Category Archives: Items of note

Hey look, new color scheme!

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So in the midst of a day spent mostly trying to tie up loose ends before I head to Port St. Lucie next week, I changed the color scheme here. I had grown pretty attached to the handsome autumnal tones (which, my wife will tell you, are also the colors of the furniture in our extremely masculine living room, since everything needs to match Vin Diesel and Usher Riding Into Battle on a Chariot Pulled By White Tigers, the obvious focal point of the room [it really ties the room together]), but with Spring Training on the horizon and all I figured I should probably switch to something more baseball-appropriate.

Problem is, bright colors hurt my eyes and I stare at this site for a good portion of the day, so I had to keep ’em reasonably neutral. And I like to keep the colors distinct from Mets colors because this isn’t technically a Mets blog.

First I had a darker blue with gray accents (whatup Hoyas), but some early Twitter feedback said it looked too much like a Yankees blog that way. So I worked in some green, because, you know, baseball.

Now I’ve looked at it and tweaked it so many times that I can’t decide if I like it or if I’m just sick of futzing with it, so I’m going to go with this for a little while and see how it plays.

Half of you read the site on RSS anyway, so in that case carry on. But if you hate it or love it or it gives you a seizure, let me know.

It’s b.s. that I still have to pay for my own shoes

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Erin Andrews, who signed an endorsement deal with Reebok last month, is not the only ESPN personality or member of its “College GameDay” team to have a contract with a major shoe company.

Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso have deals with Nike that Corso described as a joint arrangement that largely involves speaking engagements for the athletic shoe and apparel company.

– Richard Sandomir, New York Times.

Sandomir goes on to investigate whether the endorsement deals present conflicts of interest for the ESPN personalities. Honestly I can’t imagine it could really be that big a deal unless, while discussing highlights of Cam Newton running all over the SEC, Lee Corso started yelling, “It’s gotta be the shoes!” or something.

The big issue here is that I still have to pay for my own shoes like some sort of chump and/or sucker. I’ll have you know, Nike, that I keep a sports and sandwich blog of moderate repute and host a modestly regarded web-based baseball video series. Also, since we’re on the topic, Nike, I never wear your sneakers because they don’t fit me right. So either you make the Air Ted Bergs custom-fitted to my feet or I take my talents to Saucony.

Speaking of: Saucony, we can do this right now. I’ve been wearing your Jazz sneakers almost exclusively in all non-athletic sneaker-requiring situations since the turn of the Millenium. And now they’re hard to find at the mall and I have to order them at Zappos. That’s the type of commitment to your product that should be rewarded with an endorsement deal, I think. Just send me free sneakers and I’ll tell everyone how comfortable they are, and how they help make my size-13 feel look at least vaguely proportional to my 5’10” frame.

Same goes for you, Dr. Marten. I know your monopoly on the goth-kid market crumbled sometime in the early 1990s, but I’ve been wearing your oxfords to work since I stopped having jobs at which it was acceptable to wear Sauconys. We can make this happen. I am the host of the Baseball Show for cryin’ out loud! I WEAR YOUR SHOES WHILE I TALK TO CERRONE ON SKYPE! That’s a landmark sponsorship opportunity.

I never made a conscious decision to just keep buying the same shoes once a year every year, it just kind of happened. At some point in the late 1970s my dad apparently did the same thing.

Twitter Q&A-style product

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Kind of a long story that I might touch on later, but I don’t have my phone, which had the audio of the interview I intended to transcribe today. So in lieu of that, here’s some Twitter Q&A-type stuff. Actually, these ran long so I’m breaking them up into two posts.

One of the inevitable downsides of a sports reporter’s affecting or achieving disinterest in his subject is that readers will perpetually speculate which team he or she favors. I am lucky in that I am able to come right out and tell you I’m a Mets fan so there’s no doubt where my rooting interest lies, and even so I have been accused of being a “fake” Mets fan — though it was never clear if those people meant I was faking my favoring of the Mets or just a fake human, perhaps some sort of bot developed by SNY to forward the company line.

Anyway, I’m reasonably sure that in 90% of cases, the fan guessing at the journalist’s rooting interest is wrong — either it’s simply a matter of confirmation bias on the part of the fan, or the journalist quietly roots for some team the fan hasn’t even considered, or the journalist unknowingly favors the players and teams that make his job easier, or the journalist really doesn’t care. But Stark, here, lends credence to the common Mets-fan theory that he’s a big-time Phillies fan, formed partly because of his past as a Phillies reporter and partly because he dedicates thousands of words to trumpeting the Phillies’ grit and hustle and greatness.

The section about the Mets’ offseason in Stark’s column is so silly it doesn’t even really merit a response. It starts with a joke about how Sandy Alderson probably didn’t know what a Ponzi scheme was before this offseason (with no mention of how he went to Dartmouth then Harvard Law), then goes on to… oh lord, it’s not even worth my frustration. Basically every single thing he writes in the section is wrong or poorly considered.

I was actually thinking about it, so here’s a good excuse. It doesn’t often happen to me — usually I check for my phone, watch and wallet before I leave anywhere. But today I had a small notebook in my coat pocket, and I must have mistaken that for my phone. I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning so I took the train into the office in the middle of the day.

When I finished the Daily News and reached in vain for my phone, my reaction to not finding it wasn’t disappointment or annoyance, but something closer to terror. Then when I realized I was terrified by not having my phone on me, I grew even more terrified because of the implications of that response. What the hell is wrong with me? It was only a little over a year ago that I got a smartphone, and now I’m so dependent on the thing that I completely panic when I don’t have access to it.

I mean, granted in this particular situation I had work I wanted to be doing that required the phone, plus it was technically in the middle of my work day and I work on the Internet, so I have a couple of excuses. But still. Kinda got me thinking of the Matrix, and wondering if the first people that plugged into those pod things did so on a voluntary basis.

I am generally of the mind that the technology that enriches our lives makes us smarter, and I have no doubt that the awesome breadth of information now almost perpetually available at my fingertips has better prepared me to succeed on Jeopardy. But I do wonder sometimes if the constant distraction affects the depth of my thoughts, and if I wouldn’t be better off putting the damn thing on the shelf for a few days every so often to better convene with whatever the hell is out there that’s not on Twitter.

Humorless Fort Wayne bureaucrats disrespect proud legacy of Harry Baals

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Despite garnering far more support in an online poll than the thicket of other suggestions, residents shouldn’t expect Fort Wayne’s new government center to be named after one of the city’s longest tenured mayors.

Deputy Mayor Beth Malloy said naming 200 E. Berry St. the Harry Baals Government Center was “probably not” going to happen….

Baals – pronounced “balls” by the then-mayor but “bales” by his descendents – became the Republican nominee for mayor in 1934 and was elected for three successive terms. He returned to politics in 1951 by winning a fourth term but died in office in May 1954. His accomplishments include elevating the railroads in town and negotiating the contract with the Army to establish Baer Field as an air base.

– Benjamin Lanka, Fort Wayne Register.

In a story that easily could have been ripped from a spec script for Parks and Recreation, the government of Fort Wayne, Ind. put the name of its new building up for an online vote and somehow failed to consider that Fort Wayne’s longest-tenured mayor ever was named Harry Baals.

Now, they’ve either got to go to work every day in the Harry Baals Center or disrespect the legacy of the great mayor Harry Baals. I’d obviously opt for the former, but apparently the Fort Wayne government doesn’t like to work blue (pun only vaguely intended).

Also, the polls are still open. Rock the vote.

And I suppose now is a reasonable enough time to admit that the fake student-government campaign from my college days that I’ve alluded to several times on this site was indeed for a candidate named Harry Balls. Every year, the full list of every tallied vote — regular and write-in — was published online. We chose the name because we thought it was funny in its simplicity, but also because it was easy to remember and spell correctly in the write-in form. Also so our campaign materials could be filled with various puns like the ones made here.

The funny thing — or maybe the unfunny thing — is that the campaign sort of spiraled out of control. We wound up dedicating way more time than we expected to and committing way more energy than we thought we would, and some of the real candidates — most of whom took themselves and student government extraordinarily seriously — got pretty worked up about it. In an incident that to this day marks the most thorough missing-of-the-point I have ever witnessed, one candidate actually approached me hoping to gain Harry Balls’ “official endorsement,” insisting that he and Harry Balls represented a lot of the same ideas.

When it came time for the outcome of the election to be announced, we actually went down to the student center to hear the results. But there was a delay. And then more delay. Some guy came out and said they were having a problem with the computer voting system. About an hour later, they announced the winner — not Harry Balls. But for the only time in the four years I attended the school, they never published the full results of the election. I’m still suspicious.

This post does not contain a picture because I am unwilling to search for “Harry Baals” on Google Images from my work computer.


Wait a minute, really?

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Mob families are so infested with rats these days it’s a wonder there isn’t ear-piercing feedback from all the recording devices.

One Colombo captain, Anthony (Big Anthony) Russo, was taped in December pledging to track down a rat and “chop his head off” only to turn into Tiny Tony and start eating cheese the minute he was pinched.

Now, we have a Genovese associate-turned-informant named Joe Barone crying about the FBI dumping him for getting involved in a murder-for-hire case with an NYPD informant.

Rats ratting out rats!

It’s almost enough to make you admire the standup guys, if there are any left.

– Michael Daly, N.Y. Daily News.

I hope this post doesn’t stray too close to sanctimony or politics, two realms I normally try to avoid. But really, Michael Daly?

To his credit, Daly goes on to explain that the mobsters in question — the ones who take their full punishments and do not cooperate with investigators — aren’t exactly good people. But isn’t stigmatizing and terrorizing cooperative witnesses like, a real problem, and not just in mob movies and The Wire?