Friday funny
DMZ · January 20, 2006 at 9:42 am · Filed Under General baseball
From McSweeny’s: “HISTORY’S MOST LOPSIDED TRADES, AS RENEGOTIATED BY OAKLAND A’S GENERAL MANAGER BILLY BEANE.”
Original Trade: Boston Red Sox trade Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 (1920).
Beane Trade: Red Sox also acquire rights to high-school star Lou Gehrig, California kindergartner Joe DiMaggio, and unborn son of semipro player and zinc miner Mutt Mantle; as part of three-way deal, the word “curse” is expunged from the Oxford English Dictionary.
You could have included the link….
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/1/16wayne.html
Whoops, fixed. Stupid tags.
Brilliance!
They probably would’ve still consummated that deal, were it not for New York’s unbridled demands for the rights to 2-year-old California toddler Theodore “Splendid Sprout” Williams.
Another good read is the Eavesdropping tapes with Matthew Barney and Björk.
Dammit. Now I’m going to waste an hour reading McSweeney’s. Thanks a lot Derek.
John Moe’s pop song correspondences.
We could play another fun exercise by saying “What if the Bavasi/Lincoln/Armstrong team had re-negotiated this deal?”
Original Trade: Boston Red Sox trade Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 (1920).
Bavasi/Lincoln/Armstrong Trade: Concerned that Babe Ruth’s reputation as a party animal will result in a less family-friendly atmosphere at Fenway Park, the Red Sox reject the Yankees’ intial offer of $125,000 and instead settle on a trio of Class A prospects who have no potential BUT were born and raised in the greater Boston area.
To replace Ruth, the team acquires Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox, who at the time is being accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. Management is unaware of this scandal, instead thinking that a guy with a nickname like “Shoeless” must mean he’s really gritty and probably hustles a lot.
To management’s surprise, before he even suits up in a Red Sox uniform, Jackson is banned by baseball, and the team is forced to bring up their trio of local heroes, thus earning back the fans’ love and affection. The team continues to pay Jackson’s salary for the next 12 years.
Sub-Onion snub-point snark. Which is about all there is to be said for Dave Eggers, as well.
Ah, the most polarizing figure in american letters, until James Frey came along. I’m staying out of that one.
I know a lot of people hate McSweeneys for that Eggers connection, but if you can read those pop song correspondences w/o laughing (link in #5), then you’re a better man than I.
and you can always choose to just think of John Moe for his purely Seattle/Federal Way connections 🙂
I’m simply amazed that there is a baseball blog that references McSweeney’s or Dave Eggers, liked or not. And I wasn’t aware,though I should have been,that John Moe contributed to them.
Please, God. Help me make it to spring…
Glad I’m not the only one who feels that way about McSweeney’s and Eggers. Their brand of “look at how clever I am” literature bores me to tears.
#12: Yep, too bad, because Dave Eggers, underneath all the crap, is pretty talented. But his writing is so busy screaming “LOOK AT ME!” that the talent hard to embrace. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is a brilliant 300-page book trapped in a painfully larger tome. I’m surprised the pages didn’t all stick together from all the masturbating he did in print.
I just read a Heartbreaking Work a few weeks back, but I’ve never been too impressed by anything that he, or others have done with McSweeney’s.
I happen to like the “look at how clever I am” literature. With the Sedaris, Palahniuk, Vonnegut varities included.
“The most polarizing figure in American letters” is Dave Friggin’ Eggers?
Doesn’t Ezra Pound merit a mention?
Or Art Thiel?
Incidentally, if you want to read some good baseball lit online, there are a couple of good e-zines. One is Elysian Fields Quarterly, which is always baseball lit. Another is Hobart Pulp, which does a baseball issue once a year (and full disclosure: yes, one of my stories is among those on Hobart, but I’d consider it one of the weaker pieces they ran).
Oh, and something I completely forgot about the issue of Hobart that I was in: all of the photography accompanying the pieces is from Safeco.
Speaking of humorous offtopic things:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=bayless/060120
Skip Bayless has a crush on Seattle.
And this, not humorous, but also off topic. From a story in the Daily O today about upcoming Mariner FanFest…
“FanFest will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Jan. 28-29. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 6 to 14. Children 5 and younger will be admitted free.
Mariners pitchers Felix Hernandez and Jarrod Washburn and catcher Kenji Johjima are scheduled to join manager Mike Hargrove and his coaching staff at the event. ”
So this is how you get the King’s autograph. All I say is, what, no Carl Everett?
me, I just re-read Summerland.
“The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself; to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.”
21: here’s another piece by Chabon you might like, very short: A Gift. It’s an essay about his dad and baseball cards.
Somebody told me to come here and post off-topic stuff. So here I am.
I like pie.