Without the stars, of course.
Today’s been an emotional one at Fenway Park. The Boston Bruins-style “everybody sings our national anthem in unison” moment has officially become a Boston staple. Pat-down lines were endless. Tears were non-stop. At the perfect moment, David Ortiz dropped the mother of all f-bombs, and baseball helped do what it always does: makes us feel better about the stupid shit in our lives that isn’t baseball.
There are plenty of sports events to watch on TV tonight, from the Phillies-Reds game at 7PM ET on ESPN 2 to the Sabres at Bruins on NBC Sports at 7:30 PM ET to the incredibly intense Jazz and Lakers games, on ESPN at 8 PM and 10:30 PM respectively, which will decide the fate of both of those teams, as one of them will miss the playoffs. There’s also WWE Main Event on ION, in the event that I ever discover what channel that is on U-verse.
Chances are I’ll probably end up watching the Cardinals game in an exhausted daze on my couch, because the 24/7 cable news cycle is breaking me to pieces, and I don’t even watch that nonsense. But it finds a way to sneak up on you and get you in a mental chokehold, like carbon monoxide in a running car in the garage, except all in my brain. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, to be honest, but I’m tired and my head and heart hurt, that’s for sure. (I’ll be more fun tomorrow, I promise.)
But baseball made me pretty happy last night as teams and fans across the country paid tribute to the victims of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing, and I’ll watch that New York Yankees video again, as the Bronx Bombers fans sang along with “Sweet Caroline” for one night. And I had some leftover photo tributes left over from my morning search, so I figured in lieu of the TV listings, we could honor New York’s finest baseball fans one more time.
Actually, I should say that most baseball teams (if not all) and fans were class acts last night, as moments of silence were held in honor of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing at ballparks across the country. More specifically, a number of parks played “Sweet Caroline” as well, as the song, of course, is a staple of Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park tradition.
But because sports fans can be such overzealous a-holes sometimes thanks to heated rivalries, it’s especially sweet to see that New York Yankees fans paid their respect to their bitter adversaries in Beantown by playing the song and singing along. Leave it to the one thing that makes people act the most insane to help bring us a little closer to normalcy.
If I’m making a list of things I love and have to constantly defend, “baseball” and “Final Fantasy games” are at the top of the list. I’m a diehard Cleveland Indians fan who has had to justify every crummy “rebuilding” season of fire-sale trades, and I’ve had the “NO, FINAL FANTASY IV IS THE BEST ONE” video game hipster conversation more times than I’d like to admit. I mean, VI is better than IV, but I rep IV.
What I’m saying is that this preview of the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays season in J-RPG form is relevant to my interests.
I swear to God I played this game as a child. I think it was included on some Nintendo 90 games on one cartridge collection.
At the time it didn’t make sense, but now it’s crystal clear.
There’s a lot of gold to be found in the clip (Reyes being weak against artificial turf is especially choice), and while it might not live up to the epic Final Fantasy joke execution of lasagna using Merton in that one episode of Lasagna Cat, it’s what I like to see in my MLB parody videos. Spoiler alert: if you sleep at an inn with Colby Rasmus in your party, you can see one of four dreams about finishing in third place.
[h/t to Sportress]
And I say HEY! What a wonderful time of day! Where you can learn to work and play, and read the first Sports On TV of 2013: the 20 greatest sports moments from PBS Kids’ ‘Arthur.’
‘Arthur’ is about the mostly-educational adventures of Arthur Read, an 8-year old aardvark who … well, learns to work and play and get along with the people in his hometown of Elwood City. Arthur started as a series of children’s books by author and illustrator Marc Brown, and eventually became a cartoon so popular it has over 1.1 million likes on Facebook and is the longest-running children’s animated series in the U.S., second behind only ‘The Simpsons’ as the longest-running animated series in the U.S. period. It’s also full of sports, and sometimes I like to write things on my comedy sports blog that my girlfriend will enjoy.
If you don’t already love ‘Arthur’ and have no interest in flipping through this list, listen to the opening theme, included below. If you can listen to the entire thing and not sing it for the rest of the day, I’ll let you off the hook.
Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with Kate Upton.
It is not an easy task to put together a list, such as the Greatest Sports Moments of 2012, specifically because so many things happen in any given year that it’s all but impossible to universally gauge which one event or person is greater than another. But since we’re just a couple dudes who like to make fun of stuff and almost always ignore actual sports news, it’s really quite easy.
With that said, here’s a quick breakdown of how our team of fact checkers and sports analyst number crunchers determine which people, places and things were the most important and influential in 2012…
