In Which Nick Marickovich, Esq. Saves Baseball in One Afternoon

Baseball.  America's Past Time (Pasttime?  Past-time?....eh, what ever)...is in trouble.  

Look at these statistics I made up:

• 63.4% of males ages 18 - 54 think that football is much cooler than baseball
• Americans spend $2.7 billion on football merchandise every-year.  Baseball doesn't even come close.
• Many people, instead of spending 3 hours watching baseball, would rather play Madden
• Most people like cupcakes better.  I, for one, care less for them.

Baseball's problems are also illustrated by the fact that the other day, after the Angles pulled their pitcher after giving up 4 runs to the Yankees, I heard this conversation on the radio.

"Hey, let me ask you something:  when you give up four runs and leave two men on base and get pulled, does that earn you a high-five from you team-mates?"

"I don't -- "

"Because I saw all those Angels players high-fiving Santiago and I got a real problem with that.  I don't think his performance warrants a high-five.  A pat on the butt maybe, and a hang in there, but a high-five is like "great job!" you know?"

"It may not be us for to add verbal speculation to a gesture in the dugout."

"But nobody says "hang in there" and gives a high-five.  It just doesn't happen."

At this point I had to turn off the radio to order some lunch from Chic-Fil-A.  Usually the good people at Chic-Fil-A are spot on with taking and fulfilling orders, but this time was different and I had to correct the woman on the other end of the speaker a number of times and it was a good minute or two before I was able to resume listening to the broadcast.  

"I mean, you can't just let them sit there and mope in! the corner of the dugout. You have to interact with him in some way."

"No, but I still don't think that was a performance meriting a high-five."

"You're really not a high five kind of guy, are you?"

"No, Glenn, I'm really not.  It has no place in baseball.  Do you think Honus Wagner would give you a high five after hitting a grand slam?  No sir.  He'd give you a firm handshake and how d' yuh do.  And you know what else I don't like..."

Give me a break.  Such whinging and whining.  Baseball, with its slow measured play, is supposed to be an oasis in a sea of people blabbing and screaming and trying to fight their way through rush-hour traffic.  It is a-kin to a massage, except the supple hands of Gerda Svenjonson and the peruvian flute music she plays whilst rubbing warm oil vigorously into your body are replaced by beer, brats, and dizzy bat races between innings. 

So.  Here is how I would save baseball:

One:  Immediate League Restructuring

I'd re-organize baseball more on the order of European soccer.  I'd keep both the National and American Leagues, but I'd do away with the the divisions, so that the two leagues are essentially now two large divisions.  Wins/losses would be kept the same as they are today.  Top 3 teams from the NL and the AL gets into the playoffs.  

The big twist:  relegation, which is a concept that I love.  Bottom three teams in each league get demoted to AAA, and the top 6 AAA teams get promoted up to "the show".

The Europeans do some things well (topless beaches), but not all things (topless beaches).  So there is no reason to go fully Continental on everyone's assess.  As already mentioned, there will be playoffs.  Ties?  Fuck that!.  Americans want to see winners and losers, we'll give 'em winners and losers. No ties!

Oh, and every team plays each team in their league 8 times (4 away, 4 at home) and teams from the other league twice.  That lowers the number of games from an epic 162 to a more manageable 142, if my math is right.  

Two:  No more whining about the way things used to be and how you like them better, old baseball men.

Every baseball commentator should be required to watch this clip from "Kelly's Heroes" before commentating on a game so that they can dig how beautiful everything is, and maybe say something righteous for a change:

A Villanelle for David Moyes

A Villanelle for David Moyes

Manchester United have fallen from grace,

While Sir Alex Ferguson lectures in Boston.

And David Moyes cannot save face

After losing, emphatically, the title race

The cry goes up from Lanzhou to London

That Manchester United have fallen from grace!

And the Glazers, who so often victory chase,

Are disappointed with results, quite less than awesome,

Thus David Moyes cannot save face.

So Man U supporters, drink your beer by the case!

And Sell the “Chosen One” banner off at an auction!

For Manchester United have fallen from grace!

But do not the statue of the great one deface,

You, who did not heed his wise words of caution,

Which is why David Moyes cannot save face.

You gluttons of victory must feel the disgrace

And the pains that other fans feel oh so often.

At last Man United has fallen from grace,

And David Moyes cannot save face!

"First of all", you might be asking, "What is a Villanelle?"

Simply put, a villanelle is a poem of 19 lines of six stanzas (five with three lines, one with four) that have an aba rhyming scheme (abaa for the last one).  The tricky thing about it is that the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated throughout the poem, though some variation is allowed. When I read about the form in The Making of A Poem by Strand and Boland, I never thought I'd be able to write one.

"Okay then," you say.  "Who is David Moyes?"

David Moyes, as of April 21, 2014, was the manager of Manchester United.  As of April 22, 2014, he is not.  He looks old for his 51 years, and he has been cursed with large eyeballs that sort of pop out of his head when he gets angry.  

Sadly for him, he's been angry a lot this season:  Manchester United sit 7th in the table at the tail end of their worst season in the Premier League era with 11 losses in the league -- more than they had in the last two seasons in Sir Alex Ferguson's reign combined.  

Anyways, today at work I had the honor of breaking the news to my boss after I saw it on CNN, who is a Manchester United fan.  I can't say that he didn't see it coming, but he was stunned that Man U would sack the manager with only three games left in the season; you would expect them to at least have the class to let the man finish it out....Unless they think that firing the manager will inspire the team to pick up points in a desperate attempt to reach the Europa League.  It is an odd thing, but sometimes in football firing a manager can give the team a quick lift and improve their form for at least a few matches...sometimes more if a capable interim manager is named.

Slowly a villanelle on poor old David Moyes took form.  I started it before carrying out an audit on the CVN 78 and finished it during lunch.  I know it's lousy -- I had to do strange things with my language to make it fit the form and at the end of the day I didn't really follow the rules as strictly as I should, such that the Secret Poet's Committee of Standards and Forms would probably deny it the classification of a true villanelle -- but the fact that I could have a thought and bend it into something at least resembling such and old poetic form was accomplishment enough for me. 

Birth of the Newport News Candy Factory Daily Hot Dog Lunch

This is no bullshit people:  times are tough at the Newport News Candy Factory.

The trouble is generally thought to have started when we missed the nougat craze of the mid 90's because management, frankly, didn't know how to spell it and they thought it was too "French".  Then there was the great chocolate covered prune debacle of 2004, and sales further suffered during the Great Recession.  Things finally came to a head in 2010 during a meeting of the board when CEO Mr. Smithington, son of founder Hunter Smithington, looking like an old pale frog in a suit at the head of the table, spoke and said that way back when he was a kid the Newport News Candy Factory made things had "zip, zing, and pep. We should do that again, get back to our roots.  I want something with pep!"

And thus Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were born.

They were little chewable candies that looked liked peppers.  The "pep" came from a bit of caffeine that was laced into candy.  We might have pulled it off except for two small problems:

1.  Mr. Smithington demanded that they be licorice flavored.  Now, it is true that Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were not necessarily made with children in mind, but rather for the more sophisticated professional on the go who might do with a nip of caffeine but doesn't have the time or the inclination to grab a cup of coffee or a latte mochachinomiamio;  unfortunately, studies show that 7 out of 10 sophisticated professionals agree that licorice tastes like shit.  When confronted with that scientifically verifiable fact Mr. Smithington defiantly declared that he had been making candies since Marlene Dietrich grew tits; that no one had sold more candy than him on the Eastern Seaboard; that candy was what he knew and the bunch of smart-ass college kids from New York who did the study don't know jack. People love licorice and that's that. So we went with it.  

2.  The ad campaign floundered.  Mr. Smithington was a great lover of the arts, and he wanted to include some of his favorite paintings in the campaign.  These two spots ran in prominent magazines all over the nation:

All well and good I suppose; but then there was this ill-advised doosie that ran in Playboy:

The blogosphere went ape-shit with stories about how the company was being run by a bunch of backward looking, misogynistic old fuddy-duddies who laughably still thought that people actually read Playboy magazine, when all bloggers know that print is dead. Even the 30 percent of sophisticated professionals who actually love licorice wouldn't be caught dead with a box of Mr. Pippen's Peppy Pepper Poppers for fear of being "un-cool", "not-hip", "not-with-it", "not-down-with-the-whole-women's-lib-thing".

The board voted to clean house.  Mr. Smithington went to spend the rest of this days in his large house overlooking the James River supplied with all the licorice his vast fortune could buy, and he died on a Tuesday.  Some say it was of a broken heart; others say it was probably licorice poisoning, a deadly disease that claims one life every 5 years in the United States alone.

Of immediate concern was raising worker morale in an age of stagnant wages and diminishing benefits. We basically ended up with two choices:

Choice number one centered on Employee Engagement.  We'd bring in Gallup and get them to deliver their patented Q12 survey and management would fix our leaky roofs and buy us ping-pong ball tables and bring in former astronauts to inspire us about our mission and offer yoga classes and have engineers sitting at their desks on hoppity-hops (or is it hippity-hops??) and we'd all band together every Thursday and sing kum-bay-yah.

OR, for the same cost, we could feed every employee in the company a hot dog per day for the next 13 years, and that included weekends.

The hot dog lunch idea was intriguing.  It would show the employees that management cares by offering them a free lunch.  Without having to worry about what to have for lunch at work people would actually show up on time because they weren't busy trying to pack their lunches at the last minute.  On the flip side, health care costs for the labor pool, their bodies subjected to a daily dose of low quality frankfurters, would undoubtedly rise.  Yet again, on the other hand, with cancer being the main risk of daily hot dog consumption, the policy would have the morbid side benefit of making early retirement buyouts unnecessary.

"No," said Sandra Moynaham, the VP in charge of making the decision.  "If the press even thought we were thinking like that, they'd have a field day.  It's bad enough as it is that we don't make the campus tobacco free."

In the end, the added health care costs were too steep to support the daily hot dog lunch, and upper upper management figured it would just be another entitlement the union would demand to keep.  In the immortal words of the not so immortal licorice lover Mr. Cyrus Smithington, "You give 'em 13 years of anything, you might as well give 'em 100".

So we all took the Q12 quiz.  We found out, based on the level of disagreement with the statement "I have a best friend at work", that we really don't like each other very much.  We all decided to remedy that by having a series of events that would bring us all together, were we could share our stories and our thoughts on what truly matters in life.

What possibly could bring everyone together in such a way??

Food.  Food brings people together in just that way.

And thus, the daily Newport News Candy Factory Hot Dog Lunch was born.

Where I Follow up on my Brackets.....eh, you know what, I won't.

So I was going to do this big thing where I looked at all my brackets and tried to see which method yielded the best results (i.e. shoot from the hip, the much maligned BORAT ranking, a combination of the two, etc.).

But you know what, I am not going to, because I don't really care.  I'm sorry for those of you who were waiting with bated breath to see the results, but if you really want to dive into the results by all means do so. Do me a favor and let me know how things turned out.

Not well, I imagine.  Not well at all.