t that much better. It was easy no matter what mode you were doing, the players involved (with the exception of Sammy himself) were ridiculously nondescript (compare this to the colorful cast of the great Backyard Baseball series), the graphics were bad even for their day, the announcer was annoying (he’d call Sammy “the man, the myth, the legend” basically every other time he came to the plate) and, oh, right, it was still a softball game starring Sammy Sosa. By the way, I remember that Sammy’s statistics were maxed out in the game, and that there was also a button on the player editing screen that would allow you to transform any player into Sammy Sosa- even if the player was a woman! Yes, with just the tap of a button, you could change anyone, regardless of age, race, or gender, into Sammy Sosa circa-2000… to play slow-pitch softball.
Think about the horrible implications of that.
Yeah, scary.
Oh, and this was the “thrilling” opening to the game. Although this is from the Playstation version and not the PC version, I seem to recall it being very similar:
(Shivers)
There was a fight between agents during the Winter Meetings today. One guy threatened to burn the other guy’s house down. Jeff Passan has the story over at Yahoo! Sports, and he makes a reference to Punch-Out! in it, which is awesome.
Exactly what the title of this post says: Bull Durham will become a musical. Yeah, seriously.
Now, I have zero experience in musical theater and only slightly more than zero in theater in general, but I guess I’ll give this a shot, so without further ado, my one-man performance of the Bull Durham musical:
….
No, wait, no, I won’t. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to see it. You’d stab your eyes out, rip your ears out and then skins yourself so that you wouldn’t have any chance of even feeling the vibrations created by my voice. So… yeah. Sorry. (No I’m not.)
So, I found this in my family storage. It probably was gotten by my grandfather:
You see that? Well, yes, it’s an image of Pittsburgh’s hopes and dreams being extinguished, but it also is the cover of the Spring Training program for the Atlanta Braves in 1993, when they were in West Palm Beach.
Let’s go inside, shall we (after the jump):
Robinson Cano is now a Mariner. I did NOT see that coming. And they paid a ridiculous 240 million dollars for him, which is absurd, especially given the long length of the deal and the fact Cano is already in his thirties.
However, that, along with the fact that the Mariners are apparently not going in hard to get David Price (amongst others), means there is perhaps no better time than now to be remembering how back in 2002 the Mariners saved humanity from a grand Sasquatch Invasion, which is easily one of the ten worst types of invasions to deal with. And they did it in TWO issues! Yeah, some teams would stop with just one issue, but the Mariners released TWO in 2002. That is true devotion to giving the fans what they…. want? And, what’s more, They were available outside of the stadium too, available at local McDonald’s! That way, you wouldn’t even have had to go to the park to get your hands on these comics!
Oh, and yes, it was done by Ultimate Sports Entertainment/Ultimate Sports Force, why do you ask?
Both comics were written by David B. Schwartz, who’s Twitter account calls him a “entertainment lawyer by day, comic book writer by night.” He’s recently been doing things for independent comic companies like Aspen, where he most recently wrote a title called Idolized, if my research is correct. Since he’s a lawyer, I’m going to be extra-careful not to say anything that might cause him to sue me. Thankfully, he does a pretty good job with these comics, given the circumstances that surround comics like this.
Doing the art for the first issue- and the covers of both issues- was Brian Kong. Kong has done a ton of stuff over the years, from comics to cards to recently illustrating a children’s book about how baseball teams got their names. In part two, the art was done by Dennis Calero, a prolific artist who co-created Cowboys and Aliens, which was later very-loosely adapted into a movie, as well as work with DC and Marvel. Like with Schwartz, they do okay given the circumstances.
Anyway….
Go below the jump and let’s get started on the stories themselves:
The Baseball Continuum 