Hating the Past: Dumb Little Child

In Kindergarten, Dickie Noles came to our school for an assembly to tell us drugs were bad, mm'kay.  At one point during the assembly, Noles is giving away prizes.  He asks when did the Phillies win the World Series?  I didn't normally volunteer as a child in these situations but my hand sprang up.  Noles actually called on me, and even as a little guy I knew the answer.  "1980," I shouted.  Noles says that was correct, walk up here and get your copy of a 1980 World Series Program. I was proud that I knew the answer and proud that I won a prize.

I took the program home and was excited to show my parents.  My dad said to hold onto the program, which I did for a little while.  Collage Day game at school soon enough and guess which pictures I couldn't wait to put in my collage?  Unfortunately I was a dumb little child after all and cut apart a piece of memorabilia and posted next to glitter, stickers, and who knows what else.  Good news for me is the programs aren't worth much more today then they were in 1980. 

Kind of a nothing post I know, but you might find it interesting and think of something dumb you did when you were little, not matter how insignificant.

Two Tickets to Paradise?

A great deal of buzz has been going around this week about the Florida Marlins selling tickets to Roy Halladay's perfect game, which took place last Saturday evening, May 29. You're reading that right - the Marlins, one of only three organizations with multiple World Series championships in the post-1993 Wild Card era, are selling tickets to a game that not only already took place, but featured their team fail to put a single runner on base. Not only are the tickets selling fairly well, but this is not even an unprecedented move. OK, I get it. You buy a previously-unsold ticket to a perfect game for face value, hang onto it for a few years, keep it in good condition, maybe even frame it. Then one day you hope to be able to toss that bad boy up on eBay and sit with your feet up as the bids roll in for such a vaunted piece of memorabilia.

Normally you'd expect me to blast the Florida organization for chasing dollars this way and essentially giving a big F-you to the 25 men who wore a Marlins uniform that night. But oddly enough I'll give the Marlins a pass on this one. Take the revenue where you can get it. I see it more as a passive-aggressive jab by the Marlin organization at their relatively disinterested fan base for coming out to the ballpark in putridly small amounts despite the team being consistently respectable and competitive. It's like they're saying, "ok, all you South Floridians, maybe if you guys did a bit better job of showing up to our games and acting like you really cared about the team, you'd have the right to be miffed at the fact that we are somewhat celebrating a game in which we were dominated. But until then, we don't want to hear it." I'll stop short of saying I applaud the Marlins for doing this. Let's just say I "golf-clap" them for doing it.

But of course, if I didn't have anyone to chide, I wouldn't be writing this. I've got to tweak the few thousand people who actually went online and bought these after-the-fact tickets. Like I said before, I get what your reasoning is - you want that little piece of baseball history and the prospect of selling it at a profit in the future. But do you have no personal pride or sense of what is genuine? Are you really going to anxiously await for your prized May 29 Phillies/Marlins tickets to arrive and then cherish them as if you were actually at the game? Are you going to display the ticket(s) prominently somewhere and pass stories down through the generations about the view from your seat that night, at what point you realized the perfecto was in reach, how nervous you were not to jinx anything, or the lump that went in your throat before Shane Victorino tracked down that monster fly ball to center for the first out of the 9th inning? No, my friend, you are not going to do any of that.

If you bought a ticket to that game after it took place, please look yourself in the mirror. You are now on the level of the guy who buys a $1,000 driver to try to make up for the fact that his golf swing stinks, or the guy who uses his buddy's dog or toddler son to try to pick up women, or Charlie Sheen one night in 1996 when he bought up all the left field lower deck seats at an Angels game in a fruitless effort to get himself a home run ball. Stop trying to cheapen and dilute the experience of the 25,086 who were indeed present at Sun Life Stadium that night. Money can't buy life experiences. That's what makes them so valuable! Yes, I'm certain I read that somewhere.

Go Ahead and Tase Him, Bro

Did he deserve it, or was it excessive force? That's been the big question for the past 24 hours or so, with the explosion of the story of a kid running onto the field at Citizens Bank Park during Monday night's Phillies/Cardinals game and proceeding to be given a torso full of taser by the cops. Media outlets of all shapes, sizes, locations, affiliations, and genres have since run with this issue in one way or another. Naturally, it is our obligation to weigh in while this story is apparently such a hot-button issue (or at least before the news cycle renders it an afterthought, likely by week's end).

The jackass deserved it. I don't want to hear crying from him, from his friends, his mom, the ACLU, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or whoever the hell else has an opinion. I don't want to hear it. It is made abundantly clear from the time you're about 4 years old that you don't belong out on the field during a game, and if you're stupid enough to run out there, then you have it coming to you. Above all else, there is a practical issue here, a matter of safety. Players, coaches, and officials stand out on the field in front of thousands of (possibly inebriated) spectators. To say they're somewhat exposed and/or vulnerable is not a stretch. Don't believe me? In recent years there have been not one, but two incidents of fans leaving the stands and attacking on-field participants, not to mention the famous Rick Monday incident in 1976. I don't care if everyone says this 17-year-old douche in Philly last night was just a harmless class clown. I'm sure that's all he is. But there's no way of knowing that when he comes charging out of his seat and darting around the outfield, resisting the apprehension of the cops.

There's more to it than the "protect the players, coaches, and umps from lunatics" angle. What gets me so riled up when someone pulls a such a stunt is that they refuse to understand it's not about them. There were nearly 45,000 people in the stadium that night, and they paid to see a game between arguably the two best teams in the National League, not to see a skinny kid with a gigantic nose run around. Sure, we all laugh and cheer if we're at a game and an idiot runs onto the field, but at least with me I get enjoyment out of seeing the guy get caught. Just like the "Don't tase me, bro!" moron that gained national fame a few years ago, anyone who runs out onto the field like that is trying to make themselves the spectacle instead of just minding their business and being a spectator. You want to be a spectacle? Then make a nice catch of a foul ball, or something, anything else that doesn't interfere with the game.

So, until next time, don't cry police brutality on this one. It's not like this guy was an innocent bystander that got the voltage from some asshole cop on a power trip, nor did they keep tasing the kid until his heart stopped. Once he was down, that was the end of it. He made the decision to run out onto the field, so let the consequences be what they may.

Towel Off

I have been a Yankee fan since 1993, the first year that I was old enough to follow baseball day-in and day-out. Living in South Jersey, I still go to 4-5 Phillies games a year, and I've gone on the record multiple times to say I have the utmost respect for the Phillies organization and their ballclub. My sister and most of my friends are Phillies fans. I'd only root against them in the case of a series like this one, or even better, this one. But I must take one issue with the Fightins: the rally towels.

I thought the rally towel was a great touch back in 2007 when the team made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, as well as in 2008 when they won their first World Series since 1980. I was at a game during the last weekend of the '07 regular season when the towels were first handed out at the gates, and I made it to a Phillies playoff game in both '08 and '09 as well - so I can say from experience that a rally-towel waving Citizens Bank Park was a great sight to behold in those days. To appease the pro-Phillies faction that may be cursing me already, enjoy this example of what I'm talking about.

But those days are over with. October is not a novelty to this team anymore, and it should not ask its fans to treat it as a novelty. Rally towels scream "thrilled to be here!" like a married guy who's allowed a night out with his single male friends without his wife. I thought it was especially curious that the rally towels were brought back out for the division-clinching game last year - even though the NL East had been pretty much a formality since the end of August (they won the division by a healthy 6 games).

Here's the deal. The Phillies are far and away the best team in the National League. It's very very hard to imagine them missing the playoffs this coming year as long as they stay healthy. Once you reach the point that they have now reached, the fans' "rooting aides" have to be left out. You don't see rally towels in New York or in Boston. You didn't see them in Cleveland when the Indians were in the playoffs every year in the Thome/Manny era, and that team had sucked for decades prior to that.

You know where you did see them? You saw them in San Diego in 1998, where the Padres were one of the most "just thrilled to be here!" teams in World Series history. You see a stupid Rally Monkey in Anaheim that has to tell fans when it's time to put their iPhones down and slap together their Thunderstix, because they're still largely oblivious to the baseball nuances and have to make noise with inflatable sticks so they can pretend to know what's going on in front of them. And in Tampa in '08, you had cowbells. Cowbells. Let that stew for a minute or so.

And all of that crap is great if you're a team or city that is new to seeing a modicum of success in baseball, or any sport for that matter. But franchises and fan bases should outgrow that phase after a certain amount of time. It's like when you first get your driver's license and you'll volunteer to do every monotonous errand imaginable just because the idea of driving a car by yourself is so new and cool. This is why sports fans in the Northeast have little respect for sports fans on the West Coast - because the West Coast fans never surpassed that "Oh, we need milk? I'll go! I'll run out and get milk! I don't even care that it's 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I just shut my light out to go to bed. I'll go get the milk!" phase.

So, I leave the Phillies and their fans tonight with this. You're already a hard nosed East Coast sports town with some edge. You want Philadelphia to become an honest-to-goodness baseball town? Show us you can make the place rock without the rally towels. Show us all you need on a chilly October evening is your two hands, your voice, 3 or 4 domestics in the parking lot, and your passion. That, and cease with the damn E-A-G-L-E-S chants when you're at a baseball game. But that is a topic for another day.