Mets fans may hate Shane Victorino for a variety of decent reasons, but his annual charity fashion show not only raises lots of money for underserved youth but is also one of the most reliable sources for embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels. For example:
You know who’s impressed? Brian Schneider’s impressed:
Needless to say, the archive has been updated.
Via multiple Twitterers, including @meechone, @juliaquadrinoo, @happyhank24 and @crashburnalley.
Chris McShane at Amazin’ Avenue investigates.
Undoubtedly, this has been Davis’ most promising stretch of the season. This month, Davis is walking more, striking out less and enjoying a better batting average on balls in play than he did in his woeful April and May. But as I think I said on the podcast, since we’ve been burned by signs of life from Davis before, at this point it’ll take real, lasting life from Davis for me to be convinced he is all straightened out again. And a week and a half worth of good games — as promising as they’ve been — doesn’t seem enough to say that for sure.
But then again, two months doesn’t make for a very convincing sample either. Baseball be baseball.
Your mini-golf question got me thinking: would you watch a PGA Tour event that took place on an ultra-complex mini-golf course?
– Dan, via email.
What? Yes. Definitely yes. And I never watch regular golf unless for some reason it’s the only palatable thing on TV or there’s some guy with a great beard or hilarious pants or something. Have you seen golf on TV? These guys are awesome at golf, no doubt, so it’s impressive. But it’s just golf guys hitting golf shots, all business-casual, and no matter how many times I say, “wow that guy hit one hell of a golf shot,” I’m always, in the back of my mind, wondering how that guy would fare with Randy Quaid in full hockey-goalie gear menacing him, Caddyshack 2 style.
So yeah, I’m all-in for a PGA Tour event on a full-scale, impeccably maintained mini golf course full of hilarious obstacles, and preferably one that includes human defenders. Because as gorgeous as elegantly manicured lawns with rolling hills and smartly placed sand traps and water hazards can be, nothing is so beautiful as a stark-raving-mad Randy Quaid dolling out wedgies on behalf of the proletariat. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say I’d travel to play said full-scale mini-golf course, taking my chances against the Peter Blunt system.
As for my mini-golf question from last week, this weekend I found a course that nearly met my requirements. Unfortunately, it’s not very close to New York.
Last I played Sunset Playland in Bennington, Vt., the course looked forlorn, with too-trodden artificial turf guiding balls into holes and cracking concrete under empty one-time water hazards. Last I saw the place, it appeared closed for good, a sad reminder of fun times spent there with my family in summers past.
But upon passing it while en route to breakfast at the spectacular Blue Benn diner with my wife Saturday morning, I spotted a freshly painted course with brand-new obstacles including a windmill on the old first hole that appeared apt to meet my stated desire for “one colorful moving object somewhere on the field of play.”
We returned later to find that, indeed, Sunset Playland offered everything I was looking for in an outdoor mini-golf course, save the (rather important) short ride from the city. And, perhaps amped up by the discovery, I started off playing as good mini golf as I can ever remember.
My wife is normally good for nine competitive holes of mini golf before she loses focus and fades on the back 9, but this time she struggled from the outset. The battle, from the outset, was between me and par for the course.
Now, I don’t know who determines the par on a mini-golf course, or even, really, why there always is one noted on the scorecard. I’m not aware of any USMGA. At many places — including Sunset Playland — the pars for many holes seem somewhat arbitrary, with plenty of par-2s more difficult than par-3s, and so on.
But as far as I’m concerned, once you’ve cemented a victory over everyone else in your party, every mini golfer should play to beat the course’s par. At an amateur level, this sport is about personal bests, after all. And I must admit now that I’ve never parred or beaten the par for a mini golf course in my life. Maybe you have and you’ll tell me about it in the comments section. I won’t be ashamed. My mini golf game normally hinges on the type of high-risk, high-reward play that often results in a couple of sixes on the scorecard and at least one frustrated on-course meltdown.
This time, I played conservatively from the outset and shot two-below on the front 9. Perhaps due to nerves, my game grew shakier on the back half of the course, and I bogeyed a couple to fall even. The 15th hole featured a barn obstacle with a tunnel only slightly larger than the golf ball in its base and an obvious wimps-way-out around the side. Sitting even with par and realizing this was my chance for mini-golf glory, I shot for the tunnel and nailed it. On 99 percent of mini-golf courses around the country, putting one cleanly into such a tunnel with the right amount of force means a hole-in-one or a gimme putt for 2 — which would have been good for a birdie. But here, apparently, the tunnel was a trap. The ball rolled straight out the backside into a rocky hazard, and it took me an extra stroke to play out of it. Plus one.
I was still within sight of parring the course come Sunset Playland’s 17th hole, which has flummoxed me since my youth. The Par-3 starts with a narrow, bending, steeply inclined track, the top of which features a hole that sends the ball down a tube and out onto the green below, like this:
Getting the ball to the top of the incline requires a strong putt, but a ball hit too hard that misses the hole on top might bounce off the rocky waterfall and roll all the way back down to where you’re standing. It needs a perfect touch, and one I apparently lack. I hit the ball way too hard, sending it skipping up the incline, where it hit against the back wall and bounced into the grassy area between the incline and the green.
Since the course’s final hole — the ball-collector hole — is a Par 1, I needed a miracle. Rather than taking the one-stroke penalty and providing myself some forgiving drop on the course, I opted to play through from the grass. This is definitely not safe or sanctioned mini-golf play, but par was on the line. So I chipped the ball back toward the green, successfully launching it over the concrete barrier and, in fact, right on line with the hole. But it bounced over the hole and off the course again, destroying my dreams of glory. After another failed chip, I took the drop, humbled.
The part of Randy Quaid, Saturday, was played by this cartoon cow:
It taunts me still.
Beltran: Praised.
More on the event likely to follow.
This is local sandwich-related news so I’m linking it here even though I have some reservations about making fun of the 911 caller in question. Who among us hasn’t at least considered it?
More importantly, is anyone familiar with the Grateful Deli in East Hartford? Are there sandwiches good enough that when they’re wrongly constructed, it constitutes an emergency?
Via James K.
For some reason, some jackass flyered up Bethel, Alaska heralding triumphant and altogether false news of a forthcoming Taco Bell. Gawker has the story.
Via John.
– “About to ruin the style and the image that ya used to”
– “Allow me to amaze thee”
– “Like M.C. Hammer on crack”
– “The new fool in town”
– “Looptid”
– “Sometimes I get ridiculous”
– “Spunky”
– “You appear to be in pain”
– “Humpin’, funkin’, jumpin'”
– “All the girls they adore me”
– “I’m a freak”
– “Shakin’ and twitchin’ kinda like I was smokin'”
– “You can’t get near me”
– “Hey yo fat girl, come here, are you ticklish?”
– “I like to bite”
– “Really funny lookin'”
– “They say I’m ugly but it just don’t faze me”
– “You stare, you glare”
– “Like a fit or a convulsion”
– “Now I’m gonna do my dance”
Presumably R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball has never gotten busy in a Burger King bathroom.
Peace and Humptiness forever.
If you’re tracking these things — and you probably aren’t — R.A. Dickey settled another TedQuarters preseason over-under last night. 76 percent of readers believed the Dickster would throw more than 1.5 complete games this season. They were correct. More on Dickey likely to follow. But in short: He is awesome and he has been awesome.
Also, since Chris Schwinden is now starting games in Triple-A for the Indians, it seems likely he will not make at least 7 1/2 starts for the Major League Mets this season. But we can’t exactly rule it out yet.
If you were tracking David Wright’s brief chase for a .400 batting average, you might be disappointed now that he’s only hitting .352 for the season. You might even figure he has tailed off a bit. You’d be wrong though.
Check it out. Here are Wright’s OPSes by month:
April: 1.064
May: 1.000
June: 1.042
What happened to Streaky David Wright?
Wright’s batting average has tailed off a little after his blazing start as his batting average on balls in play has normalized, but he has made up for it with a bit more power of late.
Also, Wright, so plagued by strikeouts in the last few seasons, has struck out only twice in 48 plate appearances in June. For the season, he has struck out at a 12.8 percent clip, well below not only the 22.9 percent rate he maintained from 2009-2011 but also the 16.4 percent mark he averaged from 2004-2008. He is walking more often than striking out for the first time in his career, and walking more and notching extra-base hits at a higher rate than he ever has in any season.
We’re still less than 40 percent through the season, but the Wright we’ve seen so far is not the good but underwhelming 2009-2011 version or the awesome 2004-2008 version but some even better upgrade, David Wright 3.0. And it’s spectacular.
Also, lost in the awful Subway Series sweep by the Yankees this weekend was this, the longest home run hit by a Met this season:
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Wikipedia Wednesday, for real this time.
From the Wikipedia: The Jersey Devil.
Presumably you have heard of the New Jersey Devils, the hockey team that lost in the Stanley Cup Finals to the Los Angeles Kings earlier this week. But if you’re like me, you had never heard of the cryptid from which they got their name until Eric Simon of Amazin’ Avenue alerted you to its existence (or lack therof) earlier this week. And if that’s the case, what a strange coincidence.
Though their are many different variations of the Jersey Devil, most versions and sightings of the legendary creature say it’s a winged biped with hooves that makes a terrible shriek. Think a pterodactyl that walks on two horse legs and has the head of a huge camel. It’d be a pretty terrifying thing to see out in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, provided it existed. It doesn’t though.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jersey Devil was better known as the “Leeds Devil” after colonial politician and incorrigible yes-man Daniel Leeds, mostly because no one liked Daniel Leeds — sort of the same way everyone in Europe besides the French used to call syphilis “the French disease.” Supposedly Leeds’ 13th son morphed into the monster then killed its mother and escaped shortly after its birth in 1735, but it turns out both Leeds and his wife were long dead by then, and not at the hands of any monster besides human mortality.
Before its breakout season in 1909, the Jersey Devil showed flashes of brilliance in its ability to flummox notable military types. According to the Wikipedia, Commodore Stephen Decatur — the War of 1812 hero for whom tons of stuff is named — spotted a winged creature in Hanover while in New Jersey to check out the forging of the cannonballs he needed for his conquests. Since he had all those freshly forged cannonballs he was itching to try out, he fired one at the beast but it was unaffected by the shot.
Later, Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s gadabout brother who was in the United States to sell jewels he had stolen from the Spanish crown, came face to face with the hissing Jersey Devil while hunting alone on his Bordentown estate in 1820. He was too stunned to shoot it, though, and ultimately moved back to Europe without ever seeing it again.
The Jersey Devil apparently laid low for about 90 years until the so-called “Phenomenal Week” of January 16-23, 1909, its “most infamous spree.” During that stretch, hundreds of people throughout the Delaware Valley reported sightings of cloven footprints in the snow and of the creature itself, prompting enough panic that schools were closed and workers stayed home. Seriously. No one died or got hurt or anything, what with the Jersey Devil not being real, but everyone got freaked out enough to take precautionary measures. And hey, better safe than sorry. Who really wants to be the first to die at the hoofed hands of a cryptozoological horse-bat that terrorizes South Jersey? It’s really a wonder any territory nearby is occupied today.
Alleged encounters that week included a Jersey Devil attack on a trolley car full of passengers in Haddon Heights and one on a social club in Camden. I don’t know what actually happened. Mass hysteria does strange things to people. Remember that just a couple of years ago tons of people in Connecticut reported seeing mountain lions after that one from South Dakota got hit by a car on the Merritt Parkway (cousin Ray has more on the subject).
And in fact, though there has never been quite a run of Jersey Devil sightings like those of 1909 since 1909, people still claim to run into it every so often. Twice there have been supposed corpses. As recently as 2008, there were 10 sightings reported to a local “Devil Hunters” group, which seems primed for its own really stupid reality show.
The Jersey Devil has been referenced, hunted and speculated about dozens of times in film, television, music and video games. Bruce Springsteen has a song about it, obviously.
Also, according to a Monmouth University poll reported on May 20 of this year, nine percent of New Jersey residents believe the Jersey Devil exists. Not Martin Brodeur. The shrieking, leathery-winged biped Jersey Devil. Roughly one in 11 people who live in New Jersey believe it’s out there, terrorizing chicken coops and such.
Maybe!
Tedquarters 