A Diamond In The Rough.

No matter which way you slice it, and they're tough to slice, a diamond is still a diamond. I'm talking about baseball diamonds, of course, and how the majority of fans and players these days want to follow suit with the New York Yankees in building 1.5 billion dollar stadiums to further pamper their overpaid players (Teixeira, Sabathia, AROD!) leaving the Wrigley and Fenway cathedrals to likely go the way of Shea and Yankee Stadium.

Now, in my opinion, which is, in my opinion, the most important opinion on the planet, baseball is the best game that can be played on this earth, and it DOES NOT MATTER where the game is played. As long as the bases are ninety feet apart, and the mound rubber sixty feet, six inches from home plate, I am as happy as a Northside Chicagoan watching the Cubs win the World Series... not that anyone under the age of 100 would know what that feels like (BAZZZZING);)

Carlos Zambrano, the Cubs' ace pitcher was just quoted at New Yankee Stadium saying:

"You come into a ballpark like this and you see great things. You wish that Chicago'd build a new stadium for the Cubs".

Whoa there, Big Z; great things? Like what? A martini bar? Touch-screen LCDs in your locker? What about Wrigley Field's ivy walls, or the completely hand-operated scoreboard? Being a diehard Reds fan since birth(and you have to be diehard...), my hatred for the Cubs is runner-up only to that of the Yankees, but before I'm a Reds fan, I'm a baseball fan, and therefore can't imagine Northern Chicago without historical Wrigley Field. Besides, there's no better place for my Redlegs to lay the hurt on the ol' Cubbies:)

But seriously, baseball predates even the civil war. It isn't about flashy scoreboards, or luxury skyboxes, it's about two teams playing eachother on a warm summer day. It requires nothing more than eighteen players, some hotdogs, four bases, and a pitching mound. I can't stomach the idea of Fenway being torn down just to allow 10,000 more seats. Fenway Park has been a baseball icon since 1912. It's the oldest park in in Major League Baseball, and I think it should remain so until it literally crumbles to the ground during a sell-out Sox/Yanks game.

Parks like Wrigley and Fenway give you those nostalgic, Coca-Cola commercial, father/son feelings that can't be replicated in a 1.5 billion dollar colosseum. George Hermann Ruth, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Joe Dimaggio, just to name a few, all played and sweat on Yankee Stadium, and now it's gone by the wayside of extravagance? Weak... Yankee stadium was itself a testimate to the longevity and greatness of the game of baseball, and it hosted the greatest players to ever play the game, but I guess replacement is the fate of all that is good in the world. Yankee Stadium will be torn down piece by piece and sold to the highest bidder so that the already filthy rich Yankees can generate even more revenue.



Where does it end? Babe Ruth's home field will be demolished. Will Wrigley field, where he called his shot in the 1932 world series, be destroyed too? Is Fenway soon to be replaced by a dome with astroturf? It may not be the prettiest ballpark in the world, but it sure as hell has the most character. Pesky's pole, the curse of the Bambino, the Royal Rooters, the green monster. Character, not extravagance, is what so many in this country need to learn to appreciate.

A diamond in the rough...

A Simple Choice, Me Thinks

The other day I went into Half Priced Books to just to look around. I really didn't want to spend any money since I'm between jobs right now, but I ended up walking out having bought ten movies. Now, ten movies under any normal circumstance will run you from 100 to 200 bucks, and I didn't just buy a bunch of B horror movies.

Check this out: Rocky, The Urethra Chronicles, Jurassic Park, Pulp Fiction, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of The Jedi, Red Dawn, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now those are some gems! Which begs the question: How much did I pay?

Five dollars!

Five dollars for ten classics! That's fifty cents a piece. How did I do it? This may be hard to stomach for some, but remember those bulky, black, plastic things that you had to rewind after you watched? Yeah, VHS, MMMMmmm... the satisfying tape hiss that is VHS. Now, you could buy Rocky for fifteen bucks on DVD, or you could dust off that bulky-ass VCR in your attic and enjoy the same movie for fifty cents.



A simple choice, Me thinks. ;)

...And This One Belongs To The Reds!

So here was my dilemma; some of my friends and I had just moved out of our house to a place down the road, and we were without cable with baseball season about three days out. No, I didn't panick. I didn't start hyperventilating into a brown paper bag. Well... okay, I came close, but a very simple idea soon came to me that pacified my very warranted anxiety.

I delivered pizza for about five years from high school through college, and my favorite thing in the world was, and still is, listening to Marty Brennaman call Reds games on the radio. Even when I have the game on television I usually mute Chris Welsch and turn on the radio to hear Marty and Jeff both praise and criticize my team; however, at this time in my life I was without a radio except in my car. I literally sat in my car for three hours outside my place listening to a spring training game. This; however, couldn't continue. I could talk my roomies into splitting the cost of cable with me, but none of us watch TV, so we would be paying for cable just for baseball, which is a pretty damn good reason in my opinion, but not gonna happen. or, I COULD BUY A RADIO!

I remember listening to Reds games on old analog radios when I was a kid, so I didn't want some digital cd/mp3/mp4/blue ray/xm/retinal scanner that happens to pick up am stations. No, I wanted an old fashioned analog radio with turn dials and everything. No heat sensing on/off switch, no digital channel memory, just a warm-sounding, vintage radio.

So I got on craigslist and found just that; a 1978 Sony AM/FM with a simulated wood finish about fifteen minutes drive from where I live. So I got in my car, drove there, and bought it for ten bucks. That very night I listened to Marty and the Reds beat the Brewers 7-6. By the way, what was with simulated wood in the 70s? Fake wooden paneling, fake wooden radios, fake wooden dashboards in cars; what's the deal?



...and this one belongs to the Reds!