Song of the Week - Lemonade by Cocorosie

Another Podcast song of the day, this time from KEXP. The song is strangely compelling, the video just weird. The group, mainly two sisters have a strange background.

The Worst Baseball Set of All Time

Perhaps the baseball blogger community beat up this set sufficiently when it came out in early 2009, but this set was so bad it deserves every kick directed at it. You remember it, Upper Deck 2008 Documentary. This card highlight's Greg Maddux pitching his 5,000 inning. That is certainly a notable milestone which deserves to be commemorated. So why is Manny Ramirez on the card? This is the type of foolishness for which this set is well known. But this card takes foolishness one step further into dishonesty. Manny is wearing a Dodgers away uni when this game was played in LA. And even worse, do you see the guy sitting in the background behind Manny's knee. He may be a bit blurry, but he is surely wearing a Cardinals uniform. The catcher is wearing a red wrist band. There are a lot of people in the stands wearing red. This picture is not from the game highlighted, it is not even from a Giants-Dodgers game.

Why am I so worked up about this, over 2 years after the set came out? When this set was announced, I thought it was a great idea. I looked forward to trying to collect a card from each of the Phillies games in 2008 (the year they won the World Series). What a great collection that would have been. What a disappointment.

National Chicle Phillies?

I'm still liking the National Chicle Baseball but there sure are some puzzling things about it.

I already posted this card of Ryne Sandberg in a Phillies uniform. For most people when you say Sandberg, they think Cubs. After all, he played 15 seasons for the Cubs and 13 games for the Phillies at the very start of his career.What about this following card? I'd hazard a guess if you said Jimmy Foxx to most people, they'd say, ah, he was a baseball player a long time ago. He's not a player I think about often even though he played 11 years in Philadelphia, but for the A's. His last game for the A's was in 1935. Late in his career, he played one season for the Phillies, in 1945. By the way, Foxx died in 1967. He was only 50 years old. According to Wikipedia he choked to death on a piece of meat.
Then we have this card. Gaze upon it.
That's right, an emaciated Ryan Howard in an A's uniform. Why?

Japanese Submariner Shunsuke Watanabe

I recently picked up a pack of 2009 Topps Chrome, with this card.

2009 Topps Chrome World Baseball Classic #31
As I was reading about him on Wikipedia, my daughter happened to come in. She is a fan of all things Japanese. The Wikipedia article described his low-ball pitching technique. My daughter suggested I see if there was a You Tube video of him. There were a number of them. This one had the best quality. It's a bit long, but he stikes out the side.



It was also fun to listen to the Japanese announcers. My daughter was able to translate some of what they were saying, including why one or the other of them kept saying "hai". In Japanese, this means, yes, and indicates to the speaker that the other guy is still listening to him.

Song of the Week - Florence + The Machine - You Got The Love

My daughter put me onto Florence + The Machine. Florence Welch is the lead singer. The Machine refers to the band of session musicians who played on the album and who tour with her. There is a lengthy Wikipedia article on her you can read here. This song and the video are a lot of fun. She has a fabulous voice.

Thursday Night at the Movies - Robin Hood

Robin Hood, let me count the ways. We have the heroic Robin Hood.
We have the gay Robin Hood.
We have the singing Robin Hood.
We have, eh, this guy as Robin Hood.
Now we have the gritty Robin Hood.
Life in the middle ages sure was hard. There was mud, and blood, and arrows in the neck, and mud, and deception and mud. Ridley Scott has constructed a middle ages with little romanticism. There is a little between Robin and Marion, and it is almost jarring.

This is a Robin Hood origins story. Since many people believe that Robin Hood is only a character of fiction, there is no harm in concocting a new story about Robin Hood. Could be plausible. It connects all the familiar pieces: Richard the Lion Hearted's Crusade, the evil King John. Maid Marion, Little John, a drunken Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and arrows whizzing through the air. And did I mention mud. There is a surprising amount of politics in this movie. But this is a time when political problems were usually solved with a sword so don't expect a lot of political science.

The movie is violent but probably less so than your everyday first-person-shooter video game. For all the people that meet their end by way of a sharp pointed object, there is surprising little blood. A couple arrows through the neck were pretty gruesome.

We liked the movie. Russell Crowe does a good job as a simple guy who just wants to get on with his life after 10 years of war but can't stop himself from doing the right thing. Cate Blanchett is an earthy but reserved Marion and the scenes between them are good. I kept wondering what had happened to her pointed ears (a LOTR reference for you poor souls who didn't get it).

After Robin arrives at the Loxley homestead, blind old man Loxley tells Marion to make sure Robin gets a bath. "You stink" he says to Robin. After the bath, Marion takes Robin on horseback on a tour of the Loxley land. This reminded me of a line from Monty Python's Holy Grail. There is a scene where King Arthur and his men are clopping by two peasants mucking around in the mud. One says to the other "That's the King". "How de ya know?" says the other. "He ain't got shit all over 'im", he says.

1950 Bowman Billy DeMars

A few weeks ago, Dinged Corners made a post about 1950 Bowman. Since I didn't own any of this set, I had commented on the post that I'd have to see if I could get a card from the set. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found this card.

1950 Bowman - Billy DeMars #252Well, maybe you can't imagine my surprise and delight. DeMars had a 3-year major leage career, from 1949 through 1951. I was born in October 1951, so his entire playing career was before I was born. He was a 3rd baseman and shortstop who hit .237 in 211 at bats.
So why the excitement? After a few more years playing in the minors, he became a minor league manager from 1958 to 1968. But, I best know Billy DeMars as the Phillies hitting coach from 1969 to 1981. That was the period when Mike Schmidt (my favorite player of all time) played for the Phillies and they won their first World Series in 1980.

But even better. I get an opportunity to tell my Billy DeMars story. In March of 2006, my good friend Brian and I went to spring training in Florida. When we weren't going to games (we saw 3 in the 4 days we were there) we visited as many ball parks as we could. When we visited the Blue Jays field, the place was open and we wondered in and took some photos on the field. As we were leaving, a guy came up to us and asked if we were Phillies fans. This was a reasonable guess as we were both wearing Phillies garb. He said that Billy DeMars was on the field giving his son some batting tips. Would we like to meet Billy? Sure we said.
That's Billy in the middle, Brian on the left and me on the right. Billy was very friendly and kindly posed for the photo. The best part was his story of how he straightened out Mike Schmidt's swing and turned him into one of the best home run hitters ever.