Welcome to our newest column at With Leather, the Orioles Report! In the Report, we’ll be following along with the Birds’ 2012 season and chronicling the unique, exciting things that happen when the O’s take the field! NOTE: NO BASEBALL WILL BE FEATURED
Today’s episode, wherein an elderly woman sitting in the crowd holds a bat longer than Ryan Flaherty, from Holdout Sports:
It happened in the bottom of the second inning at the Phillies’ spring training stadium in Clearwater, Florida. Ruiz’ bat slipped out of his hands as he swung, and the bat landed just to the right of the woman, who may have been the oldest woman in that section of the park, but obviously still has enough reflexes to react and grab the bat.
Come for the standing ovation they give a lady for touching a bat from her seat, stay for the slow motion replay where Carlos Ruiz loses control of his bat and the section behind him does an involuntary point-wave.
Next week on the Orioles Report: the Oriole Bird accidentally hits a guy in the face with a hot dog, then eats the hot dog.
It’s not really fair to say that a Minor League Baseball team with a performing, five-member mascot band and a hot dog vendor who is half ostrich has “lost” their mind, but it’s safe to say the Reading Phillies have been consistently out of it for years and the Baseballtown All-Star Home Run Derby is the next harrowing step of their descent into madness. Picture of me at a school desk in R-Phils Mascot Band bassist Bucky the Beaver’s home unrelated.
Anyway, Reading is either trying to make the concept of a home run derby as chaotic and dangerous as possible or throwing in with Mutant League Sports, you decide: they’ve put a dunk tank, a crane, a trampoline and a “gaff ball picker-upper” in the outfield affixed with any number of unfortunately-placed interns that will earn you “hundreds and hundreds of points” if you hit them. Believe it or not, a teenager hanging from a crane with a baseball glove trying to catch fly balls isn’t the worst idea: 500 fans are going to be IN THE INFIELD having a VIP party with food and drinks and crafts and what-the-hell-ever-else while the Eastern League All-Stars hit home runs over them. There’s a net, you see. A net I’m sure will keep pop-ups from reigning down on the head of some dude elbows deep in ribs, or onto any of the various fire-related or electrical equipment they’ve got set up.
And THAT’s not even the worst idea: Grammy award-winning jazz guitarist David Cullen will be sitting in front of home plate, playing guitar as guys hit home runs over him. Nothing says “sports fun” like a guy getting brain damage while trying to pluck his way through f**king Woodsongs, I guess.
If you’re in Reading on the 10th of July, go to this and send me a report. Try not to die from a fly ball to the dome between point A and point B.
The 10 Freakiest Commercials of 2011 - That ‘Dead Island’ announcement trailer really is fantastic, and I wish any part of the actual game was as good as it. Also, I want somebody to make a Skyrim trailer like this with a guy taking an arrow in the knee in reverse, ending with him as an adventurer like me. [Warming Glow]
The Robert Downey Jr. Acting Venn Diagram - I feel like Chaplin should be in here somewhere. [UPROXX]
This Week in Posters: Battleships, Ghost Riders, & Spider-Men - The funniest thing I’m going to see all week is another goddamn Spider-Man origin story advertised as “untold”. Starving kids in Africa know Spider-Man’s origin, just shut up and make him fight Electro. [Film Drunk]
Four Theories on Why the Internet Has Such a Massive Almost Unexplainable Crush on Alison Brie - Nice science, Pajiba. She’s a gorgeous woman who seems nice and she has big boobs, end of experiment. [Pajiba]
Observe The Phanatic In Its Natural Habitat - I didn’t want this to get bumped completely off the page yet, because it’s one of the best things I’m ever going to share with you. [With Leather]
Before Hollywood Ruins Them: 15 Sci-Fi and Supernatural Scripts On The 2011 Black List - Somebody throw Seven Hill City on there, I’ve almost convinced people to just come film it guerrilla style in Austin. [Gamma Squad]
Waka Flocka On Wiz Khalifa’s Success: “All Hype” - Also, payola. [Smoking Section]
Christina Hendricks Is Johnnie Walker’s New Internet Sales Rep - hey christina, your boobs would look a lot better if you didn’t smash them against your chest and throttle yourself with them [UPROXX]
Stop Whatever You’re Doing And Watch This Video Of Dogs Hanging Out Of Car Windows - Seriously, do that. [UPROXX]
The 45 Best Mugshots Of 2011 - The 100 Best Buzzfeed Lists Of Things That Happened In 2011 2011. [Buzzfeed]
OCD Dog Hates When Kitchen Cabinets Are Left Open - I need this dog, I’ve got some Sixth Sense shit happening in my house. [The FW]
7 Things to Watch for From the Golden Globe and SAG Nominations - #1: whether or not anybody actually watched Hugo, because it is better than anything being nominated. [Moviefone]
A Gallery of Classic 8-Bit Mashups from Drew Wise - He’s the guy that designed the potato chips bags! [Unreality]
As many longtime readers know, I am not a fan of the Phillies but I love the Phillie Phanatic more than most members of my family. Some combination of Jim Henson, a love of animals on ATVs and a longing for those innocent days of VHS blooper tapes has made me interested in whatever the Phanatic does, to the point that if you read “the Phillie Phanatic went to the Galapagos Islands” and don’t care we probably can’t be friends.
At a Phillies game one night, the Phillie Phanatic notices that he looks a lot different than everyone else. His Mom, Phoebe, explains that before he lived in Philadelphia, the Phanatic lived on the Galapagos Islands. To show the Phanatic that being different is part of the beauty of life, Phoebe sends her son back to the tropical island chain where he was born.
Join the Phillie Phanatic on his long journey back to the Galapagos Islands, where he meets creatures of all shapes and sizes.
The photos you’re about to love are courtesy of MLB.com. Amy Cadge should get a Pulitzer for the one of the Phanatic with a baby sea lion.
The St. Louis Cardinals won Game 7 of the World Series on Friday to secure the franchise’s 11th title (11 in ’11 is not ironic, despite what Shane Victorino thinks) and they had a whopping 48 hours or so to enjoy it before the entire world crumbled around them. Yesterday morning, Tony LaRussa announced his retirement after 33 years of managing and three World Series wins (16 and 2 with the Cardinals, respectively). Instead of celebrating an incredibly improbable championship run, Cardinals players and fans now wonder, “Who will be the next manager and will it affect whether or not Albert Pujols stays?”
Only one man – St. Louis GM John Mozeliak – knows the answer to that first question, and only one man – Albert Pujols – knows the answer to the second question. Granted, his agent, wife and kids probably know, but he’s the only man who matters for right now. That doesn’t mean, though, that every sports writer, blogger and Internet commenter on Earth won’t make predictions, some of them accurate and most of them way off base. First up, former Cardinal and the grittiest shortstop ever, David Eckstein.
“Albert would stay if (Jose) Oquendo got the job.”
“My initial reaction (after learning of La Russa’s retirement) was, ‘It needs to be Jose Oquendo,’” Eckstein said. “When you played for Tony, you didn’t want to disappoint him. When I was playing infield for Jose, I didn’t want to disappoint him. I know how much he has put into this. When you can get a player to play outside of himself, for someone else, that’s when you get the best out of a player.”
LaRussa has long lobbied for Oquendo to get his shot at managing a big league ballclub, and he certainly has a nice foundation and situation in St. Louis. He makes sense as a replacement, as the fans and players love him. But that really doesn’t mean much of anything.
This isn’t really a sentence that ever should’ve been typed, but somebody in the St. Louis Cardinals front office forgot to file copyright the intellectual whatever of the squirrels that ran onto the field during games 3 and 4 of their series against Philadelphia, and now that the “serendipitous rodent” has become a “mascot of sorts” for the club, every bootleg t-shirt jockey and sports-minded taxidermist is free the plaster the thing on its wares.
“No one can come and say, ‘This is ours,’” Haim Mano, marketing professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said of the Rally Squirrel. “It’s wide open.”
Major League Baseball, he added, could claim copyright of the footage of Games 3 and 4 against the Philadelphia Phillies two weeks ago, when a squirrel temporarily interrupted the game and darted across the field. And vendors could also run into dangerous territory if the squirrel-themed merchandise includes something that looks like a team logo or other trademarked material.
As funny as the discussion gets (and remember, it’s a discussion about how you can make chocolate squirrels and call them Rally Squirrels to sell them to dumb Cardinals fans, but if you put the Cardinals logo on them you’re infringing), it doesn’t get any better than this:
To help market the nuts at the St. Louis shop, a family member dropped off a squirrel statue that has been passed around the family as an inside joke for years. They placed a red background behind it.
“I don’t think anybody can copyright squirrel nuts,” he added.
They need to take advantage of the trend now, because win or lose, the “rally squirrel” won’t be around forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could think of another animal to cite when rooting for the Cardinals?
Welcome to our newest column at With Leather, the Orioles Report! In the Report, we’ll be following along with the Birds’ 2012 season and chronicling the unique, exciting things that happen when the O’s take the field! NOTE: NO BASEBALL WILL BE FEATURED
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