Barry DeMann Remembers....Baseball Playoffs

After taking it on the chin last night with the Minnesota Twins...a 3/1 underdog....Barry DeMann was in a blind rage last night.

The Twins absolutely blew this game. Taking a 3-1 lead into the ninth, reliever Joe Nathan had not given up a home run with a man on....all season! A-Rod's post-season woes, have been well documented, even though he's started this season's playoffs on fire. What does he do? He hit's a two-run blast of Nathan to tie the game.

If that wasn't enough, the Twinkies left men on base in every inning...including the bases loaded with no outs in the 11th.

Games like this make Barry DeMann reach for the Pepto-Bismol.

The feeling I had reminded me of the worst beat BD ever took on a baseball playoff game. I am sure you remember the game, but not in the way that the gambler does.

October 17, 1999; National League Championship Series..Mets vs. Braves.

DeMann felt confident placing his wager, this day, on the posted
run total of 7.5 runs. DeMann took the, over 7.5, feeling certain
that Atlanta would knock around Mets starter Masato Yoshii.

DeMann's instincts couldn't have been more wrong.

A pitcher's duel throughout, the game was still tied at 2, in the 15th inning.
DeMann still needed four more runs for a winner.

The Braves went up 3-2 in the top of the 15th. Then, the Mets tied the game and methodically filled the bases, in the bottom of the 15th. DeMann could sense the possible magic in his excitable bones.

One of DeMann's all-time favorite players, Robin Ventura, stepped to the dish.
Ventura had proven to be dangerous in these situations, as he hit 18 career grand slams(tied for fourth on the all time list).

As if he sensed DeMann's wishes, Ventura ripped one over the right field wall for a "GRAND SLAM". DeMann, in the middle of his third back flip, barely noticed the comments of Bob Costas, who kept questioning how they were going to "score this".
In their excitement, The Mets mobbed Ventura, who never made it to second base. After some delay the final score was posted as 4-3...Ventura credited with what would be known as the "grand slam single" and DeMann...well he just took it in the shorts.

Just another reminder in this business...you never know....even when you do know!

Be careful out there.

Barry DeMann

Bang...boom

Did you ever have one of those days?

I had one last Thursday, and let me start by telling you that (after some of the things I've ben through) if I make it safely into my bed at night, no matter what else might have happened since the alarm went off, as far as I'm concerned I had a good day.

Some are definitely better than others, though. Just take my Thursday. Things were pretty much on the plus side of the ledger until I was returning to work after lunch.

I was driving one of my company's cars and as I approached the (red, at the time) light at US 31 and Old Meridian I was coasting to a stop with my foot on the brake when I decided to organize the papers that were strewn about the empty passenger seat. I took my eye off the road just long enough to tap the car ahead of me which already was stopped.

The elderly woman got out and without exchanging any words, or even glancing at me got out a white glove and performed an inspection on her rear bumper that would have made a drill sergeant at barracks inspection time proud.

After ascertaining that her newer model Impala had sustained no damage and securing my name and phone number, said woman got back in and, much to my relief, drove off. Seeing as how she had my name, I thought it was in my best interest to report this (non) accident to the transportation director.

Feeling no pity for me he quoted book, chapter, and verse from the policy manual the section which states that such occurences require a follow up urine drug screen and breathalyzer test.

I complied. After completing the above, I decided that any more work would be pressing my luck, so I headed for home.

I work in Carmel and live in Kokomo. The facility where I had to leave my expelled air and two ounces of pee was located on the upper east side of Indy, so I decided to take a shortcut home through Noblesville.

I would have a hard time verifying this I'm sure, but the next 15 minutes might have put me in the record books. No sooner had I left the scene of my post accident test than I approached a construction site in downtown N'ville.

I saw orange barrels...I saw workers...I saw a metal plate that is used to cover construction holes in the road...

What I didn't see was that only half of the construction hole was actually covered. By the time the front end of my car had come to rest suspended in the air, held up by my front bumper resting on the edge of the metal plate and both the driver's and the passenger's air bags having deployed, I realized that I was quite possibly the first person in history to take a pre-accident drug screen/breatalyzer.

Nothing else bad happened, and in fact I might just come out a little bit ahead, given the fact that the police report concluded that there were no warnings or barriers around the open pit. I will be having some conversations with somebody about liability.

But most of all, it just goes to show what I said before...if you set your standard low enough, like me, every day that you make it to bed alive and kicking, is really just another good day.

Nothing To Do

Beatles For Sale

BEATLES FOR SALE

I love the Beatles.  Specifically, their music.  I have every song they ever recorded in my possession, and I listen to them quite often.  And I’ve got to admit, the Abbey Road commercial for Beatles Rock Band is about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time, Fab Four or otherwise.

But I have to admit, I’m starting to feel a bit like I’m being taken advantage of.

09/09/09 has been looming large for some time on my planner, and I have been anticipating the Remastered Beatles catalogue since I first heard about it.  I sent a psychic Christmas list to Santa with the $260 complete set as the only item on the list.  Of course I couldn’t wait.

While stopping by a certain overpriced coffee chain the other day for my mid-morning break, I impulsively purchased my favorite Beatle album “Rubber Soul”, just to see what all the fuss was about.

I have zero knowledge of how music is produced.  I can’t tell you the tricks that were used to make these new, improved versions of songs that I’ve listened to at least 15,000 times different than before.

I can tell you that within the first 20 seconds of the first song on the disc, Drive My Car, I fully expected to look over my right shoulder as I was driving up College Avenue and see Ringo pounding on his Ludwig kit in the backseat with Paul, plucking the bass.  It sounded great!

Still, I’m feeling used and abused.  The people in charge of this stuff know by now that I, along with countless others who share my obsession, will spend our money on the same thing over and over and over again as many times as they polish it up and stick it on the shelves.

Next year, they might as well not even go to the trouble of dressing up at all.  The good folks at Apple should just print the trademarked Beatle logo with words “Send us your money” and put it on a billboard.

Got any stamps?

The Coolest Thing Ever

There have always been heroes.  Depending on which way you believe, man was either created to look up to and want to be just like certain other men (or women up to other women, as it were), or evolution made us that way.  The point is there has always been a time when certain ones of us were – to put it bluntly – cool as hell.

In case you’re wondering, I am one of the looker uppers.  And while every generation can claim that their bigger than life citizenry was the coolest of all, I’ll take mine any day. 

See, I was born in 1960, so I was just the right age to be totally, head over heels, 100% captivated by the space program.  I’m a little too young to remember the start of it with the Mercury 7 and the earliest one man trips to space.  I have a vague memory of some of the two man Gemini stuff.  But I remember the Apollo part of the program that got man to the moon like it was yesterday. 

 

Advances in technology throughout the ages have always astonished the common man.  That continues to today.  But no matter how marvelous and miraculous the leap, up to and including the electronic age we now are privileged to be a part of, there has been and always will be only once in all eternity that men left the Earth and voyaged to another world for the first time, and that happened exactly 40 years ago.  It was July 20, 1969 to be precise.

 

And that brings me to the whole point of this exercise…the coolest guy that ever lived or ever will live was the Astronaut. 

 

James Bond, James Dean and LeBron James all rolled into one and multiplied by 10 wouldn’t be half as cool as the least known Astronaut from the 1960’s US Space Program.  You definitely had to be there, but I can tell you that if you were a boy between the ages of 6 and 16 and didn’t want to be a part of what was going on, I guarantee that you were playing with Barbie Dolls.  It was universal.  And to tell the truth, for me personally, it still holds.  I have at least a dozen books about the space race to the moon, a scale replica of the Apollo/Saturn V rocket, and even a Neil Armstrong doll in full astronaut regalia. 

 

There was some talk during the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency of scrapping the boring and repetitive Space Shuttle program and going back to the moon by 2010.  Now it looks like that might not get off the drawing board.  It would be neat to see, and it just might jump start a renewed interest in the sciences in our schools.  But it will never capture the imagination the way Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, et al did back in the day.

The Perfect Dad

Is there such a creature?  Of course not.  But you can certainly learn a lot, as they say, from watching TV.  If you’ve watched as much as I have over the years, you get to see glimpses and bits and pieces of dads doing their thing.

Imagine if you could build the perfect dad just like you would build a salad at a salad bar – some of this, a little of that, on and on.

Since this is Father’s Day, let’s give it a try.  Here is my idea of the Dad who has it all:

DAD	QUALITIES
Andy Griffith	Fairness, ability to admit when he’s wrong, consistency
Mike Brady	Even-tempered, analytical, soft spoken, firm yet fair disciplinarian
Homer Simpson	Fallibility, imperfections
Jed Clampett	Common sense, honesty, innocence
Cliff Huxtable	Humor, class
Charles Ingalls	Work ethic, family values

What would you get if you had a dad who had all these character qualities?  There’s no way to ever know, because there has never been a perfect dad.  If God wanted a perfect dad, he would have made one.

The truth is, dad’s aren’t meant to be perfect.  We as fathers just need to be who we are and give our kids what they really want from us more than anything…our time and our love.

One of the hardest things to be in this world we live in today is yourself, and it’s getting harder every day.  Don’t try to be Mike Brady or Charles Ingalls.  Your kids are smart enough to see through it anyway.  Just be who you are and everybody will be better off.

One more thing – HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

Anger Management

As vastly different as we all are, there are a few things that each member of the human race have in common.  Excluding the fact that we all require oxygen to sustain life, probably the most common trait shared is that we all are endowed with a wide range of emotions.  While we are able to both experience and control these to varying degrees, all six or so billion of us know what it is like to feel happiness, sadness, fear, love, hate, empathy, jealousy, and loneliness.    And let us not forget the emotion that (at least in the last two or three generations) has become the most prevalent of all – ANGER!!!!!

In fact, anger has become such a staple of our fabric that we also endow our fictional characters with varying degrees of it as well.  This is especially true of television characters as they are portrayed in sitcoms.

Of all forms of comedy, the one which usually elicits the most frequent and loudest laughs is watching the misery/misfortune of others. 

In keeping with this line of thinking, and seeing as how it is now well into the baseball season, this long-suffering Cub fan thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the greatest examples of how someone getting downright mad can be funny as hell.

Of course, in order for someone to blow his top, there must be at least one buffoon who provides the vehicle for the eruption.  This is nothing new…long before TV ever was thought of Stan Laurel and Lou Costello were tormenting Oliver Hardy and Bud Abbott respectively into a lather until the final eruption, usually but not always climaxing with violence (another form of entertainment). 

Just as in reality, these practitioners of the made for TV boil-over do it in degrees.  Here are some of my faves:

SHORT/NO FUSE

These guys fly off the handle at the drop of a hat:

          Frank Costanza (Seinfeld)

          Ralph Kramden (Honeymooners)

          Skipper (Gilligan’s Island) 

TIME DELAYED EXPLOSION

These characters exhibited a modicum of self control, but it didn’t take much for the inevitable:

          Chief (Get Smart)

          Sgt. Carter (Gomer Pyle)

          Fred Flintstone (The Flintstones)

MASTERS OF THE SLOW BURN

The best of the best.  These poor souls were tormented beyond all human endurance, you could literally watch as the heat rose in their faces.  Giving it all they had to avoid letting their tormentors get the best of them.  But in the end, it was a lost cause.  The most fun to watch, by the way:

          Oliver Douglas (Green Acres)

          Mr. Mooney (The Lucy Show)

Where have you gone, Whitey Ford?

A couple of weeks ago, my son Nick and I went to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play the Padres.  We had chosen this particular game for two reasons; one, because most of the other Cub games were already sold out when we went on line in March to find tickets, and two, because we were hoping to see our one and only hometown major leaguer – Joe Thatcher, who for two seasons had bounced back and forth between San Diego and their AAA team in Portland.

Upon returning home, I took a few minutes to see the damage this trip had cost us. 

            Tickets:                                         $130

            Parking:                                          $30

Concessions/Souvenirs:           $70

Not counting gas and one night’s lodging, we had spent over $200 to watch the likes of Rich Harden, Mike Fontenot, Milton Bradley, and Bobby Scales.  I can’t even remember any Padres from that night except Jake Peavy.  What a bargain.

Flash forward two weeks.  I am reading a book about baseball, and the following thought occurred to me:  If you were a baseball fan in 1960, and who wasn’t a baseball fan back then, and you were inclined to go and watch a ball game, you could go to any major league park on any given day and walk right up to the ticket window.  Once inside, it’s likely that one or more of the following would have been in the lineup that day:

Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Yogi Berra, Don Drysdale, Roger Maris, Frank Robinson, Duke Snider, Whitey Ford, Billy Williams, Luis Aparicio, Bob Gibson, Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, Willie McCovey.  If any of those Hall of Famers were in the lineup, it’s a good bet that the card was written out by Casey Stengal, Walter Alston, Al Lopez, or Lou Boudreau.  And if you took a transistor radio to the park, the action would have been described by the likes of Harry Carey, Red Barber, Jack Brickhouse, Mel Allen, or Ernie Harwell.

The fact is, a team that you could put together from players on major league rosters that year would wipe the floor with a team consisting of the stars of any other era in the history of the game.  Period.

Who do we have to stand in awe of today?  Alex Rodriguez, the cheating PR machine?  Manny Ramirez, the cheating ego maniac? 

I once had the opportunity to see Donald Davidson, the pre-eminent Indy 500 expert/historian.  It was a question and answer event, and I asked him what he thought the greatest era of the 500 was.  His answer surprised me, but the accompanying explanation did not.  Expecting to hear names like Foyt, Unser, Mears, Johncock, Andretti, etc., he named guys I had never heard of from the early 50’s.  He then said that it’s only natural for fans to idolize the guys who were popular when we first begin to follow a particular sport.  This makes perfect sense, but does it apply to this discussion?  C’mon.

When one of the players from 1960’s era would get to the coveted $100,000 salary, we applauded and stood in awe, mostly because normal people can comprehend what $100,000 is.  When we read about A Rod and $252 million, we sneer with contempt because none of us has even the slightest notion of what that really means.  It’s Monopoly money, and baseball (pro sports) has become something that is beyond the average man’s paradigm.

Baseball still has a large following of young fans, and that’s a good thing.  But the names on my list are as far removed from today’s 12 year old as Woodrow Wilson and Jack Dempsey are from my generation.  What do we as fans really have to look forward to?

Tony Soprano lamented the fact that he was getting in on his way of life (organized crime) at the end of the line, way past the glory days.  Is this reality or just the Donald Davidson perception?  I guess we’ll never know.